Daily Inspiration Quote by Deborah Bull

Deborah Bull slips a small truth bomb into a sentence that sounds like gym-floor trivia, then uses it to pry open a much bigger cultural lie: that the scale tells the story. The line is engineered to puncture a common visual assumption about dancers - that their apparent lightness must translate into low weight - and to expose how “weight” gets smuggled into conversations as a moral verdict rather than a measurement.

Her intent feels protective and corrective at once. “You might think” is a gentle indictment of the audience’s gaze, the casual arithmetic we do when we look at bodies trained for performance. The phrase admits the misunderstanding without shaming the listener, then redirects attention to the biomechanics of dance: strength built through repetition, muscle density earned, not accessorized.

The subtext is a quiet defense against a long-running aesthetic regime in ballet and contemporary dance, where thinness is fetishized and numbers (in costume fittings, casting, weigh-ins, offhand comments) can become tools of control. By separating “weigh more” from “very lean,” Bull draws a bright line between health and the culture of surveillance. She’s also reminding us that dancers’ bodies are functional instruments: the point is power-to-weight ratio, endurance, and line, not compliance with a bathroom-scale fantasy.

It works because it reframes the body as performance technology, not public property - and because it smuggles compassion into a factoid people will remember.