Sara Mearns stepped onto the stage as the Sugarplum Fairy wearing something more precious than a jewel-encrusted tiara. In her ears, invisible to all, were hearing aids.
“I heard every single noise possible,” she said. “Backstage, onstage. The shoes on the stage sounded like cymbals in my ears. The music was so loud. The audience was ridiculously loud. Everything was magnified. It almost sounds artificial. I’m like, is it really like this? Is this real?”
It’s been only three weeks since Mearns, 38, was fitted with semi-permanent hearing aids and one week since she stepped back into the role of Sugarplum in “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” for the first time since 2020. Her first performance, on Dec. 30, was shaky, she said. But on Friday night, her second — sensitive and seamless — “the feelings came back of Oh, you know how to do this,” Mearns said in an interview. “There’s nothing you need to worry about. You just need to go out there and enjoy yourself and be yourself and command the stage, and I really did feel like myself again.”
In videos posted to Instagram stories before those shows, Mearns, the acclaimed, musically penetrating New York City Ballet principal, spoke about coping with hearing loss for the past 10 years. “I won’t miss entrances anymore or not hear the music,” she said on Instagram, “or have to ask the pianist to play louder or have them turn the monitors up.”
She was able to hear things she hadn’t heard in years. Chirping birds. Wind. Clicking shoes. “I was just bawling walking down the street,” she said of her trek to her Lincoln Center dressing room where she filmed the videos.
“I was a little dramatic and crying,” she said, “but I just wanted to capture the first moments within that first hour of hearing again.”
And she wasn’t sad. “It was, like, excitement of, OK, I can have a new life with this,” she said. “I don’t have to be in pain anymore. I don’t have to be embarrassed anymore. I don’t have to hide.”
Mearns, who dances with startling presence and in-the-moment authority, has been open about her struggles with mental health, but her public posts about her hearing — and how long it has been an issue — were a surprise, though, she said, many of her colleagues have known about it, including her dance partners and Marquerite Mehler, the company’s director of production.
Even so, Mearns wasn’t entirely transparent about her hearing loss to many; she would make light of it or laugh it off. “I didn’t want people to feel awkward about it,” she said. “So it’s like hiding yourself. You’re hiding your actual issues. And then when that happens, it just becomes a bigger mental problem for you.”
And the isolation it brought on was crushing. “It’s not like I want to, like, go party now,” she said. “I mean, those days are over. But I don’t want to feel like I can’t go to dinner, or I can’t go to a loud restaurant, or I can’t go to a concert, or I can’t sit and enjoy something in the theater.”
Basically, she added, “I just want to hear people talk, and I want to hear the music that I’m dancing to.”
Tyler Angle, her frequent partner at City Ballet who paired with her for her “Nutcracker” return, knew that it was something she’d been dealing with for a long time. But even he learned of her new hearing aids through Instagram. He said her hearing loss was “not something that was brought up or shared or discussed, unless we were talking about the monitors being too low or not hearing.”
He remembers that when they walked out onstage for their first pas de deux in Jerome Robbins’s “Goldberg Variations,” he would “squeeze her hand so she would know when it would start,” he said. “And then we’d get the rhythm of it.”
It helped, Angle said, that he and Mearns are able to hear music in a similar way, their responses fueled by the same impulses. Because of that, he said, “she would have my body and my cuing and my breath to also help tell her what the meter was and what the tempo was.”
Mearns has been shocked, she said, by how many dancers she’s heard from who have hearing loss. “I hope that I can inspire them to maybe do something about it,” she said. “I’m not saying that everybody needs hearing aids. Everybody’s different. That’s why you have to do all the tests.”
She first had an issue with her own hearing 10 years ago. In Brazil, she attended a rehearsal for Carnival held in a metal gym where around 100 drummers played for an hour. When she left the gym, she said, she could no longer hear, which lasted for a couple of days. When she returned to New York, she went to a doctor and learned that she had hearing loss in low registers in both ears. “It wasn’t that bad that I really was impaired on a daily basis,” she said. “I just knew that this event had happened and I wanted to get my ears checked.”
But it got worse. During the pandemic, Mearns said, she recognized: “I have a problem because I can’t hear people talk with masks on. And I then realized, Wait, I can’t see their mouth. Which then was like, I have been watching people talk instead of listening to them. I have been reading their lips.”
She was nervous to do interviews, to participate in talks. She was mortified to ask pianists to play louder. Last year, she suffered from injuries and felt “everything sort of falling apart for me,” she said. “I was like this is also a huge thing that’s contributing to my life being so closed off and dark, and I need to do something about this.”
Mearns underwent a series of tests to pinpoint the problem, which is nerve hearing loss. In October, she worked to find the best option for her hearing aids with her audiologist, who put them in place. She can’t feel them, but they make her hyper aware of the vibrations in her body, the air when she is spinning, the reverberation of landings from jumps and the sound of her pointe shoes.
It’s still early days, and she’s getting used to hearing more than she would like, including conversations that are happening some distance away. “I’m like, I don’t need to be hearing that,” she said. “Why can I hear that?”
But dealing with her hearing has been healing in a way that goes beyond dance. “This whole hearing aid thing was part of me reclaiming my value and confidence as a person again and as a dancer,” she said. “As a woman.”
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