20Something: Ally

“Success is you discovering what actually makes you happy, and then doing it.”

I’m jealous of Ally Vernon for two reasons:

1. She lives in London. But more on that later.

2. She managed to rediscover joy in dancing.

Ally and I were both ballet majors at the University of Utah. We both began our college careers filled with confidence that we’d go on to dance professionally. And we both lost our love for ballet during our time in the program.

The difference between us lies in the fact that Ally found hers again.

The Ally I remember from college was soft spoken and introverted. We shared a waning satisfaction with our collegiate environment, and while I didn’t realize it at the time, a growing sense of ostracization from our peers as we inched further from the path drilled into us by our instructors. The Ally I remember from college would not, I admit, be someone I pegged to move across the world to continue her dance education. And yet, here she is. 

I don’t remember exactly when Ally and I met. It must have been some time during my sophomore year, when she was a freshman. The SoD (that’s the University of Utah School of Dance in all its glory, laypeople), keeps classes largely separated by grade, so we mostly overlapped in rehearsals and in the dressing room. Even in passing, I found a sense of warmth radiating from Ally. I could always count on her for a smile and a soft laugh. We bonded over our dissatisfaction with a very flawed curriculum, and our exchanges often ended in a joking (but not really joking?) “That’s it for me. I think I’m really gonna quit!”

A few reflection-filled years later, Ally tells me she found both the environment and her peers unwelcoming and unsupportive. Many of her teachers and classmates had a kind of tunnel vision surrounding ballet that left little room for anyone and anything that threatened the purity of it. To put it frankly, the program sucked the joy out of ballet for her. It was unnecessarily competitive, she says. “A lot of people [in the program] lose why they even are dancing in the first place.”

Humor me with a moment of critical analysis: ballet is a Western dance style that unfortunately rests on pillars of systemic racism and sexism. “Otherness” is frowned upon. This dynamic, this disdain for anything that strays from the Western classical status quo, trickles down to even the most menial parts of ballet training. Your foot doesn’t have the perfect natural arch? Yikes. You don’t have a tiny waist and toothpick legs? Not good. You expressed an inkling of interest beyond the edges of the marley floor? Your focus must be elsewhere. You must not be fully dedicated to your art form. You might want to consider quitting.

Ally found her undergrad education rife with these issues. The ballet program (and those who ran it) rewarded students who fit the ballerina cookie cutter perfectly, and cast aside those who crept so much as an inch outside the lines. But despite her misgivings, she took the leap that many college-level dancers strive for after graduation: she joined a professional ballet company. Again, to her disappointment, it didn’t measure up to her expectations. “It honestly wasn’t as fulfilling,” she admits. “It didn’t really feel worth it.” So she left. 

I ask if she was only performing classical ballet, because I know this can feel limiting to dancers. She explains that that was part of the problem, but more prominent was the lack of community she felt amongst the other girls in the company. While she found common ground with them in the studio, it was hard for her to relate to the way they worked toward their goals. In a profession that rewards those individuals who can claw their way to the top, support between peers is often sorely lacking. And when your job is so physically and emotionally taxing, support is exactly what you need. 

Ally holds a much more compassionate idea of what a ballet environment should look like. “I’m perfectly fine not being in every single show that is put on, and being able to do other things outside of ballet,” she says. She would rather dance because it brings her joy, not because it guarantees her a place in the spotlight. She’s happy to watch her peers thrive in their roles, as long as they’re enjoying themselves. She wants space to explore other interests, while knowing she still has a spot at the barre to come back to when she’s ready.

Knowing that she now spends her days happily dancing, I’m eager to hear how she rediscovered the joy that ballet once brought her. It’s something that, after a full two years off, has only now begun to inch back to me. 

“I went to a hip hop class,” she tells me. 

Damn it. So not in my comfort zone.

And so not in hers either, as it turns out. “One of the things that the teacher made us do was everyone got in a circle, and everyone had to [do] hip hop improv… in the middle of the circle by themselves.” 

My literal nightmare. 

“Everybody was so good, and I was terrified because I literally don’t do this kind of movement,” she says. Understandably, she stood completely still when it was her turn to go. She told the teacher she didn’t have any hip hop training and didn’t know what to do. Skipping her turn in the center was by far the most appealing option. 

“Nobody cares,” her teacher responded. “Just have fun and do whatever you want!”

No one had ever told her that before. “I think I did, like, Italian fouettés to trap music,” she laughs. It was a far cry from the rigid class structure she was used to, yet oddly freeing. 

Even more surprising than the teacher’s encouragement was the verbal outpouring of support she received from her classmates, another rarity in a traditional ballet setting. “Realizing that that kind of dance environment exists where you can go take a class and nobody is gonna judge you for how good you are, and all they care about is having fun, really reminded me of why I started dancing in the first place,” she says. Passion for dancing renewed, she inched further out of her comfort zone and started taking burlesque classes. “It’s all about you and just, like, feeling yourself and not worrying about what other people think of you… It was such a departure from ballet.” 

As she describes how her perspective on dance has shifted, I’m curious if her definition of success has changed as well. I figure, if she’s no longer measuring success by how high she can lift her leg or how many pirouettes she can whip out, there must be some new standard she holds herself to. Her response is refreshing:

“Success doesn’t need to be about getting a promotion, or a job, or making a lot of money and being the richest person…. I think success is you discovering what actually makes you happy, and then doing it.” Her metric of success has nothing to do with following a traditional or linear path, and everything to do with ensuring her own happiness in whatever venture she chooses. “I think in order to have a successful life you just have to be happy with who you are and what you’re doing.”  

With success on the brain, I ask Ally what her goals for the future are. Does she want to take another stab at a professional dance career? Does she want to teach? Does she want to research? Option B is the winner. She wants to teach dance in a college setting so that she can make sure that future generations of college-bound dancers don’t have to endure the toxicity that she did. 

“I’ve been thinking a lot these last few years about how ballet teachers affect the mental health [of their students.]” Cue a large and emphatic nod from my side of the Zoom. “People in the ballet world don’t emphasize mental health enough… for me, that’s something that’s really important.” She wants to teach an empowered group of students who are as strong mentally as they are physically. 

“I really, really want to make sure it’s an environment that really fosters positivity…. Girls in ballet have a hard time speaking up for themselves.” Again, a nod of agreement from me - it’s a pattern I’ve seen in myself and in my former classmates, both in and out of the studio. Ally wants to flip the script for her students. “If they’re raising a problem, [they shouldn’t] have to feel like people are gonna judge them because they’ve created an inconvenience.”

The path toward this goal brings us to the present. Ally is living in London, getting her MFA in Dance and Embodied Practice at the University of Roehampton. She describes the program as one that encourages individuality and community at once, and allows students to try their hands at all different styles of dance. Most importantly, everyone in the program wants to see their peers succeed. There’s a smile on her face the entire time she talks about it.

For the past 40 minutes I’ve been dying to ask Ally about living in London. I’m not shy about my love for the city, and now we’ve approached reason #2 for my jealousy. 

She had the idea to move in April of last year, and by June she was across the pond. “I kind of just went into it blindly,” she says. She hoped for an Emily In Paris-esque experience, filled with excitement, fashion, and cute boys with accents. I, for one, cannot blame her. 

“It was definitely a little bit more challenging than I had anticipated. But it’s been really fun.” She tells me that her eyes have been opened to different cultures and traditions that she never would have interacted with if she’d stayed in Utah. Nearest to her heart are the pieces of her Chinese heritage she’s begun to connect with. “It made me realize how much we should value people from other cultures. Just to be able to learn something about a different place in the world, I think, is really special.” She’s out of her comfort zone, and she’s loving it. Doing Italian fouettés to the trap music of life, if you will.

“Are you someone who can step out of your comfort zone easily?” I ask.

“It depends,” she says. “I definitely like to do things that I’ve never done before. But when it comes to big life changes? No,” she laughs.

So naturally, she packed up her life and moved across the world. No big deal.

I ask her what the best year of her 20s has been, fully expecting it to be this one. Living in London? Spending your days doing what you love? How could you top that? She swivels mindlessly in her chair and stares at a spot on her ceiling as she reflects for a beat.

To my surprise, Ally tells me that the best year of her 20s was her senior year of college. That would be the year that the pandemic peaked. Not a likely choice, but I applaud her ability to see past the inevitable hardships of that year. She took the time to foster closer relationships with those around her, namely the 20-some girls she lived with in her sorority house. “It was like living with 20 of your best friends. I always felt like I had something to do, I always felt like I had someone to talk to, I never really felt super lonely.… I was really lucky to have that experience, because I know a lot of other people definitely didn’t,” she adds.

So it seems, for Ally, that it all comes down to community and joy. Her happiest times are spent with people - learning from them, connecting with them, growing together. It takes a certain mindset to endure feelings of distance from your peers and to revisit them years later not to wallow, but to actively work toward building a world where someone else can avoid them.

She leaves me with this: “You genuinely never know what someone is going through.” In her toughest moments, when she felt the most ostracized, she learned the importance of treating everyone with kindness as the bare minimum. It’s a basic lesson, one instilled in most of us from childhood, and yet it’s the lesson that seems most often forgotten. Above her job, above where she’s living at the moment, and above what she’s endured in the past, Ally puts the importance of kindness.