continnect July 2016 | Page 12
Where You Meet Yourself in a Giant Mirror Every Day,“BLACK
You Learn
SWAN”
to Deal
FAIL with
AND Your
THE BALLET
FailingsROAD
and Assets
TO WISDOM
belt. “Of course I miss my toenails, and my joints are those let level. “They are all valedictorians,” she says. “It’s the
of a fifty-year-old, not a thirty-three-year-old woman,” the ballet.”
dancer says in jest. “But these are nothing compared to
what other dancers have gone through,” she adds, flashing
on memories of dancers rushed to hospital suffering with
life-threatening anorexias, which would usually kick off Where You Meet Yourself in a Giant Mirror
after someone pointed at those two “extra” kilos.
Every Day, You Learn to Deal with Your Fail-
ings and Assets
Helena Sgouramani
“Ballet is about training twelve hours a day, feeling ugly,
feeling fat, facing constant rejection, falling apart, and
picking up your pieces, all at once. Yet, strangely enough,
I name ballet as the reason why I have never sunk into
depression starting then.” In every audition the Bejart
graduate attended, she would carry along all the ideals of
perfection imprinted in her, only to see them crush. “No
matter how tall, short, dark-skinned, light-skinned, thin
or voluptuous you were, at the end of the day, you were
at the whim of the director’s personal taste. This freed
me from the tantalizing feeling of injustice in the world,
and I am at peace with myself ever since. In this light, I’m
probably wiser, even apt to live life in a stoically humorous
way.”
Sgouramani is currently a PhD Candidate in Basic and Applied Cognitive Science in the Department of Philosophy
and History of Science at the University of Athens—under
a full Aristoteles Onassis scholarship—and a member of
the Multisensory and Temporal Processing Lab at the same
university. She is adamant ballet was a precursor to her
academic success, the hard work, the persistence, the focus, traits she sees –now as a ballet teacher—in all her
seventeen-year-old students at the pre-professional balJuly 2016 Edition from continnect.com
m continnect.com B [email protected]
© Pat Catterson
“I don’t recall a single day of my life not dancing,” are
the words of Pat Catterson, acclaimed choreographer,
dancer and veteran teacher, who has choreographed and
presented over one hundred works in New York City
since 1968, and taught composition and mentored student works at UCLA, the Juilliard School, Danshögskolan
in Stockholm and elsewhere. An offspring of parentsballroom dancers and a tap dancer-grandfather, she had
no other choice than first-dance at three.
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