A Ballerina Prized for Her Musicality Deals With Hearing Loss

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.