“City of Night Birds” Author Found Freedom in Ballet as an Adult: 'After a Lifetime of Unrequited Love, That Is Enough' (Exclusive)

Juhea Kim first fell in love with ballet after watching 'Center Stage,' but it didn't love her back until she rediscovered dance as an adult

I knew I wanted to become a dancer when I saw Center Stage, that cinematic touchstone for a very specific subset of Millennials. (No woman born in the mid- to late-80s hasn’t longed to be caught in a dance duel between American Ballet Theatre stars Ethan Stiefel and Sasha Radetsky). Ballet had been my after-school activity since age nine, but it only became a passion after watching the film.

Soon after the epiphany, I attended the pre-professional summer intensive at Universal Ballet in Korea. By the middle of the first class, I knew I was the worst dancer in the program. For the rest of the two weeks, I had to stretch beyond my human limits in order to merely blend in with the others.

Looking back, I feel tenderness and pride at the way I, a 15-year-old, handled the cutting insults and subpar conditions without flinching or giving up. The ballet master banished me to the back of the class; the boy who partnered me heaved sighs while executing lifts.

For what it’s worth, I was dancing on ill-fitting, “dead” pointe shoes that did nothing to support my weight. When I took them off at the end of each day, the inner lining was stained scarlet by my bleeding toes. I had paid for the intensive myself with savings from part-time tutoring, and didn’t want to bother my parents about a new pair of pointe shoes.

But as I limped home on the subway, I’d be held aloft by a sense of desire and accomplishment greater than humiliation and pain. I was in love with something that would never love me back. Ballet, more than anything else in my life, told me I would never be enough.

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Ballet was a tantalizing dichotomy: it offered ethereal grace on the other side of bodily distress, and the appearance of control when control was exactly what you couldn’t have. Even professional dancers make mistakes every day, falling out of turns and forgetting combinations. For someone like me, with far more passion than ability, ballet magnified the loss of control I felt in every aspect of my life.

My parents’ marriage was breaking apart and our family was under financial hardship. I had no idea whether I’d be able to afford a college education or grow up to have a normal job with salary and benefits, let alone become something as fanciful as a ballerina. Still, I persisted, because of an unaccountable instinct that I longed to explore and embody — only, what I felt internally was so much more elegant than what my body could express.

It was when I arrived at Princeton that I finally got to experience what it’s like to have my movement reflect my creative instinct. In Modern Dance and Choreography, we were instructed to roll around on the floor or even simply walk around the studio, to feel our bodies in space. No one discounted me because of my shyness, the size of my thighs or the inability to afford several classes a week. We studied works by female choreographers, focusing not just on dance but on creativity itself.

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For my final project, I choreographed and danced a solo set to Elliot Goldenthal’s “Alcoba Azul” from the film Frida. I’d been heartbroken by a love affair, and all of that early 20s angst went into my performance; at one point (during a strange movement that admittedly involved Kafkaesque crawling on the floor), I heard the entire audience gasp in unison. Afterward, friends told me that this single gesture sent shivers down their spine.

Martha Graham once said, “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.” Channeling that vitality through my own body awakened me to a whole new consciousness of life’s possibilities — and of my possibilities as an artist. Dance was how I first learned that I was a storyteller.

And then, after that post-show high, I graduated and didn’t dance for the next 11 years. Clinging to any toehold in the Great Recession-era New York, I strove to get a “normal job with salary and benefits,” yet every step I took misfired until I eventually became what I was always destined to be: a writer. I loved seeing performances, but dancing became a distant memory.

Then COVID broke, and I took a free online ballet class in my living room, pulling on a burgundy leotard that I’d last worn as a college senior. Afterward I took another, and another. Months later when my editor asked about my next novel, I knew it had to be about ballet. Since then, I have been dancing nearly two hours each day, five or six days a week. Writing about and dancing ballet so consummately has been a euphoria I couldn’t have foreseen as an insecure adolescent. 

I also couldn’t have foreseen how my body would change. At age 37, I am amazed to discover that I am a better dancer now than I was 20 years ago, and what I lost in youthful stamina I more than make up for with better coordination and faster grasp of choreography. I am most surprised by how much easier pointe work has become, wearing properly fitted shoes in good condition. My “too big” thighs have leaned out.

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Instead of being ashamed at my plumpness, I now cast critical glances at my bony chest, but mostly I just don’t care. When I look at my reflection in the studio mirror, I see someone who gave everything, despite numerous discouragements and portents of failure, to carve out a creative life in all the ways that “vitality” sings to her. What I mean is, I am a satisfactory amateur ballet dancer for being a professional novelist.

The other day, a woman in my ballet class asked me for tips on how to execute a soutenu turn into a developpé. Thanking me, she said, “You do this so beautifully. I have noticed you for weeks because you have fluidity, this quality of movement.” It was a touching compliment because I no longer feel that ballet is about control, perfection, or blending in — it’s about freedom to be who I am. I could never have become a ballerina; but I’ve come to express my inner life through dance, in the studio and on the page. After a lifetime of unrequited love, that is enough.

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City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim comes out Nov. 26 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.