Toby Kassell

I would like to tell a story that changed the way I perceived myself in tights forever. When I was 24 years old one of my childhood friends tragically died of AIDS. I received a phone call late at night and was grief stricken. The next morning I decided to try go to work as usual and I was doing very well until my hand touched the barre and I became aware of something that I had never noticed before.

I was standing in a large, empty room, surrounded by 30 or 40 adult men and women, all wearing tights and leotards of various colours, clutching a wooden bar with furrowed brows, bending and stretching their knees like their lives depended on it.
Before I knew it, they had rolled the wooden bars away and after painfully balancing on one leg with the other lifted as high in the air as physically possible, proceeded to attempt to turn around and around on one leg as many times as possible. When this was not achieved satisfactorily, men and women would bare their teeth and stamp their feet!
I was close to tears. At this moment I also noticed that while executing all of this bizarre physical activity, this large group of people had their eyes constantly fixed on an enormous mirror that ...