Translator: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Maria Pericleous
When you’re 18 and you’re attending university,
it’s supposed to be a time of finding yourself
and working out what you’d like to do with your life.
I knew what I wanted to do with my life by the time I was probably five.
So, when I was 18 and entering university though,
I’d found myself, I’d lost myself, and I was left heartbroken.
And, no, it wasn’t by a boy;
it was by my first love, which was ballet.
You see, I was living every little girl’s dream.
At the age of 15 I left my family –
no that wasn’t the dream –
but I left my family, travelled down to Melbourne,
to study ballet full time at the Australian Ballet School.
It was an amazing opportunity: we danced all morning,
did some schoolwork in the middle of the day,
just the bare minimum to get by, keep the parents happy,
then we spent the rest of the afternoon,
well into the evening, continuing our classes, our ballet.
We were also in a really privileged position
because we got to watch and see what we were to become one day.
But as I stood in the studios
watching the company members rehearse ballets and take class,
there was like a disconnect,
I just felt like it wasn’t for me.
The dream that I’d had all of a sudden felt hollow.
There was a few reasons for this.
One would have been because I have more of an athletic build –
mind you, I look back at photos and I go, “Oh my gosh, I was so tiny.”
But at the time, I thought I was huge,
and it developed some very unhealthy eating habits.
I also found out quickly
that to be good at being in a dance company,
you have to be good at being told what to do,
follow the rules.
Something I’m not very good at.
And, finally, one of the reasons,
in this photo, I was just about to go on stage
to perform with Queensland Ballet’s season of “Sleeping Beauty”.
And I remember when I look at this photo,
the anxiety I felt behind those eyes about going on stage.
You see, I enjoyed the casting, I enjoyed learning the choreography,
I enjoyed the process leading up to the stage time,
but when it came to actually being on stage,
that should have felt like a reward, and it just didn’t.
Which is a bit of a problem when you’re a dancer;
you’re supposed to be a performer
and enjoy the stage, and I just didn’t enjoy it.
So it was getting down to crunch time.
I was at this point in my life where I had to make a decision.
Because I had to, if I were going to quit,
and I wanted to go to university,
I had to go back home, finish grade 12.
So, I decided, at the end of the day,
I didn’t want to count calories any more,
and I wanted to maybe have my own business one day –
clearly I was born to be my own boss.
And I decided to quit, but I was heartbroken.
You see, it’s not that I didn’t love ballet any more,
I just didn’t know how to make it fit and work in my life.
I had a couple of weeks left in my contract at the school,
so I wasn’t allowed to go home yet,
and when I was finishing those weeks, my parents actually wrote to me.
I can’t believe I kept these letters because I don’t keep anything.
But I’m so glad that I did.
My dad’s letter pretty much says:
“Here’s some money. Go buy yourself some breakfast and a nice magazine.
I know you’re going through a really hard time right now,
but I promise it’ll all work out.”
Typical dad response.
My mum’s letter was a little bit more accurate,
and I love having it today as a bit of a teaching lesson.
She beautifully wrote,
“My darling, I know you feel like a failure,
but I promise you
all these challenges you’re facing
are there to shape you into the woman you are to become.”
And, bloody mothers, they’re always right.
At the time, I was like,
“Mum, I’m just a failure. Thanks mum, that’s nice, nice card”,
tossed it to the side,
again, can’t believe I kept it.
But I’m so glad I did,
because when I was at university,
whilst my friends were getting hospitality jobs and retail work,
I was offered some dance teaching, in particular, ballet.
Thank God, they did that, because, piece by piece,
I started getting a little bit of myself back.
I learned to love ballet in a different way,
and I learned to love ballet in a teaching way,
which, when you think about it, that’s what I was looking for.
Today, I have five years down the track,
my own dance studio,
and I teach students from the ages of three
all the way up to 70- and 80-year-olds ballet … plus.
Yes, 80-year-olds!
I’m going to tell you today why I think ballet is so brilliant.
I think ballet is brilliant because it teaches grit.
One of my favourite authors and humans is Angela Lee Duckworth.
She speaks about grit.
She says the greatest indicator of success
is someone’s grit.
Defined by your stamina –
so your ability to run the marathon,
not the sprint in life,
and to be able to make goals,
and no matter what challenges come your way,
to be able to cope, refocus and continue on the path.
What do I think ballet teachers do?
We teach grit.
Now, more than ever,
when children are too busy looking at their screens,
and too busy chasing Instagram likes and selfies and hashtags,
now, more than ever,
do we need to build resilience within our children.
Parents just want what’s best for their child,
and whether they know it or not,
they’re looking for activities
that will build this grit within their children.
There’s no hack,
there’s no quick fix,
there’s no app to do this, unfortunately.
But, I tell you, if you send your child off to a ballet class,
you will build resilience and grit within your child,
that will come out being probably
a little bit of a high achiever, overachiever.
(Tittering to herself)
And I find that when I hear
parents of non-dancers talk to parents of dancers,
they say, “I can’t believe you spend all this money
for three minutes at the end-of-year concert in a tutu.”
And they couldn’t be more wrong.
I’ll tell you what they’re paying for.
They’re paying for discipline,
they’re paying for self-care.
So their child’s the one
that’s going to rock up at the job interview,
really well dressed
and shake hands with their future boss with really good posture.
Everyone just sat up, just a little bit!
They’re also paying for them to become a team player,
but, more importantly, they’re also paying for them to learn
how to be a solo player.
It’s really important that students are able to self-motivate
without having a cheer squad behind them.
This goes a long way.
You’re also paying for them to be creative.
You’re paying for them to learn how to fail gracefully.
You’re also paying for confidence and commitment.
And the best gift you can give them
is friendships with like-minded little souls
that enjoy classical music
and spending half an hour on the curvature of their arm.
But, most importantly, I think ballet teaches them
that success doesn’t come overnight.
Because you have to be incredibly patient
to learn ballet.
And it also teaches them that failure is not permanent.
It’s not a permanent condition.
And if you fail you can get back up, and you can try again.
These are my adult ballerinas.
They understand all these benefits.
But they understand these benefits and more.
Ballet for them is an escape from their daily lives.
When they attend a ballet class and their hand touches the bar,
they have a full hour
where they have to concentrate solely on what their body is doing.
For example, I’m going to show you a plié.
When you pop your feet in first position,
you have to press your toes and your heels into the floor.
You have to rotate through your calves,
rotate through the knees, through the thighs,
squeezing the glutes, lifting up through the waist,
closing the ribs,
opening up through the chest, pressing the shoulders down,
lengthening through the neck,
what I like to call the snobby ballerina look.
You then place your arms in bras bas,
which means that we’re curving our arms, but not relaxing.
You have to have your fingers just relaxed enough,
but not too much,
and then we take a plié.
So we bend,
and then we come back to that position that we just found.
You don’t have time to think about anything else.
And that’s just one step;
we put hundreds of steps together
in one class.
They don’t have time to think about
the fight with their daughter
when they kicked them out of the car on the way to school.
They don’t have time to think about
the thousands of loads of washing they have at home.
They don’t have time to think about
the looming deadline on this project they’ve been stewing over.
All they have is themselves
and the bar, and a full hour of, I would almost say, a meditative state.
So, we’ve spoken about ballet being a form of meditation,
and I’ve also had clients tell me that their mental health is improved.
I’ve seen it myself.
They’ve told me about their chronic pain improving.
They’ve told me that they’ve had increase in productivity
not only at home but in their work life.
Some have even built businesses under my nose with their newfound focus.
I have worked with Olympians and football players,
and so if they think that ballet is of benefit to them,
we must be on to something.
But, more importantly, the most special thing I’ve come across
is being in a ballet class with a man who has Parkinson’s disease
and a tremor so bad that he can barely move from A to B in a very short distance.
But the moment we play some classical music
and I hold his hands and we sway together,
he’s almost as smooth as I am.
It was incredible.
One of the benefits that I found interesting and unexpected
is gratitude.
About 12 months ago, I showed my students a video
of some ballet students in Nairobi, in the Kibera slums,
and they were studying ballet.
The first thing the kids noticed was that the floor was dirty,
they were holding on to the walls because they didn’t have a ballet bar,
they didn’t have the correct shoes,
if they did have leotards, they were ill-fitting.
And they were like: “Wow!”
And I was like: “I know, look around us, look at your beautiful studio,
you guys need to be so grateful.”
I swear the parents of my students loved me that day.
And they were so inspired that –
and I swear I didn’t even tell them to do this –
from that day on when they finish a class,
they say, “Thank you, Miss Georgia.”
They say, “Thank you, class.”
And then they jump on the floor, and they go, “Thank you, dance floor.”
And some even kiss it, which is kind of gross.
But how beautiful that they’ve learned such mindful habits.
They inspired me so much
that I decided to put my money where my mouth is.
And in three weeks time,
I’m actually travelling here to teach ballet,
which is really exciting.
I’m also bringing over some supplies,
and I’m also working with other ballet teachers within their community
to help them bring better ballet classes to these children.
I think now more than ever, in the fast-paced lives that we lead,
we have to develop some parameters and a framework
for how we want to live our life.
I use ballet as a framework for my life.
It teaches me to show up,
it teaches me to work really hard,
it teaches me to learn how to fail,
and it teaches me to celebrate success,
which I think people should do more of.
It also teaches me how to serve myself,
but not only myself, the others in my community.
And what ballet does
is it actually teaches me to do all of this really gracefully.
These are my students holding leotards that they have donated,
that I’ll be bringing over in a couple of weeks’ time to Africa.
People often ask me what I do.
And I will say
I am definitely not in the business of producing professional dancers;
I’m in the business of producing really awesome, gritty people.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Ballet music)
(Applause)
When you’re 18 and you’re attending university,
it’s supposed to be a time of finding yourself
and working out what you’d like to do with your life.
I knew what I wanted to do with my life by the time I was probably five.
So, when I was 18 and entering university though,
I’d found myself, I’d lost myself, and I was left heartbroken.
And, no, it wasn’t by a boy;
it was by my first love, which was ballet.
You see, I was living every little girl’s dream.
At the age of 15 I left my family –
no that wasn’t the dream –
but I left my family, travelled down to Melbourne,
to study ballet full time at the Australian Ballet School.
It was an amazing opportunity: we danced all morning,
did some schoolwork in the middle of the day,
just the bare minimum to get by, keep the parents happy,
then we spent the rest of the afternoon,
well into the evening, continuing our classes, our ballet.
We were also in a really privileged position
because we got to watch and see what we were to become one day.
But as I stood in the studios
watching the company members rehearse ballets and take class,
there was like a disconnect,
I just felt like it wasn’t for me.
The dream that I’d had all of a sudden felt hollow.
There was a few reasons for this.
One would have been because I have more of an athletic build –
mind you, I look back at photos and I go, “Oh my gosh, I was so tiny.”
But at the time, I thought I was huge,
and it developed some very unhealthy eating habits.
I also found out quickly
that to be good at being in a dance company,
you have to be good at being told what to do,
follow the rules.
Something I’m not very good at.
And, finally, one of the reasons,
in this photo, I was just about to go on stage
to perform with Queensland Ballet’s season of “Sleeping Beauty”.
And I remember when I look at this photo,
the anxiety I felt behind those eyes about going on stage.
You see, I enjoyed the casting, I enjoyed learning the choreography,
I enjoyed the process leading up to the stage time,
but when it came to actually being on stage,
that should have felt like a reward, and it just didn’t.
Which is a bit of a problem when you’re a dancer;
you’re supposed to be a performer
and enjoy the stage, and I just didn’t enjoy it.
So it was getting down to crunch time.
I was at this point in my life where I had to make a decision.
Because I had to, if I were going to quit,
and I wanted to go to university,
I had to go back home, finish grade 12.
So, I decided, at the end of the day,
I didn’t want to count calories any more,
and I wanted to maybe have my own business one day –
clearly I was born to be my own boss.
And I decided to quit, but I was heartbroken.
You see, it’s not that I didn’t love ballet any more,
I just didn’t know how to make it fit and work in my life.
I had a couple of weeks left in my contract at the school,
so I wasn’t allowed to go home yet,
and when I was finishing those weeks, my parents actually wrote to me.
I can’t believe I kept these letters because I don’t keep anything.
But I’m so glad that I did.
My dad’s letter pretty much says:
“Here’s some money. Go buy yourself some breakfast and a nice magazine.
I know you’re going through a really hard time right now,
but I promise it’ll all work out.”
Typical dad response.
My mum’s letter was a little bit more accurate,
and I love having it today as a bit of a teaching lesson.
She beautifully wrote,
“My darling, I know you feel like a failure,
but I promise you
all these challenges you’re facing
are there to shape you into the woman you are to become.”
And, bloody mothers, they’re always right.
At the time, I was like,
“Mum, I’m just a failure. Thanks mum, that’s nice, nice card”,
tossed it to the side,
again, can’t believe I kept it.
But I’m so glad I did,
because when I was at university,
whilst my friends were getting hospitality jobs and retail work,
I was offered some dance teaching, in particular, ballet.
Thank God, they did that, because, piece by piece,
I started getting a little bit of myself back.
I learned to love ballet in a different way,
and I learned to love ballet in a teaching way,
which, when you think about it, that’s what I was looking for.
Today, I have five years down the track,
my own dance studio,
and I teach students from the ages of three
all the way up to 70- and 80-year-olds ballet … plus.
Yes, 80-year-olds!
I’m going to tell you today why I think ballet is so brilliant.
I think ballet is brilliant because it teaches grit.
One of my favourite authors and humans is Angela Lee Duckworth.
She speaks about grit.
She says the greatest indicator of success
is someone’s grit.
Defined by your stamina –
so your ability to run the marathon,
not the sprint in life,
and to be able to make goals,
and no matter what challenges come your way,
to be able to cope, refocus and continue on the path.
What do I think ballet teachers do?
We teach grit.
Now, more than ever,
when children are too busy looking at their screens,
and too busy chasing Instagram likes and selfies and hashtags,
now, more than ever,
do we need to build resilience within our children.
Parents just want what’s best for their child,
and whether they know it or not,
they’re looking for activities
that will build this grit within their children.
There’s no hack,
there’s no quick fix,
there’s no app to do this, unfortunately.
But, I tell you, if you send your child off to a ballet class,
you will build resilience and grit within your child,
that will come out being probably
a little bit of a high achiever, overachiever.
(Tittering to herself)
And I find that when I hear
parents of non-dancers talk to parents of dancers,
they say, “I can’t believe you spend all this money
for three minutes at the end-of-year concert in a tutu.”
And they couldn’t be more wrong.
I’ll tell you what they’re paying for.
They’re paying for discipline,
they’re paying for self-care.
So their child’s the one
that’s going to rock up at the job interview,
really well dressed
and shake hands with their future boss with really good posture.
Everyone just sat up, just a little bit!
They’re also paying for them to become a team player,
but, more importantly, they’re also paying for them to learn
how to be a solo player.
It’s really important that students are able to self-motivate
without having a cheer squad behind them.
This goes a long way.
You’re also paying for them to be creative.
You’re paying for them to learn how to fail gracefully.
You’re also paying for confidence and commitment.
And the best gift you can give them
is friendships with like-minded little souls
that enjoy classical music
and spending half an hour on the curvature of their arm.
But, most importantly, I think ballet teaches them
that success doesn’t come overnight.
Because you have to be incredibly patient
to learn ballet.
And it also teaches them that failure is not permanent.
It’s not a permanent condition.
And if you fail you can get back up, and you can try again.
These are my adult ballerinas.
They understand all these benefits.
But they understand these benefits and more.
Ballet for them is an escape from their daily lives.
When they attend a ballet class and their hand touches the bar,
they have a full hour
where they have to concentrate solely on what their body is doing.
For example, I’m going to show you a plié.
When you pop your feet in first position,
you have to press your toes and your heels into the floor.
You have to rotate through your calves,
rotate through the knees, through the thighs,
squeezing the glutes, lifting up through the waist,
closing the ribs,
opening up through the chest, pressing the shoulders down,
lengthening through the neck,
what I like to call the snobby ballerina look.
You then place your arms in bras bas,
which means that we’re curving our arms, but not relaxing.
You have to have your fingers just relaxed enough,
but not too much,
and then we take a plié.
So we bend,
and then we come back to that position that we just found.
You don’t have time to think about anything else.
And that’s just one step;
we put hundreds of steps together
in one class.
They don’t have time to think about
the fight with their daughter
when they kicked them out of the car on the way to school.
They don’t have time to think about
the thousands of loads of washing they have at home.
They don’t have time to think about
the looming deadline on this project they’ve been stewing over.
All they have is themselves
and the bar, and a full hour of, I would almost say, a meditative state.
So, we’ve spoken about ballet being a form of meditation,
and I’ve also had clients tell me that their mental health is improved.
I’ve seen it myself.
They’ve told me about their chronic pain improving.
They’ve told me that they’ve had increase in productivity
not only at home but in their work life.
Some have even built businesses under my nose with their newfound focus.
I have worked with Olympians and football players,
and so if they think that ballet is of benefit to them,
we must be on to something.
But, more importantly, the most special thing I’ve come across
is being in a ballet class with a man who has Parkinson’s disease
and a tremor so bad that he can barely move from A to B in a very short distance.
But the moment we play some classical music
and I hold his hands and we sway together,
he’s almost as smooth as I am.
It was incredible.
One of the benefits that I found interesting and unexpected
is gratitude.
About 12 months ago, I showed my students a video
of some ballet students in Nairobi, in the Kibera slums,
and they were studying ballet.
The first thing the kids noticed was that the floor was dirty,
they were holding on to the walls because they didn’t have a ballet bar,
they didn’t have the correct shoes,
if they did have leotards, they were ill-fitting.
And they were like: “Wow!”
And I was like: “I know, look around us, look at your beautiful studio,
you guys need to be so grateful.”
I swear the parents of my students loved me that day.
And they were so inspired that –
and I swear I didn’t even tell them to do this –
from that day on when they finish a class,
they say, “Thank you, Miss Georgia.”
They say, “Thank you, class.”
And then they jump on the floor, and they go, “Thank you, dance floor.”
And some even kiss it, which is kind of gross.
But how beautiful that they’ve learned such mindful habits.
They inspired me so much
that I decided to put my money where my mouth is.
And in three weeks time,
I’m actually travelling here to teach ballet,
which is really exciting.
I’m also bringing over some supplies,
and I’m also working with other ballet teachers within their community
to help them bring better ballet classes to these children.
I think now more than ever, in the fast-paced lives that we lead,
we have to develop some parameters and a framework
for how we want to live our life.
I use ballet as a framework for my life.
It teaches me to show up,
it teaches me to work really hard,
it teaches me to learn how to fail,
and it teaches me to celebrate success,
which I think people should do more of.
It also teaches me how to serve myself,
but not only myself, the others in my community.
And what ballet does
is it actually teaches me to do all of this really gracefully.
These are my students holding leotards that they have donated,
that I’ll be bringing over in a couple of weeks’ time to Africa.
People often ask me what I do.
And I will say
I am definitely not in the business of producing professional dancers;
I’m in the business of producing really awesome, gritty people.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Ballet music)
(Applause)
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