Why are We Dancing? Short Reflections on Ballet and Piano
16th May, 2026
By Yuhua Emma Zhang
On a rather bustling afternoon during my school hours, I told another pianist and fellow classmate that I was practicing and preparing a piece for a recital, namely, the Haydn Sonata in F Major Hob. XVI:23. Sharing this information out of genuine excitement for its brisk passages and overwhelming optimism from each note, her reaction surprised me.
“Isn’t that piece kind of easy? Why don’t you learn a more impressive piece like La Campanella or Liszt’s Etudes?”
At first, the response seemed insignificant and slightly amusing since I chose a piece that suited my small hands, but I realized her reaction stemmed from an issue much larger than what I had experienced. Increasingly, I saw the same reaction occur with other classmates, not only in piano, but in ballet as well. After I had organized their collective reactions into a singular coherent thought, the problem was not the aim to experience more technically demanding repertoire, instead, it was that technical prowess in an effort to win the validation of others is an infinite loop of comparison that reigns over artistic experience and aesthetic appreciation. Instead of choosing a piece for enjoyment when playing, or a variation in ballet, constant comparison fuels these young proteges to choose works that allow them to flex their technique, in turn mitigating the sole point of art.
In both circles, there is a rapid obsession with technical virtuosity and a heightened fear of being perceived as “less advanced”. It coincides with social pressure, competition culture, and external validation being more emphasized than ever by the growth of social media. Competition itself was never the antithesis of goodness, but it frequently distorts artistic priorities by overemphasizing the importance of scores and relative ranks compared to one’s competitors. They can inspire ambition, excellence, virtuosity, and most of all merit to be recognized, but are only the silver-lining to a plague of problems that affect these artists to pursue validation, over meaning. Constantly hearing in ballet, “that variation is too easy, I don’t want to be seen doing it” or “but I can’t show my technique off” sounds harmless at first, but it perpetuates a tier system based off of prestige-chasing, rather than what the specified art is built for. Thus, art becomes to feel like a cry for validation and less like expression.
Before I fully understood the gravity of this situation, I found myself horrifyingly thinking in this same template as well.
So, what now? Why are we dancing? What are we doing this for?
To answer this question, we must find the root of the problem. According to Aristotle, all things possess a telos: an intrinsic purpose or final end toward which they strive. In this artistic context, then, what is the telos of ballet? What is the telos of piano? Is it medals, technical mastery, and rankings? Or is it something far less tangible and abstract, yet infinitely more meaningful: beauty, expression, emotional honesty, and the cultivation of artistry itself? Art cultivates virtue, and with the second definition, the “telos” is more apparent.
Perhaps the issue lies in the way modern artistic culture increasingly prioritizes the visible over the experiential. Nietzsche described art as a tension between two opposing forces: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian embodies structure, precision, discipline, and technical perfection; the Dionysian embodies emotion, ecstasy, immersion, and lived experience. Ballet and piano undeniably require Apollonian discipline. Without rigorous training, technique cannot exist. Yet when technique begins to shadow emotional experience entirely, art slowly loses the very essence that gave it meaning in the first place, which only exists in the Dionysian.
This imbalance becomes increasingly visible in modern competitive artistic circles. Difficult variations are often valued over emotionally resonant ones; virtuosic repertoire becomes more admired than expressive repertoire. Conversations surrounding ballet increasingly revolve around turns, extensions, flexibility, and technical tricks rather than musicality, character, or emotional interpretation (with the influence of competitions such as YAGP). Similarly, in piano, immense attention is devoted to speed, difficulty, and visible virtuosity, while quieter forms of artistry are often overlooked because they are less immediately impressive. Immanuel Kant argued that beauty should be appreciated “disinterestedly,” meaning that true aesthetic appreciation should exist independently from reward or utility. Artistic decisions have now become filtered through external validation:
“Will judges like this?”
“Will this make me seem advanced?”
“Is this variation difficult enough?”
“Will people be impressed?”
Under this mindset, art ceases to become an end in itself and instead becomes instrumentalized—a means to obtain recognition, prestige, and comparison-based worth. People no longer require external authority to pressure them into comparison; instead, they continuously pressure themselves. In artistic spaces, this manifests as a constant psychological evaluation. Over time, this mentality transforms art from a deeply human experience into a performance of self-worth. Despite all of this, I do not believe technique itself is the enemy. Ballet requires immense discipline and piano demands years of rigorous training. Technical mastery is essential because it allows artists to communicate ideas with clarity and freedom, but technique was never meant to replace artistry itself.
This is what I had forgotten, even if only briefly. Somewhere between competitions, comparisons, rankings, and validation, I had stopped asking myself why I loved these arts in the first place. I had stopped appreciating the exhilaration of movement synchronized with music, the emotional release hidden within choreography, and the overwhelming beauty that can emerge from a single phrase of music played sincerely.
Perhaps the purpose of art is not to impress others, but to remind us how to feel.
And perhaps the moment we stop obsessing over appearing extraordinary is the moment we finally rediscover why we loved art in the first place.
Thumbnail Image Credits:
Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "New York City Ballet production of Balanchine's "Ballet Imperial"" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1964. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/e99f5e70-b08a-0137-2e8c-376f85bcf6d8
