By Megan Burbank

“I’ve always loved ballet,” says Sarah Witherup. We’re crossing a busy street in University Place on our way to lunch, our workout clothes on over our ballet dresses. We’ve spent the morning in dance class and have just an hour before we have to head back to the studio at Dance Theatre Northwest, a small dance school and company that’s running a four-day ballet intensive for 13 adult dancers. Witherup was the first person I met today: a smiling, friendly face at the studio’s reception desk. She’s only been dancing for a year and a half and, like me, started as an adult. When she talks about ballet, her enthusiasm is infectious.

Witherup is the kind of ballet student that ballet teachers love: She’s committed to learning the fundamentals of the art form, even excited about it. Along with Melanie Kirk-Stauffer, the artistic director of Dance Theatre Northwest, Witherup helped organize the intensive at the studio, which has a charming, old-fashioned vibe: Think Degas ballerinas on the bathroom wallpaper, a palette of Gatorade drinks in the designated break room, walls covered in mirrors, a glass case filled with knick-knacks and photos of past performances on every available surface.

But it was important to Witherup that it also offered something different. When she decided to finally give ballet a try, she chose Dance Theatre Northwest because it was the only studio she could find that had a non-discrimination statement posted on its website.

That’s important in the world of ballet, which upholds traditional gender notions more strongly than most other art forms and has a long history of privileging body ideals rooted in white supremacy and the anti-obesity movement. It’s possible to find studios and companies that explicitly reject these harmful standards, but that can take work. At Exit Space in Seattle, where I dance most often, there’s no gender-specific dress code for adult classes, and many teachers structure their classes to challenge ballet’s strict gender binary rather than reinforce it.

But that’s not the case everywhere. And it’s an important consideration for many adult dancers like me—when you’re in your 30s and paying for your own classes, the last thing you want is a rule-bound environment with the depressingly gendered expectations of a Gymboree—and it was especially important for Witherup, who is trans.

In Kirk-Stauffer’s structured, challenging ballet program for adults, Witherup found her creative home, a supportive environment for her development as a dancer – and her transition.

At first, she says, she was hesitant to take the studio’s beginner classes. But as she developed a good relationship with Kirk-Stauffer through private lessons, her confidence slowly grew enough to take the plunge. And she discovered, surprisingly and wonderfully, that her gender transition could happen in parallel with dancing. “The ballet studio gave me so much confidence,” she says. Soon she was walking to the barre in a dancer’s classic uniform: a black leotard and pink tights.

This uniform is required for women at Dance Theatre Northwest—men wear black tights with white T-shirts—which I admit I found a little jarring, given my experiences mostly in studios with no dress code.

But when I read the rest of the dress code guidelines, I was pleasantly surprised that Dance Theatre Northwest makes it clear that gender nonconforming students can follow any dress code or incorporate elements from any of these guidelines “to ensure comfort and personal expression while maintaining the discipline and uniformity essential to dance training.”

Witherup and another dancer who is nonbinary were instrumental in incorporating these details into the dress code, and Witherup speaks fondly of how the studio made adjustments to the rigid gender roles typical of classical dance.

Resistance to such changes in ballet is often attributed to the need for uniformity and clean body lines. But one only has to look at the work of companies like Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet to understand that cohesion in ballet depends on technique – not on how the dancers look or what they wear.

The Dance Theatre Northwest intensive course is proof that you don’t have to cling stubbornly to traditions to be able to dance beautifully.

And Dance Theatre Northwest’s intensive is also proof that you don’t have to cling rigidly to tradition to make beautiful dance. You just have to teach good technique, and that’s what it does: The morning barre is accessible but technically focused, with friendly corrections and patient guidance from guest teacher Richard Philion.

Later, Kirk-Stauffer teaches the students simple but elegant choreography for an optional performance the following week. She says keeping the performance optional is important to her, and it’s a rare move for an intensive course – but one that feels considerate and respectful of the adult dance students’ goals and busy lives. We roll out mats for conditioning and round it all out with a choreography lesson from Swan Lake.

I leave during the last musical class. By this point, I’ve been dancing for hours and need to recharge my batteries and take notes. As I eat a sandwich in the break room outside the studio in my leotard and tights, the tiny muscles in my feet are more tired than ever and I hear the first notes of a swing song echoing from the class that Witherup had told me to be particularly excited about earlier.

And I think of something Kirk-Stauffer said during the variations course this afternoon.

Variations are dances from classical ballets that occur at key moments in the story or say something about a character – or simply fill time while the lead dancers catch their breath backstage. Kirk-Stauffer believes it’s important for adult dancers to practice these variations to see what’s possible. We may never perform them, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t experience what it feels like to dance one.

I had learned several variations in the past: Bluebird and the Lavender Fairy by Sleeping Beautythe henchmen of a ghost queen in Gisele that make men dance to death (one of them is my favorite variation I have ever learned), a heavily modified White Swan from Swan Lakeconducted via Zoom in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the variant that Kirk-Stauffer wanted to teach us, from a Swan Lake Pas de trois seemed more difficult than the others, simply because it is fast. I am not tall, but I am tall enough for ballet, and that can make quick little steps a challenge. It takes me longer to get back to the ground after a jump.

I’m not the only one.

Many of us struggled with the Swan Lake Excerpt, but Kirk-Stauffer’s enthusiasm never waned. When the steps were difficult to follow, she told us to focus on getting the direction changes right. It was a way to keep going without drowning in perfectionism.

This consistency is what makes any kind of progress in ballet possible: just keep going, keep practicing, keep challenging the parts of the art form that exclude people, imagine a dance world that welcomes everyone and then take as many steps as you can to build that world, but most of all, just keep dancing.

Witherup comes out of musical class and says hello.

“How’s it going?” I ask.

She reacts with a playful but exhausted demeanor familiar to any dancer learning something new: “It’s a disaster!” she says.

And then she goes back to the studio.

Megan Burbank is a writer and editor based in Seattle. Before becoming a full-time freelance writer, she worked as an editor and reporter at the Portland Mercury and the Seattle Times. She specializes in business reporting on reproductive health policy and stories at the intersection of gender, politics and culture.