The Ballet I Give Away

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You can pour a year into something that lives for two hours, then hand away everything it earns. I have done it twice, and at the end of this year I am going to do it a third time.

Before the wellness business, before the writing, before the medical equipment bench I work at on Vancouver Island, there was a barre, a mirror, and a teacher counting in Spanish. I trained as a dancer in Mexico. Dance was the first hard thing I ever loved, and it taught me something that has quietly shaped everything since. You pour years into a craft the audience will only ever see for one evening, and somehow the years are the point, not the evening.

I do not perform much anymore. My life in dance had its long chapters and then closed most of them. But every couple of years I go back to Mexico and I produce a ballet, and when the run ends I give the proceeds away.

What it actually takes to stage a ballet

Producing a ballet is mostly the unglamorous part: the theatre booking and the rehearsal calendar, the dancers and the music and the lighting cues, the budget and the hundred small problems that have nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with making the beauty possible. Months of it, for an evening that vanishes the moment it ends.

The part nobody photographs is the week before opening, when the thing is still ugly. A lift that keeps landing half a beat late. A cue that washes out a face you spent a month training. A dancer with a fever and an understudy who has never run the second act. You sit in an empty house near midnight with a notebook and a cold coffee, fixing what you can and making peace with what you cannot, and then somehow it opens, and for two hours it is not ugly at all. That gap, between the mess you lived inside and the thing the audience finally sees, is most of why I keep doing it.

And then I keep none of it. There is no business model here. From the first rehearsal, the whole thing is built to be handed to someone else.

A Nutcracker in 2022. La Fille Mal Gardée in 2024. The two productions together put roughly seventy thousand pesos into the hands of the Cruz Roja, the Mexican Red Cross. I kept nothing, and that was the point. What I was after the whole time was the quiet certainty of having done it.

The same hands

People sometimes ask why I would route a ballet toward a first-aid organization, as if art and ambulances belong in separate worlds. To me they have always been one gesture pointed in two directions. Some mornings I get a wheelchair back into the kind of shape that lets a stranger leave the hospital. Some evenings in Mexico, a few hundred people watch something beautiful and, almost without meaning to, help a stranger they will never meet. The same hands do both, and the island in Canada sits closer to the theatre in Mexico than either one looks.

I tend to build many small things and aim them all at the same place, the way many little streams can be made to run toward one river. The ballet is one of those streams. It earns me nothing, and that is exactly what makes it mine to give.

Some streams you keep, some you give

I am not a saint about this, and I would rather describe the real shape of my life than dress it up. I build other things that I do keep. The writing. A small wellness business I am trying to grow on purpose, in the open. Those are streams I tend because I want an income that belongs to me and a schedule that answers to me, and I have never once been embarrassed about wanting that.

The ballet is the stream I built to give away, and having one of those changes how the rest of them feel. It is easy to suspect your own motives when everything you make points back at you. The production I hand to the Cruz Roja is the part of the year I never have to wonder about. It keeps the rest honest. A person who only ever builds for himself slowly forgets why he started, and a person who only ever gives slowly runs out of anything to give. I am trying to be the third thing, the one who builds enough to have something worth handing over.

The third time, at the end of this year

At the end of 2026 I go back to do it again, another Nutcracker. It will be the third production, and something happens on the third time. A thing you have done twice is a pair of events. A thing you do a third time becomes a tradition, a small fixed point you can steer the rest of your year by.

None of it is a sacrifice. I have come to think the giving is not a tax I pay on the art but the reason the art felt worth making in the first place. A life holds together better when the things inside it point somewhere past you, and a production I get to hand away points further past me than almost anything else I make.

You do not need a stage

If any of this is for you, it has nothing to do with ballet. Most people should never produce one, and I say that with affection. It is just that almost anything you already know how to make can be made for someone other than yourself. A skill, a meal, an afternoon, a small business, a talent you have always assumed was too modest to count. Make the thing well, and then aim it at a person who needs it.