No Longer a Cog

Thoughts on Challengers & Destiny

In my junior year of high school, I did a small stint at a quite professional, quite strict ballet school in the greater Seattle area. I was seventeen - an age when many begin looking down at their hands, seeing what they’ve gathered over the last decade, and figuring out what they must leave behind and what they can take with them into adulthood. Ballet was something that I thought I could take with me, having been abundantly praised at my recreational studio. But like many sects of athletics and arts, at seventeen, I was about ten years too late to taking the whole thing seriously. If I wanted to be a professional ballerina, I should have made that choice before I lost all my baby teeth. I didn’t know that yet though.

I was placed in the advanced technique classes, but I’d guess my age was a greater factor in my placement than my skills alone. The school couldn’t have this Bambi-legged dinosaur towering over the middle schoolers. My classmates and I put our dance bags in the dressing room: a dingy closet of a room with ill lighting, damp carpets, and a stench of feet. There was hardly room to tie our pointe shoes, so we taped our toes with our knees bent and pressed against our chests. Small talk with the other girls more often than not resulted in complaints: about school, about dance, and about how terrible they felt they were at just about everything.

After our toes were taped and our ribbons were tied, we assembled at the barre in our pink tights and dignified black leotards. Most studios have a hierarchical dress code, denoted by leotard color: beginning levels start with light pink, then light blue, then lilac, and then the colors get darker and darker until you reach the most advanced tier - black. Light to dark. Hair slicked back in a high bun. Pink satin concealing open wounds.

Some of the instructors at this studio opted for more brute force in their teaching methods. Criticism was barked at us in short bursts and, at times, non-sensically. There were rarely moments to stop and discuss corrections in a more detailed manner, we were left to translate the abstract, garbled feedback into muscle memory on our own. Physical touch was leveraged roughly. My knees were forcibly rotated outwards in my retiré. One time, in the splits, a teacher stood on my legs for so long, that I had to ask her to stop out of pain. 

Many of the students quietly cowered under the reign of the school’s intense artistic director. I, on the other hand, seldom dreaded her classes. They were a reprieve from the loud frustration other teachers expressed towards my dancing. In the artistic director’s classes, no one yelled at me or touched me, which was rather unsettling - like the quiet before a crack of thunder. I wondered, for a while, why this was the case - if this instructor was the highest-ranking professional at this company, why did she cut me so much slack? Was she partial to my skills? Was I exempt from her corrections? As I watched her continuously snap at the more talented students, it eventually clicked into place: she simply didn’t care about me. Arriving at her doorstep at seventeen, I was already a firm fixture. Physical and mental habits had been long baked in, I had fewer soft bits of clay to manipulate. Like any ceramic that’s handled too heavily, in my current state - with more hardened morals and ticks - I would have cracked under her thumb. I was a waste of time.

One day, after a difficult class, one of the instructors (one of the yellers) gathered us all on the floor and stood in front of the mirror facing us. He launched into an exhaustive sermon about how none of us cared about what we were doing in the slightest. There were girls around the country - at bigger, more serious schools than this one - who cared so much more and it showed in their training. They were hungry for challenges, to ascend to greatness, and they were better than us. They would become professional dancers, and if we didn’t begin caring, we would not. The instructor’s brow furrowed, his hands waved, and saliva spewed from the corners of his mouth as he spoke. He looked as though he might cry.

As we silently filed back into the dressing room after class and unlaced our ribbons, I noticed the girls’ expressions were as blank as sheets of paper. Truth be told: they did not care. One quit a few months later to join her high school’s rowing team. Another got married right out of high school and popped out several babies in quick succession. Most went on to well-regarded universities, likely with the aid of ballet as a high-caliber extracurricular, and have seemed to abandon dance altogether - at least that’s how it appears on Instagram. Like me, they work non-creative, non-physical jobs. 

Like a set of hands that becomes immune to the heat of a stovetop after many years of cooking, everyone became numb to the yelling, to the physical discomfort, and ultimately to caring. I wonder, at times, why they kept up their practice. What motivated them to carry on when they were so clearly discontented? It’s easier to continue a practice that’s so familiar - to keep business as usual than to try to change things. It’s especially easy when there’s someone else at the helm who can carry the burden of caring for you - wringing their hands and demanding more out of you, as someone likely did for them in their youth. You misplace their goals as your own, you shadowbox an invisible competitor in too big shoes because you’re a child, and really, how are you supposed to be so certain about what you want? All the while, they scream at a brick wall.

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Luca Guadagnino’s film Challengers (2024) was released several weeks ago and has been met with ecstatic reception. It is, in my eyes, a near-perfect craft - a visually and sonically pleasing feast of color, sweat, sport, and sex. Centering three highly skilled, fictional tennis players (Tashi Duncan, Art Donaldson, and Patrick Zweig) and their relationships with one another, the movie explores tennis as a relationship and relationships as tennis - a ceaseless struggle to break out of cycles of habit and regain rhythm and direction following loss. It is a movie about, as one character puts it, “winning the points that matter,” at any cost and in any arena.

In the cut-and-dried fashion typical of internet discourse, much deliberation about the film on Twitter centers on which relationship is most salient - Tashi and Art’s, Tashi and Patrick’s, Patrick and Art’s, etc. Who is this film really about? Who is meant to be together? It’s fun to take sides after watching “love triangle” films (Team Art! Team Patrick!), but, of course, the answer to this is impossible, and a bit beside the point. The film isn’t about any one duo being the “right” couple. It’s about the string of desire, scorn, competition, and feeling that ties the three characters together inexplicably. Still, there was one relationship I was left thinking about quite a bit more than the others: the relationship between Tashi and tennis.

In the final episode of Succession, after losing his siblings’ support to become Waystar Royco’s CEO, Kendall Roy desperately clamors for a lifeboat. “I am like a cog built to fit only one machine,” Kendall says to his brother and sister, floundering. Similarly, in Challengers, after college tennis star Tashi Duncan injures her knee, she screams at her friend Art for going easy on her as she attempts to retrain. After stumbling on the court in her bulky knee brace and smashing her racquet out of anger, Tashi sits at the foot of a tree stump in defeat. She peels off her knee brace and stares at her defunct knee with one of the few looks of genuine sadness she displays in the film. The other time she shows this face of despair is later in life when her husband tells her his plans to retire, and that he won’t need her coaching efforts further. What does a person do when the one thing they’re supposed to do is ripped out from under them? What do you do when you can no longer be a cog in the machine you’ve been destined for?

Kendall Roy and Tashi Duncan sitting in their respective losses. Photos and inspiration for this point of comparison from @uhhhLecksus on Twitter.

In Challengers, tennis is often humorously referred to as simply “hitting a ball with a racquet.” In moments of frustration in my dance classes, I similarly found comfort in reconsidering ballet as a watered-down, simplified sequence of steps. Roughly three hundred years ago or so, some man put his heels together, turned his toes outwards, and declared the posture “first position.” He and his cohorts and successors then codified many other positions, gestures, and movements, creating the ballet vocabulary that we more or less have today. Like the game of tennis, rules and parameters were established to determine students’ proficiency. Your hips must rotate to this degree in this posture, you must extend your leg in this manner in your développé, and so on. But on an elemental level, a tombé-pas de bourrée-glissade saut de chat isn’t so different than the Macarena - it’s a series of movements that when strung together, create a recognizable dance. 

Breaking ballet down to its essence in this way allowed me to create some distance between myself and my inadequacy, dulling the ache, but not silencing it. It also made me wonder how such a subjective practice could cause so much distress - how obsession could manifest over something so basic. But as Challengers depicts, the “practice” is rarely about the series of movements itself - it’s about the person you are because of it. How it’s taught you to relate to yourself, others, and the world at large.

The thing about being exceptional is that you are the exception, and by definition, atypical - estranged from the norm. In athletics and arts, great talent necessitates great mundanity - for every individual who makes it, there have to be rooms, tennis courts, and studios of people who don’t make it, either weeded out by the rigor or by forces outside their control. Like a life-altering injury, physical or mental ineptitude, an apathetic teacher, or, more likely, a perfect storm of many forces. The rug being ripped or slowly dragged out from under you doesn’t quiet your ambition - it just changes it. You set your sights on the next goal - being the best coach instead of the best player. And you can reap great achievement and satisfaction from that. But in the face of others’ indifference - their lack of caring, their eagerness to lay their practice to rest - you can urge and urge, but there’s only so much you can do. Try as you might, you can’t replace others’ inattention with your concern. We can’t change others and we can’t always change our own circumstances and that’s what’s at the root of all heartbreak. At the root of estrangements between individuals and between people and their practices.

This realization crosses my mind as I watch Tashi’s face sink on the big screen. I recall my harsh instructor’s tear-filled eyes years ago. Both of their feelings echo my own feelings. What would have happened if Tashi and Patrick hadn’t fought before her career-ending injury? What would have happened if I were born with greater hip mobility? If I were shipped off to Russia to train before I lost all my baby teeth? How am I to know if I was one fork in the road away or infinite steps away? And would I have been better off? Who’s to know really? 

What I do know now is what my instructor was likely holding back from saying that day: If only you knew what I would give to be in your place. If only you knew.

Art Donaldson and Tashi Duncan

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