Having only known Laura Wentzel for 30 minutes, I already know this: she is resilient. You don’t notice her essence right away. But with time, with wind, with the seasons shifting quietly around her, you look around, and she is still dancing. Standing tall. Standing still.
When I asked Laura about her earliest memory of dance, she made no mention of technique — instead, she spoke of butterflies. She was five years old, sitting on the floor in a butterfly stretch, imagining, if she could have her own butterfly, what color it would be and where it would fly.
“Mine was purple,” she laughed, though she remembers that the “cool” answer was “rainbow and sparkly.” Her introduction to ballet wasn’t precision or turnout; it was ribbons in the air, skipping, and joy.
That joy has never left her.
Ever since that first class at five years old, Laura has been doing ballet nonstop. Even with her busy high school schedule, balancing sports and academic pressures, ballet remained one of her constants: “I just feel certain that I’m going to continue to do ballet my whole entire life,” she told me. Her hometown studio teacher, now a great-grandmother, still dances en pointe. “I want to be like her and be a 75-year-old woman who’s still moving her body and doing ballet,” Laura said.
At Swarthmore, however, ballet transformed. Her home studio was “not the most rigorous environment,” and when she arrived here, she encountered a different intensity. Ballet became more goal oriented, but “not in a negative way,” she noted. Not less joyful, simply more aware.
And awareness, for Laura, begins at the barre. Even pliés, the very first combination at the barre, continues to be a site for growth: “I’ve been doing pliés since I was five years old … You’d think that after sixteen years, it would become second nature,” she joked, adding, “But even after sixteen years, I’m still constantly… finding things to do to make it better.” You can hear how her voice brightens when she talks about pushing herself. “I think it’s so cool that ballet requires so much technique that there’s always something to work on,” she said. “You can always push your body a little bit farther and extend your limits.”
Precision, however, is often mistaken for rigidity. Ballet carries a reputation for being “rigid” or “stiff,” so when Laura told me she has found freedom within it, I couldn’t help but ask her to say more.
“It’s very precise,” she said carefully. “But it’s not at all rigid.” She then described the concept of opposing forces: grounding deeply through the standing leg so that the working leg can move freely — stability creating expansion. The stronger and more aligned her base, the more liberated the rest of her body can be. “Even as we strive to find control, precision, and nuance in our movement, I actually can’t think of a place where rigidity is a good thing in ballet,” she added.
And then, as if to prove her point, she shared an anecdote with me. “All last summer I would balance in passé on relevé whenever I was brushing my teeth,” she said. If she finds her center, “meaning, I have the weight of all the parts of my body stacked in alignment on my standing leg,” she can “do anything [she wants] with [her] arms, including vigorously shaking one to effectively brush [her] teeth.” With her core engaged and everything still except her arm, she can hold the balance for at least a minute on each side.
It is a perfect illustration of what she means by finding freedom through grounding. Freedom is not the absence of control, but rather knowing where to hold and where to release it. Ballet is grounded yet airy, structured yet free.
That balance follows her beyond the barre.
“My favorite thing in the whole world is performing,” she said without hesitation. “The best word to describe the way a performance feels for me is magical.” In the studio, she refines, corrects, and focuses. But on stage, something shifts: “When I’m on stage, under those lights, in a costume, it’s like something else takes over, and I just get to … I just get to dance and experience the magic.”
The technical critiques fall away. What remains is connection. “Dance … is its own language. It can tell a story without words, and it can make people feel really strong emotions.” And of all those emotions, she chooses one deliberately: “I think my favorite emotion to convey … is joy.” Joy isn’t something she consciously reaches for; it’s something that seems to emanate the moment she begins to move. “My goal is to share the joy that I feel while I’m performing with the audience,” she lit up as she said, making it unmistakable how deeply joy anchors her as a performer, as an audience member, and as the little girl who first fell for dance.
What strikes me most about Laura is not just her discipline or her technical growth. It is her steadiness, her refusal to harden, even as she strengthens. The way she centers her practice in steady control without losing her lightness. The way she continues to refine without losing the original spark of skipping across a studio floor at five years old.
In the studio, she works. On stage, she lets go: “On stage, I let go of all the little critiquing thoughts that are really beneficial for growth in the studio, and I just let the dance take over.”
She bends. She roots. She grows.
And when the lights rise, she lets the dance take over.
