The Turning: Room of Mirrors · iHeartPodcasts and Rococo Punch

S2: Ep 2 - Ritual Healing

January 24, 2023·38 min·3 clips

Elizabeth Kendall felt Balanchine's ballet was a gift of joy that reached her soul after her mother's death.

The theater replaces the family. The excerpt follows Balanchine at school as work, older boys, and music lessons start to shrink his world. Music is the thread he still has. Elizabeth treats it as his link to the past, after his family left him at school when he was nine. She does not overplay the abandonment. She lets it sit there: a child too young to know where grief ends and anger begins. One door closes in him. His family fades back, and the theater becomes the place that keeps showing up. Music holds what speech cannot. That is why Elizabeth reads his gift for fitting steps to music as something stranger than technique. Ballet becomes an inward language, a way to talk where ordinary attachment has already failed. His teacher sees composure. Courteous, distant, almost too sure of himself, he looks independent while loneliness sits at the center. Then Sleeping Beauty gets through to him. Under the lights, with music and costume around him, his dislike of the school turns into devotion. The beauty does not erase the hurt. It grows right beside it, which makes the art feel protective and expensive at the same time. Elizabeth follows that pattern closely: a boy left inside discipline learns to make theater into family, and his body into memory.

As heard by us

A careful portrait of how abandonment, music, and ballet shape a life.

Balanchine is framed less like a monument and more like a child shaped by abandonment, music, and the theater. The story moves through the losses of his early life and settles on ballet as both refuge and language, making that inner logic feel lived in rather than explained from…

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Listen for a ballet life shaped by abandonment, music, and memory.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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