Designer By Day, Ballet By Night

If you are not following @Pointebrush on Instagram, you are really missing out.  Meet Margot, a designer and dancer out of NYC, who is re-imagining ballet every day on social media.

Margot: I was born and grew up in Hong Kong. When I was really young, my mom enrolled me in ballet classes at a small ballet school there. My mom had danced ballet in her youth so I imagine she must have been really excited to have a little girl and promptly brought me to the first ballet class for tots she could find. It was run by an elderly British lady named Carol, sort of a relic from colonial old Hong Kong.

When I was a little older, my mom could see that the training at that school wasn’t all that good for anything beyond young toddlers discovering creative movement so I was moved from this smaller school to a much larger, more vocational school which had a more structured system, and which followed the British RAD syllabus. It came as a real shock to me how strict and academic it was compared to my first school. I learned to do my pliés and tendus properly and every year we had the annual RAD exams where special examiners from the UK would fly in to town specifically to grade and evaluate each student. Because my mom was such a big fan of ballet, she often took me to performances of the Nutcracker, Swan Lake and other ballets that came to town. I even met Marcia Haydee and the great Dame Margot Fonteyn when she visited my school. I had no idea who she was at the time but I remember my mom gushing all about her (I was after all, named after her). My dad is also a huge fan of classical music so beyond just ballet, I developed a love of classical music that I still have to this day.

Margot: Oh how I wish I had never stopped. I don’t think I would have ever gone on to become a professional but having come back to ballet after over a decade, I think quitting in my teens is one of my great regrets. The main reason why I stopped ballet was that the rigid academics of my school just sucked out all the joy and love of dance. It felt for a while like I was a robot just preparing for my annual exams and evaluations without any joy and artistry. It felt very cold and uninspired and I eventually just lost interest. The headmaster of my school sat down with me and my mom at the time and tried to discourage me from leaving but at that point I think I was just over it. I don’t blame the school or the teachers, perhaps I just wasn’t mentally prepared for the academic necessities of higher education in ballet. Ironically, it’s the love of classical music and artistry that brought me back to ballet many years later.

On the other hand, with design and visual arts, it’s always been a part of who I am as a person. Most friends and family remember me as the little girl who could be seated at a table or couch (or virtually anywhere) for hours and hours at a time as long as I had pencils and paper. That’s all I needed. My parents’ dinner guests were always wowed by how I could keep myself entertained for hours on end and they wouldn’t hear a peep from me no matter how late it got. I think deep down, I’ve always known that I’ve wanted to be a designer or artist. I never had an epiphany or made a decisions at any point in my life, I think I had always known all along that visual art in some, way, shape or form was going to be what I did for a living. I never really did anything extra-curricular with my art other than practicing and painting on my own. It’s when I applied to college and was accepted by a design school in New York (Parsons School of Design) that my higher education in art began.