Life in the Mirror: A Short Documentary on Body Image in Dance

This documentary explores the contradictory dichotomy that dancers’ body image represents. Dance training enhances body awareness, discipline, focus, creativity, tones muscles, stretches, and puts dancers’ in peak physical shape. Dancers’ bodies are capable of doing things most people cannot even imagine while making it look effortless. Yet, negative body image is an all too common side effect of a life spent in front of the dance studio mirror. Skipping meals, over-exercising, and self-loathing have been accepted as routine for so many dancers in amazing physical shape. Dancers have relatively low body mass indexes and fat-to-muscle ratios as compared to the general population, yet they have many issues related to body image. In the general population, the chance of suffering from an eating disorder is one in 100. But, as the National Eating Disorder Information Center reports, in ballet dancers, that chance is one in five. Others have likely been affected by other symptoms that arise from negative body image–dieting, over exercising, body-hatred, or low self-esteem. It is well known that dancers live with this negative body image, but it has been shrugged off as an unavoidable side effect of the art. This project further investigates this issue through a series of interviews of dancers from Union College and Bellydancers in western Massachusetts. These interviews and filmed movement culminated in an artistic documentary about body image in dance. The goal of this documentary is to explore, through language and art, the contradictory effects of dance on body image, both negative and positive.