Woman with a Fan in the Bar, Ģederts Eliass, 1918
The dancing girl melted into liquid gold. Her limbs grew back and gold dripped from her fingertips. I begged to dance like her. I found my mom in the audience and we walked out of the ballet studio together. The outside was an umber desert with thick grey skies pillowing above. A girl was laying on the ground next to a wheelbarrow and her spine was sticking out. “Mom, I need a new spine for the next recital”. She turned the girl over, and I laid on top. The perished girl's spine transferred into mine and I stood up tall.
The girl next to me was crying. Her blisters had popped against the hard wood of the point shoes. “Do you want to hear my dream?” I asked. I told her about a fish with legs swimming in the sky. It was a lot less frightening than the dream about the spine. Mrs. Illona walked in and everyone sat up straighter. I would often imitate Mrs. Illona's walk in the changing room. She wore bright white trainers and walked with her feet turned out, her back tall.
She didn’t like me very much and cast me as a rat in The Nutcracker for three years--the only role where you purposefully hunch. When she first came to our school she was a substitute teacher. No one told us she was trying out for the position of artistic director. I would purposefully throw a leg where I wasn’t supposed to or scrunch my face into something terrifying. The other girls would giggle. The room is surrounded with mirrors, and knowing the attentiveness of Mrs. Ilona she saw it all.
When she was cross with you her smile would grow. Her feet would be turned out and she would hinge forward at the waist, the tip of her nose barely touching your own. She was so often cross with me I could describe her eyeshadow routine.
I was at the barre going through the first combination. Mrs. Illona slowly walked around and turned her feet towards me. She slapped my belly, then poked my butt a few times. “Tighterrrr,” she sang. I imagined that scene from Shrek where Fiona sings so high that the birds burst, their feathers slowly drifting towards the ground.
Lillian Ansell is an artist from Berkeley, California. She is currently in the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Program at the School of Visual Arts.