90 MINUTES OF BEING ME

// BY MADELINE ART

“When I grow up,” I wrote for a first-grade assignment, “I want to be a ballerina.” At this point I was taking one ballet class a week, at a studio 30 minutes south of my house. I loved the routine of this: my mom pulling my hair into a bun and helping me shimmy into my pink tights and baby blue leotard. Each week I silently walked into the studio and stepped into first position, my left hand on the barre.

Every ballet class has the same structure: the fi rst half is at the barre. Your movements grow progressively larger, warming up the di erent muscles you need to dance. The order of combinations is always the same: pliés, tendus, dégagés, frappés, rond de jambes, fondus, grand battements, adagio.

When you start, the ballet barre is on your left side and your left fingers rest on top of it. Your heels touch and your toes point away from each other. The turnout of your feet should spiral up your legs, so that if you were to draw a line up the front of each leg — from your third toe up your shin and through the center of your thigh — the lines would face away from each other. My teachers always told me to pretend my legs were barbershop poles: energy spiraling upward and outward. This is first position.

The combination for pliés generally doesn’t change at all.

Two demi pliés (bend your legs a little) and one grand plié (bend your legs a lot) in each position: first, second, fourth and fifth. Somewhere around eight, you age out of third position. But the rest hasn’t changed. This is how I started ballet classes at age four; this is how I start ballet classes now.

After pliés, the combinations vary from class to class. The teacher creates a sequence of steps for each exercise, sets it to piano music, and teaches it. You do it on the right side, and then the left side, and then probably never again. My obsession with ballet took off two years before I wrote this in my first grade class, when my mom and aunts took me to see “The Nutcracker” for the first time. I was four years old and entranced. At the end of Act I, fake snow falls from above the stage while the corps de ballet waltzes below. This is one of my most vivid early memories. I wanted, more than anything, to be onstage.

My chief goal, then, was to be Clara, the show’s young star. Clara receives the titular nutcracker for Christmas and is so enamored that she sneaks back to her living room after dark and sleeps under the Christmas tree, clutching her doll. In my favorite pictures of myself from these years, I’m trying to do the same: curling up in the space between the bottom boughs and the floor, pretending to sleep, and hold- ing a nutcracker as if it were a stuffed animal. Maybe I was hoping to live out Clara’s storyline — to be transported to the Land of the Sweets. More likely, I was wishing that one day I’d be doing the same onstage. In second grade, I quit. I had grown bored of the repetition. My mom sent my ballet teacher a letter saying she was pretty sure I’d find my way back to a studio, and in a few