Author Archives: asher
… Or Are We Dancers?
Back to the question of dancer-identity, and that of choreographer-identity, this morning, even though half an hour ago I was standing in the kitchen sort of floating on the idea that all this wrangling for identity is a symptom and the disease is illusion; qv Everything the Buddha Ever Said, Ever, not to mention quite a bit of what other great spiritual figures have said.
Anyway.
I think a great deal of this rests upon the question of legitimacy.
Most cultures have quite a bit to say about which pursuits are and aren’t legit for adults within their purview. In the United States, ballet (and probably most or all other concert/theatrical danceforms, really) is in a weird grey zone.
It seems that it’s mostly regarded as totally legit (perhaps even intimidatingly awesome) if you’re a professional dancer or someone who otherwise makes money in the field of dance, or a university-level student or apprentice preparing to do so. Meanwhile, it’s significantly less legit but probably still within the unspoken Tolerance Specification if you’re an adult student who goes to class once a week for fun (ideally as a way to pass the time while your kid(s) is/are in their class).
However, if you’re you’re a wacko who eats, sleeps, lives, and breathes ballet (or another dance idiom) and doesn’t make money from it, you’re out there in cloud-cuckooland, far from the borders of legitimacy. In short, people generally don’t get it (and aren’t sure you actually have the right to do what you’re doing).
I think it’s that sense of perceived illigitimacy, maybe, that leads so many of us to question our right to call ourselves dancers.
After all, it’s a rare bird who questions the right of an adult amateur who likes to fish to call herself a fisherwoman or an angler; likewise, anyone who plays the piano can call himself a pianist without raising more than the occasional eyebrow. Ditto guitarists, singers, cyclists, runners, car enthusiasts, birders, gardeners, and (to a lesser extent) painters and writers (I think there’s a little more policing of these last two).
I think the difference lies in the fact that the above pursuits are Within Spec in our culture, while formal dance (excepting, possibly, ballroom*?) isn’t. If you schlep over to the town square and set up your easel, almost nobody thinks you’re out of line — even if you’re a terrible painter, really. If you break out your ballet moves in the town square, meanwhile, you’d better bring the skillz, or people will definitely tell you (in one way or another) that you shouldn’t be dancing in public**.
*You guys, why does SwiftKey think badigeon is a more likely choice here than ballroom? Seriously — or, as SwiftKey belittle helpfully suggests, serially, stylishly, or sorely.
**I just realized that there’s an identity-policing component here that’s not dissimilar from saying, “People your size shouldn’t wear leggings.” It’s that whole, “You should totally be you unless I find you unattractive, in which case you should either cover up or maybe just try being someone else” thing. Feh.
Basically, adult amateur dancers experience a strange kind of pressure from both sides: the dance world doesn’t always regard us as legit, and the broader culture thinks we’re cray.
And so legitimacy becomes immensely important to us (after all, we spend considerable amounts of time and sums of money on this thing of ours, and the broader culture really kind of demands that we justify that somehow), but we struggle to determine at which point we can legitimately call ourselves dancers in the context of the medium of concert/theatrical dance .
I am, frankly, all for the notion that if you dance, you’re a dancer.
I’m all for the idea that if you dance, and you feel a desire to or see an opportunity to create a performing group, doing so is a legitimate pursuit, and you don’t have to get permission from the Powers That Be even if you’re freaking awful at dance.
In fact, there’s probably a great deal to be said for dancing badly. When you do something badly, people think, “Huh, I could do that,” and maybe they give it a try, and maybe they discover a passion and buy season tickets to the local company that’s struggling to survive in an age that isn’t sure ballet (or whatevs) is even relevant anymore. Or maybe they just get a good chuckle.
Sure, haters gonna hate — but they’re already hating away at home, and they don’t get to tell us who to be.
Likewise gatekeepers gonna gate, but I’m pretty sure that, on the whole, innovation tends to spring from the ranks of the gate-crashers.
So go assemble your dance peeps and crash some gates.
And know that if you’re dancing, you’re a dancer***.
***Full disclosure: I know that this kind of thing is much easier for me to say and do as an educated white male from a privileged background who walks around in a body that largely matches conventional ideas of what a “dancer’s body” looks like. And I also totally get how ironic it is for me to give you permission to crash the gates, amiright? Like, here I am, unintentionally acting like a gatekeeper for gate-crashers.
This stuff is complicated, y’all.
Momentary Gratitude
When your brain is wired bipolar-fashion, it’s not always possible to do the whole “attitude of gratitude” thing consistently.
But it does happen, for me, sometimes, and now is one of those moments, so I think it might be good to record here a few specifics, so maybe I can refer back to them later.
So here we go.
I am grateful for the strength and adaptability of my body, which allow me to do amazing things.
I am grateful also for the weaknesses of my body, which keep me humbler and more human than I could be without then.
I am grateful for the path my life is on, as strange and hard as it is sometimes, and for the messengers in my life who remind me that control is an illusion and that not all who wander are lost.
I am grateful for the path my life has taken, through dark places and through bright, because it has brought me here, and here is pretty good.
I am grateful that I am able to feel that way, at least right now.
I’m grateful for the knowledge that gratitude, like everything else, is fleeting and enduring all at once, and for the knowledge that I’ll lose my grip on it, but that’s okay, because I’ll get it back.
I’m grateful for the freedom to be as I am made, and to live this weird, liminal life, even though tomorrow I’ll lyrically complain both about the way I’m made and the life I’m living. That’s okay, too. I’ll get it back.
I’m grateful for having lived long enough now to know that this moment will pass, that harder ones will follow but that these, too, will pass.
I’m grateful fly the burgeoning ability to take both these kinds of moments and turn them into art.
I’m grateful for a life that lets me do so.
Tomorrow I might be ungrateful and irritable. That will be okay. It happens to the best of us.
Today, right now, in this moment, I’m grateful.for these things, and other things, and for all the people who have helped me see.
Wednesday: Killer Class with All the Fondu;Trapeze 2, Day 1
Not gonna lie — I’m cooked.
One of the company dancers who I hadn’t encountered in class before came today (we’ll call him Company B, because using initials fails when everyone in your life has names beginning with B or T), and that was excellent, since he’s one of the dancers I try to emulate (it turns out that he’s also really nice). The energy overall was really good; the greater the number of company dancers in class, the better the rest of us tend to dance.
Ms. B murdered tenderized us with fondu (which we did twice) and adagio (which we did twice) at the barre and then basted us with more adagio (which we did twice) at center.
When we were sufficiently tenderized and basted, Ms. B seasoned us brightly with a Balanchine-inspired combination full of cool balances and turns, then sautéed us (literally).
We also did a nice combination with ballonnés and entrechats quatres, though it seems I can’t remember all of it now.
Our grand-ish allegro was beautifully simple:
Temps levée arabesque
Temps levée passée
Temps levée arabesque
Temps levée passée
Tombe pas de bourré
Glissade
Assemblé
Launch into opposite side without stopping.
…So we did it beautifully, except maybe for the part when I kept temps-levée-ing instead of doing the tombe, etc., on the This happened because I was thinking about my arms, though also because I was totally into the feeling of flight.
I caught Company B’s eye just as I realized I’d, like, left out the whole ending, and we shared a laugh about it, which was cool.
After class, Brienne gave me two very specific notes on my turns, and an unexpected compliment: she really likes the energy with which I attack my turns, but I’m still taking too wide a fourth and compensating by pulling up and back. I have also developed a habit of snapping my toe to the back of my knee instead of the front, which I didn’t even realize. Derp!
Anyway, we had a couple of minutes before she had to run off, so I did a few turns, and they were really quite nice. I also wrote that correction down (about turning from a smaller fourth) because it’s one I’ve heard before. Oops. O:)
In trapeze 2, new material included:
single-knee hangs
Pullover to front balance through drop to catcher’s hang to angel through pull-up to “Barbie feet” to owl to crucifix
Mermaid roll-up to seahorse
So that (and all the warm-ups) was my first trapeze 2 class.
That’s all for tonight. I’m famished!
À bientôt, mes amis.
Aerials: That Moment When You See The Lightbulb Come On
The seeds of what will make you a unique master of your particular passion are already present. Trust yourself. Don’t give up.
— Emily Hursh
Today I went to noon Mixed Apparatus Class, which is quickly becoming one of my favorites (though we didn’t get to do trapeze .. bleh).
There were seven or eight of us today, up from the usual 3, which was kind of nice (though we missed having our little semi-private tiny group class :D). One of them is a really awesome lady who started training recently at the insistence of her son (who is in a bunch of my classes).
While we were working on silks, she said something like, “…You guys who have been doing this forever always look so great.”
I said, “Thanks!” and stepped up to take my next turn on the silks. Only later did I realize that she actually thought we’d seriously been training for, I don’t know, more than a year anyway.
At the next opportunity, I mentioned that we’d just started in January, and she’d probably be where we are in a couple of months.
You know how in cartoons, there’s that lightbulb-over-the-head thing that happens? I swear that was what happened today.
And that was really cool, because it is great to watch someone realize that the next goal is closer than they thought.
(For what it’s worth, I’m having a lot — a lot — of these lightbulb moments in ballet right now. Things Are Coming Together.)
Anyway, that was awesome. It’s nice to be the bearer of good news for once!
In that vein, then, let me direct you to this amazing post on Living Omily about The Gap (not the place where you can buy overpriced trousers):
Whether or not you cirque, if you’re doing creative work (Ballet Peeps, Assemblé!), you should read Emily’s post*. I am almost willing to guarantee that it will speak to you.
So, yeah. There’s that. The funny thing is, I saw Emily’s post (linked by one of my instructors, the Fabulous Ms. A, on the facebarge) after I started writing this. So, yeah, serendipity in action.
And now I have to go do some work and then maybe try to take a nap, though I am actually terrible at napping because it takes me so long to fall asleep that usually I have to get up before I nod off.
Tomorrow it’s Ms. B’s Killer Class, Trap 2 (YASSSS!), and conditioning … woof. Better get some sleep tonight!
À bîentot, mes amis!
Monday Madness
I didn’t do Modern T’s class this morning because I had a scheduling conflict, so I went to M. BeastMode’s evening class today.
We were all just coming back from Spring Break, so M. BeastMode went easy-ish on us (which meant class was pretty relaxed, for me; M. BeastMode’s class at its hardest is still only about half as physically grueling as Ms. B’s Killer Class).
Barre was great. Everything went beautifully at barre. I worked on the let it happen principle, and suddenly my fondues, developpés, and grand battements were beautiful, high (or, as required, low and elastic), and really effortless.
Ditto turns, as a general rule. Fine and effortless, mostly. Turns from fifth are back; turns from fourth are trending towards reliable doubles again.
We did a quarter turn-half turn-full turn combo that was perfectly intuitive as long as you didn’t think, but went straight to Helena Handbasket (good ol’ Ms. Handbasket, heh) if you second-guessed yourself or started thinking. Mostly, though, I acquitted myself beautifully doing turns.
Ditto across the floor, at first. We did a cool combination that I am now nearly unable to remember, but it was set to a tango, and the goal was to focus on economy of movement. Since this is a thing I’m working on anyway, that was great.
Then we did another thing across-the-floor, and it just … I don’t know. There was a renversé. I love renversé, and I can do it quite well, and did beautiful renversés while marking the combination … and then, for some reason, when actually dancing it, my body kept insisting that the step in question should be fouetté, even though there was no fouetté in the combination.
Bleh.
I didn’t work that part out until after class, though. I just knew that something cray kept happening to my beautiful renversé moment.
This is what happens when I don’t go first and don’t mark all the way through the combo while the first group (or, in this case, groups) are going because I’m afraid of kicking somebody or getting in the way.
So, um, yeah. I shall work on that. It is getting a heck of a lot easier to pick up combinations, though (honestly, picking up almost any ballet combo seems like a breeze after a complex modern combo — not because modern is harder, but because ballet is my “first language”).
After, I ordered most of the remaining parts for our trapeze costumes (which should double for ballet stuff, later; it looks like things might be shaping up in terms of getting an adult students’ performing group together, but more on that later, as I don’t want to screw it up by speaking too soon).
Likewise, it would seem that I now have a choral performance iron in the fire for next year, which is great — not something that will require a year-long commitment, but something I’ll enjoy immensely.
So that was Monday. I’m super tired, so I’m off to bed.
G’night, everybody.
Finally Back On The Silks
One word: Yasssssss!
We got a great explanation today about getting into this inversion (crossback straddle/v inversion).
Sure, you can try to just muscle it up with your legs, but that’s the hard way (and note the word try, here — many, maybe most, can’t actually invert from the upright crossback straddle just by muscling it up).
The — well, let’s be frank — the less hard way (it still requires a fair bit of strength and coordination, but feels pretty easy once you get it) is to use your abs to contract up through the hollow-body position while pushing the poles of the silks away with your hands (which should be quite high).
Basically, you pull your pelvis towards your face using the core muscles, just as if you were doing a head-tail contraction in Modern dance.
I couldn’t do this with any degree of polish before my recent break-for-illness — not because I was weaker (though I was, towards the end), but because I hadn’t grasped the point about using hollow-body to achieve the inversion.
Today, Tall C explained that, and it clicked. Huzzah! Denis didn’t hear her, and still wound up muscling through it with great struggle. A couple classmates and I mentioned the hollow-body part when he came down (we also mentioned it when he was on the silks, but he couldn’t hear us over the sound of his effort, heh).
He’ll get it next time.
Honestly, since I haven’t been doing silks, I expected today’s class to suck — but it was actually awesome.
We also have video in which I — clearly tired — basically mark my way through a bit of choreography and fumble into arabesque at the end. I’ll post it later. Watching it, I was surprised that my transitions didn’t look like complete crap, given that I was pretty cooked and really not even trying.
Anyway, it’s good to be back at it, and I think my newly-reduced schedule will help immensely.
À bientôt, mes amis.
Good Things
I’m still wrestling my freight train, but at the same time, a couple of really good things have happened this week.
First, I’ve been promoted to Trapeze 2,which surprised the heck out of me, since my formal trapeze training has encompassed about two, maybe three months (it took us a while to pick up Trap 1 after we finished Intro). I do feel confident with the Trap 1 material, though, and I can execute most of the skills with quite a bit of polish and finesse. I’ve also gained a lot of strength, which is nice.
Second, we handed in our application for the Spring Showcase tonight. We want to do a tandem dance trapeze act, if the rigging allows — the defining différence being that dance trapeze uses a single point with a pivot, while truly static trapeze is rigged to two points — dance trapeze can freely spin; static can’t. We want to use the spin in our choreography.
The music will be the Spanish Dance from Swan Lake. I’ve got the opening and the end worked out in my head, as well as some of the skills and transitions in the midst.
B. and I also did some good work on the opening to Simon Crane, which is shaping up nicely.
Also, the opening développés are no longer hard. I really will have to try to video some of the choreography — though the opening is written for ten dancers, minimum, so it would have to be an abbreviated version.
Okay, so that’s it for now. Video of the Dueling Trapezes will be forthcoming!
A Freight Train Called Depression
In terms of ballet and in terms of aerials, 2016 has been a good year.
I am a far better dancer now than I was at this time last year. In fact, I’m a far better dancer than I was six months or so back, when I auditioned a piece for a show in Cincinnati. It wasn’t accepted* but the act of auditioning changed how I thought about myself as a dancer and a choreographer: which is to say that without even realizing it I began to think of myself, unequivocally, as a dancer, and as someone who works in the ephemeral medium of dance. It made me buckle down and really focus on learning my craft.
The hard thing, the really hard thing, is that life being a thousand times better than it once was — while it helps — doesn’t stop bipolar disorder in its tracks.
Mania still leans on the throttle, sending the whole thing charging wildly into the unknown, fired by over-stoked engines.
Depression still roars out of the night and crushes me under its wheels. I still live a life in which, at times — more times than I care to admit — I’m clinging by the skin of my teeth; by the tattering shreds of my nails.
There are still too many days on which getting out of bed seems unthinkable; on which feeding myself is a chore I’d rather not bother with; on which even going to class (the one thing that I know will reliably lift me into the light, if only for a little while) is almost unbearable.
In some ways, I think of this in the same terms that I think of ballet.
Ballet is like bike racing: it doesn’t really get easier. You learn more and more steps; they become part of you — but the physical demand increases apace with your command of the physical vocabulary of ballet and your ability to use that vocabulary beautifully and expressively.
Just as the rigors of bike racing are absolutely, irrefutably worth it when you’re descending a gravel track at 30+ miles per hour with the wind in your teeth and no hope of any victory except the one over the voice that has so often told you, “You can’t,” the rigors of ballet are absolutely, irrefutably worth it for those moments when everything comes together, when the steps and the music and the soul all move as one, and suddenly you are the music and you can fly.
I do not expect ballet to get easier, so I’m not disappointed when it doesn’t. Like most dancers, I find a specific thrill in tackling challenging steps and I revel in hard classes; even spectacular failure in the service of attempting something difficult has its own charms.
Bipolar isn’t quite the same — I suppose there’s something to admire in the tenacity with which all of us, medicated or un-, hang on through its fits and starts, in the face of its slings and arrows, but there isn’t some beautiful craft to master at the end of it all (except insofar as the craft is life: but that’s a thing we all share, bipolar or not).
But it is hard; sometimes, in long stretches, unstintingly hard. And while the manias can hard — particularly the black, dysphoric ones — the depressions are probably harder.
So I write from the rails of a depression in which I am suddenly paralyzed by potent self-doubt; suddenly more than half convinced that I have no business pursuing the calling of my heart, that I am a deluded try-hard who will never do anything meaningful (even noting that I apply the term “meaningful” on a scale that has nothing to do with money or fame), and that I should just lie down and die.
I write from beneath the wheels of a freight train that, for reasons beyond understanding, wants to undo me — or perhaps simply from the wheels of one that has lost its brakes. Again.
I write not to ask for sympathy (which I usually find kind of annoying) or to fling my misery out into the world so others can be just as miserable as I am, but because sometimes the most powerful response I have found to just this thing is the act of naming it, writing it down, looking it in the face.
Later, when I’m recovering, I’ll come back and look at these words and wonder, How could I ever have thought that? (Just as I wonder now, about my own right to regard myself as an artist, How could I ever have thoughtthat?)
I will try to remember what it felt like to hurt so much for no reason; to not even be sure that “hurt” is the right word, not because of the magnitude of the pain, but because it is so very sourceless and alien — and I will not be able to summon the feeling.
But I will understand why I wrote this: to say, This is what is now, at this moment, and to do so clearly and publicly, to stop it rattling around in my head, so I can go outside and plant a redbud tree that my friend B. brought me from an Arbor Day celebration.
So I can get up and go to conditioning class tonight.
So I can finish cleaning the kitchen, or at least do as much as I can (thinking all the while, “For the love of all that is holy, how long can it take to wash a few dishes?!”).
So I can collect the tatters of my soul and get back to weaving dances with them.
So I can get back to dreaming.
Honesty is the first tool when depression comes thundering in. So this is my honesty. This is my island of grace. This is my song and my banner, though I try, now, not to see any of this as a battle.
But we go into the mission field, too, with a song and a banner, don’t we, to tend to the sick and the wounded.
Saturday Class: Progress is Relative
I can’t say that I was at my best this morning, but I can’t say that I was at my worst, either.
Ballet is funny like that. Progress is always relative.
You have not-so-great days, and you have to remind yourself, “Six months ago, I would have thought this was a great class; I would have been really proud of my adagio and really impressed at how well I remembered the combinations.”
So by my current standard, today was, as they say, “Fair to middlin'” — mostly great Barre (though my mental block about flic-flac continues unabated); fairly good adagio (though there was a little too much “making it happen” on the first run); turns … Eh.
Here’s the combo:
Waltz turn and waltz turn
Pique arabesque
Extend
Down (plie)
PDB
Chassée
Fourth
En Dehors*
Fourth
Relève
En Dehors*
Fourth
Détourner
Chassée
Fourth
En Dedans (as many as you can, obvs)
Pliè
… Repeat until you run out of room.
*These could be singles, doubles, triples — whatevs.
Not a hard combination, but pretty, unless you for some reason keep screwing up your turns.
Little jumps would have been better if I hadn’t switched into a totally different combination halfway through and then gotten scrambled trying to get back into the right one.
This is the danger of strong kinesthetic learning abilities! Your body is all like:
“Cool! I remember this from yesterday! :)”
And your brain goes:
“No, that’s not it! :/”
And your body goes:
“But I thought…? :O”
… And so on.
We ran out of time and didn’t do grand allegro, but that’s probably okay. My lungs are still a little verklempt. Slow and steady heals the lungs.
At the end of the day, my technique is about a thousand times better
Anyway, that’s today. We’re off to the Met Live in HD.
À bientôt, mes amis.
Friday Morning Fumbling
I had many troubles with the sleepings last night, as is probably evidenced by my falling back onto something resembling a combination of dogespeak and lolspeak.
As a result, today, I arrived on the scene mentally jumbled, then proceeded to try to lead pliés.
Oy vey.
You guys.
I have been doing pliés since I was six. You would think I would have this down. Likewise, I’ve designed (edit: and led) plié exercises for beginning dancers before. Whole barres, in fact.
It’s not hard. In fact, it’s so easy that the proverbial cave man could do it, providing that his musculoskeletal system allows for an appropriate degree of turnout (otherwise, he should modify accordingly).
Usually, you can do something like two demis, one grand in 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th, then stick cambres and things between them if the music allows. At the end, you either take a sus-sous and possibly detourné or maybe you don’t, depending on your class. Maybe you just take a sus-sous and balance. Maybe you just finish en bas.
Anyway, coming up with an opening plié combination is normally the easiest thing in the world.
But, OTOH, it really helps if you listen to the music first and work your way through. Which I totally failed to do.
So there we are doing the pliés I’ve just given, and I’m going, “Oh, crap, I should’ve included cambres in here, there’s totally time,” and kicking myself and screwing up the port de bras. That I’ve just given.
Meh.
Anyway, later in class it got better, as my brain finally decided that it could come on line and work a little. I had an easier time asplaining the chassée-sauté combination that we did going across, and even convinced the class to relax and play around a little.
Semi-Pro Tip: when doing a simple chassée-step-sauté combination, invoke the Party Scene from Nutcracker; it makes everyone giddy (unless they hate the Nutcracker, in which cause … I dunno, there are good party scenes in basically all of Petipa’s ballets; just pick one). Likewise, to encourage freedom in the arms, ask your dancers to imagine themselves in big floofy skirts that they can wave around with their hands — grown-ups think this is funny, which makes them laugh, which helps in and of itself, but they’re often willing to step right into the Big Floofy Skirt role. (YMMV with guys; I didn’t have any guys today, but I’m certainly not afraid to don my Big Imaginary Floofy Skirt.)
I was, however, an overall terrible example much of the time, because sleep deprivation had left me a tad wobbly and was also making it hard to keep my head in the game.
Seriously, when we had some time to practice turns at liberty, I did two stellar singles from fifth, then somehow got distracted by my own reflection and pretty much fell over. I mean, not all the way, but you know how it is.
Bleh.
Anyway, next week, I will come prepared with a plié exercise in addition to all the fancy tendus I keep thinking about, and then I will maybe introduce them to basic mazurka step, which I think they’d enjoy.
And, also, I will listen all the way through the music while class is getting itself set up, so I know what I’m working with (though if it’s the same music, I know what we’re doing now).
And, with any luck, I will be less sleep deprived, so things will hang together (like my head and eyes and arms, for example; so many times my head was just like, “Oh, we were doing rond de jambe now? I was, you know, thinking about Swan Lake, and also about bagels.”
So there you have it. Failing to plan is planning to create a deeply inadequate plié combination.
Remember that.
À bientôt, mes amis.
danseur ignoble 