Category Archives: adventures
Pilobolus, Revisited (Again)
I keep coming back to Pilobolus’ summer intensive, and not only for the dance technique.
…Not that you can really separate the technique we learn and build here from everything else that makes this experience so resonant.
And that’s so much of it: so much of why I came the first time, and so much of why I keep coming back, even though my work as a professional ballet dancer looks, at first glance, like it must be a completely different animal.
I keep thinking: so much of what I’ve learned about how to be a dance artist, I’ve learned here.
Not the steps—the steps don’t make the artist (and Pilobolus’ whole approach isn’t really about “steps,” per se).
Rather, I’ve learned so much here, from the very beginning, about being vulnerable, about finding what’s there, about connecting with other people, about using my body to speak to someone’s soul. About speaking my own soul through my body.
This is never the same experience twice: every time I come, I’m a different person (you can’t cross the same stream twice, etc). But because it’s in the same place, using the same basic frameworks for connecting with each-other, for moving together, for creating together, it very vividly calls memories back to my conscious mind, and that’s like having a different kind of window into myself.
I remember what things were like; what I was like, and sometimes I think, “Wow, this is so much less scary now,” and other times I laugh at myself and go, “Welp, still bad at that.”
Here, it’s profoundly okay to be bad at things. It’s profoundly okay to screw up. In fact, some of the best stuff comes from the biggest blunders. Grace rushes in at the most unexpected moments.
Also, I always wind up crying. Usually, I make it to Wednesday, at least, but this time a moment in a piece one group made this afternoon—Monday, Day One—caught me right under the sternum.
It is a gift to be able to cry in a room full of people who were, a few hours ago, complete strangers.
And now I’m in bed, reading, reflecting, with my fan humming and blowing a cool breeze over me, and I can’t help but be so staggeringly grateful that in the midst of a rocky stretch, here is this incredible gift.
Here is this place of grounding, where—if I’m lucky—I will come for many more years, and every time I’ll have just as much to learn as the first time
It isn’t a stretch to say that Pilobolus played a huge role in my path to becoming a professional dancer: I began to learn to really trust myself and to feel my own power in Pilobolus’ masterclasses several years back [•]
- This was in the Before Times, so it honestly feels like half a lifetime ago.
It also isn’t a stretch to say that my first Pilobolus Summer Intensive cracked open my soul in a way that it desperately needed.
This season of healing in which I currently live began, in earnest, here.
That healing, too, has been central to my work. To be a dance artist, it helps to be able to be vulnerable. It helps to be able to forge a connection to other human beings—to come open-hearted to pas de deux; to come to the audience with whatever truth the role before you asks you to carry. This is as true in ballet—possibly the most artificial species of concert dance—as it is in the gym at Woodhall, where we strip off our layers of training and Just. Fucking. Move.
Part of what we do here is just learning to get out of our own way. To try to step out of self-judgment and do stuff; to move from the inside out instead of thinking about the eyes watching our outsides.
Somehow, that’s incredibly healing.
This year, I almost didn’t come: we’re still hypothetically buying a house in an historically terrible market for buyers, and although this is professional development, I didn’t know if I could justify even its very reasonable expense.
Mom offered to pay half my way, so I signed up for one week.
Another year, perhaps, I’ll do three.
But for now this week is enough. An island of deep healing in the midst of a life that’s full of both healing and struggle right now.
So I’ll be here and breathe here, and thank G-d I’ve come back again, to this touchstone place, where so much began for me.
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
In Transition
The weirdest feeling in the world might be the specific limbo between the time when the AD calls to offer you the contract—a really good one—and the moment when you actually sign it, when some part of you keeps feeling like, But what if it’s all a dream, or a mistake, or, or, or—
I’m still wading carefully into these waters; still got one foot in the land of “To Know, To Will, To Dare, To Keep Silent.” But it’s very hard to keep the lid on—even partway on—when you just want to jump up and down and sing.
Huge Updates
First, in October, I’ll be trekking out to California to perform the role of Romeo in Leigh Putting Ballet Company’s signature production, Sweet Sorrow: A Zombie Ballet
When Leigh first asked if I’d be willing to come out for this role, I was ecstatic, obviously. I mean, it’s not every day one gets offered a leading role, and I’ll finally get to meet a lot of the dancers I’ve worked with remotely.
It’s a particular honor because this is the 5th anniversary production of this show, after which it’ll be taking a hiatus for a couple of years. No pressure, right? ^-^’
Next, I’m starting a new teaching job soon, just started training at a new cirque studio, and I’ve got an audition next Wednesday for a company that I’m excited about potentially joining. I dropped in on their open company class this week, and the company dancers asked if I was planning on auditioning and told me I should definitely audition, which was awesome.
That’s kind of a huge step from my early days in the company at LexBallet, when I felt like nobody, including me, was sure I should really be there.
(I actually had no idea there were auditions coming up, so I’m doubly glad they mentioned it! Part of my brain is still stuck in the pre-pandemic ballet world norm of auditions taking place in late winter/early spring.)
If you ever have the chance to visit a company and take company class before you decide whether or not to audition, I highly recommend it.
One of the reasons I didn’t audition before relocating was simply that I wanted to get a feel for different companies first. That isn’t always possible—a lot of companies don’t do the “open company class” thing, though some will invite you to take company class if you’re a member of another company and you message ahead about classes in their school—but it seems like the ideal approach whenever possible.
As an autistic dancer, it’s probably even more important. It really helps to know in advance if the vibe is going to work and whether the artistic staff communicate in ways that work for your brain.
I was extra lucky in this case, because I got to take class two days in a row with the founder and AD of the company. It was definitely a little intimidating, because this is a well-reputed company I knew of when I was growing up (I mean, not one that’s a household name like ABT or anything—that’s never been a goal for me). It turns out, though, that the founder of the company seems like a lovely person; very grounded, down-to-earth, and firm-but-kind in a way that works really well when wrangling dancers.
I’m very much looking forward to the audition, which seems like a bit of a bizarre thing to say, but here we are.
It helps that it’s in the same time slot as a class I was planning to take anyway—my brain is just looking at it as a class or a workshop, which is exactly how everyone advises dancers to see auditions in the first place.
It’s impossible, of course, to know if I’ll make the cut—but it’s worth going regardless.
I’m reminded once again of the experience of learning how to track-stand on a geared bike: you begin knowing you don’t know how and failing often, then somewhere along the way you begin to figure it out. Later, at some point you sort of “come to” mid-trackstand and go, “I’m doing it!” (and immediately startle yourself into having to put a foot down).
Later still, you look back and realize it’s been a while since you really thought about it consciously. You might not be a past master at the track-stand, and you might not be breaking any records, but it’s a thing that’s there in your physical repertoire of cycling skills.
More and more often, this is how I feel about my career in dance. I’m still immensely grateful for the circumstances that brought me here, but I feel less and less often like I don’t really belong and like I hope nobody will notice that I’m desperately faking my way through absolutely everything.
I suppose that, like most things, if you fake it long enough while making an effort to actually learn, sooner or later you’re no longer faking it at all.
Anyway, that’s it for now, more or less. In the interest of my general policy of not jinxing things by saying too much, I’m keeping further audition details under wraps for now (probably until I know how the audition turns out).
I keep saying I’ll try to post more often and then being discombobulated by life, but I’ll say it again anyway, now that the relocation process is largely behind us.
Either way, until then, tuck and roll, my friends!
Thoughts on Adult Intensives
Okay. So.
Suddenly, here it is almost May.
This happens to me every year, but it’s definitely worse without the structure of the ballet company schedule(1).
- How am I supposed to keep track of which month it is if the only major landmark is Nutcracker? Jeez.
Which, in turn, means that summer is barreling down on us at a staggering rate of *checks google* 1038ish miles per hour, give or take(2), replete with its array of Summer Intensives.
- circumference of the earth/24 (3)
- Wow, only a few sentences in and I’ve already included 2 notes and a note-on-a-note
I’ve already committed to LouBallet’s Adult Summer Intensive, which seems like a really good way to finish out my … seven??? years of training there—a way to spend some concentrated time with some of my favorite teachers and classmates while also, of course, keeping my ballet skills on point(e). Besides, it’s a great program, and we get to learn cool original choreography (some of which has made it to my video CV/audition reel, because I actually felt good about it after watching it).
It’s also fairly affordable, which is more important than usual, since I don’t yet have paid work lined up for, like, after this summer (fortunately, D does).
I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford to do basically anything else this summer that doesn’t at least offer me a full scholarship or the equivalent thereof, but there are several programs I’m flat-out dying to attend (DuCon!!!!! ADF! Pilobolus!) if finances magically allow. Likewise, I’m ever-curious about adult SI offerings, and I like to keep an ear to the wind about what’s available—so, from time to time, I go hunting.
And in the process of hunting, I’ve noticed something.
Adult SI Pricing Can Bring You To (Two?), Ahem, Tiers
Yeah, you’re right. That was terrible. Sorry.
In the growing world of adult summer intensives and workshops, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern: there are basically two pricing tiers.
- Tier One: programs that are actually less expensive per week than a lot of (perhaps even most) youth SIs
- Tier Two: programs that are either as expensive as or actually wildly more expensive per week than even top-notch youth SIs
Tuition for the second tier of adult SIs typically runs more than twice the weekly cost of tuition at the first tier, though the dance offerings are often comparable (or, in some cases, richer at the Tier One programs).
I’m curious about what drives the difference in price, and whether the organizers of the different programs (especially Tier Two programs) realize how deeply pricing might impact the makeup of the student body at any individual program.
Given that none of these programs, as far as I know, are restricted to local students only, and that the adult ballet community justly thirsts for quality SIs like hummingbirds thirst for nectar (though it’s fair to say we dancers are less likely to stab each-other in the pursuit of coveted spots around the feeder), “what the market will bear” clearly isn’t the only factor at play. Likewise, all of them have limited spaces, and the number of available spots doesn’t seem to have much to do with pricing models (if it did, we could expect both LouBallet’s and LexBallet’s SIs, which are limited to fairly small numbers, to command much higher prices).
Bringing Tiers To You: A Look At Prices
A brief survey of adult SI pricing reveals a pretty broad range, but it’s worth noting that many of the Tier One programs, though typically open to dancers at all levels, are designed in ways that allow them to serve serious dancers across the spectrum from fairly new beginners to emerging professionals.
Lexington Ballet’s adult SI (scroll to the bottom of the linked page for registration info), at $240 for five four-hour days, continues to be an absolute steal, and I’m not just saying that because LexBallet has been my company and my ballet home for the past few years. The quality of instruction is superb, and I don’t know of an adult SI that’s priced more affordably (unless we start breaking things down per hour, in which case it’s Mutual Dance Theater, hands down). Participants from this SI have found also their way into character roles and even company contracts, thanks to the close participation of LexBallet’s AD, School Director, and other artistic staff.
Mutual Dance Theater’s Modern SI–the one I took a few years ago, before Mam-Luft & Co merged with Mutual–runs $399 at most (late-bird tuition, for disorganized folks like me) for a packed week, with programming 9 AM to 5 PM every day. It’s not ballet-specific, and it’s not one I’d recommend to a true beginner in any dance idiom, but it’s a beast of an intensive (in a good way), and hella affordable. It’s also very much geared towards emerging professionals.
LouBallet, fairly typical of the first tier with its $550 tuition for a 5.5-day program[4], could almost certainly double its tuition and then some and still fill the spaces. Instead, they’ve chosen to keep the tuition right where it’s been (for which I am deeply grateful). Ashley Thursby-Kern, who runs the program, specifically considers its role in offering an intensive program for college dancers and emerging professionals who may have aged out of youth SIs, while continuing to foster an environment that supports new dancers as well.
Westside Ballet’s program, located in Santa Monica, is a bit shorter per session (3 hours/day over 4 days) but offers three sessions priced at $500 each. The faculty includes Martine Harley, who is the company’s AD, and Sven Toorvald, along with others representing some top-tier companies. The third week focuses on pas de deux and variations, and if I wasn’t teaching an SI that week, I’d find some way to get my behind out there for that.
ArtEmotion‘s offering– the most expensive I’ve included in this category–looks very comparable to LouBallet’s and, at $800, still seems pretty approachable to those of us in the “broke-ass dancer” category[5]. This is one of the oldest ongoing adult intensives, held at Ballet West’s Salt Lake City studio, and has long been on my list of Intensives I’d Attend If They Weren’t The Same Week As Something Else I’m Already Doing.
- This is a fugly link, so if it doesn’t work, try this one: LouBallet MBB Landing Page
- Assume that this category includes both “lay” dancers with limited disposable income and those of us among the professional segment who usually have access to at least some summer programming for free, but who might have been impacted by pandmic-related closures and/or impending moves (hi) and, either way, still need to stay in shape until September.
These programs, and programs like them–my “First Tier” adult SIs–are largely affiliated with established ballet companies or schools. Access to existing studio space and, perhaps, a built-in supply of students and teachers explain at least some of their relatively affordable prices.
They also tend to be light on extracurriculars–those factors that might make things feel a bit more like a vacation, I guess. Not that you need them after, for example, eight straight hours of modern dance buttkickery.
Tier Two, meanwhile, is a bit more of a mixed bag: one of the programs in question features one of my favorite master teachers and looks like an absolute banger of a program for focused advanced dancers; others seem a bit more like relaxing ballet-themed getaways.
I realize that this perception is very much colored by my experience as one of the aforementioned Emerging Professionals, with its attendant feature of being both chronically broke and accustomed to dancing 30+ hours per week. As my friend Tony (who looks like a tall Steven McRae) says, “Hi Ho, the theatrical life.”
So what kind of programs, you might ask, are in Tier Two?
First, of course: SunKing, the granddaddy of adult SIs. At the time of this writing, SunKing doesn’t have a website up, and I’m not clear on whether or not it’s actually happening this year (links to SK’s Facebarge), but it was always out of my price range anyway. It was one of the few that had enough draw to offer a partnering class, which would’ve been awesome to take before I embarked on Ballet Company Lyfe (y’all, learning partnering piecemeal while rehearsing actual ballets isn’t ideal, is what I’m saying), but not quite awesome enough to warrant launching an OnlyFans or something at this point in my career. Still, I’ve always had the impression that the actual instruction overall was quite good.
Given the serious, focused programs and excellent instruction available in Tier One, there’s only one Tier Two program that leaves me feeling butthurt about being, well, semi-broke, and that’s Runqiao Du’s inaugural DuCon–which I’d leap to attend, if I could afford it (but I can’t, unless I figure out how to make a few thosand dollars PRONTO). DuCon falls at the, well, less-inaccessible end of my second tier: tuition runs $1499 for one week or $2799 for both weeks, and the program offers an excellent teaching staff (Mr. Du himself, plus others), a 6-day week, and programming that runs from 9:30 AM ’til 8:00 PM Monday through Friday. Moreover, Du’s youth SI (which also runs for two weeks) is priced exactly the same, so we (would-be) adult participants aren’t left feeling like cash cows.
At the far end of Tier 2 is another brand-new event: International Adult Ballet Festival. Not gonna lie—I was intrigued when I heard about this one on the Broche Ballet podcast: the program offers a workshop, showcase, and a competition (not a selling point for me, but certainly a unique offering). However, at only 4 days long, IABF comes with a staggering $2950 price tag. To be fair, that does include hotel room, breakfast, lunch, and a couple other meals–but broke-ass dancers are pretty good at finding cheap housing and food, and if I’ma drop $3k on tuition, it’s going to be at DuCon or ADF.
Don’t get me wrong, IABF sounds like a really fun event–but it’s pretty clear that I’m not really their target audience (this isn’t a program that believes adult dancers can’t build careers in dance, but I don’t think it’s really intended for those of us who are already doing so). Likewise, the website’s vibe is more Awesome Ballet Vacation than Come Get Your Ass Handed To You For A Week Or Two. There’s value in both those approaches, of course. Likewise, the event does bill itself as a festival, rather than as a Summer Intensive: more, “Come celebrate ballet!” than “Come suffer with us!” And it’s good that such a thing can exist.
But still. $2950 for 4 days. Wow.
Do Different Tiers Reflect Different Audiences?
As an autistic person, I am perhaps more inclined than most to sort of forget that people can be interested in the same things I’m interested in, but experience those interests very differently(6).
- Some people can apparently like things without tending to rebuild their entire lives around those things! Who knew?!
It doesn’t automatically occur to me that someone else might want to take a summer intensive for different reasons than I do, or maybe, for the same reasons, but perhaps prioritized differently.
Life, for me, the drivers (at least, the ones I can think of right now), ordered by priority, might look like this:
- Refine and improve technique for upcoming season and/or auditions
- Dance AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
- Learn new steps and/or new partnering skills
- Learn repertoire
- Maintain at least the bare minimum fitness level that will prevent me dying on Day 1 of new company class, assuming successful auditions
- Ideally, add a useful piece to my audition reel
- Hang out with my peeps, new and existing
Explicitly not in my list are the following:
- Relax
- Take a break from my regular job (because ballet is my regular job)
- Find out what it’s like to be able to dance full-time (again, bc that’s basically already my life)
This makes it difficult to imagine choosing a 4-day intensive at any price when there are so many available that run 5 or 6 days or longer: my primary goal is to immerse myself in a demanding curriculum for as long as possible.
Likewise, I find it difficult to imagine being a dancer, but also being satisfied living a life in which a four-day ballet immersion would feel that much different from, like, normal life, because my experience of being a dancer has basically been, “Holy heck, drop everything else, this is the thing
i MUST do.”
And yet, rationally, I am aware that I know people in that exact target market—people who have very demanding careers that they love outside of dance, not to mention family lives that don’t basically also revolve around ballet, but who also passionately love dancing.
Quite a few of them could easily afford a few thousand dollars for a short, almost-all-inclusive ballet intensive. Time is probably in shorter supply for them than it is for me, and the sheer convenience of having almost everything planned out might mean saying, “Hey, I can do this!” instead of “Wow, yeah, I don’t have the time/mental bandwidth/whatever for all this planning.”
Likewise, the fact that I straight up forgot to put “have fun” on my list of priorities says a LOT … though mostly what it’s saying is that, even during the roughest parts of my first year with LexBallet, I still had fun, and I still wanted to be there more than I wanted to be anywhere else in the world.
So it doesn’t occur to me to put “have fun” on the list, because, even if the atmosphere somewhere turns out to be awful, I’m going to enjoy dancing anyway. Especially if I know I’m only there for, at best, a few weeks.
For someone who’s returning to work in another field after their summer program, on the other hand, fun and relaxation might be much higher priorities. There’s something to be said for options existing that fit the needs of people in that situation, too.
Conclusion: I Which I Leave You In Tiers
(Or not, depending on if adult summer intensives are of any interest to you at all.)
Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t the Most Important Thing In The World.
But it’s a valuable insight for me (as someone who is fully behind the idea that different people have different wants and needs but who is also sometimes an absolute bonehead at imagining them), and I hope it might be helpful to others considering adult summer programs—especially, maybe, those considering their first adult summer program.
For me, for example, Mam-Luft (now Mutual) was in many ways a great first summer program—but it was also extremely demanding, often emotionally challenging, sometimes lonely, and just plain physically exhausting. I definitely had some major breakthro moments, but I also failed A LOTTTTT in front of 50 people, with no hope of fading into anonymity, since I was the ONLY guy that year. Oh, and I shredded my foot.
If I hadn’t, by then, already been a pretty experienced student, quietly putting in the foundations for a career in dance; if I was of a less stubborn constitution; maybe especially if I’d taken that SI knowing I had to go back to stressful job, I might’ve felt very differently about exactly the same experience. It might even have made me conclude that SIs weren’t for me, which would’ve been a shame.
So maybe the real TL;DR for this post goes like this:
- There are a lot of adult summer programs now! That’s awesome!
- The programs can be roughly divided into two pricing tiers
- The price of a program doesn’t directly reflect the quality of instruction—most of them look pretty solid!
- The less-expensive programs seem more likely to attract a mixed student body of both amateur and professional dancers
- The more expensive programs are more likely to include things like meals and extracurricular events
- Before you choose a program, it’s a good idea to hash out your needs, goals, and priorities (Will you be going straight back to work in a busy emergency room? Consider a shorter or more relaxed program—you’ll still learn a lot, but you won’t return to work exhausted)
- If you choose a shorter or more relaxed program this year and discover that you want to go harder, you’ll have gained valuable insight for next time
- On the other hand, if you choose a challenging program send find it’s a little too much right now, you can either try again next year or try an easier one next year
- If you get to go to DuCon, please tell me whether it’s as awesome as it sounds so i can figure out whether i need $3000 extra next year 😅
A Final Note: American Dance Festival & Pilobolus
Although I could arguably include American Dance Festival’s Summer Dance Institute in either one of my tiers, and would love to attend the full program, I’m setting it off to one side for now. In short, although full-time tuition runs $2,275, it’s comparable in length to a full-scale youth SI, and offers a staggering array of programming geared towards developing professional dancers. Likewise, you can actually Choose-Your-Own-Adventure your way through it by taking individual classes at $750/4-week class.
Likewise, although the cost-per-session of Pilobolus’ excellent program has increased to around $1000, its generous scholarship program makes it relatively accessible, though you can still rack up $3000 in tuition if you go for all three sessions at full cost. It’s also kind of in its own category because, honestly, a lot of ballet people probably wouldn’t be super interested, which is fine.
Rough Day, But Not As Rough
CW: Mention of Suicidal Thoughts
Today was … yeah.
It wasn’t the worst day I’ve ever had. Not by a long, long, loooooooong measure.
But it was the kind of day that starts with a reminder of the fact that the ballet company I worked my butt off to be worthy of is still on hiatus, and that since I’m moving, it’s very unlikely I’ll be dancing with them much, if at all, ever again, and that as such the part of my career that meant the most to me is still stalled (pending auditions, etc). This is, for me, a big deal.
I’m also tried and probably haven’t eaten enough bc my schedule is weird and nothing sounds like food, so I’m sure some of this is just down to the fact that I turn into a giant toddler when I’m hungry or tired, let alone both.
So, anyway, right now, my brain is simultaneously like YOU ARE AWFUL, LIFE IS AWFUL, EVERYTHING IS AWFUL and also like OMFG STOP BEING SUCH A GIANT DRAMATIC EMO TODDLER (while yet another part is like Can’t we just stop being so judgmental of our own emotions, here? Sheesh).
But, also, another part of my brain is like, “Dude, you know what? I remember that we’ve felt like this before, and it was terrible and sucked and felt like it would go on forever, but then eventually we stopped feeling like this. So, I’ma let you finish, but you know, it’s very possible that eventually this will stop, too.”
It reminds me of a thing I realized about my suicidal episodes, which come on very fast, usually when I find myself feeling trapped: I can tell myself to wait a day (or an hour, or thirty seconds), and if nothing has changed, I can kill myself then. I tell myself that over and over, until finally I stop having to tell myself that. Sometimes it takes weeks. Sometimes it takes less than a day.
But so far I’m still alive, partly because I really mean it in those moments. Like, I tell myself that option is there, and bizarrely, that helps me feel a tiny bit less trapped. That probably wouldn’t work for everyone, but it often works for me (in combination with having people in my life who can help me, of course).
Anyway, I think this is the first time my brain has chimed in with NOOOOOO EVERYTHING IS HORRIBLE AND IT WILL BE HORRIBLE FOREVER and another part of my brain has said, “Hey, you know, that could be true, but experience tells me it probably isn’t[1], so instead of getting caught in this idea–though you can go on feeling that way, over there, it’s okay–I’m going to hang out and wait and see,” and I’ve been able to sit with that paradox without it losing sight of that second thing, really.
- I mean, notwithstanding the fact that in some ways life is unrelentingly horrible to a lot of people. Like, for an incredibly large number of people, that is pretty objectively true, though so many of those people are incredible at enduring things nobody should have to endure. But that’s a different sense of the thing.
I am still struggling with being knocked out of the thing that was so central in my life, and not having somehow gotten my crap together enough to audition last year so I wouldn’t be in this position now (though I’d still be moving, so I’d still be facing the terrifying gamut of auditions). The structure of company life brought a lot of sanity with it, for me; it helped shape my time in ways I’m not good at doing for myself (I don’t mean that as a value judgment: it’s just not a thing my brain does well, and that’s fine). It helped me grow both as a dancer and as a person in ways that I’m not doing, or perhaps not doing as much, under current circumstances (I’m sure I’m learning other things, but the thing you have doesn’t replace the thing you lost; that’s just how grief is).
It’s been hard to talk about this because, quite frankly, the response one often gets is, “Why are you complaining! You have no idea how lucky you are to have had the time that you did in that company.”
Which is both dismissive (grief is not lessened by knowing that one has lost something rare and special; not at all) and, frankly, incorrect. I would hazard that I know better than anyone alive the staggering constellation of circumstances that coincided to give me my time at LexBallet: I know keenly and viscerally just how incredibly lucky I am.
But I also know that luck was only part of it, and that an ocean of hard work and no small measure of sacrifice was also involved.
Grief is real; grief is hard; and still I work not to cling to grief, but to say, “Hello, grief,” and let it be there, while also knowing that other things will come, though I have no idea what they will be, and they might not be the things I imagine that I want.
So here I am, sitting with these things that I feel, and sitting with the uncertainty of things, and part of me is in turmoil about it (though probably more in turmoil about needing to go to bed and/or eat) and part of me is at peace with that turmoil. Which feels kind of neat, in its own way.
And now I’m going to go feed my inner giant emo toddler and go to bed.
~
PS: the thing that made everything boil over this morning was having a bad day in class in a way that felt like a step backwards: I kept not trusting myself to have the exercises, and instead of just saying, “Ah, feck it,” and going for it, kept watching everyone else in the mirror to make sure I was right, which then actually prevented things from sticking in any meaningful sense, which led to a kind of crisis of nerves in which I couldn’t pick things up because I was busy being afraid that I couldn’t pick things up, to such an extent that L’Ancien called me out on it (which I deserved).
That reminded me how much confidence I’d gained during my time with LexBallet, and which (in that moment) I feared I’d lost, which gave my brain (which was already in a weird place, probably for purely biochemical reasons for once) a thing to hang up about, which colored the rest of the day, which might otherwise have been only a normal day in which some things sucked and other things rocked and most things were just meh.
Besides being okay with sitting with the place where my head is now, part of the answer is to be willing to say, on mornings that I’m as foggy as I was this morning, “OKay, I’m going to hang back and give myself more time to pick things up.”
Sometimes forcing myself to go in the first group every time is a good strategy. Sometimes it’s not, and it’s silly to cling to that strategy when it’s not working.
~
PPS: At the end of class, when I finally got out of my own way and decided to just trust that I knew the combination, I got some very nice remarks from L’Ancien. That should tell me a lot. I’m sure it will when that part of my brain is ready to listen.
Nachmo with Catsup
Wait, no.
Make that catch-up.
I know, I know. Terrible pun. I’m genuinely sorry, and yet I know I’ll just do it again. Such is the nature of puns.
Okay, so I’ve basically been incognito for two months. November and December are, erm, a little busy in the ballet world and we had a bunch of house projects that became urgently important (and thus got done, but also ate up my unscheduled time).
Then I caught COVID (spoiler alert: thank G-d for vaccines & boosters) and, even after recovering, wasn’t sure what to say about it.
So! Let’s get that one out of the way first.
I can only assume, based on the timeline, that I probably caught COVID while on our miniature tour. Given the timing, the fact that we[1] performed without masks only to later find out the audience was also unmasked, and the fact that almost nobody in the town where we performed seemed to wear masks anywhere at all (and that my masks are all the protect-other-people kind that do little to protect the wearer), it’s deeply probable.
- “We” being a group of vaccinated dancers (with the exception of a few who were too young) and very careful about masking. As far as I know, the decision to have us dance unmasked came down to our artistic staff being given the impression that the audience would be masked, because they’ve been extremely careful throughout the pandemic.
That said, it’s hard to say with certainty, because even though I still basically wear a mask whenever I’m around people who aren’t in my pandemic pod, I don’t usually wear an N95 or KN95 mask. Initially, that was because supplies of those were limited for quite a while and people working in healthcare really need them; more recently, it’s been partly because I already own about a million ordinary masks, because I’m mostly around other people who wear masks, and because N95s are an absolute beast to dance in.
As a result, I could’ve picked up the virus literally anywhere, since enormous numbers of Kentuckians, particularly outside of Louisville and Lexington, simply won’t wear masks.
Anyway, because I teach students in the K-12 bracket (who, until recently, weren’t eligible for vaccination) and because as someone with asthma and a history of serious respiratory illness I’m at higher risk of severe complications of COVID-19, I got both initial vaccine doses pretty early and received my booster the day I left for the beginning of our Nutcracker run.
It’s impossible, of course, to say how things would’ve played out if I wasn’t vaccinated, but given my risk profile and medical history (I’ve had pneumonia five hecking times, y’all–my lungs don’t play), it’s pretty likely that the outcome would’ve been poor.
Instead, I had:
- a fever for two day or so
- the worst sinus headache I’ve ever had (which is saying something, because fren, I’ve had some wicked sinus headaches in my time)
- sore throat (though not as bad as the worst strep I’ve ever had, which, to be fair, I totally allowed to get out of control)
- nosebleeds
- scabs inside my nose (next to the headache, this was the most miserable thing–blowing my nose was horribly painful for a bit)
- more than the usual post-nasal drip which occasionally made me cough
- two days with no appetite
- a near-complete loss of the ability to taste or smell anything but salt (that happened first, oddly enough, and persisted the longest except for some lingering fatigue, which I’d expect after any significant illness)
Oh, and I basically slept for a solid week, which was great, since it meant I basically only experienced the rest of the symptoms in brief snatches, including that truly egregious headache.
I spent a few extra days in bed with pretty intense fatigue, and then one day I experienced the familiar sensation of being bored as heck and unable to lie down for even thirty more seconds and knew I was going to be fine.
You’ll notice that I didn’t mention any lower-respiratory symptoms at all. In fact, as miserable as it was (at least when I was awake, anyway), and as much as it made me miss the rest of our Nutcracker run, my case of COVID-19 would be classified as mild-to-moderate. I emphasize that because, frankly, I think a lot of people don’t understand that basically, no matter how miserable you feel, if it doesn’t send you to the hospital, your COVID-19 isn’t severe.
Not to say that it’s not serious–especially given the potential for Long COVID and its unknowns, and the fact that a couple weeks out of work can decimate a family’s finances–but it can be much, much worse, and that’s a really important point when we’re talking about vaccine efficacy with regard to an illness that can easily kill young, healthy people and that is killing people at staggering rates.
I did take a ton of meds, all of them over-the-counter except for benzonatate, which is a prescription medication that kills the urge to cough. That was important for me since post-nasal drop and/or throat irritation can kick off coughing jags that in turn kick off an inflammation cascade that leads, at minimum, to severe asthma attacks, but which has in numerous instances created a fast track-to-pneumonia situation for me (did I mention that my lungs don’t play?).
I wasn’t willing to take that risk when a simple telehealth appointment could prevent it.
At this point, I’m mostly back to normal: I can make it through a pretty decent ballet class (even with a mask), though I still get tired more easily than usual.
Compared to the average sedentary person, I’m back to being hella fit, though I’m definitely not back to typical mid-season professional dancer fitness.
My best metric is sleep: at typical mid-season fitness level, even after six to eight hours of class and rehearsal, plus whatever happens in the evening, it takes me a couple of hours to fall asleep when I go to bed. Right now, one class and some housework makes me tired enough that it’s a struggle to read for half an hour (which, a bit foolishly, I keep doing because I’m afraid I won’t be able to fall asleep ^-^’).
My second-best metric is fatigue. The form of EDS I have does this weird fatigue thing: I can work my way up to professional-dancer stamina incrementally, but if I seriously overdo it, I get hit with a wave of literally debilitating fatigue and have to spend a day or two in bed. Right now, the threshold for that response is way lower than usual.
But, still, overall? I feel like I dodged a bullet thanks to medical science and Dolly Parton[2].
- Simply by chance, I wound up getting the Moderna booster even though my first two doses were Pfizer–I think that was a good thing, too, since anecdotal accounts suggest that particular combination is a little more effective in preventing serious COVID-19 illness.
So, in short, I’m not mad that I got vaxxed and still got sick.
Rather, I’m glad the vaccine did its job and curtailed the severity and, probably, the duration of the illness.
While I really didn’t mind not being able to smell the catbox even while cleaning it, I’m happy to report that I’ve mostly regained my senses[3]. I lost an somewhat alarming amount of weight[4] as a result of just not being interested in food.
- Which isn’t to say I’ve become sensible–let’s not be hasty, here!
- I want to write about how this intersected with the part of my brain that still lives in Anorexia World, but I think that might need its own post. Suffice it to say that a significant part of me was far from alarmed about the weight loss, and has been struggling with regaining any of it, and I’ve realized I need to do some work, there.
That was a fairly bizarre experience, to be honest. Because I actually did completely lose my appetite for a couple of days, I discovered that, for me anyway, there’s a major difference between being unable to eat and just … not being interested in eating, but being at least somewhat able to eat if I could find something that wasn’t too salty (as much as I like salt, when it’s literally the only thing you can taste, a lot of things are suddenly too salty).
Like, normally, I try to eat with a kind of relaxed mindfulness–actually giving attention to the experience of eating, but also to participating in conversations and being aware of what’s going on around me in general. I had no idea how important the ability to taste was to me, in that process.
When I couldn’t taste my food, actually eating enough was really hard.
First, my interest in food pretty much evaporated, and since I’m bad at recognizing hunger signals until they get really intense, I kept forgetting to eat.
Second, actually finishing even a fairly small meal required pretty intense concentration, because if I got distracted, I just wouldn’t come back to my food. I wouldn’t have predicted that.
Also, there’s a specific kind of cognitive dissonance involved in possessing a powerful sense memory of the taste of spiced chai, but being utterly unable to taste it in real life o.O’
I’ve since gained back what I assume is most of the weight I lost, though I haven’t been weighing myself because I’m apparently constitutionally unable to remember to put new batteries in our scale ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At any rate, I no longer have to crank my belt way down to keep my trousers on.
So that’s my experience with COVID thus far (could’ve been worse, but still: 0/10, do not recommend).
In other news, it’s National Choreography Month again, and I’m actually managing to keep up to some extent, so here’s my response to Prompt 2, Master Work, in which one re-creates an iconic dance pic:
I’ll have more Nachmo stuff coming.
Til then, keep dancing.
danseur ignoble 