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].

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.