Should We Blame Ballet?

Nina is an incredible dancer. She has achieved a level of skill that most 12-year-old girls in ballet class will never have. To do this, she has put her whole self—her energy, personal space, mental and physical health—on the line. In growing as a dancer, she was stunted in so many other ways, as evidenced in her pink bedroom and her mother’s constant babying of her. In short, the correlation between ballet and Nina’s many issues seems extremely strong.

However, after thinking about the movie, I asked myself if it was ballet that made Nina this way or if it was something else. I mean, is it possible to develop schizophrenia due to ballet alone? Are we to believe that Nina would not have had the issues she did had she not been a ballet dancer? I see no reason why her perfectionist anxiety could not have manifested in another field.

Lily serves as an example of a ballet dancer that seems relatively normal and even happy. This only solidifies the claim that it is not necessarily ballet that made Nina who she became. Both Lily and Nina are ballet dancers, so what is the differentiator? Why is Nina an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, while Lily seems, to a great degree, to be a relatively normal 20-something year old?

With all this said, though I don't think we can blame ballet completely for Nina’s issues, I do think that ballet is notorious for the toll it takes on those who perform it, as well as for providing an especially perfect medium to express obsessive-compulsive an perfectionist tendencies.