As a former dancer myself, Neeleman’s success on social media is unsurprising to me, merely following the script we all learned in the ballet studio. Her life is like one big ballet performance: She is a small, pretty, white, and likable star, descriptors that could just as easily apply to a famous trad wife as to a prima ballerina. Though she gave up the stage years ago, she remains a consummate performer.
Of course, it would be unfair to blame ballet solely for Neeleman’s beliefs around womanhood; her Mormon faith has certainly had a large part in shaping those. Still, as Turning Pointe writer Chloe Angyal told Momfluenced author Sara Petersen in Petersen’s newsletter, “it’s not Ballet Farm. It’s Ballerina Farm. We’re talking about the feminine person version of this dance form. We’re talking about the pinnacle of a very specific kind of womanhood, a very specific kind of femininity.”
The complicated lessons ballet taught me about my own femininity have taken me decades to unlearn, and some of the most insidious ones I still can’t fully shake. A childhood and adolescence devoted to ballet taught me how to perform in the theater, but also long before that, how to do exactly what it took to impress teachers and choreographers. Dancers are rarely asked what would feel good to them. Instead, they are taught to dance through pain, to perform roles with troubling messages, and that the gaze of an audience (historically male, but even now, certainly patriarchal) gives them worth. These are, of course, all things that could also be said about trad-wife influencers.
The parts of ballet that last—the scores, choreography, teaching styles, and artistic direction—have always been dominated by men. As a dancer, I had a perpetual awareness that I was replaceable, so when I was in pain, or didn’t love a piece of choreography, I knew to keep my mouth shut. I never wondered what I wanted, because I had been trained that what the choreographer or teacher wanted was what mattered. From a young age, I learned to make myself just as subservient as Hannah Neeleman appears to be.
Juilliard, Neeleman’s longtime dream that she had to abandon during her first pregnancy, accepts 12 women a year into their undergraduate dance program. Juilliard dancers can earn a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree at the end of four years of training. Their alumni go on to dance, choreograph, and direct at some of the best companies in the world, and several of America’s most pioneering choreographers are on their list of notable alumni. In short, Hannah Neeleman was at the beginning of what could well have been a long and fulfilling career in ballet when she married Daniel. “I was going to be a ballerina,” she told Agnew. “I was a good ballerina.” But she knew ballet and motherhood, especially the motherhood of traditional Mormonism, were incompatible. “I knew that when I started to have kids my life would start to look different,” she admitted.