Everything about the ballet studio felt strange but unmistakably familiar—the last-minute hair fixes, the floor marked by scruffs and fraying tape, and the chorus of vaguely Slavic accents, all wrapped in an odorous haze of chalk and sweaty feet. As I took the barre, the instructor uttered words I hadn’t heard in years—port de bras, arabesque, relevé, coupé, passé, soutenu—as she urged me to “find more room” in my spine.
Growing up, ballet had been a huge part of my life until I quit at the age of 15, when the focus on my imperfections became too much for me to bear. Now I was back in the studio as a 33-year-old mother, and I was as nervous as hell. At first I avoided looking in the mirror, where I knew I would find an older, heavier, and far less capable version of the dancer I used to be.
Of course, this was no ordinary ballet studio, and this was no ordinary ballet class. All of us were all more or less “beginners” taking our first class at the Washington School of Ballet—one of the only premier ballet companies in the world to offer a full curriculum for adults seeking to learn, or relearn, the art of ballet.
In 2022, the Washington Ballet recruited world-renowned dancer and choreographer Miya Hisaka to revive the program after enrollment had taken a dip during COVID. Quickly, Hisaka got to work, creating a curriculum complete with seven levels of classes—from beginner basics to advanced. In just three years she has doubled the number of faculty and classes available per week while quintupling the number of students, from 1,600 to more than 8,000 and counting.
Born to Japanese American parents who were forcibly relocated to internment camps during World War II, Hisaka grew up in Cleveland, where she says she never felt like she belonged. That was until she saw a local performance of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—one of the first dance companies in the world to feature dancers of color. “I saw them, and I knew right away: That’s what I want to do. That’s who I am,” she says. At 17, Hisaka was recruited by Ailey, which kicked off a decades-long career as a professional dancer and teacher, including a nearly 30-year stint as head of the dance program at Georgetown University.
Now in her 60s, Hisaka has made it her life’s mission to introduce ballet to adults of any age or experience level, debunking the myth that ballet is exclusively for the young, thin, or white.
This ethos of acceptance means that the adult program at the Washington School of Ballet embraces students from all backgrounds and ages—from dancers who have just graduated high school to students like Tina Kaneen, 72, who grew up with ballet and later returned to the practice at the age of 50. Kaneen and her peers say the sense of community at the Washington School of Ballet is unlike anything they’ve experienced in their adult life. Ileana Arroyo, a 64-year-old student from Puerto Rico who couldn’t afford to take a ballet class until her mid-20s, shares, “On my first day, I went and there was a group of people who said, ‘Hey, do you want to grab lunch with us?’”
Hisaka tells Glamour, “The worst feeling in the world is going to a ballet class where you don’t know anyone or you don’t feel like you’re good enough.” At the Washington School of Ballet, she aims to make everyone feel comfortable and welcomed. At the core of her work is a belief in the curative power of ballet. “Ballet breaks through all barriers,” she says. “It transcends race, income, and language. It helps us to move forward and to heal.”
For students like myself who grew up with ballet, taking ballet classes as an adult can feel like a reclamation over our bodies, many of which were deemed “unsuitable” for ballet. “Ballet is woman,” declared George Balanchine, famed dancer and longtime director of the New York City Ballet. During his 35-year tenure from 1948 to his death in 1983, all dancers at the New York City Ballet “had to be fashioned, honed, and molded to Balanchine’s liking,” writes Glory Liu for The Nation. “Fat, curves, any excess flesh, were considered obstructions” while “extreme dieting, taking pills, and excess exercise were common strategies among dancers who wanted to earn or stay in his favor.”
While things in the dance world are slowly improving, the specter of Balanchine’s ideal trails many students who grew up with ballet—myself included. From as young as four or five, we dancers were taught to incessantly self-correct, pushing through pain as we looked in the mirror, scanning for flaws as part of a brutal, never-ending “surveillance” of our growing, ever-changing bodies.
Fifteen years later, this surveillance still haunts me. As a student for more than a decade, I pushed through pain, performing as my legs shook and my toenails fell off, though it was never enough. Male teachers would come up to me, whispering within inches of my ear that I had the “perfect ballet body”—until I didn’t. In front of entire classes, they took to pointing out my flaws—my flat feet, my differently sized legs, my long arms, my Dominican hips—as my peers critiqued my meals, tallying the caloric intake of each blueberry, tangerine, and Goldfish cracker.
Yet at the Washington School of Ballet, there is no room for judgement or competition—two things that are so often associated with ballet. “None of us want to be famous. None of us are going to perform at the Kennedy Center. We’re doing this for fun,” says Arroyo. Still, that does not mean that the program’s students don’t take the practice seriously. Many students say they appreciate what ballet has brought to their lives. Side by side with prima ballerinas, they are able to improve their strength, endurance, posture, coordination, and flexibility while engaging in a certain “elevation” of the everydayness, by which our very movements can become art. “Ballet has become not only a source of personal growth, mental retreat, and physical well-being,” says Patrick von Suskil, a student in his early 40s, “but also a ‘stage’ for artistic expression I never knew existed.” Over the next few months, von Suskil and his fellow students will be gearing up for the program’s third annual Adult Student Concert, scheduled for later this spring. With its full program, stage technology, and all original choreography, many students say that the concert makes them feel that they “are really part of a company.”
In building the adult program, Hisaka has assembled a faculty of the highest caliber, hiring many current and former members of the Washington Ballet. She is also sure to hire teachers who genuinely enjoy working with adult students. “They aren’t there because their parents want them to be there. They are there because they love it,” says Rafael Bejarano, a company principal originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, who received a scholarship from the Washington Ballet after finishing first in the semifinals of the Youth American Grand Prix.
As the one of the program’s longest-serving faculty members, Linda Baranovics tells Glamour how rewarding it is to teach adult students—“I get so much more than I give,” she says—while longtime company member (and now rehearsal director) Tamás Krizsa says that teaching adults is what has re-sparked his love for ballet. “It’s food for my soul,” he says. “I feel like I have to do this.”
As a physical art form, there is perhaps nothing as visually specific or exacting as ballet, meaning the impulse to self-criticize may be inevitable, especially as we age. Of his experience as an adult student at the school, von Suskil tells Glamour that his greatest challenge has been “accepting that, despite my best intentions, as an older dancer, I may not always be able to execute movements at the technical level I aspire to.”
Yet as we get older and the opportunities to express ourselves dwindle, there is something liberating about saying something with your body—even if it isn’t perfect, and even if no one is listening. Every time I take the barre, I am able to get lost in the music and do simply what my instructor tells me—to think of my neck as a fountain, to move my feet along a rainbow, and to imagine my shoulders as wings that can help me fly. The mirror becomes another tool, rather than a representation of my perceived weakness.
When I leave, I know what Miya Hisaka says is true: That “life is so much better with dance in it.”
Cornelia Powers is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, The Cut, Time, The Washington Post, Elle, and others. She is currently working on her first book, an ancestral memoir about her great-great-grandmother, Bessie Anthony.
