Relevé

Fiona Wada Gil entered a pre-professional ballet program at eleven. By the time she was sixteen, the notes she was getting were no longer about her dancing. She retired at twenty-one.

“I was struggling with a recurring injury. I thought that with cross-training and strengthening, I'd be able to have a lasting career.”

Relevé is a portrait of what a profession can ask of a body, and of what happens after the answer is no. Fiona talks about an injury that would not heal, about a company that made her contract conditional on her body, and about the slow work of finding dance again on her own terms — in other studios, other styles, a long way from the barre.

It ends with her going back to it for the first time in nine years.