The Turning: Room of Mirrors · iHeartPodcasts and Rococo Punch

S2:Ep 7- The Line

February 28, 2023·53 min·4 clips

Chloe Angel reveals 'the line' in ballet is often code for 'you need to lose weight,' exposing a toxic culture.

1. This episode of The Turning: Room of Mirrors focuses on how ballet culture uses the concept of 'the line' to enforce a specific body ideal and traces its impact through the experiences of two dancers. 2. The episode features Chloe Angel, journalist and author of Turning Point: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself, along with former New York City Ballet dancers Sophie Flack and Katherine Morgan. 3. The core thesis is that ballet's thin ideal, inherited from Balanchine and embedded in the language of 'the line,' operates as a system of body shame that is rarely made explicit, giving it unusual durability. 4. Chloe Angel argues that fat phobia is the most deeply entrenched issue in ballet — the thing ballet culture will compromise on last — and that the language of 'clean, pure, undistracting lines' encodes an ideal in which breasts are unclean, butts impure, and hips distracting. 5. Balanchine is described as the 'father of American ballet' and credited with establishing the model of the all-powerful artistic director whose approval dancers craved as though it were religious validation — 'If it's not God, then it's the art form or Balanchine.' 6. Both Sophie Flack and Katherine Morgan were around 10 years old when they watched Balanchine choreography for the first time — Sophie saw Patricia McBride dancing the Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, and Katherine saw NYCB perform the Nutcracker — and both decided they had to dance Balanchine. 7. Katherine Morgan describes having her body evaluated by teachers as young as 12 and 13, being told she was 'talented enough but would always have to watch her weight.' A physical therapist discussed the size of her thighs in front of her when she was under 10. 8. At School of American Ballet (SAB) auditions, parents were scanned to predict what the child would 'turn into' genetically; Katherine notes this was irrelevant for her because she was adopted. 9. Sophie Flack, living in the SAB dorms in New York at 15, describes students running the dorm stairs between classes to burn calories and competing over how little they ate — meals eaten while walking between classes. 10. Sophie developed an eating disorder at 12 after studying four tapes of Balanchine repertoire and concluding the only way to keep her developing breasts from growing was to restrict her diet; at 15 she visited a surgeon about breast reduction and was told to simply lose weight. 11. SAB teachers referred Sophie to a nutritionist after concerns about her weight loss; the nutritionist prescribed 2,500 calories a day, which Sophie describes laughing at because she was 'sustaining herself on so little' — she could not finish half a mini muffin at a bake sale. 12. Sophie was accepted as an NYCB apprentice at 17 and describes the news being delivered in the indirect 'speak of the theater' — never direct, always an afterthought, 'a power they held over us.' 13. Within her first year in the company, a ballet mistress told Sophie that Peter Martins had noticed she'd gained weight — described as her 'first fat talk.' 'Peter says he notices you've gained weight' is how such messages were always delivered: never from Martins directly, always through intermediaries. 14. Katherine Morgan was cast as Juliet at the Saratoga summer residency just two weeks into her apprenticeship, replacing a principal who had torn her calf muscle — and performed despite accidentally hitting her partner Tyler in the face during a turn, leaving blood on her costume. 15. Katherine describes the phrase 'get in shape' as the company's standard code for 'lose weight'; at 19, she was told she wasn't 'in her best shape' and allowed her handler to believe she had only recently gotten her first period, since she knew the emotional context would be used as an excuse. 16. Katherine gained 45 pounds in six weeks while dancing Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, barely eating and spending eight hours daily in a Peter Martins choreography session; after eight doctors over two years, the cause remained undiagnosed. 17. Sophie, after years in the corps de ballet, asked Peter Martins for the chance to study roles in Balanchine's abstract black-and-white ballets — he responded warmly and asked her to bring specific ideas — but when the next casting was posted, she wasn't even called to understudy. 18. In 2009, during budget cutbacks, Sophie received a call from Peter Martins' assistant saying Peter wanted a meeting; she fell to the pavement on the Lower East Side, described the feeling as being diagnosed with a terminal illness, and said 'I didn't know another way to live.' 19. Peter Martins told Katherine to put her health first and that there would always be a place for her, but Katherine never returned to professional dancing after leaving; Sophie also never danced professionally again after her layoff. 20. The episode closes with Sophie asking a question she was too afraid to make explicit at the time: 'Was it my body?' — the question that sat underneath years of discipline, sacrifice, and an eating disorder that had started at 12.

As heard by us

A grounded look at how ballet pressure can turn thinness into discipline.

Sophie's story shows how ballet can push girls toward staying prepubescent, then follow that pressure into a teenage consultation about her body. A surgeon's casual advice to lose weight starts a harmful pattern.

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Why you'd press play

When ballet discipline starts to look like self-erasure, this episode follows the line carefully.

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