A Northwest Ballet Program Is Making Space for Adults — And Challenging Outdated Gender Norms

by Megan Burbank

"I've always loved ballet," says Sarah Witherup. We're crossing a busy street in University Place on our way to lunch, warm-ups on over our ballet clothes. We spent the morning in dance class and only have an hour before we need to get back to the studio at Dance Theatre Northwest, a small dance school and company hosting a four-day-long ballet intensive for 13 adult dancers. Witherup was the first person I met today: A smiling, welcoming face at the studio's front desk, she's only danced for a year and a half, and, like me, she began as an adult. When she talks about ballet, her excitement is infectious.

Witherup is the kind of student ballet teachers love: She's committed to learning the foundational basics of the art form, and even excited about them. Along with Melanie Kirk-Stauffer, Dance Theatre Northwest's artistic director, Witherup helped organize the intensive at the studio, which has a charming, old-school vibe: think Degas ballerinas on the bathroom wallpaper, a pallet of communal Gatorade in the designated break room, walls of mirrors, a glass case of tchotchkes, and photos from performances past on every available surface.

For Witherup, though, it was important that it offered something else, too. When she decided to finally give ballet a try, she chose Dance Theatre Northwest because it was the only studio she could find with a statement of nondiscrimination posted on its website.

That matters in the ballet world, which upholds traditional notions of gender, more than most art forms, and has a long history of privileging body ideals rooted in white supremacy and anti-fatness. It's possible to find studios and companies that explicitly reject these harmful standards, but it can take work. At Seattle's Exit Space, where I dance most often, there is no gendered dress code for adult classes, and many teachers structure their classes in a way that challenges ballet's strict gender binary rather than reinforcing it.

But this isn't true everywhere. And it's an important consideration for many adult dancers like me — when you're fully in your 30s and paying for your own classes, the last thing you want is a rule-bound environment with the depressingly gendered expectations of a Gymboree — and it was especially important to Witherup, who is trans.

In Kirk-Stauffer's structured, robust adult ballet program, Witherup found her creative home, a supportive environment for her growth as a dancer — and her transition.

At first, she says, she was reluctant to join the studio's beginner classes. But as she developed a strong rapport with Kirk-Stauffer through private lessons, she slowly built up her confidence enough to take the leap, and she found, surprisingly and beautifully, that her gender transition could unfold alongside her dancing. "I got so much confidence from the ballet studio," she says. Soon enough, she was arriving at the barre in the classical uniform of women dancers: a black leotard and pink tights.

That uniform is required for women at Dance Theatre Northwest — men wear black tights with white T-shirts — which, I admit, I found mildly horrifying given my experience primarily at studios without dress codes.

But when I read the rest of the guidance on attire, I was pleasantly surprised to see Dance Theatre Northwest specifies that gender-nonconforming students can follow whatever dress code they want, or incorporate elements from each, "ensuring comfort and personal expression while maintaining the discipline and uniformity essential to dance practice."

Witherup and another dancer, who is nonbinary, were instrumental in adding these details to the dress code, and Witherup speaks fondly of the way the studio has embraced adjustments to the rigid gender roles typical of classical dance.

Resistance to changes like this in ballet are often justified by the need for uniformity and clear body lines, but you only need to see the corps work of companies like Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet to understand that cohesion in ballet comes from technique — not what dancers look like or what they're wearing.

And Dance Theatre Northwest's intensive is also evidence that you don't need to cling rigidly to tradition to make beautiful dancing happen. You just have to teach good technique, which it does: The morning barre is approachable but technically focused, taught with kind corrections and patient instruction by guest teacher Richard Philion.

Later on, Kirk-Stauffer teaches the students simple but elegant choreography for an optional performance the following week. She says keeping performing optional is important to her, and it's a rare move for an intensive — but one that feels thoughtful and respectful of the goals and busy lives adult dance students have. We roll out mats for conditioning, then cap it all off with a lesson in choreography from Swan Lake.

I duck out during the final session on musical theater. At that point, I've danced for hours and need to fuel and take notes. Eating a sandwich in my leotard and tights in the break room outside the studio, the tiny muscles in my feet more tired than they've ever been, I listen to the first notes of a swing song echo out of the class Witherup told me earlier she was especially excited to try.

And I think about something Kirk-Stauffer said during the afternoon's variations class.

Variations are dances from classical ballets that happen at key moments in the story or establish something about a character — or just fill time while the principal dancers are catching their breath backstage. For Kirk-Stauffer, it's important for adult dancers to practice these variations just to see what's possible. We may never perform them, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't get to see what it feels like to dance one.

I'd learned several variations in the past: Bluebird and the Lavender Fairy from Sleeping Beauty, the henchwomen of a ghost queen in Gisele who make men dance to their deaths (one of these remains my favorite variation I've ever learned), a heavily modified White Swan from Swan Lake, conducted over Zoom in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the variation Kirk-Stauffer chose to teach us, from a Swan Lake pas de trois, felt more difficult to me than these others simply because it's fast. I'm not a tall person, but I'm tall for ballet, and this can make quick little steps a struggle. It takes me longer to get back to the ground from a jump.

I'm not the only one.

Many of us struggled with the Swan Lake excerpt, but Kirk-Stauffer's enthusiasm never flagged. If the steps were hard to follow, she told us to focus on just getting the directional changes right. It was a way to keep going without being sunk by perfectionism.

That persistence is what makes any kind of progress in ballet possible: simply continuing to show up, to practice, to challenge the pieces of the art form that keep people out, to imagine a dance world that welcomes everyone and then take as many steps as possible to build it, but above all, just to keep dancing.

Witherup emerges from the musical theater class and says hi.

"How's it going?" I ask.

She responds with a playful but exhausted demeanor familiar to any dancer learning something new: "It's a trainwreck!" she says.

And then she steps back into the studio.

Featured image courtesy of Sarah Witherup.