Dance - Wendy Buonaventura wonders why ballerinas suffer so much for their art

For years, ballet has dominated western dance: it is perceived as an elite form, superior to other types of dance. Perhaps it is fitting that an art which rejoices in the artificial, and celebrates human triumph over nature, has come to represent the western ideal. Fitting, that is, for a society with a thousand-year-old religious and philosophical distrust of the body.

I recently invited a ballerina in her thirties to dance in a film I was making, which included a cancan-and-ballet duet. She was returning to the profession after a long absence, owing to the health problems that beset many ballerinas.

She told me once, quite cheerfully, about a dancer she knew who had had cosmetic surgery to enhance the arches of her feet. The operation involves surgically breaking the bones and realigning them, and it's not as rare as we might think. Why do artists do it? Well, for no better reason than that choreographers have decided high arches are beautiful.

The ballet and fashion worlds share not only a devotion to a particular type of female body; both also reject their performers at a very early age. The greatest indignity for a ballerina occurs in her mid-thirties, when she is considered past it and is more or less thrown on the scrap heap. There is little place for mature ballerinas in the exclusive world of ballet, nor for the glorious diversity of the female body.

I never once saw the ballerina with whom I worked eat. While the rest of us chomped away on sandwiches and cake and chocolate, she smoked (to kill her appetite) and drank water or coffee. She often put the sandwiches I made for her lunch in her bag - for the train journey home, she said. But my guess is that she dumped them when she got to the station.

In the late 19th century, an Arab sheikh described western dancers as "winter plants, colourless and tasteless, with sickly faces tormented with hunger. They hardly eat and are thin, poor mad creatures." He was writing at a time when the seeds of anorexia were being sown. Western women were starving themselves in order to imitate the fashionable, undernourished look of tuberculosis sufferers. The culture interpreted their pale, feverish appearance as a sign of sexual appetite, and prostitutes with tuberculosis were actively sought by men with a taste for dangerous liaisons. (This macabre fashion anticipates fashion photography's recent vogue for adolescent girls with the black-rimmed, hollow eyes of drug addicts.)

Yet, however frail ballerinas may look, they have to be tough to survive in ballet, where humiliation and pain are endemic. Dancing on pointe (a requirement made of female dancers only) involves a dancer's entire body weight bearing down through the ankle to a tiny area at the tip of the toes. Pointe shoes can make the toenails curve inwards like claws, and broken bones in the feet are one of the trials that ballerinas may suffer. The photographer Colin Jones observes: "I've often seen girls with blood seeping through the satin of their shoes after dancing on pointe for two hours in a three-act ballet."

Am I alone in finding the puppet- like strutting of pointe work grotesque? Why do ballerinas accept that their work should involve habitual pain and damage to their bodies? Turnout, which is required of both male and female dancers, developed from the duck-like style of walking that was fashionable among the aristocracy in the 17th century. It is only one aspect of ballet technique that requires the body to move in ways for which it simply isn't designed. The hip bone is slowly coaxed to rotate outwards in its socket from its natural position. "Training" begins in early childhood, while the bones are still malleable.

To the ballet world's way of thinking, a dancer's ability to create this distortion in her body is all part of her triumph over its natural "limitations". We should not wonder that many ballet dancers need hip replacements in their forties, nor that a greater percentage than average suffer from osteoarthritis in later life. According to recent research, their pain threshold is three times higher than that of other people. As the former prima ballerina Deborah Bull once joked, dancers alone could keep the Nurofen company going.

As for pointe shoes, the first thing that dancers do with a new pair is try to soften them. They hit them with hammers, slam them in door jambs, bang them on steps. How strange: brand new shoes, fresh from the manufacturer, being pummelled with such ferocity.

The American prima ballerina Gelsey Kirkland did not fit the type. After enduring all the normal humiliations of ballet, she resorted to drugs. Yet when she was at her least stable, she received the greatest eulogies of her career. Anorexic and hopelessly dependent on cocaine, Kirkland turned herself into the typical martyred heroine of classical ballet. When she finally rebelled and published her story, she was reviled by the ballet fraternity, which closed ranks against her and denied her allegations about misconduct in the profession. You could say it was a lesson to other ballerinas to keep quiet about their troubles.

The experience of going back on to pointe after a gap of some years was very painful for my ballerina. When the film-ing was over, she handed me her toe shoes as a memento and declared: "I'm never wearing pointes again!" In the film, she was performing alongside a curvaceous dancer who radiated voluptuous sensuality as she frothed up her skirts, kicked her legs in the air and turned cartwheels across the floor. I'd teamed the cancan and ballet together as two equally rude dances. True, no dance can quite compete, for shock value, with one in which a woman holds her leg above her head in order to exhibit her crotch. But is it really any different when a male ballet dancer holds his partner aloft, her legs open like a pair of scissors, displaying her crotch to the ogling audience as he marches round the stage?

Every dance includes movements that seem comical when we stop to analyse them. But only in ballet are we expected to find completely ludicrous moves sublimely beautiful. It is peculiar that the art world reveres what is essentially, despite having moments of loveliness, an art of high camp.

But classical ballet is the dance little girls dream of being able to perform. Its fairy tales are irresistible, with dolls who come to life and girly sprites who fly through the air. How can children know that ballet represents the most concerted attack on the female body of any dance; that there is a price to pay for playing eternal child-women and pink princesses; and that, even if they're fortunate, their brilliant careers will be brief and painful?

Wendy Buonaventura's I Put a Spell on You: dancing women from Salome to Madonna is published by Saqi Books (£15.99)

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