There’s a legend in the dance world that once you reach a certain size in pregnancy, you can turn better. Rebekah Kowal, a dance professor at The University of Iowa who took advanced ballet classes into her final month of pregnancy with her second child, remembers pulling off a triple pirouette in class one day. “I was seven months along, and so big that I’d just laugh when I caught sight of myself in the mirror,” she says. “But when I pulled that off, I thought, ‘Wow! I guess it is true!’”
A triple pirouette? When I was seven months pregnant, I thought twice before going after a carton of milk in the far aisles of the grocery store. Wouldn’t the boxed soy milk in aisle four suffice? And I distinctly recall making the very poor decision to jaywalk across a busy four-lane street in Los Angeles. As the cars rumbled toward my hulking frame, I knew I had only their humanity to save me; I couldn’t dart or weave, only lumber hopelessly.
Although I tried to stay fit during my pregnancies, doing yoga and swimming up until my kids were born, I never enjoyed those fifty extra pounds. I didn’t find them “interesting,” as Kowal told me she did and there were definitely no pirouettes. For dancers, however, their bodies are their primary tools of artistic expression. Pregnancy offers them obvious challenges and unexpected pleasures. The pleasures have only been allowed in recent decades as contemporary attitudes about pregnancy and athleticism, as well as women and work, have evolved. Classically trained ballerinas of earlier eras seldom had children if they wished to keep performing. In fact, a euphemism for pregnant dancers—un mal au genou, French for “knee injury”—was coined after a nineteenth century ballerina, Marie Taglioni, feigned an injured knee to explain her disappearance from the stage.
Today, more ballet dancers perform during and after pregnancy, though the rigidity of the form still keeps mamas in the minority. It’s more common for modern dancers to have children and to dance through their pregnancies. Some have even made pregnancy a subject for dances. Heidi Henderson, a choreographer and dancer who has danced with many modern dance companies, performed two weeks before her first daughter was born. Although her pregnancy was not a direct subject of the dance, the choreographer and other dancers, all of who were younger than Henderson (“I was of ‘advanced maternal age,’” she laughs, recalling the sticker that an OB nurse adhered to her medical chart.), were thrilled to have her ever-changing body as part of the performance. The one exception was the costume maker, who kept creating ever more voluminous dresses for Henderson. Rebellious, Henderson turned them around so that the tighter fitting area was around her belly and the flowy section was in back.
PREVIOUS PAGE
