Star tells how pressure to achieve physical perfection has left 'many' of her former colleagues unable to become mothers
On the eve of the new season at Milan's La Scala, one of the ballet company's leading lights has dramatically revealed the extent of bulimia and anorexia among ballerinas.
Breaking an unspoken rule never to discuss eating disorders among Italy's elite dance corps, Mariafrancesca Garritano told the Observer that one in five ballerinas that she knew was anorexic and, as a result, many were now unable to have children. "The chance of getting fired has crossed my mind, but I love La Scala, I care about it, and that's why I really hope things can change," said Garritano, 33, who won a fiercely contested place at the company's academy when she was 16.
One of the world's oldest and most prestigious theatres, La Scala opens its new season on Wednesday with Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. The event traditionally draws the cream of Italian politics and industry as well as foreign royalty. To launch its 2012 season, the company will take up an invitation to perform at the newly restored Bolshoi in Moscow before returning to Milan in January for Manzotti's ballet Excelsior, which was first premiered at the theatre in 1881 and will star Roberto Bolle in the new season.
But behind the glittering globe- trotting profile of the company, all is not well with the dancers, said Garritano, who has previously told all in a book, The Truth, Please, About Ballet.
Anorexia and bulimia are two of the most common eating disorders. Both are portrayed in dramatic fashion in the film Black Swan, the Oscar-winning ballet psychodrama starring Natalie Portman.
Repeated warnings about pushing young dancers to punish their bodies in the search for physical perfection have so far been ignored in Milan, said Garritano. "When I was training as a teenager, the instructors would call me 'mozzarella' and 'Chinese dumpling' in front of everyone," she recalled. "I reduced my eating so much that my period stopped for a year and a half when I was 16 and 17, and I dropped to 43 kilos [6.8 stone]."
Garritano said that seven out of 10 dancers at the academy had their menstrual cycles stop as they competed to eat less. "I would get by on an apple and a yoghurt a day, relying on adrenaline to make it through rehearsal," she said.
"Some dancers were rushed to hospital to be fed through tubes, others were hit by depression and still need counselling today.
"I still get serious intestinal pains and frequent bone fractures, which I think are linked to dieting."
Girls would also resort to breast reduction operations to keep their slim frames, she said, adding: "They're crazy – I am a woman first, then a ballerina." Garritano claimed that one in five students had become anorexic and a smaller number bulimic, and the same proportion were still suffering, "not just at La Scala, but in the business. And many now cannot have children."
A spokeswoman for La Scala declined to comment about the danger of anorexia at the academy today. Garritano said she that had been told not to discuss it publicly. "But I talk to people coming through the system, and it seems nothing has changed. Too often the teachers are frustrated former ballerinas who do to others what has happened to them.
"Parents believe their daughters are in good hands, and lose touch as the girls start a religious relationship with the practice mirror, their teachers and then the public."
For Garritano, ballet was an escape from an unhappy childhood in Calabria in southern Italy. After her mother died when she was 11, her father took up with a woman with whom he had been having an affair and dispatched his daughter to live with an aunt. It was her tough upbringing, she says, that offered some protection against the pressure of the academy. "My stubbornness saved me from slipping into anorexia – that and my greedy memories of the fried food I ate in Calabria."
Such hard-headedness prompted the young ballerina to rebel against the servile attitude that was expected of dancers. "I couldn't take it in silence when teachers shrieked at us. If you use military training with ballerinas, you get robots, not artists." After entering the company as the top of her class in 1998, Garritano sued La Scala when she thought she was being overlooked for promotion, finally becoming one of 14 solisti this year. "For months I would not dance after speaking out against managers. I have always been outspoken, but I have seen careers held back and others soaring thanks to who you know."
Now, through her book, Garritano is getting the message out to young dancers that the ballet is gruelling but can be a dream life if you can avoid eating disorders. "I wanted to alert the world to this and, thanks to the book, students and mothers are now asking me questions through Facebook.
"All it would take is for more ballet dancers, who are better known than me, to step forward and tell it like it is."