Remember: You Are A Prince
Tonight we premiered three new works.
I danced a principal role in two of them, with two excellent partners.
I made a tiny mistake in my first piece that the audience didn’t see (my brain skipped ahead and my partner saved me from myself right away ^-^’), and an angel press didn’t quite get all the way there because I let a wardrobe malfunction distract me (my trousers ripped — good thing I kept my tights on under them!), but other than that it was quite possibly the best performance I’ve ever given as a dancer.
I felt confident. I felt strong. I felt connected to each of my partners, to the music, to the corps, and to the stories we created with our movement.
In short, I felt good. I felt present.
~
Afterwards, I had this moment that felt like a little series of windows in time had opened up.
For a heartbeat, I caught a glimpse of a long-ago me from a terrible time in my life; a me that couldn’t believe that he would ever dance at all, let alone like this. A me that politely demurred when someone suggested auditioning for the dance program at Academy (the arts magnet that I did attend, although I didn’t major in dance) because the thought of not making the cut felt like a knife twisting in my heart.
A me that honestly didn’t believe I’d make it to the age I am now. A me that didn’t even really believe that I’d make it to my next birthday.
For a heartbeat, I saw a slightly older me — the me who couldn’t follow up on a friend’s suggestion that I drop in at a local ballet company’s school. I still couldn’t let myself hope. I still believed both that you cannot return, once you leave the country of Ballet, except as a tourist, and that I probably wasn’t really good enough — that I had the physical aptitude, but not the brains.
For an eyeblink, I saw myself, raw and just a little bit hopeful, a college student finally setting foot in the studio again, cradling in my heart of hearts the dimmest hope that somehow, maybe, I might find a way to dance, even just a little.
For a breath, I saw the dancer that I was towards the end of my first year as an apprentice at Lexington Ballet, stubborn and determined, but also frustrated and so, so afraid I’d never figure it out.
I wanted to reach back and say to them — to all those iterations, all those past selves, so to speak — Even now, we’re making it. We’re getting there.
A couple of years ago, my friend BG told me, “You will dance, and you will do great things.”
And tonight I danced, and tonight I think my company made something great and beautiful.
Tonight I danced a pas de deux that ends with me carrying my partner off the stage, and as we vanished into the wings, the audience responded resoundingly. I heard a voice shout, “Bravo!”
That’s no small thing, on a Thursday night in a city where people don’t see a lot of ballet, and really don’t see a lot of contemporary ballet. (That pas was in the closing ballet, which is quite contemporary.)
Reader, none of that is the main reason that I dance: I dance because dancing is where my soul, or whatever you want to call it, thrives. It’s where my heart feels whole.
But I’d be lying if I said that it was anything less than amazing to know that you’ve captured this room full of strangers and brought them with you on your journey and actually moved them.
~
At the end of the day, besides the dancing itself, it blows my mind that I am part of this company: that I’m valued and wanted; that I have friends at work; that I get to spend my working days creating art with these vibrant, singular people.
It blows my mind that I’m living this life.
The sense of gratitude is impossible to articulate. So much of my life right now is a prayer of thanksgiving that, even in the hard and dark and troubled times we’re living through, somehow there’s room in the world for art and for artists, and somehow I’m one of them.
This night is a golden night. My heart and soul keep thrumming with a deep kind of contentment.
I think: so this is how it feels to be in the place where, not too long ago, you hardly dared to dream that you might someday be.
Right before I went on for the first time tonight, standing in the crossover behind the stage, I took a deep breath and repeated something that L’Ancien told me time and again in class. Simply: “Remember: you are a Prince.”
He would say this to me when I was struggling and getting into my head and getting in my own way. Just, “Remember: you are a Prince.”
Tonight, I was a classical prince in foofy Regency-revival sleeves and a velvet waistcoat and tights and a contemporary prince in 50s (60s?) Greaser gear, with my t-shirt sleeves rolled up and black trousers (that almost made it to the end of the show).
What links the two is the decision to believe, for this moment, that you deserve to be here.
That and my hair, because 10 minutes isn’t really long enough to un-shellac your hair and turn a buttoned-down Edwardian ‘do into a passable DA.
PS: Counting the five in the Noir finale, there are about 20 lifts distributed between the pieces I did tonight (10 in the main Silver pas; five in each finale). And excepting the angel press that didn’t quite make it (see above) they all went well by any measure, be it metric, Imperial, or SAE.
Lifts
We’re deep in the teeth of a new short (~20 mins I think?) ballet in which I’m mostly doing pas de deux with tons of lifts[1].
- Metaphorical tons, though I suppose that if one adds up the weight of all the lifts I’ve done in the course of learning and rehearsing this piece, it’s way more than one ton … That’s a very weird thought. There are more than 10 lifts in the main pas de deux and a few more in the finale [2], and assuming my partner weighs 100 pounds (I’m not great at estimating weight, but that would be pretty light for a full–gown ballerina) that’s significantly more than 1000 pounds total per run. And there’s a press lift in the finale, just for kicks ^-^’
- I’m going have to count the lifts with pen and paper; when I try to just visualize my way through, I lose track the very second I run out of fingers
I finished today’s rehearsal with the extremely satisfying thought that I, in this piece, get to be a human rollercoaster.
Next week we start another short ballet (they’re for an upcoming show with three pieces). I’m doing pas de deux in that one, too.
It’s weird to have entered this part of my career where I’m suddenly doing meaty pas de deux; principal roles that stretch me as a dancer and an artist.
Back in the day, I always said I’d be happy to be a permanent corps boy somewhere, and I don’t think that was incorrect – I love the whole process of class and rehearsal. Whether I’m in a principal role or dancing in the inevitable Village Festivities Waltz is immaterial to me as long as I can dance.
That said, I’m not complaining for a second about finding myself in a company where I have a chance to do the work I’m doing now (never mind the fact that there are very few companies in the US with enough guys for “corps boy” to even be a thing).
I just don’t think I ever imagined I’d be working like I am right now, learning new choreography hand over fist, being trusted with hard stuff (some of the pas work in this piece is very challenging).
My life isn’t perfect. There are still a lot of bumps in the road. But I still feel incredibly, incredibly lucky to be doing what I’m doing now.
Perspective
Sometimes, new experiences shed light on past experiences in ways that change how we understand them.
Sometimes, that helps you understand your own journey in ways you didn’t know you needed.
Ballet Trauma: It’s A Thing
As a ballet dancer, I began my career at The Lexington Ballet Company in Lexington, Kentucky.
I will always, always be grateful for the risk LexBallet took in picking me up out of their summer program. At the time, I didn’t have much history as a performer, and I was missing pretty significant chunks of the training that professional ballet dancers are expected to have when we begin our careers.
My first year was rocky, and the source of that rockiness (bullying by a senior company member) wasn’t handled well — but that doesn’t change the fact that, in my time with LexBallet, I learned so much as a dancer that would’ve been difficult to learn if I wasn’t dancing thirty hours per week. I learned how to function in a ballet company, I gained invaluable performing experience, and I eventually began building friendships that remain with me to this day (including AK, who I ran into again at NEBT because the ballet world is terrifyingly small).
I had some great mentors there, and very solid examples both of how to be a sound member of community that is a professional ballet company and, perhaps just as importantly, how not to be.
This isn’t to say that everything was perfect.
It wasn’t. Ballet has historically been sort of infamously problematic, and LexBallet didn’t entirely escape that legacy.
There were problems. Some of them were pretty significant. Some of them were worse than I realized at the time, not least because male ballet dancers are considered magical unicorns that might bolt at any moment and tend to be handled with much greater discretion than are female ballet dancers. Some didn’t fully come to a head until after I had moved away.
When I was there, I often said of LexBallet, “We’re a family — a dysfunctional family, but still a family.”
I still think that’s a pretty apt description: members of dysfunctional families often care deeply about each-other, and they can accomplish amazing things together, but they also share common wounds. Likewise, people within dysfunctional families can care deeply about their fellow family members while still causing them very serious harm.
That said, things were more dysfunctional than I understood at the time (LexBallet is currently in the process of taking some major strides to address those things, by the way, and I think that’s really cool and amazing).
Some of this I just plain didn’t see (again, magical unicorn), and some of it I kind of saw, but didn’t see enough to understand what I was seeing, either because it was consistent with my prior experiences and therefore felt normal-but-not-good, or because I was only witness to parts of what was going on, so I couldn’t get beyond, “This thing I’m witnessing seems kind of wrong but I’m not sure why.”
There were, of course, also the traditional, established traumas of the Ballet Cinematic Universe: though it wasn’t said in so many words, there was still the sense that nobody’s body was right. Some of the artistic staff treated us less as fully-realized artists who were working very hard than as interchangeable Dance Production Units who were never functioning quite as specified. There was, to be honest, kind of a lot of yelling.
We company members sometimes discussed things amongst ourselves, but I don’t think any of us really believed we could do much about it, in no small part because I don’t think we really believed things could actually be different. Things were just as rocky for almost everyone else we knew at other companies.
It turns out, in fact, that there’s a lot of this in the Ballet Cinematic Universe. Is anyone surprised by this?
Not really.
The surprise, I think, is how many of us have felt like things at our own companies are fine, because they’re not as awful as whatever’s happening at some other company.
A Bit of Unpacking
The audience of this blog is basically Bunheads and a few people who’ve been reading my stuff for years, so this might go without saying, but: ballet people kind of live on a different planet. Ballet has its own, deeply-immersive, very powerful culture, and because dancers spend so much of their time immersed in the Ballet Cinematic Universe, we might as well be living in a different country than that in which our next-door neighbors live.
Moreover, the culture in question propagates itself through selection. While ballet is famous for selecting for a very narrow range of body types and excluding everybody else, those outside the artform may not realize that it also selects for a specific temperament — one that is conscientious, cooperative, and obedient.
Historically, ballet has been the most hierarchical of the streams of dance. Its traditions belong to a Europe that has pretty much ceased to exist in every other sphere, and among those traditions, writ large, are hierarchy and obedience.
Ballet students in traditional programs learn from the very beginning to obey those in charge of us. As children between six and eight years old, just beginning serious ballet classes, we’ve historically been expected to place our hands on the barre, close our mouths, and follow instructions.
Those who aren’t naturally inclined to do so tend, very quickly, to drop out of training.
Those of us who continue — even those of us who take a circuitous route out of and back into ballet, as I did — learn both implicitly and explicitly that we should be quiet in class and rehearsal, take instruction obediently, only ask questions for clarification, and accept criticism gladly and quietly.
We also learn that our bodies are instruments on which our teachers and choreographers and directors create art.
We learn that hierarchy is to be respected, even at great cost.
We also tend to learn to internalize responsibility: when things are difficult, we must be the problem; we must be doing something wrong.
We also learn that we are replaceable. That if we don’t like the way things work, there are a thousand other dancers waiting to take our place.
So while the average 21st-century American might find it difficult to understand why we’d put up with a lot of the conditions that are considered pretty normal within the professional ballet world, we have difficulty understanding that other conditions could exist. Most of us are very intelligent, so we can understand that they should, in a philosophical sense, be able to exist: it’s just hard to make the jump to imagining what that would be like.
Likewise, we can find it difficult to imagine that we can pursue those conditions while continuing to work within the artform to which we’ve dedicated our entire lives (see above with regard to believing that we are replaceable).
But Maybe?
I’ve just finished up my first month with New England Ballet Theatre, and it’s wild how different the vibe is than almost anywhere else I’ve worked, including places that weren’t within the Ballet Cinematic Universe.
A part of me is really kind of afraid to keep repeating it out loud, because somewhere deep in my soul I’m extremely superstitious, but NEBT is built different, and it’s built different by design.
I didn’t write much about my audition at NEBT, but the fact that I felt welcome and comfortable during the audition, rather than stressed out and frightened, should really have been my first clue. I assumed that was just because I was auditioning outside of the normal audition season, at the same time as a good friend — but, in retrospect, a lot of it had to do with how both Rachael, our AD, and the existing company members welcomed both T (my friend) and me.
Since then, I’ve been slowly realizing that NEBT feels like home because Rachael is making a concerted effort to build a different kind of company: one in which we dancers are not eternally-malfunctioning Dance Production Units, but in which we are people and artists first.
This, in turn, is helping me to see the scars I carry from earlier experiences. Sometimes that’s uncomfortable, but healing isn’t always comfortable.
Likewise, this isn’t to say that life at NEBT completely stress-free. Ballet, as an artform, is stressful: we live on this knife’s edge, on which we pursue a perfection that we know cannot be achieved, but for which we’re still willing to work our tuchases off.
But I think, maybe, I’m finally beginning to understand how good stress — that is, the kind that facilitates creativity and growth — looks and feels in a work environment.
What feels so unique is that our AD handles that stress in a very different way. I have literally never heard her raise her voice, and when we’re not getting it, she takes a beat to figure out why, instead of just assuming that A] we’re not listening and B] we’re, in the British sense, thick.
We screw up. That’s just part of being human.
But, because the culture of the company has been built with the knowledge that mistakes happen and don’t have to be the end of the world, when someone screws up, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world.
Like, seriously, the first time I was suppose to run my opening solo for The Red Shoes, my brain went blank like 30 seconds in, and rather than screaming at me when I said, “I swear I knew this a second ago!” Rachael said, “Don’t worry, I don’t remember it either right now!” and we laughed about it.
To clarify: Rachael didn’t laugh at me. I laughed because I felt safe, and she laughed with me, because to be honest it really was pretty funny (especially since the first 30 seconds were great). Then I went and glanced at my notes, got my head back together, and ran the piece again.
When an overhead press lift[1] didn’t come off the first or second or fifth time in a rehearsal for an upcoming piece, nobody yelled at me or stomped around looking like they couldn’t believe that any professional dancer could fail so abysmally. Instead, we kept going. Eventually, I got the lift to work during rehearsal. We’re still two weeks out from the show that piece is in, so my partners and I will spend time perfecting the lift itself so we’ll be able to do it reliably by curtain.
- Overhead press-based lifts are roughly 25% strength and 75% timing, so nailing one down with a new partner almost always takes a minute, in my experience.
What I’m Trying To Say Is…
There’s an immense power in being safe to fail; in knowing that not being perfect the first time (or even the fifth time) won’t lead to a tongue-lashing or worse.
There’s an immense power in being valued as a human being and as an artist.
Largely because of this, we’re managing to carry off successful shows in a timeframe that I would’ve thought impossible when I was dancing at LexBallet — and I’ve turned out to be a more useful dancer than I ever believed I would be.
Four weeks from raw concept to opening night is absolutely wild: even in rep, when you’re dusting off a ballet that everyone already knows, four weeks is a pretty short lead time.
We put The Red Shoes up in a month. The audiences loved it. We got good reviews. The parts I got to watch from the house in Dress and Tech looked great.
More importantly, we’re creating a company where people want to stay.
If things continue in this vein, I can very much imagine remaining with NEBT for the rest of my career.
NEBT looks a lot like what I imagine when I’m imagining the future I want for ballet. The rigor is there; the traditions are respected — but not at the expense of respect for the human beings who are, after all, both medium and artist.
Because we are safe to fail, we are safe to try.
For me, that feels revolutionary. I think a lot of us who’ve lived our lives within the Ballet Cinematic Universe would agree.
The other day, someone drew a diagram on our whiteboard representing the difference between how we imagine skill-building progress — a straight line rising like an arrow along the axis representing time — and how it really works — a jagged zigzag that wiggles crazily around, but with an overall upward trend.
This is, in and of itself, a powerful representation of Rachael’s philosophy. Failures and missteps are expected parts of the process. We are safe to fail, so we’re safe to learn. (We’re also safe to call in sick, to have bad days, and to give injuries time to heal.)
Right now, there are eighteen of us in the company, and we talk regularly about how healing an environment it is.
Part of that healing, sometimes, is recognizing the things that have been harmful, that maybe you didn’t entirely see before. Sometimes that’s difficult in its own way.
But healing is like that, and that’s okay.
I can’t adequately express how much it means to find this oasis; this island of healing. That isn’t to say I expect it to be perfect, of course — ballet companies are run by human beings, and human beings are imperfect — but the atmosphere of grace at NEBT means, I hope, that we’ll also feel safe to work on those things together, too.
For that and for so many reasons, I hope NEBT will succeed and continue to grow. And I hope I’ll be there to be part of it for a very long time.
Joy And Grief Travel Together
We lost Merkah this week. I came home from rehearsal on Wednesday and found him.
We don’t know for certain if his death was in any way related to the surgery, because we chose not to have him autopsied, but I don’t think it was a direct cause. We’d been checking in regularly with his docs and things seemed to be pretty normal. I think maybe it was just his time.
We’re grieving, and it’s hard to write these words. He was always full of joy and love. He was never afraid to be silly. He always knew when we were sick or sad or hurting. He was always a big orange weirdo who was spectacularly and singularly himself.
We miss him, and we will miss him, but the joy of having known and loved him is powerful.
On the last morning, I kissed him on top of his head before I left and told him I loved him. I’m glad I did.
This was a rough pairing: it came on the same week that NEBT announced my addition to the company. Literally on the same day that they posted my pics and bio on Insta, so I had this very weird experience of my friends being really excited for me and me feeling really grateful and happy but also incredibly, incredibly sad.
We learn by living that joy and grief can travel side by side. One does not have to diminish the other.
It feels strange sometimes – like sunshine in the midst of a downpour – but honestly, life is like that sometimes.
I am grateful to have known and loved Merkah.
The last thing: on Wednesday I kept thinking about how I wasn’t ready for this, but how also he could’ve lived another fifteen years and I wouldn’t be ready, and that’s okay.
Most of life kind of happens when we’re not ready. We seem to live anyway.
Home
So: when last we checked in, D was sick, I was sleeping on the couch, I was stressing out about an audition email I’d just sent, and my cat was awaiting surgery for his insulinoma. Oh, and I was having trouble feeling like I was allowed to exist anywhere.
Since then:
My Cat Had Surgery (And He’s Doing Pretty Well)
When he was first diagnosed in the vet ER, it looked like the location of Merkah’s primary tumor might very likely make it inoperable. When his oncologist looked at the scans, though, she thought there was a shot, and the head of surgery agreed.
Flash forward (okay, crawl forward, because first I got sick at SI and then D got sick) to last Tuesday. Merkah went in for surgery and the surgical team was able to remove the two masses from his pancreas (it sounded like it was a challenge getting the main one, but the kind of challenge surgeons like).
While they were in there, they biopsied his liver and other areas of his pancreas just to check. The biopsies both came back with only benign changes.
Merkah came home on Friday with an e-tube for feeding, since he wasn’t into eating (cats are like that, and even though he thinks he’s a dog, Merkah is being a cat this time). He’s recovering fairly comfortably, although his medications make him pretty sleepy.
The surgeons think they got all of the insulinoma, and Merkah’s blood glucose has remained stable over the past week, so things are looking up for him.
At the end of the day, he’s 15 years old, which is definitely in Senior Citizen territory as cats go, but since housecats can live to be into their twenties, it seemed worth trying. My biggest concern was that he wouldn’t survive anaesthesia, but he came through that just fine.
If they survive surgery (which most do), the worst-case outcome for cats with insulinoma is simply that the insulinoma either proves too difficult to extract or comes back, and then you just go back to managing quality of life for as long as possible and/or trying chemotherapy.
Overall, though, in the sample of cats who’ve undergone surgical treatment for insulinoma, there’s been a pretty high rate of good outcomes, in which the surgery resolves the problem and the cats live for another two or more years (most cats who get insulinomas are older cats, so that often places them towards the end of their life expectancy).
We’ve got a follow-up coming up with some further x-rays and scans to check for any possibility of recurrence or metastases that weren’t yet visible earlier in treatment, so I’ll keep y’all posted.
It’s still early days, but things look hopeful for Mr Mu to be with us for a while longer. I know he won’t be around forever, but I’m glad to have a bit more time with him.
Everyone Recovered
D got better, and Mom managed to not catch COVID. It felt weird moving to the couch for like ten days, then equally weird moving back to the bedroom, but things are back to normal now, for values of normal, etc.
I Did The Audition
After much internal panic, I was invited to come take company class, observe rehearsal, and chat about things with the AD of the company where I was auditioning.
The tone of the email was overwhelmingly positive, so I went into the audition feeling confident and excited and…
I Got It!
This is huge for me.
This isn’t the first dance job I’ve auditioned for, but it is the first ballet audition I’ve done: I didn’t actually have to audition at LexBallet, because Mr D sort of just plucked me out of a summer program.
Moreover, I’m coming into this job as a full company member, which – NGL – feels amazing.
So as of this week I’m officially a Company Artist at New England Ballet Theatre.
My picture is on the website and everything! ^-^
My first performance with NEBT will be in the role of The Shoemaker in The Red Shoes. Léonid Massine originated the rôle in the 1948 film, and I’m excited to be taking it on in my first outing with the company.
More importantly, though, is this: from the moment I walked in to take class on my audition day, I felt welcome and, in fact, at home in the studio.
Like LexBallet, NEBT is a small company with strong dancers and big dreams. Like SPDC, our AD is a woman with a strong creative vision.
She’s also the most chill AD I’ve ever met, which is great. The vibe of the company overall is lovely. I mentioned that on Tuesday as I was gathering my stuff to head home, and we had a longish chat about it.
If I hadn’t felt so strongly from the first that NEBT is a good place, our AD[•]’s efforts to make sure SPDC was treated equitably under the circumstances would have gone a long way to convince me. Yes, the dance world is small and you don’t want to make waves unnecessarily, but Ms R has been incredibly fair and flexible, and that means a lot.
- We’ll call her Ms R, since it feels weird to refer to a ballet company AD by their first name in writing; I’ll have to sort that bit out for myself later ^-^’
As someone who kind of fumbled his way into a ballet career, it means the world to feel like I’m a dancer that the company wanted, and not just one that the company settled for.
SPDC was the first place I felt like that, and I hope to continue my relationship with them as a teaching artist and an intermittent guest artist for the foreseeable future.
If it weren’t for the fact that commuting back and forth to NYC just isn’t going to work at this point in my life, I would gladly have remained a member of SPDC, but as things stand, I’m immensely grateful for the time I’ve had there, and also incredibly grateful to T for sending me NEBT’s audition notice and to NEBT for offering me a contract.
It’s nice to feel at home in the studio. It’s nice to feel like I belong and like I fit. It’s also remarkable how much it does for you to feel comfortable and safe in class: I’m still getting my legs back under me a bit, but I’m dancing better than I expected to during my first week back as a full-time ballet dancer.
It’s early days, but I think NEBT feels like somewhere I’d really like to stay and grow as an artist. I like the other dancers, I like Ms R, and I like the way Ms R thinks both in a creative capacity and in terms of how she’s running day-to-day company operations.
Yea Verily, The World Be Smöl
One of the best things to come out of this entire situation is that my friend and OG Nutcracker Grand Pas Sugarplum, AK, from LexBallet is dancing at NEBT, which I didn’t realize until after I auditioned.
She’s one of my all-time-favorite partners, so it’s good to be reunited with her.
My friend T is also joining the company, and it’s awesome to be coming in with two existing friends (both of whom are also neurospicy ^-^).
So that’s it for now. The past year has been a gigantic adventure, and I look forward to more adventures coming up.
For now, keep the rubber side/contact patch down (unless you’re doing contemporary choreography, in which case, roll with gusto and wear your bruises with pride)!
PS I will come back and add alt text to the pics, but I’m almost to my train station
Where I Am Right Now
Blargh.
First, it’s been a rough day.
D tested positive for Covid this morning. He’s doing fairly okay thus far (just regular mild flu-like generalized blargh), but it was a kick in the face neither of us really need, not to mention spectacularly bad timing.
Like, he literally just got back from Burning Man on Tuesday, we’re in the middle of possibly buying a house and also figuring out how to afford surgery for the cat at the same time, and it’s doing my head in. (These two events weren’t supposed to coincide. Life is clearly taking the piss, here.)
It’s pretty likely that D’s got the same variant I had a couple weeks ago, so I’m probably pretty safe (though we’re still taking precautions, of course), but, like, if I can be just a little coarse for a moment?
Fuck, man. Just fucking fuck.
We’re doing everything we can to minimize Mom’s exposure, because while she’s fully vaxxed and possibly the healthiest person on the entire planet, it’s hard on her not being able to go visit R in memory care, especially right now, since he had a couple of really rocky mornings recently. We’d like to keep the duration of this phase as short as possible.
Needless to say, D being sick means my plans for today (which included working in the studio with T, curriculum planning, and letting my brain decompress a little bit) went right out the window. Instead, I spent the entire day running up and down the stairs to bring D stuff and doing the laundry that D would’ve been doing if he wasn’t stuck in bed.
(Now I’m preparing to bed down on the couch, and being grateful that I’m 5’8″/173 cm, AKA The Perfect Height[1]: Just Tall Enough To Reach The Top Shelves, But Still Small Enough To Sleep Comfortably On A Standard Sofa. Thank G-d for moderately-sized favors.)
- I mean, Richmond Ballet disagrees, and thinks 5’10” or taller is the perfect height, but it’s not their couch I’m sleeping on, here. Besides, I think Richmond is too hot, so we wouldn’t get along anyway.
Yes, these are all first world problems, but that doesn’t mean they’re not actual problems.
None of it is especially awful, but the sum of it, all these little things hitting all at once … it’s like bird-shot. Each pellet may be small, but if you get caught by a spray of that stuff, it’s gonna mess up your day.
Also it’s been hecking my executive functioning difficulties right up, since there’s been a whole lot of shifting things around and starting and stopping and restarting tasks, etc, none of which plays well with the whole autism/ADHD combo.
This is, needless to say, not where I want to be with both my teaching year and my company’s season starting on this coming week (on MOnday and Tuesday, respectively).
Oh, and I’m also stressing out about an audition email I sent a few days back, though most of the time I’m successfully managing to avoid thinking about it[2].
- This is an under-rated coping mechanism[3]. Like, if thinking about something isn’t going to be useful, it’s fully okay to not think about it if thinking about it makes your life worse (or even if you just don’t want to think about it). This is also my approach to dealing with elections. Once I’ve voted, I pay absolutely no attention to what’s being reported about the results until things are final. Listening to the numbers prior to that just gives me anxiety, no matter what. The candidate I prefer could have a lead of a jillion points, and my brain will still give me hives if I listen to poll reporting, so feck it.
- Also, I realize it’s one that you can’t always use. Like, this works for me for some things, but not for others. I have no idea why. I can ignore the stream of election coverage after voting, but I often can’t ignore my brain’s efforts to convince me that my body is wrong in one way or another. So what I really mean is: it’s often okay to not think about things if and when you can. That doesn’t mean it’s always going to be possible (which is also okay; our minds are gonna mind, bc that’s just what they do), but that if you find a strategy to take a break from the anxiety of living, it’s okay to do so. And if you can’t do that: no shade. I cannot, for the life of me, train myself to not notice when the air vents in D’s car are pointing in infinitesimally different directions, which they ALWAYS are, and if anyone could hear my internal monologue about that particular sensory fiasco, they’d think I was off the rails. So I’m not here to judge anyone else’s mind, just offer permission to enjoy ignoring things when you get a chance.
In Which My Brain Is Mean To Me For Little Or No Reason
I’m also deeply unhappy with my body right now. I haven’t disliked my body this much in several years, and I suspect it comes down to lack of studio time and seeing video from, like, 2.5 weeks ago juxtaposed with video from 2020 and one from 2022, in one of which I was still somehow pretty much ballet-company fit and in the other of which I wasn’t far off that mark.
This remains the case even though I’m making slow-but-steady progress back towards being actually company fit. I can’t stand to look at myself on video right now, so I just … don’t. Except when I have to. And then it’s just … bad.
Again, a First World Problem — and, really, the First Worldiest of First World Problems, and I know that. But.
Like, I recognize that right now I still have a boatload of Conventionally Attractive Thin Privilege. I am that jackwagon that wishes this cool t-shirt came in an extra-small, ffs.
My body image issues come from a different, much more individual, place. They’re weird and complicated and very, very specific to my body, and it’s exhausting, not least because the number of people with whom I can actually talk about it is vanishingly small.
Like, people who don’t have the level of Thin Privilege that I do just don’t fucking need to hear it. They’ve got worse things on their plates than I do, and it’s up to me to show up for them.
Likewise, I can say a million times that, in fact, I think people across the entire size spectrum look great, unless those people are me, but if I, as a thin person, gripe about my body, it’s still going to be hurtful to people with less Thin Privilege, or no Thin Privilege, because that’s a sore place for so many people. (I’m explaining this badly, but I hope it’s kind of making sense?)
And a lot of the people who aren’t in that category, the people who might seem like the logical choice to talk to, just … don’t get it?
Like, I don’t need to hear, “Your body is fine!” or, “You have nothing to worry about!” I appreciate the effort, but, like, on a purely rational level, I kind of know that?
The problem isn’t a rational one. I can’t think my way out of it.
Also, I mean, don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to know other people don’t necessarily agree with me that my body is Just Wrong right now? It’s nice to know some people think my body looks good.
But ultimately my brain doesn’t actually care, because my brain is being a dick about this right now.
This problem is a deeply irrational one. So the people in my life who get it — mostly other dancers — mean so much to me. They fully grok how this isn’t about anyone else’s body: like, I can think of so many people who are much bigger than me who look great both dancing and the rest of the time.
It’s just about my body, and how it looks to me relative to some stupid internal My (And Only My) Body Should Look This Way (And Only This Way) model, and how some fecked-up part of my brain thinks choreography looks on me, and how that interferes with my confidence.
On An Unrelated Note … Maybe
I saw a really cool, beautiful, wonderful post on Insta today that made something gel for me.
I often say that I have trouble feeling like I fit in different spaces, but what I really mean, a lot of the time, is that I have difficulty feeling like I’m even allowed to be in places.
Even as a kid, I had a really weird aversion to being seen.
Like, literally.
When I was seven, we had a bouncy horse in the backyard. I was riding my bouncy horse all alone when a neighbor whose back yard abutted our fence happened to wave. I had this awful feeling like he was going to shout at me me that I shouldn’t be riding my bouncy horse there, even though feeling that way was completely irrational. Like, I was in my own back yard.
Just, like: I was visible?
WTF.
Being made aware by my peers that I was deeply unwelcome at school — that they, at least, didn’t think I should be there — only reinforced that feeling.
So this wonderful insta post was about a librarian taking time to make sure someone felt welcome, and finding out that the other library people they work with also take time to make that person feel welcome, and safe, and allowed to be in the library.
And I realized, belatedly, that that’s part of what I’ve missed so much about my life at LexBallet. I may or may not have been the worst dancer in the company on any given day, but after the first year, I never felt like I was being Included Because Teacher Said So or whatever.
I felt like I belonged and was allowed to be there. I felt like I was part of the place, like everyone else in the company. I felt like I could stay late and work on stuff and that was okay. I was there and I was home.
It’s what I miss about Louisville Ballet’s school. I belonged there. I was at home. I wasn’t an interloper.
I’ve come to feel that way where I teach now, which is a start.
But, having first come to this realization — that I often feel like I’m not actually allowed to be somewhere, when in fact there’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest that — earlier this year, I’m just beginning to see how very extensively it interferes with my life.
Like, I don’t go for walks much because part of me is legitimately afraid someone will notice that I’m here (here! Where I have lived more of my life than anywhere else, for goodness’ sake!) and tell me I’m not supposed to be here.
Which is just, like. What????? Where does this even start? How did it begin? How do I unravel it? (I know; I know. One thread at a time. Start where you are.)
My therapist, who is absolutely amazing, is currently in the midst of transitioning to a new practice, but when I do get to start seeing him again, this is definitely going right on the agenda.
Like, I definitely have thoughts about where it might have started, but I’m not sure how to start, like, fixing it.
Anyway.
So that’s where things stand. Or, like, lie stretched out on the sofa, which is just long enough to be comfortable.
Here I am at the beginning of a new season, at the beginning of a new school year.
Things are a little wild. I just need to remember that this is just, like, for now.
Like the classic weather joke: conditions will remain the same until something changes (or however that’s supposed to go).
Anyway, here we go, into the future. I mean: we’re always going there anyway, but as humans we like categories and stuff, so we organize time with arbitrary markers, or whatever.
DuCon, Summer 2023
First, I wish I’d tracked down the dates for this year’s DuCon before I scheduled the SI that I teach, because I would have loved to have been here for both weeks.
Second, I got sick, so I couldn’t attend classes today and won’t be able to perform tomorrow, but even still it’s been entirely worth the investment.
First, the instruction is excellent. The instruction offered by not only Mr. Du, but his entire teaching staff, is worth the price of admission, and the other dancers in attendance have been uniformly kind, generous, and incredibly hard-working.
For me, at this point, a lot of what I need is refinement of what already exists, and I’ve received a ton of that over the course of this week.
I’ve also had the opportunity to learn three variations, a pas de deux, and a lot of character dance elements (which is great, because character dance is now the biggest missing piece in my ballet skill-set).
Learning that much choreography is huge. I’ve often struggled to pick up while working with SPDC. Presumably, that mostly comes down to the difference in vocabulary and our struggles to stabilize a regular rehearsal schedule, but I’ve secretly worried that maybe I’d somehow lost my ability to pick up.
It took about 30 or 45 minutes to learn the pas de deux, some details notwithstanding. We learned two variations on Monday and a third on Tuesday, and I didn’t feel like I was at sea in the least.
So, in short, my balletic brain is still working. Likewise, my body is still willing and able to do the work.
Likewise, I’m feeling pretty solid in terms of partnering skills.
Mr Du paired me with a dancer from Alaska for pas de deux, and she’s been a delight to work with. We’ve danced well together from the word “Go,” which always feels like a lovely gift from the universe, but which also says a lot about us as dancers.
Partnering is entirely relationship-based. You can know how to execute the steps, but if you don’t listen to your partner, that doesn’t mean a thing.
So the thing I’m happiest about is that my PDD partner thanked me for being a good partner, because that means the world to me. She has been a great partner, and I really hope we’ll get a chance to work together again.
When I began dancing with LexBallet, I was missing a lot in terms of partnering skills and experience. I think knowing that was helpful: when you know how much you don’t know, it’s easier to take instruction and learn.
Every dancer I’ve partnered since then has taught me a lot, and I’ve been lucky to have some great coaching, and every time I have the opportunity to partner somebody, I try to live up to the gift that my coaches and partners have given me.
It’s wild to look back on my earliest efforts, which in the grand scheme of things were only a few years ago (adjusting for Pandemic Time, since pas de deux was less accessible during the height of the pandemic), and realize how far I’ve come.
Partnering, it turns out, is the thing I enjoy most in all of ballet. I’m forced to admit that I might even enjoy it more than grand allegro.
I’m immensely grateful to find that I’m becoming rather good at something I love so much; that I’m evolving into someone who my fellow dancers regard as a trustworthy partner.
A couple weeks before I headed to DuCon, my friend T and I were playing around in the studio, improvising and inventing weird contemporary partnering stuff. They wore pointe shoes through much of this and trusted me with all kinds of weird and unusual lifts and weight-shares and melds.
A from Alaska trusted me, en pointe, with some big lifts and a tricky sequence involving a series of chaînes directly into an attitude promenade that in turn went directly into a penché in which I employed a sliding arabesque à terre to make room.
It’s hard to explain how sacred it feels to be given that trust.
A dancer’s body is both their precious instrument and the locus of their artistic voice, and to be trusted to care for another dancer’s body through difficult and complicated partnering steps is an ineffable gift.
It feels amazing to be considered worthy of that gift. It feels amazing to have confidence in one’s own ability in this way.
I’m not a world-class dancer in the sense that I’m never going to make the cut for one of the big companies like ABT or PNB or NBC[1].
- That’s National Ballet of Canada, not the TV network.
But I don’t actually care about that.
Fame and renoun have never been my goals. I just want to work in dance, and I’m doing that. I like working in small companies, and I like the sense of camaraderie that grows between dancers who work together.
But I do want to be a good partner; maybe even a world-class partner. I want to be a good enough partner that, somewhere down the line, I’ll be remembered that way. I want to be good enough to deserve the trust of my fellow dancers.
I’ve also made some new friends and I suspect some creative projects might just coalesce out of this group of kind, vivid, and brilliant dancers, along with others I’ve met at other intensives and through my work as a dancer and teacher.
On our last day of high school, my AP English teacher gave everyone in my class a card.
Each card was different and chosen specifically, individually, for the student who received it.
Mine was in the shape of a swan. Inside, my teacher wrote, simply, “Find your way.”
I kept that card for a long time, though I’ve since lost it. But I think about it a lot.
Anyway, I’m incredibly grateful to Mrs. Wachtelhausen for those words of immense wisdom at a time when I was still pretty lost.
And, in short, I think, little by little, I’m finding my way.
Move And Be Moved
I took my first Pilobolus SI in 2017 [1].
- You know you’ve been dancing for a while when you have to look through your own blog or Google photos reel to confirm which year you did something *eternal facepalm*
I guess it goes without saying that I’m a different dancer and a different person than I was back then. What I don’t know is whether it goes without saying how incredibly instrumental that first Pilobolus SI was in my life.
Back before that first SI, I’d taken a handful of workshops and masterclasses with Pilobolus. At one of them (in late 2016 I think???) I met Edwin Olvera, who snagged me as I was leaving a masterclass and said, “You’re a beautiful mover. You should come to the summer workshop. Also, we have auditions coming up, and you should go.”
I couldn’t actually go to the audition because my I had other commitments and not enough lead time to figure out a trip to NYC, but I did go to the SI, and it’s not hyperbole to say that it changed my life.
It didn’t transform me from a ballet nerd into someone who only wanted to do Pilobolus-influenced modern, but it did give me both a whole collection of new tools and a deeper insight into my own innate ability as a dancer. A few of us were offered a scholarship to stay on for another week, and though I wasn’t able to stay, that offer was really deeply edifying: it helped me understand that I did, in fact, have something worth developing as a dancer.
My time at that SI in 2017 also somehow became the thing that finally broke the ice-dam I’d built between myself and thinking about the hardest and most terrible part of my childhood.
The night before I left for home, I sat on the edge of the bed in the room where I slept growing up, and realized that the pain and terror of the worst days of my life no longer owned me: that I had learned how to trust people with my body and with my dreams in a way I’d never imagined possible.
Pilobolus SI facilitated a lot of that work.
That doesn’t mean I was really, really out of the woods yet: I had, and still have, a long way to go. But I’d lived within this system of bulwarks raised against both the past and the present for so, so long then, and to step out from them even a little was just profound.
On the drive home (which, at the time, was a long way — 800+ miles), I listened to music[2] I’d avoided for over a decade and just wept. Like, sometimes I had to pull over because I couldn’t see. All of the free and wild and giddy and dark and bright and powerful feelings I’d kept strangled into silence since I was thirteen years old came pouring through me again, and I loved the joy and the pain and the resonance of everything. I sang songs I hadn’t sung in so, so long, and they moved in my heart like the spirit of G-d across the waters of creation.
- I almost never actually listen to music when I’m driving, because it’s either too distracting or not distracting enough, if that makes sense, so this was a major departure on many levels.
I wasn’t instantly and completely and totally healed from that day forward, because that’s basically not how healing works — but I felt, for once in my life, that I had turned a corner; that I was at the beginning of a new path; a new stage in the journey.
I was ready to let the world touch me again, at least a bit.
Pilobolus, Redux
This year, I finally returned to the Summer Intensive[3].
- I did take Pilobolus’ 2-day long Teacher Training Workshop in 2018, but it’s much briefer and a very different experience. Still immensely valuable, and it still deeply influences my own teaching practice, but it’s its own thing.
I didn’t come expecting the same experience I had in 2017, because I am in a profoundly different place in my life now than I was then, and because you can never step into the same stream twice.
In fact, I tried to come with as few expectations as possible. I tried to allow myself room to be whoever and whatever I was going to be at this year’s intensive, both in the studio and in the dorms, and to receive and give and, like, just do whatever came.
That’s a difficult thing to do. As humans we thrive on stories. Stories — conscious or otherwise — are kind of how we move through the world. They frame our understanding of things (not to mention our misunderstanding of things).
And, to be fair, telling yourself “allow room for unexpected stories” and “try to release your established stories about yourself a bit” still begets stories. The point isn’t to avoid stories: it’s just to give yourself room to breathe into new ones.
Anyway, in the end, I surprised myself rather a lot. Even moreso because one of my friends from 2017 also came (she signed up at the last minute, so I had no idea she was coming) and I found myself completely comfortable with the idea that I wasn’t the same me she’d last hung out with.
At the first Pilobolus SI, I struggled to find my way in. I was reticent to join groups; reticent to offer myself as a partner (because who would want to dance with me, when I had basically no idea what I was doing?). I was mostly quiet in the dorms. I spent a lot of lunch breaks alone.
This time I was almost obnoxiously ready to jump in to things. I offered myself as a partner all the time, because to a great extent nobody knows what they’re doing, but the tools of partnering are familiar ones, and I feel comfortable using them in new and strange situations. I hung out with people a lot: not to say I didn’t grab my alone time, because I need alone time, but I, like, talked to people?
This time I contributed ideas to things, and spoke up for myself, and at one point had to navigate a particularly sticky two-day long misunderstanding that led to some pretty heated disagreements until we found enough common language to work through the sticking points.
I came to love the people with whom I was vehemently disagreeing as much as I instantly loved the people whose vibes chimed easily and naturally with mine. I came to see that, as insecure as I sometimes felt as a dancer who hasn’t truly been able to train and work full-time since the beginning of the pandemic, others in the space felt equally insecure, or even more so, for their own reasons.
I realized that sometimes we’re all afraid and all trying not to reveal our fear, because to reveal fear is to admit vulnerability, and that’s scary.
Not to say I didn’t know that rationally already — but to really feel it in your bones is a different thing. I don’t know if I’ve been there before or not. I guess it probably doesn’t matter: learning something just takes as many times as it takes.
I was also less afraid to do Stupid Pilobolus Camp Tricks after hours, which was terribly fun. You haven’t lived until you’ve done a dive roll over a limbo stick that someone’s holding like four feet off the ground[4].
- Or your equivalent thereof ^-^ This could sound really ableist or whatever, so please take it as read that everyone has their own version of this; it doesn’t have to literally be a dive roll from low orbit or whatever.
I spent less time thinking What if they don’t want me to join in; I should just stand back and a lot more time going If they don’t want me to join, they’ll tell me, and it’ll be fine.
I told stupid jokes. I made terrible puns. Many of them landed. Some crashed and burned. I made stupid, awkward, uncomfortable gaffes because my language coprocessor is terrible, and I apologized for them rather than just quietly curling up under the bleachers to die. Nobody wound up hating me, because everyone gave me grace for being the awkward little weirdo that I am.
I wore the tiny Mariia ballet shorts that I never wear because I thought I didn’t like how they looked on me, and several people commented on how much they liked them … so then I wore them to swim in a lake, because it turns out that they’re actually pretty comfortable. The ballet gods might still strike me down for that one, but so far, so good.
I made friends. We went to NY to see the company perform at the Joyce, and I held hands and clung together with one of my new friends because the choreography hit us the same way and we both wound up in tears.
I was afraid a lot, but I tried things anyway, because everyone worked to make sure everyone felt wanted and safe.
That is an incredibly, incredibly powerful thing.
The Kids, As They Say, Are All Right
This group skewed younger on average than my last Pilobolus SI: that is, the percentage of people who were in the “Traditional US College Age” bracket was quite a bit higher (the range overall was about the same, though).
The result was that the zeitgeist of the whole group shifted towards the Gen-Z ethos of meeting people where they are; of just letting people vibe instead of trying to sort them into neat categories; of inclusion as a normal thing, instead of as this sort of begrudging afterthought. Not that it felt begrudging in 2017 — just, this year, there was this unspoken, proactive, collective effort to make sure everyone was being brought in, and that if someone really wanted to work on their own, they were given space to do so in a way that still somehow let them know they were welcome and wanted and part of the whole.
If anyone hovered on the edge, looking like they didn’t know how to join in, someone always came along and said, “Hi! Come work with me!” in a way that made them feel not just included, but wanted.
If you’ve ever been the kid that was only included because a teacher stepped in and said, “You have to include everyone,” and how awful it feels to be included but not wanted, you know how crucial a difference that is. For me, that experience of grudging inclusion made up most of my childhood and the entire first year of my professional career, so this generous spirit of welcome really hit.
We all talked about this at the closing circle, after our show (which was, by the way, straight FIRE). It was the thing that, perhaps, moved us all the most.
Summa
When you go to Pilobolus’ Summer Intensive, you come home with mysterious bruises and a tenderized heart.
I can’t think of another that does that as well.
You ultimately go to most intensives (especially ballet intensives) to hone your technique. You go to Pilobolus just to go to Pilobolus, and that makes it a different experience.
For a week, or two weeks, or (if you’re lucky) even three weeks, you go and live in your body in a way that’s pretty unique even in the dance world, with a group of people who come from all kinds of backgrounds. You share a common purpose and you work for it in a zillion different ways.
You learn, both literally and metaphorically, to move other people and to be moved by them.
You find things in yourself you never imagined, because other people help you to see them.
Even the moments of conflict are gifts. This past week, I had to take a long look at my own impatience, and the ways in which living in the dance world, which is deeply immersive and often pretty insular, means I need to listen harder and pause to process more effectively when I’m interacting with people who don’t necessarily live there. I also discovered that I can, in fact, stand up for myself.
The piece my group performed for the showing came out of an exercise in which we were given the image of crossing the desert together and finding a single cup of water suspended ten feet in the air, which was then spilled by the person we lifted up to retrieve it.
The resulting dance became a reflective adagio in which we struggled against a blistering wind to reach a brilliant, holy light, and in the end only one of us made it alive, carrying another across his shoulders like a lamb, as the rest of us were transfigured into stone (in my case, as I lay on the ground, reaching for the light).
We performed it to Arvo Part’s “Summa,” which lent it a spare, elegaic quality and a singular focus.
The piece came off better than any of us had expected: this piece that we’d fought over, that I at one point offered to leave because I felt like it would be the easiest solution. When we finished, there was this moment of pause before the applause; that space of a few heartbeats that tells you that what the audience saw really hit them.
I feel that way about this intensive. You go, you experience it, and then you have to breathe with it for a while to let it wash through you.
I hope to go again next year. I don’t know what to expect, so I think I’ll stick with this strategy of trying, as much as I’m able, not to expect.
I don’t know who I’ll be then. But I’m looking forward to finding out, and to sharing that process of discovery with new and old friends.
Maybe you’ll come.
If you do, you’ll be welcome.
ps you also get a cool shirt if you come
A Tangled Skein of Thoughts
This year has been a whirlwind.
I don’t want to delve too deeply into family stuff, but we’ve been through some major transitions with my stepdad, and it’s been a difficult process with a couple of major setbacks. Things seem to be on the right path, now, and it feels like there’s starting to be breathing space again.
A few weeks ago, Merkah (my lovely catto) was diagnosed with an insulinoma, a cancer that’s vanishingly rare in cats (it’s more common in dogs, though still fairly rare, in dogs). At the moment he’s responding well to palliative treatment, and our first meeting with his oncologist offered some encouraging results. It’s early days, still, so we’ll see what happens, but the main thing is that he’s got good quality of life right now. I’ll probably write a bit more about that in another post, assuming I actually get my butt in gear and do some more regular posting some time soon.
Between these two huge things and the vagaries of that #DancerLife, my bandwidth has been pretty much tapped out for a long time. I keep thinking, “I could write about this,” and then not doing it. And now it’s July and I basically haven’t posted in six months.
Anyway, things have now calmed down enough that I’ve got a little bandwidth available, so here I am. I make no promises of regular posts, but I’m not giving up the … ghost? bhlost? bloghost? … just yet.
Sunday, I’m off to Pilobolus’ summer intensive for the week. I’m really looking forward to that, since my life has a dancer has been a bit all over the place for the past couple of months.
I’m still considering the path forward, career-wise. I’ve enjoyed the challenge of working in a different dance idiom than the one in which I’ve taken most of my training, but I still miss working in a ballet company. Likewise, my current company’s rehearsals have shifted to mostly taking place in NYC, which means a 3 to 3.5-hour commute twice on each rehearsal day.
I made a decision in the spring to stick it out for another season with SPDC and see what happens, but also (given that we’ve been rehearsing on a part-time, project-based schedule) to look for chances to guest with local ballet companies and/or figure out how to start working more seriously on some of my own projects.
I’m not a dancer who would rather be a choreographer: I’m still a dancer who very much wants to dance and feels comfortable taking direction. That said, there are pieces I do want to create and, like, they’re not going to create themselves?
Teaching continues to be the most stable part of my work life, and I’ve come to really enjoy working with my students at Danceworks.
Teaching in a commercial dance setting, even as strictly a ballet teacher, is a very different vibe from teaching in a ballet-focused program — like, you get a different set of students, and they’re largely used to coming at dance from the opposite approach to the kind of students who self-select into ballet programs.
I found this challenging at first, because as a ballet nerd, I’m intrinsically motivated by ballet itself: doing six million tendus, carefully listening to my deep rotators, and honing my conditional ecarte are very much my jam.
Some of my current students are right there with me, but a lot of them aren’t, and that’s okay. They want to get to the “good stuff” faster — that is, center, terre-a-terre, allegro, and learning choreography.
A lot of them want to try difficult steps that, really, in terms of pure ballet technique, they’re not entirely ready to learn.
At first, I balked hard at the idea of throwing difficult steps at these kids. Like, everything in my own training screams “NOOOOO!” at the very idea, and not just because Ballet Is Ballet And We’ve Always Done It This Way[1], but because we don’t want to teach ineffective motor patterns (AKA “bad habits”) that our students later have to un-learn.
Then I got annoyed, thought, “Fine, I’ll give them some really hard steps and see how they like it” and … erm … actually they liked it, and it worked.
Which reminded me that, although ballet training is crafted from the inside out and founded upon the idea of building bigger skills by working to perfect the small ones, dance can also be approached from the outside in: try a big step, keep what works, discard what doesn’t.
Like: slosh and refine[2].
Which, I guess, is also a good reminder that, when it comes to dipping a toe into the waters of dance-making in a more serious sense, I can probably slosh and refine there, too.
In fact, part of the reason that I love my students is that I’ve learned so much from them.
One of the things I’ve learned is that it’s okay to let your approach to important things evolve.
And that brings me to my last thought, for now.
When I started writing this blog, it was as a young adult returning to dance — an adult student writing for my fellow adult students.
At the time, my aspirations to a professional career were still unspoken, because honestly I didn’t really think they’d come to fruition.
Then they did.
I still feel an immense affinity for my fellow adult students. I still feel that I belong as much to the community of adult students as that of professional dancers (and that there’s no reason that the overlap of those Venn diagrams should be so small).
As such, I’m trying to figure out where to focus this blog, right now.
Also I’m doing most of my class notes over on Mastodon, so I’m trying to figure out how to import those, since I think they’re a useful part of this blog.
More soon, I hope. Ideally with pictures.
It’s been a long road, but it looks like there’s daylight ahead.
- There’s something to be said for the Great Tradition, but Sainte Agrippina herself was an innovator who actively broke with the traditional approach to teaching ballet, and as both artists and technicians we owe so much to the innovations of companies like The Australian Ballet, which have looked at the biomechanics of ballet technique and said, “Yo, dawg, if we do it this way instead of that way, we won’t just stil be able to walkwhen we’re 50, we’ll still be able to dance.”
- Not that we don’t do our share of sloshing and refining even in the strictest ballet setting — we just build a framework for the slosh first, so we don’t have to refine as much later on. Someone has probably executed a perfect en dehors turn from fifth on the very first try, but most of us have to work on most things.
It’s Been A Minute
So!
This season has been wild. My company had a bumpy road to the opening of Penelope’s Odyssey, with a couple of setbacks due to injuries and other life circumstances that led to last-minute casting changes, which is a huge thing in a very, very character-driven piece with a cast of 8.
We finally gave the first fully-staged performances on a wee tour to beautiful, snowy Vermont early this February (2023), and now that we’ve got the bumps ironed out, we’re looking forward to further performances.
I’ve been taking class with Ballet Hartford, and if you’re in the area and you’re a professional or strong non-professional dancer, I highly recommend checking out their open company class, which runs M/W/F during their season.
Though I’m very much enjoying my work with SPDC, I’ve really missed ballet company life immensely, and returning to a regular, rigorous class over the past couple of weeks has really helped.
At the moment, I plan to audition for local ballet companies, though I’d like to continue working with SPDC on a per-project basis even if I do get hired on by a ballet company. I guess we’ll see how things shake out.
For now, I’m just finding my way back into my body, shaking the rust off my technique, and rebuilding strength. We did a grand allegro today that was a blast, and though I quickly discovered that I don’t actually have a double cabriole devant right now (erm … lol), I am quickly regaining speed and power. Even my petit allegro is coming back together ^-^
Things have been a little rocky at home — not in an interpersonal drama kind of way, but just, like, Alzheimer’s is a difficult thing. I’m very glad that we’re here, both because we have a chance to spend time with my Stepdad while he’s still able to really enjoy our company and because I can’t imagine Mom having to cope on her own.
We have great in-home support three days each week, but even still, having us here means that Mom can go do her own thing sometimes, and know that someone who knows and loves R is here to be with him. D’s experience in working with patients with various dementias comes in handy, as does my experience in finding useful things on the internet ^-^’
I have had some periods of kind of … emotional not-quite-collapse? … when the complexities of my schedule and the lack of alone time have really knocked me flat, so I’m working on being more proactive about taking the down-time I need to make sure that doesn’t happen as often.
Right now, the circumstances of my life are such that I can’t always take time like that, though, and I’m trying to figure out other strategies as well.
Oh, and I’m migrating over to Mastodon from the Bird Site for a number of reasons. More on that later, though — for now, I need to jete ^-^
danseur ignoble 