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Ballet dancing requires an adhesion to the vocational dimension of artistic occupations that belittles economic hardships and physical injuries. Investment in the present and disinterestedness demonstrate the inflexible nature of vocation (just like poverty, physical sufferance may appear as a sign of election). Yet, the body remains a work instrument, and its preservation is at stake in the rationalization of its maintenance, but also in the recognition of the asymmetrical nature of the employer/employee relation between the choreographer and her interpreters. The ballet dancer, in fact, perceives herself as the actor of her own work, and her relation to health is conditioned by a logic of responsibility and of maintenance of her bodily capital, understood as a variant of cultural capital.