A tiny, dust-speckled town in north-west Victoria is a far cry from the polished perfection of a dance studio — but here in this farming region, Catherine made a simple decision that would change her life.
At two years old she began dancing, taking a jazz class two towns away. That quickly progressed to classical training — a three-hour round trip commitment for a 45-minute class.
"I loved it, more than anything. It was always where I wanted to be," Catherine says.
At age five, she decided she was going to be a professional ballerina. At 10, she began to compete, trading the classroom for homeschool to dance full-time, six days a week.
"I just woke up, went to dance, went to bed, woke up, went to dance, went to bed," she recalls.
At 10, her dedication paid off. She was one of two Australians accepted into The Paris Opera Ballet School summer intensive program, and trained at the best ballet school in the world for a fortnight.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a milestone achievement — but when she returned home, it was the beginning of a nightmare.
A changing constant
Catherine saw more of Victoria's countryside than most children. Her family moved around due to her biological father's work — "from the country, back to Melbourne, back to a different part of the country, then to a different, different part of the country," she recalls.
Despite all the changes, ballet was her constant.
"It was always the thing that I knew, no matter what school I went to, I knew what was going to happen," she says.
But while she was settling into yet another new hometown, dance became more complicated and competitive.
Her achievements meant she was considered the "golden child" of her dance classes, and she was being pressured about what her next accomplishments would be.
"All of a sudden, it was a lot of pressure to get into a school overseas if I ever wanted to be a professional … and that's when the more verbally abusive things were getting worse," she says.
"Talking about body image, talking about weight, talking about physical appearances."
Her family moved back to Melbourne after an incident during an end-of-year concert rehearsal when she says a teacher "screamed at me for 20 minutes", a tirade overheard by parents waiting outside.
"[Dance] very quickly went from something I loved to something I hated," she says.
'I was not in a good way'
A year later, and two days after returning home from an international competition, a now teenage Catherine was on a flight to France where she would be living for three months to attend a regular school.
"I was miserable from the minute I got there. I didn't know how to cope, I was eating a lot," she recalls.
Her depression largely came from being unable to dance. She says her host family, who she had never met before, decided that ballet was a hobby and refused to take her to classes.
After the months had passed and Catherine returned home to dance for 35 hours a week, comments about her appearance began from a teacher — and so did the cycle of bingeing and restricting food.
Catherine remembers when her class was first told it was time to start counting calories "so we don't get too big".
"I became more fixated on what I ate and exercised rigorously," she recalls.
"I was sure that the abuse and self-loathing I was going through would all be worth it in the end."
Outside the dance studio, Catherine's life had also changed. Her parents had divorced, and when she was at her biological father's house she was emotionally supporting her younger siblings while her mother balanced two full-time jobs.
It was during this time Catherine was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (c-PTSD).
Still committed to becoming a dancer, and a false start to attend a school in Scotland that went bankrupt, 16-year-old Catherine was now weeks away from becoming a company member at a new junior dance company in France.
But sitting in an embassy in Sydney in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, she realised she couldn't go on, after years of struggling with thoughts of suicide and self harm.
"The damage that ballet, the thing I loved most, had done to me was irreparable," she says.
It wasn't just mental trauma impacting her life. The damage manifested physically as she returned to mainstream school for the first time since she was 10, coupled with the pressure of year 12.
"I had spent most of my life knowing what I was going to do … [now] I have no idea what I'm going to do in December this year," she says.
"I very quickly stopped eating and was exercising an insane amount, my organs were starting to shut down, and my brain wasn't functioning properly."
It wasn't until a doctor's appointment that resulted in her being taken to hospital and diagnosed with anorexia nervosa that Catherine realised how unwell she was.
"I was not in a good way, and it took doctors to say 'you're going to die' for me to go 'oh, maybe there's an issue'," she says.
"But if I had continued going the way I was going, I probably wouldn't be here. I would be long gone."
'These are just teenagers'
Poor mental health and disordered eating are not uncommon in the dance world, especially in ballet — a performance art that demands a certain physique and level of perfection and grace.
"It's the perfect storm of the individual factors and the environmental factors," says Fumi Somehara, principal dietitian and founder of DDD Centre for Recovery, which specialises in dance nutrition and eating disorder treatment.
"Those who exceed in ballet … and want to have a career in that are those who are naturally perfectionists, really quite hard on themselves … really high achievers.
"And at least right now, the ballet industry really favours that, and in a way that probably takes advantage of it a little bit that … pain is glorified.
"So even the body image struggling and the dieting and the pain that comes with it is glorified as a true artist's struggle."
Fumi treats dancers from different disciplines, but says the warning signs are similar and begin showing from a young age.
"A lot of the time, it starts with negative body image, and the only way to cope is through eating behaviours, and that's how the ball starts rolling," she says.
"In that environment, where the dancer's body size is directly linked to their job, their career, their worth ... those two then kind of match up, it's a perfect storm to then feed any negative body images and disordered eating eating disorders."
Research on eating disorders among dancers in Australia is hard to come by — but a UK study found one in eight dancers struggle with some form of an eating disorder. For ballet dancers, it narrowed to one in six.
"But post-COVID, it has gone to one in three," Fumi says.
"Going into lockdown, [dancers] were taught by teachers that you can't gain weight, be careful, don't eat too much.
"Then there was the stress of 'I'm a dancer, I don't know what else to do other than dance, and if I can't do that fully, what am I?''"
Fumi says the combination of those two stressors contributed to a wider 63 per cent increase in eating disorder presentations by Australian teenagers to hospitals during the pandemic.
"That is shocking," she says.
"These are just teenagers. That's the reality we live in right now."
Changing a deep-rooted culture, one turnout at a time
Fighting back against a pervasive culture is now taking centre stage in dance studios across the country.
"It was bad in my day, but it's worse now. We're dealing with 45, 50 years of this sort of culture that we're trying to change," says Linda Gamblin, the head of training at Sydney Dance Company.
A former member of the Australian Ballet Company and Royal Ballet Company, Linda designed a training program at Sydney Dance Company that she would want to attend after experiencing disordered eating and body shaming herself.
Although Sydney Dance Company doesn't focus solely on ballet, Linda says dancers come to the company having deep-rooted beliefs about themselves, their dancing and their body image, often reinforced from years of ballet training when they were younger.
"There's an underlying culture of [ballet] teaching, which is 'you need to look like this, you need to do this'," Linda says.
"It's not 'force your turn out so your cabrioles can be better', it's 'force your turnouts so you can look better' … because that's what you're required to do in a ballet company.
"For me, that's already body shaming."
Linda says the difference of treating her dancers as people first and artists second, using inclusive language, not focusing on physical appearance, and fostering an emotionally supportive environment has been life-changing for her students.
"[The dancers] are really changing and they feel confident and good about themselves, and they go off into a variety of careers, within dance or not, and they're not traumatised, and they have happy lives and happy relationships," she says.
In Brisbane, the Queensland Ballet Academy is all too aware of its responsibilities to an even younger generation of developing dancers dreaming of a career performing on stage.
Teaching school children from as young as year 3 to year 12, the Academy takes a whole of care approach with its students, acknowledging that each dancer is different.
"That's how you get the best results, from a wellbeing, but also performance point of view," says Zara Gomes, head of performance health at Queensland Ballet Academy.
"Everyone is really, really different, and everyone's bodies respond really differently to training.
"So you need to treat them as individuals to get the best possible outcome. That's what we all want."
For the Queensland Ballet Academy, training is split between their academic studies and dancing, with a specific focus on safe movement, and a holistic approach that nurtures their physical, mental and emotional development with in-house resources.
"We're actively trying to promote the concept of the healthy, strong, fit, athletic, dancers," Zara says.
The Academy is also focused on its responsibility to look after its students who may not pursue a career in dance on stage.
"When they stop [dancing] what happens? If they're not nurtured to be good humans, if not educated, how to live and look after their bodies?" says Christian Tàtchev, Queensland Ballet Academy's director.
"What we want is to have happy, healthy and functioning human beings because once year 12 is finished, they might want to do something else with their life.
"You need to also be confident this is a healthy human who is ready to have a good life."
Changing the next generation for the better
Now receiving treatment and in a healthier place, there's an important element of Catherine's recovery: the dance studio.
"I missed it. I didn't want to admit to people that I was, because I made the decision to stop … but being able to go 'I'm allowed to miss it, and I can go back if I want to' and taking all the pressure away really helped," she says.
While teaching helps Catherine heal, it's also a source of comfort knowing she has become the teacher she always wanted to have.
"I make an active effort not to yell, and I will never single out one person … all the things I had done to me I make an active effort to never do," she explains.
"I never want to make other people feel the way I felt doing something that I loved.
"It's definitely doing a lot of healing that I didn't realise I needed to do."
But as challenging as her life has been, Catherine is grateful for the hurdles she's faced and encourages other dancers to put themselves first.
"I wouldn't be the person that I am today without all of that happening, which is very cliche, but it's very, very true," she says.
"Getting help is better than just suffering alone because it's isolating enough. And life is really worth living for.
"It might take some time to really believe that, but it does."
The ABC's Takeover Melbourne program gives a voice to young people across Greater Melbourne. If you would like to find out more about the next Takeover Melbourne intake, go to the Takeover website.
