Ballet dancers as role models

The ultimate urban heroes:
Not jocks, but ballet dancers

JIM RUTTER

Travel magazines and survey websites used to call Philadelphia the nation’s fattest city. Then Philadelphia received the title of the rudest city (for some, admittedly a source of pride). Recently, Forbes Magazine ranked us in its top 20 “Most Sedentary Cities,” pointing out that 57% of Philadelphians are obese, 26% don’t work out on a regular basis, and we each watch 32 hours of TV a week.

Is it ironic that a city with more than half a dozen professional sporting teams, as well as some of the nation’s most enthusiastic sports fans, is also one of the nation’s most sedentary and overweight cities?

I thought about this contradiction recently after Travel and Leisure magazine pronounced Philadelphia the nation’s least attractive big city. During that week, I attended the Pennsylvania Ballet’s production of Dracula, my first opportunity since summer to see two ballets within the same month in Philadelphia (Company B was the second). After watching the ballets, and admiring the dancers’ physical presence on stage, I wondered how Philadelphians could so admire athletes, yet look and act so little like them in our daily lives. Is it because they’re chasing the wrong ideal?

What I learned in Prague

When I lived in Prague a few years ago, that city’s two repertory ballet companies and three performance venues offered me at least two or three ballets per week, and I took advantage of the situation in the eight months I lived there. Even though I’m still a nationally qualifying athlete in my own sport— Olympic weightlifting— seeing multiple weekly performances by ballet dancers not only enriched my cultural life, but, more so than any sporting event, showed me the combination of a single-minded pursuit of virtue and artistry often lacking in professional sports.

Unlike professional athletes, professional ballet dancers must fuse three pinnacles of perfection: the physical, the ethical and the aesthetic. Without a relentless commitment to their art, combined with the willpower to overcome the rigorous physical demands that make that very art possible, no ballet would result; no ballet in any meaningful sense of the term would even be possible. The beauty and grace, elegance in movement and expression in form that they achieve on stage is impossible without a rigorous and daily pursuit of virtue, one that they must exercise in both the physical and artistic realms.

No time to slack off

For ballet dancers, an action is right if it produces beautiful art, and this rule applies daily: They have no time to slack off or to disregard their art. A novelist or painter can go years without producing a work, but the window on a dancer’s life is so slim that the overlap between their actions and their artistic ideals must be total if they’re to fulfill their potential.

I can’t think of another walk of life that’s so demanding. Athletes come close. But even the most dedicated athletes rarely need to combine the physical, the ethical and the aesthetic to reach their peak. Sports fans may speak of Walter Peyton’s grace on the football field, but they’ll never witness on turf anything that resembles the flawless execution of 32 fouettes en tournant.

The Pennsylvania Ballet at least implicitly recognized this understanding in its ad campaign of several years ago. On the sculpted back of a ballerina echoed the modified creed of bodybuilders everywhere, reading, “No Pain, No Swan Lake.” I would make that, “No virtue, no beauty.”

Now, if only they could convince the rest of the city.



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