As soon as she could walk, Miriam Landis was dancing, tiptoeing across the kitchen floor. Where it came from, she can't say—both her parents have two left feet—but soon Landis was in ballet lessons. Now she's bringing fellow adults into her world.
By the time she was in ninth grade, Landis was dancing six hours a day, taking classes with college students. From there, she left home at 16 and went to the School of American Ballet, a prestigious school that feeds into the New York City Ballet (NYCB). “I was just totally convinced this is what I wanted to do,” she remembers. “I mean, I was a very single-minded kid in many ways.”
After spending two years thinking she would join NYCB upon graduation, she got some crushing news: She just wasn’t tall enough. “They were like, ‘Well, we’d hoped you would grow a little bit more, but you didn’t,’” she says. When all the swans are lined up, you can’t have one short one.
Miriam Landis teaches ballet in Mercer Island, where she lives.
Fortunately, her five-foot, three-inch frame was hired by Miami City Ballet, where she performed a number of major roles over four years. But after achieving her dream, she discovered it wasn’t what she’d hoped. “I found I didn’t love it as a profession. I burned out really fast. I was living alone. All my friends were going to college and other places,” she says. “And I also kind of came to the realization that I was never going to make very much money. I was not going to have a college degree. The only people I saw were ballet dancers. It was just a very strange lifestyle.”
Landis pivoted, eventually going to Stanford University and working in book publishing. For 10 years, she stepped away almost entirely from ballet. But although it wasn’t what she wanted to do as a career, this thing she’d loved for so long still had a magnetic pull.
Although ballet can be associated with injury, high financial costs, and strict body ideals (“My values don’t always align with classical ballet’s exclusionary values,” she says), it’s also a great form of artistic expression and a good way to enhance range of motion, balance, and more. Landis wanted to reconnect with her art form, as well as share it with others. That led to her teaching at Pacific Northwest Ballet and other studios in the area. She recently started a six-week adult beginner series at Creation Dance Studio on Mercer Island, where she lives.
The goal is to get absolute beginners or anyone who’s been out of the game for a while to come and learn the fundamentals in a community setting. “When you’re a student, all you’re doing is trying to please somebody else, and so if you can learn to get in there and do it for yourself—and usually adults are there for themselves—it’s like reconnecting with something that may have been negative in the past,” she says.
During the first six-week series, the participants had a variety of reasons for being there. One had always wanted to take ballet, but her parents couldn’t afford it. One had spent years with a child going through cancer treatment, and was finally able to do something for herself outside the hospital. (Her child is in remission now and doing great.) Another who was adopted had discovered her birth mother had been a dancer, and she was looking for a way to connect with and honor her.
I had my own illustrious career in ballet, which lasted from the ages of three to six. That was due entirely to the fact that kids who spent three years at the dance school got a trophy, and the moment I saw that shiny plastic figurine, I knew I had to have it. I did my time in tutus, tap shoes, bunny ears, and buns before I collected my prized possession and promptly quit.
So it was with a little trepidation that I approached Creation Dance Studio for day one of their second six-week series for adults. As I waited for the class to begin, I watched a bunch of nimble children in Converse shoes dance to Space Jam. I tried not to think about how that was one of our warm-up songs when I played basketball in high school, well before these children were born.
My rush-order ballet shoes looked like partially deflated balloons on my feet, but I was determined to do my best, knowing that realistically, it wasn’t going to be great. But I was there for the benefits of trying something new, not to be a picture of grace and poise.
“It’s good for balance. It’s good for posture. One thing I particularly like to emphasize is coordination, because a lot of people come in and they don’t know how to coordinate their arms and their legs with their head,” Landis says. “It’s also good for memory, because when you take a ballet class, you memorize combinations, then you have to execute them. So I think it’s very good for cognition.”
Beyond the more tangible benefits, Landis has seen how powerful of a force ballet can be, when taught in a certain way, for mental and emotional well-being. In addition to providing a space for people who may feel intimidated or like dance isn’t for them, she hopes to facilitate connection to community. The participants in her first cohort, of all different ages and life circumstances, would often go to coffee together after class.
As we warm up on the barre, there are things that are familiar. The core tightening, glute engagement, and shoulder placement all connect to the strength training I do. When we later run across the room and have to do a leap while looking at ourselves in the mirror, it is more foreign. My leap looks like a toddler learning that both of their feet can, in fact, leave the ground at the same time. But in Landis’s class, we can only talk kindly about ourselves, offering a smile to our own reflections—perhaps the hardest task for the group as a whole.
“I have a lot of people that come in and they’re very apologetic,” she says. “They’ll try to do the combination, and then they’ll say sorry, or they’ll make a face. And I’ll be like, ‘Do not say sorry.’ This is a really good exercise in just bringing forth your true self, because you can’t really hide it when you’re dancing,” she says. “Whatever art you’re doing, if you’re able to do it freely and not feel like you’re being judged, it’s just a way of sort of reconnecting with your best self and bringing it forward.”
I don’t know if I brought my best self forward—that’s probably when I’m on a spelling bee stage or maybe when writing—but it was certainly a version of myself I don’t often tap into, and that is always worth exploring. I left wishing I had a cute ballet skirt like one of the other women, but mostly appreciating the supportive environment in which to stretch outside my comfort zone. (Quite literally—I can’t get my feet parallel in first position.)
The classes have been more popular than Landis anticipated, and she’s proud of the community she’s helping to build on Mercer Island. “I think it’s been as healing for me and some of my childhood ballet trauma as it is for many of them,” she says, “and it’s been really refreshing to find how much joy and pleasure people can get from dancing.”