Much like the young characters on Bunheads, you grew up studying dance. What did you like the best about it and what was the hardest part of that lifestyle?

Kelly Bishop: What I liked best about it was simply dancing. I just love to dance and I was actually watching a thing on the New York City Ballet School. When you want to dance, when you need to dance and you love to dance, it’s just a wonderful world. It’s terribly hard. It takes you away from any social life you have at school. I mean, I never went to an after-school dance or a prom or a football game or any of those things, and yet I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. I would rather have been taking another class at the ballet school. So it’s a completely different world. It’s very focused. You kind of have tunnel vision actually. It’s just a very focused world, because it’s so very, very difficult. Ballet is really a hard discipline and it takes years and years to just properly even do a position or a step. So you get so wrapped up in that.

It’s also very beautiful. I don’t know if you know that, but in A Chorus Line, I played a character who sang “At the Ballet,” which was a song that was written from my life story, from my interviews, which was really very flattering to take my words and turn them into the lyrics of a song. It was about how everything is beautiful to ballet. There is a real romance to it. It’s a beautiful form of dance. We all know how pretty ballet dancers are and how beautiful it looks even if we don’t understand it.

The hard part is having to dedicate yourself completely, and the good part is how much fun it is and how romantic it is. It’s just a great world if you love it. It’s true of gymnasts. I’m sure it’s true of athletes. It’s true of anyone who loves a particular thing. You just get lost in it. I wish that everyone could find their dream and follow that road, because it’s really the way to live life. So I’m very, very happy that my life worked out the way it did.

I don’t have kids, but if I had kids, they all would have taken ballet. Just to get started—not to push them into it or to have them become dancers, just to get that body coordination and the strength. You get tremendous strength from dance.