Edinburgh Fringe 2026
The 40-Year-Old Ballerino
Chris Davis
Genre: Autobiography, Comedy, Dance, Theatre
Venue: Venue 13
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A one-man comic storyteller, standing on stage with nothing more than a ballet barre for support, who relays his struggle with a toxic relationship, addiction, finding stability and confidence through ballet at the “advanced” age of 40, and learning to finally ignore the damaging myths about romance we’ve all been sold from pop culture and John Hughes films.
Review
Chris Davis is certainly not the type of person that springs to mind when one imagines a ballet dancer, and yet, as he states at the beginning of his one-person show, The 40-Year-Old-Ballerino, his dance teacher says he has the best ballet feet — and he does!! What transpires over the next 50-minutes is Davis’s semi-autobiographical tale of trading one addiction for another and of learning to let go of toxic relationships and ideals, and he guides us as artfully on this journey of discovery as gracefully as he moves his arms, spins, and pliés (those toes!!).
This average Philadelphia guy stands on stage with nothing more than a ballet barre for support and takes us through the significant moments of the dysfunctional relationship that led him to dance. His former partner had, we learn, been a ballet dancer, but she also proved to be an extremely opportunistic, self-absorbed woman with manipulative ways. The best and most perfect detail about the production is how Davis moves the barre around, demonstrating different ballet poses and moves, as though he is teaching a class; we, the audience, are his students and we are here to learn ballet but also gain nuggets of wisdom from his life and experiences. Eventually, the bits of the story begin to come together and we can see more clearly how ballet, in fact, became the outlet he never knew he needed to escape the harmful patterns of that particular relationship and also the sexist tropes/myths all of us Gen-X and Xennials were subjected to through films like Say Anything. A boom box does play a prominent role in this production, as does a particular song.
Starting over in life at an “advanced” age is not easy but, as Davis demonstrates, NOT impossible. The 40-Year-Old-Ballerino is a small masterpiece in comic storytelling that, by its end, had me believing in hope again, in the future, in the idea that there still is good in the world. This production is a gem and should not be missed.
