Photo Supplied

TuTuMUCH
Directed by Elise Swerhone
Running at: Cineplex Odeon South Edmonton, Scotiabank Theatre Edmonton
Jan. 17 at 1 p.m. and Jan. 20 at 7 p.m.
Ticket cost: $10.50 for adults, $8.00 for children, $9.50 for seniors and $7.75 per person for groups of 20 or more. 

A tall, slim, pretty ballerina in a black leotard looks down at a pint-sized version of herself. She looks at the little girl and with a smile, she says, “Who are you? Number 68. You’re just a number to me right now.” It’s an honest introduction to the world of professional ballet. TuTuMUCH is a real and often shocking look into the life of a ballerina trying to make it into the professional world. It’s full of excitement and disappointment, tears and laughter and hard decisions regarding years of sacrifice and pain and the limitations of one’s anatomy. And it’s all from the mouths of children.    

Ballerinas from all over the world compete to join The Royal Winnipeg Ballet School’s (RWBS) four-week summer program. It’s an intensive, often gruelling, competitive program that acts as an audition for the company’s professional division. Of the more than 1,000 dancers who audition, 70 are invited to train. And from these talented, bright, determined 10-13-year-olds, they hand pick their future full-time professional students, from which they feed their performances. 

Talk about pressure! It’s mind boggling to watch these bubbly, confident, outgoing kids jump from valley-girl speak, bursts of laughter and candy raids to somber faces and graceful bodies gliding across the studio to classical music. 

You want to yell at the screen, “They’re just little kids, give ‘em a break!”

But you’d be wrong.         

These dancers are not ‘just’ anything. They are extraordinary individuals filled with drive many adults never find. And they can dance.  

Arlene Minkhorst, the director of the RWBS says, “We’re looking for talent. The true classical ballet talent is very, very rare. Within talent there’s all sorts of parameters. There’s musicality, a physique that will not only allow the body to withstand the rigours of training but also create the aesthetic lines that we’re looking for. There’s a very keen intelligence that needs to be there. They need to have an inner-strength that you can tap into and help them develop strength and a confidence that they’ll need to realize their goals.” 

Within this hefty mission statement lays the source of many tears and unrealized dreams. You watch these ballerinas in all their grace and seeming perfection try to hold back the tears when they are told that their neck isn’t long enough, or their shoulders not slight enough to fit into the company’s ideal of performance perfection.

It’s a hard concept for an outsider to accept. All this talent and determination being turned away for the wrong body style? After all their years of hard work to get to this point, that all those nights dreaming of tutus and stage lights is all for naught because of the structure of their feet? Really?

But body structure and body shape are two different concepts. The arch of their foot, rotation of their pelvis or lack thereof can cause future injuries, while the shape of their neck line and width of their shoulders can change the aesthetic lines of the classical ballet corps. 

Director Elise Swerhone was new to these concepts as well. “At first I thought, ‘that’s nasty, can’t you give these kids a chance?’ But then I realized,” she says, “the teachers felt responsible to these kids. They did not want to encourage them to dance in an unhealthy way. To direct a child into a career they’d never be able to fulfil because of leg placement would be more cruel than to let them follow their dreams, sacrifice [everything else] and to leave their families. [The dancer] would be wasting their time and their parents would be wasting their money.”

But after following the lives of these girls, you are really rooting for them to succeed. Despite the physical pain placed on a mere child and the sacrifice of a normal life, you hope they all get in. Your eyes well up when they are not invited to stay. And you’re disappointed when the most colourful of the bunch is invited into the full-time program but declines. 

Margaret Flynn, director of The Edmonton School of Ballet, points out that pursuing companies such as RWBS and The National Ballet School at such a young age “is a scary thing because until they actually go through puberty you can’t really see how their bodies will develop.” She says, “They just naturally develop as they should into a woman’s shape and it may not be the type of shape that they’re looking for for the ballerinas in their company.”  Then the dancers are sent home. “That can be absolutely devastating to a child.”

So what does that mean to a dancer in Edmonton?

There are opportunities aplenty. In fact, RWBS’s lead ballerina Vanessa Lawson is one of Edmonton’s own. And she chose to stay here to train with Edmonton School of Ballet until she finished Grade 11. She was so well equipped in fact, that even her Grade 12 marks at RWBS were higher than those of veterans. Which is fantastic news for young ballerinas in Edmonton.

“I had very good teachers,” Vanessa says, “and a lot of performance opportunities in Edmonton. I knew that I was getting a solid base in my training but also realized that I would have to leave at some point if I wanted to make it my career.” While Edmonton is home to at least two youth companies that allow students to get a taste of performing on tour, we no longer house a professional ballet company since Alberta Ballet made its move to Calgary in 1990. 

Schools like The Edmonton Ballet Company and Vimy Ridge Academy have proved fully capable to lay the foundations of an inspired dancer, but at some point, a young professional must leave Edmonton to work. 

What about those souls with the talent, strength, and ambition to be amazing, but the body type that sits outside of the classical parameters?

Linette Smith, a ballet and drama teacher at Strathcona High School stresses the need to audition for everyone. “Ballet is all about lines and poise. If you look at the dancers in all the various companies, they’re very tiny. You have to audition for every company and pray that because you’re good enough, because you’ve got the talent, that somebody will take you. [Today] there are more companies that are not necessarily looking at that stock type.  So, if you love dancing, you’re going to start expanding your repertoire. That’s the reality of it.”

Flynn agrees. She recalls one of the most exciting performances she’s ever seen with the Ohio Ballet. “They selected their dancers totally on talent and heart and musicality and all the things that really should be what they’re looking for. It was just incredible.”  She believes that instead of rejecting dancers, directors of schools are better to steer them “into a career that would suit their physique.” 

This is the type of guidance that helped Lauren Wycoff, a dancer featured in TuTuMUCH.

Four years after filming the documentary, her feet can no longer take the pain of pointe shoes. With a body more suited to hip hop, she has won scholarships to schools in other forms of dance. Regarding the documentary, she says “it shows how perfect you have to be in the dance world and how you have to have the perfect feet and everything, but that’s just life. If you don’t have the right arch, then they’re looking out for you.

They want you to be safe. I think that if you’re not a dancer and you don’t understand I think it’s going to look very, very harsh, but that’s just the way it is. I’m really happy with where I am now. I think other things besides ballet are very important too. I do take ballet classes to keep my technique up. I love everything else I do. I love hip hop and I love jazz.

That’s very me. I fit in there.” Today, she’s teaching hip hop.

And that seems to be the moral of this story: “If you love it, you’ll share it, you’ll teach it,” says Smith. “A dancer will never stop dancing.”  It doesn’t matter that injuries are unavoidable, that their body is worn down or arthritic, or their career may end by the age of 25, the passion that lights up a the face of a dancer when they’re talking about their craft is inspirational. The brightness in their voice is unmistakable.  The discipline ballet teaches benefits every single dancer in every other aspect of their lives. The confidence and experience of setting and obtaining goals is priceless.

The friendships formed last a lifetime.  And the will to dance is uncontainable. The passion is catchy.  Ballet classes, anyone?