AMAYA RODRIGUEZ

I studied there for about 10 years. 

After around 6 years I started to disconnect mentally, in the 7th year I left. I felt like it wasn’t my world anymore. It was too toxic.

I felt like everything that I suffered and that I would continue to have to suffer no longer compensated for the sacrifices.

Leaving the sport opened many doors for me – ones that I never imagined I would have ever been able to access.

I stopped ballet totally after that, I halted due to the pain, I guess.

But recently I’m feeling the necessity to start again. But to do it for me this time, personally not professionally.

In the end it’s something I’ve studied my entire life. I can’t get rid of it, it’s part of me.

Everything about ballet… my body needs it, I need it, I need to continue to express myself with my body.

But not professionally anymore.

Doing it professionally removed the beauty in ballet that I saw when I was little.

The motive for which I started ballet in the first place – the beauty of ballet – disappeared somewhat by chasing it professionally.

It’s the reality that I still struggle to accept.

I’ve started again but just in my room.

BN: Why…

Amaya: Because I need it, I feel good doing ballet.

It’s beautiful in the end. Aesthetically – it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. It’s so delicate but so strong. In the end you’re controlling every inch of your body, you’re in total synchronicity with your body.

You appreciate it even more when you know everything it takes physically for it to look so aesthetically pleasing.

BN: I feel like you have a love hate relationship with ballet… could you explain the ‘hate’?

Amaya: You start so young. It prohibits you from everything. It makes you skip many natural life growth stages. It forces you to mature very quickly, you’re experiencing things that supposedly for your age you’re not supposed to be experiencing yet.

From 11 years old, I would leave my house at 5:30am to arrive to training at 7:00am, and would come back at 9:00pm.

All those things… you don’t have time to live normal life stages as a child.

At that moment you don’t realize because that was yoru life and your friends were there.

But you couldn’t do anything else. All day, we were training and studying.

At the end of the day, it burns you out when you start observing the life of those around you, or your siblings for example.  

That and the fact that you are constantly being judged and compared to others.

You can become the ugly duckling very quickly… very quickly.

For example, if you’re slightly bigger than the others, or your extensions aren’t as developed or where they should be.

The professors would take you to a corner, they don’t look at you or give you any coaching, corrections, or attention, everyone knows you’re the ugly duckling – you’re basically rejected.  

The professors from the old school are so black and white. You’re either good or not. Two extremes, nothing in the middle.  

Some professors would divide the group between those they liked and those they didn’t.

BN: Have you ever felt like the ugly duckling? 

Amaya: Yes, at around 16 years old. It’s when I had this crisis. It’s when I decided I would stop, although I was still fighting for it. I got injured and started gaining weight.  

When I returned to school the next year, knowing that I wanted to stop but felt like I still had to be there.

One anecdote I can share; when I came back, I was heavier, that means there are many passes you can’t do because obviously the boys were sticks too. The professor told me I couldn’t perform in the class because the boys wouldn’t be able to lift me up.

I was always very good though honestly. One professor told me once.  “I don’t understand how you can be so fat and that the steps are so easy for you and for the others not.”

I didn’t know how to feel. I was a normal size.

Another day I was in the living room of the school, and the boys came out to ask me to come out so they could practice their lifts with me, to test between them who was the strongest one.

They didn’t realize how it could make me feel and they kept insisting. The pain wasn’t always intentional.

I guess we aren’t given a manual of what is good and what is bad, especially when we’re that young.

We were in a period of growth and development at that age.

I wasn’t flat chested. I used to have a professor that asked me to tape my chest with elastic fabric to stop the growth of my breasts. The entire day… I would sweat, I couldn’t breathe. Just so that I would resemble the other girls.

Even the skinny girls that were praised, people would look at them and applauded them for their appearance, but they were suffering too, eating 1000 calories or less a day.

Even if you felt bad, you had to pretend that you felt good, even if you were dying inside.

If you had blisters all over your feet, you had to keep going.

Professors would tell you stop being lazy if you complained about pain in your foot. Until your foot was broken, they wouldn’t let you stop.  

When I came back, they send me to a nutritionist, her name was literally Usrula… no joke.

She would call me the ‘undisciplined one.’

The diet was only soup… that wasn’t discipline to me. Or to eat half a cucumber at lunch.

Ballet provoked a lot of anxiety around food. Eating disorders. We’d basically spend one month on an ultra-restricted diet and the moment the exam finished, we’d all run to buy all the cakes and sweets we hadn’t eaten that month.  

Now when I think about it, I don’t understand where I gathered the energy to train.

I remember it more like anxiety, more than hunger… from not being able to eat.

For the boys, it was the same, not with the same intensity but it was the same.

There was a girl that would go to everyone in the entire salon and ask everyone for their opinion how she looked physically that day.

BN: It’s the complete love and hate of pursing elite sport. It’s like this chasing of the thing that is liberating you and destroying you at the very same time.

But what is so wild is that those things co-exist in total chaotic harmony. That’s the Bete Noir story.  

Amaya: Yeh, we’re real masochists.  

BN: What was the lowest point?

Amaya: In the moment that I said I was going to stop. I lost all my friends from ballet – because I didn’t belong anymore.

They didn’t know how to talk about anything other than ballet, or other banal topics, and I was losing interest.

When I told my best friend that I wanted to leave, she distanced herself from me, same happened with many of my friends.

BN: Did you ever feel this existential crisis, deep thoughts on the meaning of life?

Amaya: Yes, I think we all have those thoughts, but I felt that when I left ballet.

If I Don’t dance, what do I do?

Slowly, you learn that it was only one chapter of my life. An important part but not the only part.

I study cinema now too – movies have taught me a lot.

When I see movies, it shows me the importance of sharing your story, they allow you to understand that there are many more ways to live. I see that there are other people, it makes you understand people more, it also allows you to forgive certain people because it shows you other contexts of life – examples of how other people experience life – and how different that is to your own reality.

I want to share everything that I’ve lived.

Ballet and I left each other. So I guess I’ll never know how it could have ended differently. It’s a relationship.

You are you but you’re not at the same time. It’s like an ethereal thing – something that comes in and out, that’s always there – present.

It’s something that you can never remove from yourself.

It’s a deal with yourself – a condition of who you are.

We’re a collage made up of all these experiences, not a single entity.

BN: Do you feel free now? 

Amaya: Haha, I don’t know. In some moments I feel calmer and freer, but those are only moments…

I’m learning to accept each emotion that appears, every thought, but only for the time that it exists, then let it go.  

BN: Perhaps all of this teaches us that life is just about enjoying…

Amaya: Also, to understand the difference of when you are really enjoying the process or when you’re just enduring pain and you’re so distant from the root of why you started in the first place.

A professor used to tell me – the more it hurts – the sweeter the reward. Like, what the hell is that…

Amaya Rodriguez

Ballet - Cuba

“Even if you felt bad, you had to pretend that you felt good, even if you were dying inside.

 If you had blisters all over your feet, you had to keep going.

Professors would tell you to stop being lazy if you complained about pain in your foot. Until it was broken.”