A Touch Of Abstraction

In a world of sacred geometry, I am an abstract shape. For centuries ballet has relied on the beauty of almost divine bodies to storytell. Regardless of how the dance world has evolved, all prima ballerinas seem to have some basics: perfectly arched feet & beautiful lines. Luckily, I was born with potato feet, almost flat and very short.

Even since I was little, I could never do things casually. If my mom took me running with her, I would dedicate everything and run until I could finish the 5k end of year race. Ballet wasn’t an exception. No matter where I went ballet always accompanied me. Out of French, Spanish, and English, movement was the language I could communicate best in. But with great effort came great pain. “Don’t flex your feet!” My masters would yell at me, when in reality every ounce of energy in my body was aimed at pointing them.

Professional ballerinas have absolute control over their bodies. They are aware of the tip of their toes brushing against the linoleum floor, of how each angle could look to a spectator watching them on stage. We stand on pointe shoes to elongate our figure, we “wing” our feet, to make our legs carry on in a continuous line, we point our toes to close the angle of the body harmoniously, all in an effort to visually please the eye with round, never-ending, perfect lines. But whatever I tried, my feet would go in tangent to these ethereal circles. So, I worked for it. I pushed my awkward feet into pointe shoes and hammered them into the floor. I pushed my feet under couches (an old-school ballet trick) to deform my flat arches into curves, or work with therabands for hours on end to no avail. As my technique improved, my body suffered. I ended up getting surgery on both feet to try and stop the infections and pain that came as my toenails dug into the fleshy skin of my feet when I was in pointe shoes… It left me out for months but didn’t work. Then, I got bursitis tendinitis on my ankle from overworking it to get a better arch. I couldn’t even work for it anymore. Ballet legs were meant to reflect Fibonnacci’s golden ratio spiral, but my now hurt and still flat feet would cut it short and leave it as a wannabe curve instead of a perfect swirl. I would become hopeless at times, my ballet dreams seemed to crumble like pastries in front of my eyes. No matter how good I’d gotten, there was always that “but”.

A few years ago I looked closely at the giant frame hanging over my parents’ bed. Almost all of it was taken up by a picture of my mother’s feet and my baby potatoes intertwined, a picture she had taken almost 15 years ago. At the bottom corner was a letter that had been part of her composition study. Almost everything was illegible except the last sentence. “When you wake up and decide to dance… dammit! Take off your shoes! Mine stink.” I laughed, a little because of the pointe shoe stink reality but mostly because it was true. It was time I kicked off the confinement of perfection, painted outside of the lines of Fibonacci's pretentious spiral.

Slowly, with a new vision on my life-long passion, and my still flat feet I relearned how to be a ballerina. After all, what fun would there be in a world filled with vitruvian men and women walking across the planet? True beauty in my dance would come from what I expressed beyond that architectural circle that confined the perfect human; It would come from what I projected onto an audience. Projection of sentiment cannot be measured in lines and ratios, it can only be felt. So I danced for myself, my mind still focused on pointing my feet, but my heart set on transmitting a feeling. I began to understand not only how I moved, but what moved me. Birds sit unbothered on highly charged electrical wires; they are saved from electrocution because they simply do not touch the ground. As I broke the electrifying cycle where I was tethered to the floor and hurting, I was able to let go, spread my wings and fly high. Sacred geometry, golden ratios, classical ballet technique and Da Vinci’s Vitruvius could infallibly measure the arms, legs, and face of a perfect human, yet none of them captured our most beautiful, anti-perfect yet sublime component. I will dance forever, maybe not with perfectly arched feet, but with beauty in another arch not encapsulated by mathematical calculations, my smile.

Dancing Minkus & Petipa's Ballet "La Bayadère"