Movement as performance

When movement is without joy

When movement becomes performative / competitive, I wonder where the threshold is whereby more movement mutates into mental malady?

Like most precocious spoilt four-year olds, I demanded ballet lessons and a pony after school one day. I’m still enduring the wait for the equine, FATHER.

Ballet was fun, because tutus and a distinct lack of boys, who would later become men and consistently disappoint me. I reminisce fondly of those lad-less years of my youth where pirouettes, pointe shoes and being picturesque were pretty much all I had to worry about.

But then ballet became demanding of more than just my body – it demanded my mental machinery to be concentrated exclusively on the pursuit of perfection within performance.

I was about eight years old.

We began being examined, the outcome of which were grades to be contrasted with those of my comrades – other small children equally as impressionable as I. Sometimes we received commendations for when the exam went so well, the examiner felt the need to slap an extra onslaught of praise, the result of which was amalgamation of all the other child overachievers in receipt of a commendation in one room, and had us compete with each other. Success, it seemed, required even more effort after the reward.

The higher my grades, the more invites there were. Not to parties to celebrate my already not insignificant success – but to audition for a place in a room to take more exams; harder ones this time, and with other child prodigies who were equally as impotent as I, to ask “Excuse me, but what the fuck?”

My new place in a different, more competitive room took me away form my family at weekends then. My mum taught me how to take a national train by myself without being abducted or assaulted in exchange for sweets on the way to Big Girls Ballet.

I was eleven.

Then I hit the big time – full time training in one of London’s most elite schools. It was thirteen grand a year and my mum was a telephonist. So I worked even harder to get a full scholarship so my mum didn’t have to remortgage the house.

I left home when I was sixteen.

I had anorexia by the time I was eighteen and was a drug addict by the time I was twenty-eight.

But I had performed with English National Ballet, La Scala, The Mariinsky Theatre and Madonna, not to mention my niece recognised me in Streetdance, The Movie.