Mom Says Girl Rejected From Ballet Over Weight

Dec. 21 -- It’s a case involving a 9-year-old girl with a dream, her determined mother, and society’s seeming obsession with skin-and-bone females.

Fredrika Keefer has trained most of her young life to be a ballerina, but the prestigious San Francisco Ballet School rejected her because of her “body type,” the girl’s mother alleges. Fredrika is 3-foot-9 and weighs 64 pounds.

The mother, Krissy Keefer, is the first person to file a complaint under a new city of San Francisco law that prohibits discrimination based on height and weight.

The school argues that there is no evidence that height or weight played a role in the decision to reject Fredrika.

Keefer told Good Morning America that at the audition, the girls were simply paraded around the room and were not given a chance to show their talents.

“I kept pressing them and pressing them as they kept discouraging me from having her audition and I finally got them — they finally said to me, not only was she too short, she didn’t have the right body type and the people in the audition wouldn’t even look at her,” Keefer said from San Francisco.

Keefer filed a complaint with the San Francisco Human Rights Commission last month. In it, she alleges that the ballet school, which receives $550,000 in city funds per year, has violated the new San Francisco ordinance that prohibits discrimination against people based on their height and weight. If the school is found to be in violation of its contract with the city, it could be fined or have its funding revoked.

The school maintains Fredrika had an opportunity to audition but that she is not ready to enter the school yet.

Keefer says the broader issue is giving girls who don’t necessarily fit the standard ballet mold a chance. She says we have to advance the way we think about body types and femininity.

An Audition, Then DisappointmentThe trouble began in May, when the ballet school offered Fredrika a scholarship to its Dance in Schools outreach program, a twice-a-week course of instruction offered annually to a select group of 60 boys and girls. But her mother, who is herself a professional dancer, felt that Fredrika, who has been dancing since she was 4, belonged in the school’s regular program, not the outreach program, and she asked for an audition. School officials tried to discourage Fredrika from auditioning, saying she did not have the “physical attributes that the school looks for,” according to a statement filed with the Human Rights Commission. But Keefer persisted, and was one of 20 to audition. On June 28, the school sent a letter to Keefer telling her that Fredrika had not been accepted. In a follow-up call to the school, Keefer says she was told that Fredrika’s height and weight were an issue. The dance school’s published materials say that it looks for “a healthy child with a well-proportioned, slender body, a straight and supple spine, legs turned out from the hip joint, flexibility, slender legs and torso, and correctly arched feet, who has an ear for music and an instinct for movement.”