When the dance is over

My daughters have been studying ballet since they were five and three, respectively. My older daughter decided she wanted to learn to dance after her grandmother and aunt took her to see a Christmas production of The Nutcracker. The following spring I began researching ballet schools and places to buy leotards, tights, and shoes. Her little sister watched all of this unfold with some fascination and asked me to buy her a "dance costume," too.

When I asked her whether she wanted to take lessons she shook her little blonde head. "No, I don't want to take a class, I just want the clothes."

I bought her a tiny leotard and some tiny tights and a little filmy skirt and she wore them nearly every day in lieu of more conventional dress-up play.

After about two months of watching her older sister get ready for ballet class, my younger daughter announced that she had changed her mind and was now ready to take lessons, too. She has always been precocious and sure of her own mind, so I had no reason to doubt her sincerity.

And so it began.

Now, nearly six years of fall sessions, spring sessions, summer sessions, special ballet camps, workshops, rehearsals and recitals later, the dance is over.

The dance is over.

It wasn't my choice but theirs, and I have had the exquisite pleasure of being able to talk with my daughters heart to heart about their reasons for giving it up. At 11 and 9, they are unusually circumspect about things and they are able to tell me in near-adult terms why they want to stop dancing.

I have listened, asked questions, probed the depths, and am thoroughly satisfied that I'm not raising a generation of quitters. Rather, I am raising a generation of smart young women who already know their own minds years ahead of many girls their age.

I am disappointed that I will likely never see them dance again, but I am proud beyond all measure of their ability to tell me why.

My oldest daughter said she likes playing music more than she likes moving to it. She studies the piano and spends countless hours practicing what's required by her teacher as well as composing her own tunes with titles like "Titanic," and "Falling Leaves." She also likes to write and draw and is becoming scarily fluent in both ancient Greek and contemporary Russian. She's recently matriculated to a new level of Girl Scouting and has begun work on the highest award a scout of her level can earn. In short, she is busy doing things she loves, and ballet is not one of them.

My younger daughter cast an even brighter light on her reasons for giving up the dance. She, too, studies piano and says she would eventually like to learn another instrument or two. "The thing about ballet is that you always do only what the instructor tells you to do," she said. "You can't choose the order in which to practice the barre or your floor work, and the routine is always the same. When you play an instrument, there are millions of songs you can learn and you can work on part of a hard song and then set it aside to play something easier and more fun before going back to work again on the hard piece. I can do this at my own pace and I can do it any time I want to, even every day. I don't have any control over the ballet class but the ballet class controls me. It's too structured."

Spoken like the free-spirited artist she is.

This is the child who invents her own craft projects, pours over books of paper, cloth or clay projects and uses bits and pieces to make her own creations. This is the child who cannot do a paint-by-numbers project because she wants to pick her own colors for the picture. This is the child who loves to test herself at the piano. How fast CAN she play a piece? Metronome or no? Classical or folk?

It's the endless variety of playable music, and the loose structure in which she practices and plays that makes the piano so satisfying. Ballet is rigid, unforgiving. Its curriculum is very specific, its measures of progress largely unyielding to differences in body type, developmental ability, degree of passion.

With ballet, you either love it or you don't.

With music you can love one instrument or love several. You can play a piano or a guitar, a banjo or a mandolin, a violin or a cello -- and music that's been written for one can be modified for playing on another. There is no limit to music. Ballet as a style of dance seems endlessly predictable. My daughter tells me she doesn't want to give it up because it's getting too hard. Rather, it's getting too boring.

How can I possibly doubt her when she tells me she does not love ballet -- indeed often dreads it and its encroachment into her schedule of reading, piano, sewing, painting, drawing, exploring -- and is not sad in the least to let it go?

How can I force her to bend her will to something that in time will take over her life? Now, it's two classes per week. In another year it might be three, then four. And for what? She told me she dreads the day she will have to give up her freedom to the dance. It's obvious that ballet does not liberate her, it binds her.



My daughters' feet may never dance across a floor again, but as I listen to their fingers dance over the piano keys as they play and sing together and for each other I am reminded that talent takes many forms and that none of those forms matter if they do not bring us joy.

There's a whole lot of joy emanating from our music room right now. The dance may be over, but the music plays on.