The Pregnant Pirouette: Mothers of Invention

The choreography had to remain fluid. “In one dance,” Henderson says, “six of us had to get off the floor in a very strict count pattern. As I grew larger, we had to add counts for me, so that what had initially been three counts became ten by the end of the performance.” She also moved differently as her pregnancy advanced. Like Kowal, Henderson is lanky and tall. The additional weight of a baby and new center of gravity causes a pregnant woman to dance lower. “I felt very earthy and strong,” Henderson recalls with pleasure.

Like a writer forced to write in a foreign language for a period, or a painter who temporarily loses her ability to see color, a dancer who has felt her body—usually a taut, carefully controlled instrument—change as quickly and radically as it does during pregnancy will dance differently after the baby is born. Kowal says that pregnancy helped her to realize her body’s limitations. On one hand, she was amazed by its power to transform so completely, to grow another person, and then nourish it through breastfeeding. But afterward, she was thinner and frailer than she’d been, and could feel essential changes to her muscular skeleton. “You really have to learn about your body anew after such a significant experience,” she says. “You have to face what your body can do. It’s a reckoning with your physical self.”

She and Henderson agreed that with the limitations of time, something dancers feel acutely since performance schedules are so unfriendly to families, their dancing has become less precious. They now focus on the essentials. As a choreographer, Henderson is weaving some of the lessons of motherhood into the dances she creates. Currently, she is interested in attention and patience, states of being that mothers are always trying to attain. She knows that the depth of experience has changed her dancing: “I’m not the hot shot dancer I was at thirty, but I know that I’m a better dancer now.” In other words, she may not be doing any triple pirouettes, but she’s making emotionally complex dances.