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Dec. 2024​

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My whole life, my grandmother told me, always with pride, stories from her years as a ballerina. They weren’t just memories; they were rituals passed down, woven into the rhythm of daily life. Even now, in her late seventies, she spins around the kitchen with the same quiet grace, a spoon in hand, stirring soup like it’s choreographed. She pliés while putting on her makeup and she rises into a soft  and masterful relevé to reach the top shelf of the fridge.
Once a ballerina, always a ballerina.
But beneath the elegance lies a body shaped by discipline, and pain. The artistry of ballet is inseparable from the secret physical toll it takes on the delicate ballerinas. The arch of a foot may look effortless, but it’s been molded through years of strain. Her back aches. Her ankles cramp. And nothing bears the weight of her career more than her feet, scarred by years en pointe. Pointe shoes, those iconic symbols of grace, are worn until they bruise the skin, break the toes, and are dried with blood. Then they’re thrown away, quietly, like spent tools of beauty.
This piece is a meditation on that duality. On the reverence we give to grace, and the invisibility of the cost behind it. Ballet—like much of womanhood, like much of art—is expected to be effortless, silent, beautiful. But it’s not. It’s repetition. It’s pressure. It’s performance built on pain.