No. 106 - Yelle’s “Ce jeu” changed my life

When Daphne Juliet Ellis lost her love of dance, she found a saving grace

Sep 05, 2025

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 4 min read •

My dance teacher discovered me as a “fairy” in my grandmother’s garden when I was just shy of four years old. She suggested that Granny enroll me in her school of dance down in Lewiston, and so began my fifteen-year religious ballet practice. The frugal family credit card got its swipes in. I thanked God for it then. I thank God for it now.

Ballet was fun, somatically expressive, and downright glamorous. I grew to love wide spaces and feeling for the air I breathed with curious limbs and a shining chest. Each year of study waxed the candle of my discipline in new, heart-opening ways. More hours. More stage time. Flexibility. Pointe shoes! Finally.

In hindsight, the structure ballet gave my otherwise inconsistent, divorce-torn, undiagnosed neurodivergent childhood was something only Nataraja could have blessed me with. Om Namah Shivaya!

No photo description available. — Daphne the fairy, age four

Enter thirteen. Self awareness and self consciousness met me as carnival distortions in the studio mirrors. Not the socially constructive kinds, of course. Neuroses. When I placed my left hand on the barre, I saw a mediocre body — what it could do, what it wouldn’t do — what it would never be.

Imagine dancing in front of a mirror every day for hours, then years. The fairy girl inside shrank as I grew. I wasn’t alone. All of us kid dancers got sick. We did stupid things like stand on each other’s feet to make them more supple. We overstretched our backs and legs in door frames. We only rested if we were ill, and even then we’d show up to watch class.

During my first year on pointe, though, there also came a saving grace: modern dance.

On the first day of class, the CD player where Rachmaninoff usually lived surprised me with a niche blend of indie-pop mixes, tailor-burned to guide our contemporary awakenings. The timing was perfect.

Yelle whistles at the start of “Ce jeu” for sixteen counts before the beat drops. I remember forming three lines, holding at the intro, and taking turns prancing across the floor on that third count of eight. It was not a classical turned-out situation. It was clunky. The goal was to achieve a suspension mid-air, defying gravity for moments at a time.

Ballet is a French word from the latin “ballare,” to dance. Preteen me found it surreal to be dancing to French pop music in a tiny Maine city rich with Franco-American heritage. This was long before I knew for certain I’d go to college, let alone fly to Paris one day.

“Ce jeu” is upbeat, cute, and fun. This song represented female nature at a time when I was just uncovering what that meant for me. I didn’t even speak French! Yet I could feel Yelle’s honesty and confidence. It was so healing to take class in baggy clothes and bounce myself silly like the child who fell in love with dancing in the first place. I looked forward to our “across the floor” combination to “Ce jeu” every week.

In fact, I couldn’t stand to wait.

In my free time, I found Yelle’s music video on YouTube and fell deeply in love with her as an artist. Watch it now and come back to me. She’s camp! She’s an icon!

Fast forward through the Tumblr-blue darkness of high school to my sophomore year of college. I attended a student conference at the London School of Economics and visited some American friends who were also there to study abroad. All of them were film students, and the super cool kind, of course.

At the end of an evening of drinks and games, one of them set up a projector. Its picture filled an entire wall and we all laid before it in a cuddle puddle. Everyone began suggesting interesting music videos to watch. I could hear Yelle whistling before it was even my turn.

The flat lit up orange, red, and green. I’d never watched it on such a big screen. By that time, the urge to dance was so deeply warped and repressed inside of me. Part of a past life. It made me cry. I couldn’t believe how far I’d come, or that I was there, out in the world, largely because of the discipline I got from dance class.

I still don’t give myself adequate credit for how I’ve handled many challenges in my life. I typically thank the music and my friends for all that I am now. But I’m glad that in that moment I felt surrendered enough to internalize my own progress against such a core-memory soundtrack.

Now, when I need motivation on the treadmill, I still listen to “Ce jeu.”

Sometimes, it even makes me prance. ◆