One of the most wonderful things about staying with people when I travel is that I get to see into (and participate in) the lives of people who often live very differently to me. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I also get to peek into a completely different world from mine, in a way that I wouldn’t be able to on my own. When I was in Mexico City, I had the privilege of getting a glimpse into the world of Mexican ballet, courtesy of Victoria, my AirBnB host.
I hadn’t known much about ballet before I stayed with Victoria, and I hadn’t expected that to change. The AirBnB description of my room did mention that the house had a ‘small dance studio’ attached to it, but I’d assumed that Victoria taught some private classes, probably just for casual dancers, or for people interested in dancing as a way to stay fit. I had assumed wrong.
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What I found instead was a ballet teacher who taught classes to aspiring professional ballet dancers, and who was also the director of her own ballet company, which would practice in that ‘small dance studio’.
But this wasn’t just any ballet school or ballet company, and Victoria wasn’t just any teacher. Her students are largely from less financially able backgrounds, and Victoria teaches many of them for free. She welcomes students from different backgrounds, regardless of gender, sexuality, or body type, as long as they’re committed to ballet. Contrary to ballet stereotypes, a large proportion of her students are male, and many of them only started dancing in their teens. And despite going against the conventional wisdom, she’s been successful, with students who’ve gone on to win competitions and join ballet companies to dance internationally.
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I was so taken by all of it. It was such an inspiring and uplifting story that I felt compelled to share it.
The backstory
But…how did she start doing all of this? Why? I sat down and asked her all about it.
Victoria hadn’t intended to start a school or a ballet company. She’d been a professional ballerina herself and had danced internationally with various dance companies. It was only when she was recovering from an injury that she started to teach – and, to her surprise, found that she had a knack for teaching kids and teenagers.
When she had her own children, Victoria started teaching at a local ballet school in Coyoacán – until the owner went bankrupt and shut the school down – without any notice – and with money still owed to Victoria and the other staff.
Victoria had just bought the house in Coyoacán (a grand sprawling manor with it’s own interesting history that you can read about further down this page), and with nowhere for the kids to go and her own job suddenly nonexistent, she suggested they continue the classes there, in her living room. Eventually she converted her garage into a ballet studio and the classes moved there for a time.
It wasn’t easy. One of the neighbours, seeing all these young people entering and leaving her house all the time, assumed that she was involved in something like sex trafficking, and complained to the police. Even though she wasn’t guilty of that crime, teaching classes at your home in a residential area still had a penalty of 7 years imprisonment.
So Victoria always had a cake ready. The police would come by frequently, and every time they did, she’d pull out the cake and say they were having a party. ‘Every day?!’ the police queried. ‘There’s no law against that, is there?’ she’d respond. Eventually she moved the classes to a squash court nearby.
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The dance company likewise started out of necessity. Her students were graduating, and were wonderful, talented dancers – but there’s such a dearth of ballet jobs. Without experience, only a few of them could land positions in ballet companies. So Victoria started her own company, Ballet Joven.
It’s not a large company, but it gives the most promising graduates a chance to work, to experience being in a ballet company, and to perform professionally so that they have more opportunities to then gain a position further down the line with another company. Once the dance school moved to the squash court, the Ballet Joven dancers took over the studio attached to the house.
Everyone has the right to dance
Ballet, especially in Mexico, is not particularly accessible or inclusive. Classes are expensive, and the equipment even more so. Body shaming is rife, with women constantly pressured to be skinnier, and men expected to be perfectly toned and muscled. And the attitudes are conservative – for the most part dancers still have to hide homosexuality and trans people are forced to dance according to their sex at birth, rather than their gender identity.
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It’s rough. One of my housemates, Ileana, who danced in Ballet Joven but also at another ballet school, would tell me about how her teachers would tell her she’s worthless and needs to lose weight and would heap all kinds of other insults on her. When Ileana got injured, she wasn’t stressed about the pain, but she was worried about how angry her teachers would be with her for not being able to do everything perfectly in class. (Just for the record, Ileana has an amazing body, and is super kind and so dedicated to ballet.)
This kind of mental and emotional abuse is the norm in the Mexican ballet scene. While I was there, a boy at another school committed suicide, and when Victoria started asking around, a lot of the students who’d known him told her about how he’d had to hide his homosexuality or try to pretend he was straight, that his teachers had bullied him about his looks and his weight, and that they’d constantly beaten him down. When she talked to other ballet teachers about it from some of the big schools there, they were unsympathetic. One told her that he guessed not everyone was cut out for ballet.
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This is what Victoria’s trying to change – this culture and these expectations. ‘They keep expecting Mexican dancers to have the same bodies as the Russian and French’, she told me, ‘but they have Latin bodies. They’re not tall and willowy, but they don’t have to be to be good dancers.’
At Victoria’s school, she welcomes anyone who wants to dance, and who’ll be committed to ballet. One of her students, Arturo, was obese when he asked if he could try her class. She said yes, and didn’t tell him to lose weight, just taught him. He did end up losing a lot of that weight, partly from dancing, and partly from eating healthier – not because he was told to, but because he wanted to be able to jump higher.
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Victoria also doesn’t subscribe to the emotional abuse approach. She has a playfully teasing, brash manner of teaching that makes the classes fun and makes the students comfortable. Most of all, she tries to instil in her pupils a love of dance.
Many of Victoria’s students can’t pay, and learn for free. She’s also constantly trying to find scholarships so she can send dancers to competitions and auditions. That, in fact, is how she started to rent out some of the rooms in her house on AirBnB. It’s the money from AirBnB, as well as the classes she runs on Saturday mornings for well off young children, that finance everything else.
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And it’s a labor of love. Victoria’s the only teacher, and she runs the school and ballet company with Mary Carmen, the administrator. At home she’s a single mother of 3 kids and 7 cats, as well as managing 3 rooms on AirBnB at her house, and another AirBnB listing in Cuernavaca, at her parents’ house. She teaches 6 days a week, up before 6am, and in bed after 11pm.
‘Don’t you get tired?’ I asked. ‘How do you do all of that?!?’ She admitted that it was a lot, but that every time she’d start to wonder if she should close the school and do something different, she’d get another incredibly talented or promising student, and she’d get excited about it again and know that she wanted to help them succeed. And she’s had lots of success, with students going on to win competitions and get positions in international dance companies. That’s how she proves, in a very public way, that ballet can be different.
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Want to help?
If this story moved you the way it moved me, you can help Victoria out:
- Stay at one of her AirBnB listings
- There aren’t a lot of jobs in ballet, especially in Mexico. So support the arts! See more ballet, or if you’re in charge of organising a festival or some sort of celebration, include some ballet in your program of activities.
Side note: Two indie filmmakers who’d stayed at Victoria’s house previously have been making a documentary about the school. It’s still being filmed, but here’s the trailer – it looks super cool.
About the house:
This house was built in 1927 in what is called here in Mexico as Californian-Colonial style. It was originally built by Don Jeronimo Rodriguez, a Spanish expat that was into big movie productions of the golden era of Mexican Cinema. It is said, celebrities of the time such as: Mario Moreno “Cantinflas” and Maria Felix used to visit this house. The house was also a shelter to many Cubans that fled their island and stopped in Mexico City before heading to the United States in the late fifties and early sixties. Many Cubans recall the address of Ayuntamiento 70 as the “House of Liberty”. It is when they finally arrived to this house that they knew they were safe and ready for the journey ahead. Later on, it was owned by renowned novelist and screenwriter Rafael Solana and eventually I bought it from his niece.
Lovely room in good old Coyoacán
The Way of the Potato 
Beautiful post. So many people in today’s world making a big difference with their small contributions. Thanks for sharing
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Thank you for reading!
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