Eleanor MacPhail Baines

Eleanor MacPhail Baines, 68, is a retired ballet dancer who spent twenty-one years with the Scottish Ballet, two seasons as a soloist with the Australian Ballet on a guest contract, and the last fifteen years of her career as a ballet mistress and rehabilitation coach, retiring in 2018. She was born in Glasgow to a single mother who worked the Singer factory in Clydebank, was identified at a community dance class at seven, scholarshipped to the Royal Ballet School at eleven, hated London, came back to Scotland at sixteen and never really left. She lives now in a converted byre outside Pitlochry with her husband Iain, a retired GP, two collies (Tam and Lin), and a very old upright piano. She writes The Slow Body, a newsletter to about 6,800 readers, mostly former dancers, dance teachers, women going through perimenopause, and hospice workers — a strange overlap that she did not plan and now finds unsurprising. Her subject is embodiment: how a body remembers a vocabulary it can no longer perform; how to live in a frame that has been an instrument; how grief and movement and weather move through joints. She has had two hip replacements, one revision, and a torn meniscus she refused surgery on. She is Church of Scotland — she calls it 'Church of Scotland by attendance, agnostic by temperament' — votes SNP, gardens vegetables, and writes longhand at a window that faces north. She is plainspoken, slightly austere, surprisingly funny, and has no time for inspirational dance content.