FYI this is not actual ballet. (Picture: Rebecca Reid)

It’s World Ballet Day! So please enjoy an account of how despite being dyspraxic and mal-coordinated, I took up ballet, and why you should think about doing the same.

I tried ballet for the first time on a complete whim.

Perhaps it was the fact that I’d read Ballet Shoes fifty times as a child, or from a life-long love of the stage. But whatever the reason, one rainy October afternoon I decided that I was going to start taking dance.

I started dancing (and still dance at) the Central School of Ballet in Farringdon. It’s a real ballet school. When you walk in it smells like a school reception. The changing rooms have names scratched in to the lockers and pointe shoes lying around. From the moment that you cross the threshold, you’re part of something.




Ballet wasn’t something I’d done since a short spate of classes aged four. I knew nothing. But when I went in to the studio and took a spot by the barre, it was like coming home. The words were total nonsense to me, I was at least a beat behind the rest of the class and I probably looked like a complete mess.

But it was the happiest 90 minutes of my week. So I decided to get better.

I’ve written before about how good for you it is to be the worst at something. It frees you from competing. Ballet taught me that it truly didn’t matter if my grand Battements were far less high than someone else’s, if I could keep my leg straight then I’d done better than last week. The only person I was competing against was myself.

The fact that ballet was so difficult meant switching my brain off. It was hard enough to keep the steps in my head, stay on the beat and retain a half-decent posture. Doing those things left absolutely no space in my head for anything else. Arguments with housemates, a stalling career, the fact my boyfriend never wanted to talk to me: all of it got switched off for an essential 90 minutes.

Four years later (with a large gap in the middle as my career took off and I got in to a new relationship) I’ve come back to ballet. Amazingly, most of what I’d learned was still there. Walking back in to the same studio, with the same teacher and the same music felt like being hugged by something. Never had the old adage that you can never go home again been less true.

I’m glad that I didn’t take ballet as a teenager. I was self-conscious and vain then (even more so than I am now) and I think the idea of putting on a leotard would have been too much for me.

Adult ballet isn’t like that. There are ‘real’ ballerinas in my class, and there are women in their seventies. Some people have thin bodies, some people have fat bodies. It doesn’t seem to have any correlation to their skills, and it’s not something we think about. Ballet is famous for fetishising thinness, but when you come to it as an adult, that part just isn’t there, astonishing when you consider that this is an activity where you wear a skin tight outfit and stare at yourself in the mirror.



I want to look neat, I want my leotard to be clean and ironed and I will admit to buying more skirts than I actually need, but otherwise, what I look like is a secondary concern. It’s the time of the week when my body gets the least mental abuse, to be honest.

Even if I had been the right shape for professional ballet, I would never have been talented enough. There’s a freedom in knowing that.

Because I started dance so late in life (22 is almost dead in ballet terms) there was literally no prospect of doing it as anything other than a hobby. Which is wonderful. So often we try to turn our hobbies into careers, whether it’s writing or singing or making clothes. But hobbies are important, and keeping them firmly in the hobby box is good for you.

There is a real joy in doing something not because you’re going to make money from it, or because it’s going to make you thin or get you further ahead at work, but just because you love it.

Starting a new activity is scary. Especially one which involves trying something difficult that you will almost certainly do wrong. Maybe that’s why, as we get older, we stop doing it. I can only speak for myself, but taking the leap and forcing myself to walk in to that ballet studio was one of the best choices that I ever made.

Ballet is not just for thin white people who have been dancing since they started to walk. It’s for anyone who wants to work hard, learn something new and do the same tendu fifty times over until they finally get it right.


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