My son, the dancer
by Katrina Onstad
by Katrina Onstad
In the pink ghetto of ballet class, the sight of boys still makes people squeamish. Let me say this: I was not trying to make a point when I signed my son up for ballet. Registering your kids for classes in Toronto is a particular kind of hell: It’s airplane-delay hell, it’s on-hold hell; it’s the hell of total helplessness in the face of one’s very best efforts. There are too many people in the city and not enough classes, so when I finally got through the online registration process, gymnastics, “creative movement” and swimming were filled. This is how my son ended up in preschool ballet. And I didn’t give it too much thought: A three-year-old boy doing ballet can’t be such a big deal, right? We’re post–The Bad News Bears; we’re even post–Billy Elliot. On the morning of our first class, I upsold: “You’re going to take ballet. You’re so lucky. You get to dance around for half an hour while Mommy reads the paper, something she hasn’t done in four years. I love ballet!” J. just looked at me, and said, “Mom, ballet’s for girls.” I felt nauseous. How had this happened so soon? Where had I failed him? An image came to mind: A dreadlocked boy who often showed up at my son’s daycare in dresses. His mother, forever breastfeeding some sibling or other, casually telling me, “He wears what he wants. Why fight it?” That kid would never scoff at ballet; he wasn’t the socially constructed cog that mine clearly was. “Nonsense!” I shouted. “Let’s go to YouTube!” I sat J. in my lap and showed him men dancing when I requested she produce in the flesh these hypothetical groundbreakers.
Nonetheless, she proved an excellent teacher. Through the window, I watched J. as he tentatively
pointed his toes and raised his hands above his head. When it came to the free dance, he went mental in the way I’d hoped, frogbouncing and pinballing. At the end of the class, he announced, “Good,” and left very happy. The next week, his father took him, reporting back that it went “great!” He paused. “Except . . . .” He said that just as J. was approaching the studio, one mom looked in and exclaimed, “It’s a sea of pink! So cute!” And then turned to see my son in his army shorts and England soccer shirt. “Oh . . . ,” she said, surprised. When I went the next week and peered through the glass between newspaper sections, I saw everyone in pairs, except my son. J. stood, bouncing on his toes with his hand out, his open-to-the-world face tilted upward. No girl would hold his hand. The pink cloud next to him, maybe four years old, squealed and ran away; so did two others. The moment was frozen for me: my son, rejected because he’s male. It seems that, at least where ballet
is concerned, the gender divide is as wide as ever, for both kids and parents. Kelly Bale, who manages the recreation programs at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, says that the school has been actively recruiting boys for years, offering all-boy classes and financial incentives simply to get the male numbers up. In the recreational program, 36 weeks of instruction for a girl is $460; for a boy, it’s $88, which just covers the costs. Even so, only about 20 percent of the students are boys. The repercussions for the art are serious: Can you imagine a ballet without men? Bale admits she’s heard stories about boys being picked on in the schoolyard. Yet at registration, it’s not the boys who are hesitating; it’s often the dads. “They’ll say, ‘He can’t do it that day. He has soccer,’” she says, laughing. “We play up the athleticism and the coordination to the parents. We say that it will supplement sports.” But why is a boy doing ballet for ballet’s sake such a scandalous idea? Clearly, there’s a whiff of homophobia in this aversion; ballet is about grace, beauty – pink. It’s feminine, and feminine is still only okay for females, unless you’re, you know, gay. But girls are encouraged to borrow from the best of masculinity with little controversy anymore, integrating hockey and football, learning power and teamwork without having their sexual identities defined. The river doesn’t seem to flow both ways. While I watched my son dancing, I thought about my daughter and how hard I’ve worked to tell her that she’s strong and smart and not just pretty and pink. But that was easy for me, instinctive, somehow, to protect her from the cages that seem poised above her head at every step. How shameful, then, to admit that when faced with the prospect of my little boy doing ballet, my first instinct wasn’t to tell him that he could be part of something sublime, that he could use his body to convey ideas, not just power. Instead, I pointed out that Superman wears tights. I told him
ballet could make him strong, like a man, not beautiful, like a woman. By masking ballet’s intrinsic importance, wasn’t I saying that beauty isn’t available to him as a boy? What else am I so casually
denying him when I keep him away from girls’ worlds? Am I, too, failing to take his hand?
Nonetheless, she proved an excellent teacher. Through the window, I watched J. as he tentatively
pointed his toes and raised his hands above his head. When it came to the free dance, he went mental in the way I’d hoped, frogbouncing and pinballing. At the end of the class, he announced, “Good,” and left very happy. The next week, his father took him, reporting back that it went “great!” He paused. “Except . . . .” He said that just as J. was approaching the studio, one mom looked in and exclaimed, “It’s a sea of pink! So cute!” And then turned to see my son in his army shorts and England soccer shirt. “Oh . . . ,” she said, surprised. When I went the next week and peered through the glass between newspaper sections, I saw everyone in pairs, except my son. J. stood, bouncing on his toes with his hand out, his open-to-the-world face tilted upward. No girl would hold his hand. The pink cloud next to him, maybe four years old, squealed and ran away; so did two others. The moment was frozen for me: my son, rejected because he’s male. It seems that, at least where ballet
is concerned, the gender divide is as wide as ever, for both kids and parents. Kelly Bale, who manages the recreation programs at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, says that the school has been actively recruiting boys for years, offering all-boy classes and financial incentives simply to get the male numbers up. In the recreational program, 36 weeks of instruction for a girl is $460; for a boy, it’s $88, which just covers the costs. Even so, only about 20 percent of the students are boys. The repercussions for the art are serious: Can you imagine a ballet without men? Bale admits she’s heard stories about boys being picked on in the schoolyard. Yet at registration, it’s not the boys who are hesitating; it’s often the dads. “They’ll say, ‘He can’t do it that day. He has soccer,’” she says, laughing. “We play up the athleticism and the coordination to the parents. We say that it will supplement sports.” But why is a boy doing ballet for ballet’s sake such a scandalous idea? Clearly, there’s a whiff of homophobia in this aversion; ballet is about grace, beauty – pink. It’s feminine, and feminine is still only okay for females, unless you’re, you know, gay. But girls are encouraged to borrow from the best of masculinity with little controversy anymore, integrating hockey and football, learning power and teamwork without having their sexual identities defined. The river doesn’t seem to flow both ways. While I watched my son dancing, I thought about my daughter and how hard I’ve worked to tell her that she’s strong and smart and not just pretty and pink. But that was easy for me, instinctive, somehow, to protect her from the cages that seem poised above her head at every step. How shameful, then, to admit that when faced with the prospect of my little boy doing ballet, my first instinct wasn’t to tell him that he could be part of something sublime, that he could use his body to convey ideas, not just power. Instead, I pointed out that Superman wears tights. I told him
ballet could make him strong, like a man, not beautiful, like a woman. By masking ballet’s intrinsic importance, wasn’t I saying that beauty isn’t available to him as a boy? What else am I so casually
denying him when I keep him away from girls’ worlds? Am I, too, failing to take his hand?
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