YA Free Period is Lisa Gullickson’s new column celebrating the best Young Adult Graphic Novels, the books that school us in how to be ourselves. In this entry, Lisa examines Siena Cherson Siegel and Mark Siegel’s Tiny Dancer, and how we must grieve our dreams to reconnect with our inner child.

By Lisa Gullickson — From the time Siena was little, she had always wanted to be a ballerina. When she was seven, she was obsessed with Swan Lake. It was more than just tutus and pointe shoes for her. It was about the drama, the fantasy, and how the prima ballerina could fully transform herself from the ethereal white swan, to the divinely devious black swan with a flick of the wrist. More than a feat of physicality, it was a feat of imagination. Even when she was changing schools and her unstable family life was picking her apart, she could rely on her time in the dance studio to give her a sense of wholeness. When she danced, she felt what she refers to as “the royal feeling” - this sense of confidence, separateness and transcendence.

When Siena is fifteen, an injury sets her back. She tries to “tough it out,” like her instructor encouraged her to do, but dancing on it just makes her ankle worse. She’s forced to spend six weeks in a cast and then months in rehab, while her peers are promoted without her. She had been the one to set the standards, her strong and elegant limbs always doing exactly what she asked. Before, her instructors would gesture to her as the example, but now she was feeling conspicuous in an entirely different way. Everyone could see her losing her grace. As her recovery has her waiting in the wings, she feels this estranged sense creeping up on her. “The Royal Feeling” is replaced by something akin to a haunting - the ghost of the ballerina she thought she would be.

The illustrations of childhood Siena jetéing on the beach and pliéing in her living room remind me of myself as a little girl. Except instead of wanting to be Odette in Tchikovsky’s Swan Lake, I wanted to be Aurora from Disney’s The Sleeping Beauty. Or Cinderella, or The Little Mermaid. It didn't matter as long as I was the princess. I sang endlessly to everyone and no one, turning and bowing to an invisible Prince Charming. I even got bit once trying to befriend a chipmunk. True story! Kids are asked when they are so young what they want to be when they grow up because it’s so darn cute how big their dreams are. To a child, all roads to the future seem equidistant. As we get older, however, the tenor of the question changes. Young people are made acutely aware that every decision they make is a step towards or away from their visualized future - a chassé down what Siena Cherson Siegel refers to as “the narrowing road.”

Like Siena, I stood out as a gifted musician all through my education, until I went to music school for college. It didn’t take an injury, however, to set me back. I quickly learned that all of the prima donna roles went to the girls who grew up singing arias, not Ariel. There is a very specific heartache that comes with learning that your future is not going to be what you envisioned. Siena Cherson Siegel’s Tiny Dancer is about the grieving of that expectation, so that she can be reconnected to what had her dancing in the waves in the first place.

Tiny Dancer is a collaboration of memoirist Siena Cherson Siegel and cartoonist Mark Siegel. Her personal and poignant story features the full range of her husband’s style. On one page 13-year-old Siena is a disappointed Pierrot, with sad saucers for eyes and a floppy noodle body, and a few turns later, we see Gelsey Kirkland and Mikail Baryshnikov dancing a beautiful, sequentially rendered pas de deux and we feel Siena’s breathless awe. The height of Siena and Mark’s artistic partnership is when he provides the visuals to her emotionally evocative metaphors. At one point in Siena’s recovery, she is asked to do a particularly taxing move toward the end of the class and her muscles, which used to be her pride, begin to quiver with weakness. She describes herself as a “giant jelly failure” and we see this enormous, translucent, wiggling ballerina threaten to crush the entire class. It’s heart wrenching.

It reminded me of when I was a sophomore in college and our Performance Seminar Class was being visited by a music director from the Washington National Opera. I wracked with nerves because I was rarely invited to perform in master classes, but I was on the program to sing “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Rinaldo. I had been so stricken over it that I hadn’t eaten all day and it was already 2:00. When it was my turn, my hands were blue with icy panic, and from my first note, I knew that my breath, my strength, was not under me. I shook like a leaf as I got my way through the piece, and when I finished the maestro looked at me and asked, “what do you want me to do with that?” The room froze to the chill of my humiliation. I turned into a dry, crinkled leaf, wishing a breeze would sweep me away.

After her injury, Siena takes one of her non-dancer friends to see Giselle. It’s a romantic ballet about a peasant girl who is tricked into falling in love with a deceitful nobleman, Albrecht, and then dies of heartbreak. In the second act, the ghosts of Albrecht’s spurned lovers try to convince Giselle to take revenge on Albrecht, but Giselle chooses instead to set him free. Ever since she began to study dance, Siena had become fixated on the dancers - Kirkland, Cynthia Gregory - those who had “made it.” In our youth, we tend to admire those who’s path seems like a straight line from inspiration, through determination, to success. Seeing Giselle reminded Siena of her mother, and then of herself. From this point, Siena begins to retrace her steps back to what attracted her to ballet in the first place - the narrative.

I didn’t watch a lot of ballet growing up. There was not nearly enough singing for my taste. If I happened upon ballet, it was generally a dream sequence in a movie musical like Carousel or Singing in the Rain and I would hit fast forward on the VCR. Now, I cherish those interstitial reveries. Siena Cherson Siegel’s Tiny Dancer actually ends with something of a ballet, thoughtfully choreographed by writer and artist, where Siena is lost, passing all of these former, nightmare versions of herself, searching until she finds her ‘tiny dancer.’

Sometimes I wonder about my 15-year-old self - if she’d be disappointed that I didn’t end up on Broadway, or The Met, or in some palace somewhere. I do sometimes feel that ghost of a diva looking through the mirror back at me, and there is a pang of sadness even still. I don’t know if a guiding hand tempering those expectations could have spared me that particular grief. But from that heartache I’ve learned discipline, resilience, and the power of self-expression. Maybe it’s a right of passage to shed an imagined version of yourself to become the person you are meant to be. Siena Cherson Siegel and Mark Siegel’s Tiny Dancer is a lovely, lilac graphic novel that will assure young people that even after disappointments, rejections and heartbreak, the little dreamer inside will be there to reconnect you to what those big dreams were really all about.

Buy It Here: Tiny Dancer

Extra-Curricular Reading for TINY DANCER

To Dance (2006) by Siena Cherson Siegel and Mark Siegel. This is Siena and Marks first iteration of Siena’s memoir as a dancer, this time focusing on her time working with renown choreographer George Balinchine. Though it skews slightly younger, it’s fascinating to compare scenes that appear in both books, including that evening watching Giselle.
Buy It Here: To Dance

Spinning (2017) by Tillie Walden. This is another touching memoir about leaving a part of yourself behind so that you can become who you are meant to be. Tille dedicated ten years of her life to figure skating, but what had once fulfilled her becomes draining and isolating. Spinning is about Tillie learning to move one from what had once been her identity.
Buy It Here: Spinning

Dragon Hoops (2020) by Gene Luen Yang. In this memoir, Gene Luen Yang is teaching at a high school and decides their basketball team is going to be the subject of his next graphic novel. Despite never being into sports, Yang grows to admire these young people and learns that taking a step onto the court without knowing how the game will play out is amongst the bravest things a person can do.
Read our full Dragon Hoops review!
Buy It Here: Dragon Hoops

The Fire Never Goes Out (2021) by Noelle Stevenson. It’s a collection of personal essays and mini-comics that chronicle eight years of Stevenson’s life as a creative. Sometimes funny, always honest, The Fire Will Never Go Out offers raw insight into what it’s like making a living in an artistic field.
Buy It Here: The Fire Never Goes Out

Check out Lisa’s picks for the Best Ya Graphic Novels!

Lisa Gullickson is one half of the couple on the Comic Book Couples Counseling podcast, and, yes, the a capella version of the 90s X-men theme is all her. Her Love Language is Words of Affirmation which she accepts @sidewalksiren on twitter.