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BY MAYA HARPER 17 MARCH 2014
Vogue talks to Gloria Desmond, principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, to get an inside look on what it takes to be a professional ballet dancer and the sacrifices she made to get there.
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"To me, ballet has never felt like a hobby," Gloria Desmond explains as she sits across from me on the plush velvet sofa in the living room of her Manhattan apartment. She's impressively tall, even when she's sitting down, but her gentle smile and warm disposition are nothing if not welcoming. Gloria's magestic figure turns heads whenever she enters a room, and for good reason.
"I was always taller than all the girls in my ballet lessons," Desmond tells me, then laughs and adds, "I mean, I was the oldest in the class for about three years, so it makes sense—but I'm still taller than all of my friends."
Desmond's career has been astoundingly successful. She started at the age of eleven, when most ballerinas are already at the intermediate level. "I had to learn things really fast," she explains. "There was no time to make mistakes—in ballet, when you start late, you have to catch up. It's a really demanding profession."
Since deciding to start ballet on a whim in her pre-teens, Desmond has danced in hundreds of productions, both at school when she was younger and professionally as an adult. This year alone, she's set to play Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream for forty-nine scheduled performances until June, followed by the titular character in Giselle during the winter months.
"I don't get a scheduled time off like most jobs do," Desmond admits, putting finger quotes around the words time off. "Breaks come in short bursts, and I grab them when I can. Usually, when I have free time, I'll fix my pointe shoes or just sit in the same place for as long as possible with my feet in a bucket of hot water."
Pointe shoes are the face of ballet, explains Desmond, gesturing to where a pair of pointe shoes hang on her front door with a faux bouquet of dahlias and white roses. "I normally go through about two pairs of pointe shoes a week," Desmond says nonchalantly, as though she's talking about contact lenses or disposable gloves. "During performance season, though, I'll be lucky if a pair lasts two days."
When I bring up the subject of food, Desmond wrinkles her nose like she's heard this a million times. "There's a very toxic culture in ballet when it comes to body image, and a lot of misconceptions about eating habits," she explains. "What people don't realize is that professional ballet is essentially working out for eight hours a day—so we burn a lot of fuel, and have to eat twice as much as everyone else."
Desmond knows perhaps better than anyone how physically taxing ballet can be. She's injured herself more times than she can count, and is more often than not sporting a bruised knee or a sore foot—but Desmond's worst injury was six years ago, when her car was hit by a bus in busy downtown Manhattan. "I was twenty-six when I was in a car accident and fractured my knee in three places. I was off the stage for about eight months," she recalls. "That was a really rough time for me."
The same accident that broke Desmond's knee also fatally injured her boyfriend, Marcus Lowe. She doesn't tear up when telling me about it, but just like with all losses, she still carries some of that grief with her. "It was a long road to recovery," Desmond explains, "but I got there eventually."
This is just more proof of how strong Gloria Desmond is, but at the end of the day, she's certain she could never see herself doing anything else with her life. "I walk away from every performance with something new. What matters to me isn't the money or the praise—it's the job, the work that comes with it, and the feeling I get when I'm on stage."
