The New Male Dancer

Last night I was taking an open teen/adult modern class at the studio.  A new guy showed up and it was one of his first dance classes ever.  I talked to him a bit, and it reminded me of when I took my first ballet class.

I was 25 years old then and I didn’t know much about ballet.  I always loved to dance, but had never tried anything structured.  I had never taken a ballet class, or any dance class for that matter.  I only went to the ballet once, to see the Nutcracker in Boston when I was 16.  Are guys even allowed in ballet classes?  I had all sorts of questions.  And I had a hard time finding answers.

I had been working for a few years as a sailor on cargo ships.  I quit that to go back to school, and after about a year of wanting to try a ballet class, I finally decided to do it.  I have a lot of visible tattoos.  Nothing offensive, but I’ve got a lot.  I had visions of walking into a studio and being thrown out for scaring the girls.  The best-case-scenario I was imagining was that they would just ignore me.  I was living in the Seattle area and decided that I would find the biggest ballet class in the city, hoping that there would be some diversity, maybe people in the city wouldn’t be as easily frightened of a guy in ballet class.  I decided I would take a Teen/Adult Beginner Ballet class at Pacific Northwest Ballet.  PNB is a professional company, but like many of them they offer beginner to advanced classes for the public.  I even e-mailed them to ask about classes, just to kind of give them a warning.

I showed up to my first ballet class, a bit excited, quite a bit nervous. The PNB studios are very nice, just like you’d see in a movie, huge rooms with wood floors and tall mirrors.  I went to the men’s locker room, which was empty, and I changed into a pair of sweatpants.  They told me in the e-mail that I could start out with sweatpants and socks and a t-shirt, which is good, because I wouldn’t have known where to get men’s ballet slippers or mens tights, never mind something as confusing as a dance belt!

The class was large, about 60 girls and me.  It was okay though, they were nice, seemed kind of happy to see a boy in ballet class.  I didn’t worry too much about the girls once the class started, because I was concentrating so much on how to do all of the moves.  The teacher was nice, she helped me and thanked me for coming.  Everyone was very pleased to see me and were very nice to me.

As I walked out of the PNB studios, I felt my chest lift in pride.  If I could go into a building full of girls and prance around in my sweatpants in front of them, I could do anything.

That is a little bit about how I got started doing ballet.  How a man can start taking ballet classes.  I’ll be talking more about the great experiences that came over the next years, and how ballet totally changed my life.

I’m also going to provide lots of suggestions and tutorials on how teen and adult men can get started in ballet.  I’ve done a lot of reading and a lot of research on the best ways for men to make advancements in ballet and I’m going to share that information here.

Feel free to post a comment.  Tell us about how you or someone you know got started taking dance.  Or ask a question!

Thanks,

David

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Tagged as: adult beginner ballet, Ballet, ballet training, dance attire, dancewear, first ballet class, first class, new beginner ballet