From Broken Ballerina to Storyteller with Susan Priver

The poetry that I felt in dance began to percolate in another way, so I could express it through language and still use my body.

Session Summary

A body built for ballet, broken by it, and rebuilt through language, acting, and yoga. In this conversation, Susan Priver traces her path from the School of American Ballet and classical companies like Cleveland Ballet to a devastating firing at 24 that shattered her identity and plunged her into profound depression. She shares how acting training at the Actors Studio, method-based sensory work, and eventually Harold Pinter’s The Lover gave her a new choreography for her inner life, letting her translate the “pure poetry” she once found only in dance into voice, language, and character. Along the way, yoga, art modeling, and teaching became lifelines, helping her live in a body that no longer looked like a ballerina’s while she slowly reclaimed her artistry as an actor and author of the memoir Dancer Interrupted: A True Exposé of a Ballerina’s Fall from Grace.

Takeaways from this session:

When ballet is your whole identity, being fired feels like erasure.Susan describes being let go from Cleveland Ballet in her mid‑20s during the Reagan-era funding cuts as a trauma that froze her in time, triggering a “very, very deep depression” and a sense of being utterly unloved and without identity beyond dance.
Art doesn’t die when one form ends—it changes shape.Initially more fluent in movement than words, Susan spent years in acting training learning to connect her “sensitive instrument” to the music of language, eventually discovering that the same inner poetry she once expressed in ballet could live inside a character’s body and text onstage.
Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter taps her dancer’s sensuality in a new way.In The Lover, Susan plays Sarah, a wife who keeps her marriage alive through ritualized erotic role‑play, using her dancer’s awareness of sensuality, timing, and physical presence to navigate Pinter’s razor‑edge of fantasy, danger, and desire—without literally dancing. Bongos, ritual, and Pinter’s precise language become the score she moves through.
Yoga became a bridge between the “fallen” ballerina and the emerging actor.In her late 20s, after her father’s death, stalled auditions, weight gain, and hair loss from alopecia, Susan turned to yoga to manage anxiety, befriend her non‑dancer body, and quiet the “constant negative chatter” that told her she was no longer enough. That practice eventually led to teaching, where she discovered a new voice guiding others into their own bodies.
There are ways through a “fall from grace” for dancers.For dancers who feel their career is over, Susan advocates reaching out—through therapy, movement practices like yoga, mentoring, or education—to translate kinesthetic and emotional intelligence into other forms: teaching, choreography, community programs, other art forms, or entirely new professions. She highlights colleagues who became painters, community dance leaders, and arts educators as examples of what’s possible beyond the stage.