Pride and Prejudice at the Barre

Like many 9-year-olds, Fredrika Keefer dreams of being a ballerina. But after being rejected by the San Francisco Ballet School, Fredrika and her mother are crying foul, claiming the rejection was based on her height and weight.

The prestigious school, which denies the allegations while defending its right to enroll whomever it pleases, now finds itself the target of the first complaint filed under a new city ordinance banning discrimination by city contractors on the basis of body size.

The case, which San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission is seeking to mediate, is also fueling discussion of what the child’s mother, Krissy Keefer, who runs a smaller ballet company, calls the “dark secret” of the ballet world--dancers endangering their health to conform to the sylph syndrome.

Critics of what has been called the Ballet Thindustrial Complex have been quick to mention tragic cases of dancers who have developed life-threatening eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia to stay willowy enough to fit easily into their tutus.

In June, the mother of the late Heidi Gunther, who as a teenager was a student at the San Francisco school, filed suit against the Boston Ballet, claiming that the pressure to be ultra thin led to Heidi’s death in 1997 at age 22 of complications from anorexia. At 5 feet, 3 inches and 93 pounds, Gunther had been described by the ballet director as “kind of chunky.”

In Mrs. Keefer, 47, the San Francisco school, which receives $550,000 a year in city funding, is dealing with more than an outraged parent seeking the most for her child. A self-described radical feminist, she is politically savvy and seeking to make a point about the ballet world’s obsession with thinness.

When she was 21, Mrs. Keefer founded a feminist dance company, the Wallflower Order Dance Collective. In the mid-’80s, she started another company, Dance Brigade, which presented its own version of the ever-popular “Nutcracker.” Called “Nutcracker Sweetie,” it featured a Nutcracker who was not a fairy prince but a South African freedom fighter, with dancing mice as CIA rodents.

In fighting for Fredrika, Mrs. Keefer, who still runs Dance Brigade for adult dancers, says she is looking for “justice” and for “a change of consciousness. We’re all weight-obsessed and these are the institutions that perpetuate that.”

“I’m not the stage mother type--’Isn’t my daughter cute?’ ” she says. “I’m getting a lot of the ‘bad mother’ stuff, but I know who I am, and I know what I’ve done. I’m emotionally quite protective of my daughter’s well-being.”

Fredrika seems somewhat torn. She enjoys dancing with the children’s company of San Francisco-based Pacific Dance Theater, where she takes lessons. She joined that company at age 5 and recently played Clara in its “Nutcracker” production. Still, the 67-year-old San Francisco Ballet is the big-time.

The San Francisco Ballet Assn.’s managing director, Glenn McCoy, says he is reluctant to discuss specifics of the case while it is pending. However, he says, “We frankly feel it’s tragic that this little girl’s mother has dragged her into the spotlight where people are publicly critiquing her body. We feel unfair attention has been brought to this little girl and to the school.”

Among the many issues on which Mrs. Keefer and the S.F. Ballet disagree are Fredrika’s height and weight. Mrs. Keefer says her daughter is 49 inches tall and weighs 64 pounds. The ballet school, in a legal response this month to the discrimination complaint, said Fredrika is 45 inches tall and weighs 55 pounds.

The saga began in June when Fredrika, then 8, was among 61 children who auditioned for admission to the school’s starting program for 8- and 9-year-olds. The audition followed the school’s normal procedure, with children in groups of 20 asked to hop, skip and move around stage for about 20 minutes. From the 61 applicants, 18 were accepted.

Fredrika, describing the audition, says, “We had to line up by height. I was the shortest, so I was at the end of the line. They don’t look at the last person in line because they don’t really want to take short people. I watched the judges and they didn’t look at me.”

In the discrimination complaint filed in November, Mrs. Keefer states that a member of the school staff discouraged her from having Fredrika audition, saying she would not be accepted because she “did not have the right body.”

In the school’s legal response, a staffer admits suggesting to Keefer that her daughter not audition, since, after participating in the ballet’s Dance in Schools program, she had already been offered a scholarship to continue in that program. Mrs. Keefer, however, says that the in-school program, which does provide some classes at S.F. Ballet School, nevertheless does not offer the level of training her daughter deserves.

The staff member denies telling Mrs. Keefer that height and weight are determining factors in the selection process. The school further contends that even if the staffer made such a statement, it is irrelevant, because she was not an audition judge.

The school’s published criteria states: “The ideal candidate is a healthy child with a well-proportioned, slender body; a straight and supple spine, legs that are well turned out from the hip joint, and correctly arched feet. The child should also have an ear for music and an instinct for movement.”

In Mrs. Keefer’s view, “slender” is the key word here. “They can’t see that slender is a body type.”

It’s not that Fredrika is fat. At least not by normal standards. She is at best solidly built. “She’s not skinny,” says her mother. And “she’s not tall.”

The complaint also alleges sex discrimination, saying that the school has more stringent height and weight standards for female dancers, and alleges that the ballet school’s policies regarding weight, height and body shape for female dancers “contribute to serious and severe health problems,” including anorexia nervosa and bulimia.

Further, it states, Fredrika’s weight, height and sex, not her technique and talent, “were the determining factors leading to her rejection” and her abilities as a dancer “were of no concern to the school.”

The school has responded that the child’s previous training “is not a significant factor in determining acceptance.” The ballet’s McCoy adds, “You have to somehow determine who has the raw stuff, the best chance of success. We feel that as a professional training school, that is our prerogative. To set students up to not be successful perhaps does them a disservice.”

The school acknowledged that “an applicant’s height and weight may be considered in certain circumstances, [but] these characteristics are never the sole determining factor” for 8- and 9-year-old applicants. The shortest girl in the school is 47 inches tall, and students’ weights range from 40 to 71 pounds.

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No one enmeshed in the controversy denies that eating disorders are a problem in the world of ballet, where being thin is an issue of aesthetics and of the fact that female dancers are often lifted into the air by their male partners.

Abnormally thin--15% or more below normal body weight--is the goal for many dancers.

“These are real concerns, absolutely,” says McCoy. “We’re always on the lookout for it.” Among thousands of dancers who have trained at the school over the last 10 years, he estimates there have been six identified cases of anorexia or bulimia, most of these among the younger girls.

The policy guidelines prepared by Dr. Richard Gibbs, the ballet’s supervising physician, include regular weight checks, performed at random, to thwart underweight dancers who would “load with water” prior to weigh-in, a common practice.

McCoy says the school places “heavy emphasis on education on nutrition and eating disorders” for children 11 through 13, with 4 1/2 hours of required classes a year.

True, McCoy says, ballet dancers are expected to have a low weight “relative to the rest of us,” but most are able to achieve that ideal “in a way that is not harmful to them.” He disagrees with those who point to increasing pressure in recent years for dancers to be dangerously thin. Rather, he says, “we’re seeing a lot more awareness of the problem. That’s a good thing.”

Susan Kleinman, a psychologist and pioneer in dance therapy who counsels women with severe eating disorders at the Florida-based Renfrew Center, disagrees. With dancers, she says, it’s not uncommon that “their body image becomes so distorted, they can’t tell what their size is. It just never seems quite small enough. The joy of dance goes out of their lives as they attempt to meet the standard of today. The medical consequences are very serious. They may vomit 10 or 20 times a day, lose their teeth, lose their hair, develop osteoporosis.”

As for Fredrika, her mother is adamant that the audition was nothing more than a brief “eyeballing” of the girls to determine which ones had the right body type. “Archaic,” she charges, drawing an analogy to the days when flight attendants “all had to be young and blond.”

Keefer acknowledges having been a bit pushy in her dealings with the school but says she simply wants the best training for Fredrika. The selection process, she contends, should not be based on “whether someone is going to be 5 feet 7 and skinny.”

Larry Brinkin, a coordinator for the city’s Human Rights Commission, says the agency hopes to “get all the parties to agree to mediate,” in coming weeks. If a resolution cannot be reached, “then we would investigate” the allegations. Should the ballet be found in violation of the city ordinance, Brinkin says, the commission would recommend revocation of city funding. The final decision would be up to the public contracting agency, Grants for the Arts, which allocates the hotel tax funds.

Meanwhile, Fredrika seems to be handling her newfound fame with considerable aplomb. When learning of an appearance last week on “Good Morning America,” she brightened at the prospect of staying overnight in a fancy hotel with room service. Told that she and her mother would be picked up in a taxi, she smiled impishly and said, “Why not a limousine?” And, yes, the brouhaha has given her a certain eclat among fourth-grade classmates at the Buena Vista public school in San Francisco.

Keefer says she hopes the issue will be resolved through mediation, although she has not ruled out an eventual lawsuit. “I would like to see them take Fredrika--and make a really concerted effort to look at their policy.”

What ballet needs today is fire and passion and a diversity of types, she says--dancers like Fredrika. “It’s not 14 girls the same height in the corps de ballet that grips you.”

Her daughter she says, has suffered from “confusion, humiliation and serious questioning of whether . . . she could ever become a dancer.”

At the same time, Fredrika’s demeanor seems to give new meaning to the term self-assured. With little urging during an interview at the dance space that houses her mother’s company, she jumps up and executes a rather impressive arabesque. Asked to size up the competition at the June audition, she recalls one girl she knows who was accepted. “She’s taller, but she’s not as good a dancer as I am.”