#ashley tuttle

She said that one thing she tells all her students, no matter the level: 'What if I took the rules of ballet away?  You don’t have to turn out, you don’t have to point your foot, you don’t have to straighten your knee.  What’s left?'  After a while, students usually come around to the answer: movement. 'That’s what dance is,' [Ashley] Tuttle said.  'I think in the ballet world, we get stuck in being perfect.  As a dancer, that was part of my challenge, too.  I wanted to be perfect technically so badly that I didn’t always think of dance.  I try to instill that when I teach class:  Let’s breathe, let’s smile, let’s dance.'

When you play golf, you’re playing against the course.  It’s not about the other people.  I’ve had a lot of weird stuff happen to me in my career and in my life, and there were moments when I thought, I’m doing this because I’m good at it, but do I love it?  And the minute it was taken away, I realized that I just love to bend to the side and stand up and bend the other way.  We lose that in trying to be perfect.  It’s going back to the idea that movement is so important.