Karen Kain

Location: Ontario | Profession: Actor/Performance Artist

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Karen Kain 1971

Karen Kain is likely Canada’s best known – and most internationally successful – ballerina. Like all aspiring dancers, she began her career early at four years of age. She began at the National Ballet School in Toronto at the age of eighteen, where although she was seen as having a lot of potential, she was criticised for being too tall and weighed too much to be a serious dancer. However, she proved her critics wrong and at the age of 21, was dancing with Rudolph Nureyev and taking the National Ballet around the world as the principle dancer. She is now the company’s artistic director.

Karen Kain 2005

What They Said

At the age of 27, the success of an early career began to fade for Karen Kain. She started to second-guess her own abilities. “I lost my confidence and I didn’t want to go on stage and I didn’t think I [could] meet people’s expectations because they’d heard so much about me and they’d bought tickets and they were expecting – well, I was quite convinced that I couldn’t give them whatever it was that they were expecting.” The anxiety worsened and she began to feel like a fraud, as though she didn’t deserve the adulation she was getting. “It must be some kind of mistake, and I was going to get found out!”

The low confidence level affected her performance. “I went through a really tough time in my career, sort of just starting to not perform well, and people were calling me on it. Then, when that starts, you start losing your confidence even more and it becomes like a snowball.”

When it grew to be too much to handle, Kain decided to take some time off. It was the necessary cure for being caught up in a world where the outside is rarely seen; a world where each player is constantly judged by the responses of others.

She took a leave of absence for almost a year. It was the first time she had stopped dancing in a quarter century. She had yet to turn 30.

On the recommendation of several friends and colleagues, she went to see a psychiatrist. She was forced to look inwards. The burden for a celebrity like her had been the unrelenting scrutiny of every detail: praising when she was successful, damning when she wasn’t. The recognition took several months. She had to examine her real motivations for success. When the critics lambasted a performance, she had always grown depressed. When her idol Nureyev hadn’t been around, she lost all ambition to excel. The problem was clear: at the heart of it, her career had been driven by a strong desire to impress others.

 When she returned to dancing, she made a strong pact with herself. “[I] decided that I really did want to dance and it wasn’t for anybody else I was going to dance, it was for myself, which again sounds so simplistic, but I needed to go through a lot to get to that point and to feel like I wanted to brave it again.”

She continued on with that mindset for over a decade and her insecurities never bothered her to the same extent. In some way, she needed the breakdown in order to confront the small insecurities that had plagued her early career.