I got cast! (And not the broken-bone kind 😁)
Next audition on my radar is ballet-related, but I’m not sure when it is. Dates haven’t been posted yet.
Category Archives: balllet
I Need A “Don’t Go All Out” Setting
It was chilly in the studio last night and I didn’t take class before rehearsal, and I’m regretting it today.
Never mind that BG told us a million times, “Don’t go all out; we don’t need to tonight,” my brain kept being like, Meh, none of the jumps are big.
Ah, well. I’m surprisingly sore this morning. (I also forgot that the floor in that particular studio is haaaaaard.)
My brain snagged on a tombé-coupé, balloné, sus-sous, repeat sequence: it just didn’t want the sus-sous to be there.
In the video, you can see me thinking, even though I’m way across the studio.
I did get it, though, and we’re up to 2:20 now.
Sunday Class: Grand Allegro Pyrotechnics
This has to be brief, as I still have a boatload of stuff I need to finish today, but JMG gave us a really lovely, long grand allegro today, and I apparently tossed out one hell of a nice tour-jeté.
It was edifying to hear that it was nice, because I put All The Efforts into that run, including the tour-jeté (which I spring-loaded as if BW was there to remind me to jump higher) and couldn’t catch my breath because stupid allergies are stupid, so after we finished I had to sit down so I wouldn’t puke.
I don’t think that the left side was quite as nice, but it was still pretty nice, with the added bonus that there was no fear of barfing after finishing the run.
I think this is probably the first time I’ve managed to cram grand assemblé, tour jeté, saut de chat, pas de chat, Bournonville jeté, and a tour into a combination in class 😛
Oh, and today I did triple turns on command. Bad triples—one was pretty decent, the others were like, turn, turn … FECKING TURN ALREADY AIGHT, one with the Hoppity-Hops of Shame—but triples nonetheless. Both sides. Like four of them. So that’s a thing now, I guess?
I remember when bad doubles on command were the only doubles-on-command that I had, so I’m taking this as progress.
Any now, back to restoring all the freaking financial data via manual data entry because apparently I have severely, severely offended the Demi-urge of Bookkeeping.
Modern: The Side Successions Succeed
…Sort of.
I learned to love side successions in Cinci last summer. They are so the opposite of ballet, but when they work, holy crap, they’re beautiful (and they feel really good; like your body kind of massages itself while you’re also stretching).
Yesterday we worked on side successions a lot, especially a little traveling side succession thing that has been doin’ me a heckin’ bamboozle during a combination we worked on Tuesday and today, à la “Ballet Squid Goes Modern.”
I wasn’t thinking of it as a travelling side-succession. I was thinking of it as … I dunno, a more vertical washing machine(1) with wavy-gravy arms?
- To whit: “washing machine” might not even be the standard Modern Dance People name for the thing I call a “washing machine,” which is basically a squatty kind of chaîné in 2nd en tournant that you do en manège … yeah, I pretty much always wind up describing modern in ballet terms.
In fact, it’s a side-succession coupled with a chassé and a little turn-under.
We did a bunch of these across the floor to some super-cool flamenco music (if I had time for another dance form in my life right now, I’d go straight for flamenco).
Overall, a fairly successful class: I got frustrated at the end because I was struggling to remember bits of a long bit of choreography and I was All By Mysee-e-eeelf, so I couldn’t crib off someone else for the missing parts.
Curiously, I think I remember most of the choreography now ._. I am sorta cursed with that thing where the choreography consolidates on the way home.
Anyway, now I’m going to go try to wrangle the finances. Apparently, at some point, our Quicken restored a backup file (and apparently lost the newer ones?), and I’m basically having to re-do the reconciling for all of 2016. Not happy about that at all.
Rep Class Again
Rep/Rehearsal went well tonight. Our piece is coming together. I continue like it. It’s not difficult, but it’s pretty (and I get to show off my floaty jumps and my extensions, so that’s nice too).
We’re adding a second weekly rehearsal session for the next few weeks so we’ll have time to nail down the rest of the dance. It’s something like 4.5 minutes long; we have the first 2 minutes set.
BG counts the music per phrase, which results in some completely wack counts (there’s a phrase that counts out to 7 beats because of some rubato and a caesura; it’s one of those moments in which Vivaldi goes, “HA! You thought this movement was over, BUT IT’S NOT!!! PSYCH!!!”).
Took class beforehand also. It went really, really well. My brain, my arms, and my legs were all working at the same time (will wonders never cease?). Turns were good; petit allegro was fine … even when BG was like “No Big Arms Because This Is Petite Allegro.” Which was basically a correction for me.
We were a big class in a tiny studio, so there were lots of zig-zaggy combinations. I’m down with that. I think they’re good for getting us to STOP FREAKING THINKING SO MUCH (which was basically the theme of tonight’s class). You can’t freak out about OMG LEFT SIDE INCOMING if you’re constantly zig-zagging back and forth between left and right.
Also, BG made everyone do contretemps, and I actually lurve contretemps, so it makes me happy that now everyone knows how to do them. Or, well, everyone who was in class tonight. Not, like, the whole planet.
The weird part is that my left side has suddenly decided to be better at turns and at jumps that have turns in them. No idea why. It just is what it is.
Oh! And today, in killer class, the billion and fifteen chaînés I have done in BW’s class paid off. We used them in a combination, and it just was like, “Oh, chaînés, no problem.”
So it was like, “Pas de problème,” and not “Pas de problème.”
…Which is officially the most linguistically arcane and nerdiest pun in the history of my puns.
So apparently I no longer hate chaînés. I am, in fact, forced to admit that I kinda liked the way they felt today.
o_O’
In other news, I am now under obligation to make a video. I was marking a piece of choreography while transporting my giant water jug, my towel, and my notebook across the room, and T decided that I need to shoot some video with the giant water jug.
So I’ll probably sort that this weekend, because the idea sounds hilarious, and so totally typical of me. I am forever doing turns with a towel in my hand or jumps with a water bottle because I start thinking about the choreography and forget that I’m carrying things.
And, of course, should said video actually arise, I shall post it here (and on My Tiny Pathetic Insta Feed).
Killer Class: Okay, There’s Your Head, But Where’s Your Arm At?
Yesterday, I was wrestling with my head in modern class.
Today, it’s back the ongoing struggle to figure out where the hell my arms are in ballet.
At barre, Killer B. reset my free arm in second again. It was wandering around a little behind my shoulder. Such is the weirdness associated with hypermobility.
I made a point of remembering how it felt where she put it, rather than trying to feel for a stretch I’m never going to feel because my body is like, “Pfft, please, this isn’t even a stretch.”
Turns were back in order today, though my spot is still kind of WTF.
Likewise, in terms of just plain strength, things are definitely improving. The turnout is back to sorting itself by the end of tendus, and I found myself adding relevé even when Killer B didn’t suggest it: the second set of grand battement, for example.
We did a beautiful adagio at center twice. I had the sense to ask a question about the arms, but then spent too much mental energy thinking about that moment and made myself a little tense on the first run. The second was better.
We talked about the weird thing we do in ballet where we make a rule and establish it soundly, then break the bejeezus out of it: so all through barre, we focused on imagining a wall that would keep our arms aligned, only to use that wall and then break right through it in adagio.
A a nice waltz/turns combination from the back and an equally nice terre-a-terre followed. Double turns are back on tap, suddenly. Triples are intermittent but kinda there; I had one in each class this weekend and one today. The thing I’m working on is pressing up into my turns rather than jumping into them, a correction I’ve now received from two different teachers in the same week 😛
(File under, “You might need to fix something if…”)
To be fair, jumping into my turns is something I know that I do, which is why I’m so very, very, very much better at adagio turns than up-tempo turns. I like to just kind of ooze into adagio turns: squeeze on up to demi-pointe and float. Sometimes I jump into them anyway, though, when I’m worried I’m forgetting the choreography.
Regardless, it was a good day for musicality. A lot of the music was from Swan Lake, and we got to feeeeel our way through the combinations up until petit allegro rolled in (then it was back to OH G-D HANG ON FOR DEAR LIFE).
I’m still fighting the most annoying cold ever, so petit allegro was meh. Little warm-up jumps were fine except for the fact that I had the combination slightly wrong, so I kept having to sort myself out.
On the other hand, I felt less like dying after petit allegro than I did in BW’s class on Thursday … probably because I wasn’t the only dancer in class and could get away with hiding in the back and half-assing it. Shame on me, I guess, but on the other hand I have dance team followed by another class and rehearsal, so completely cooking my legs before lunch seems like a bad idea.
Where’s Your Head At?
So, it turns out that—believe it or not—modern is not ballet (or, if we’re going to put that in programming terms: modern != ballet). Or, well, it’s not ballet most of the time. So, basically, modern is not ballet, except when intermittently it is ballet.
Jeez.
Anyway.
Today in modern class, we were doing those swirly arm things that result from making circles from high contraction to side curve through high release through the other side curve.
If you don’t modern, this probably makes exactly no sense to you. If you do modern, though, there’s a good chance that you know what I’m talking about. Basically, you don’t really move your arms; you move your sternum and upper back, and that moves your arms.
Anyway! They were sort of the Topic of the Day, and early on they appeared in a nifty tendu/rond-de-jambe/travely combination.
I was having trouble with it. Not with the legs, not with the arms, not with the body or shoulders, but with the head.
No matter what I did, it wanted to point the wrong way. That made the whole thing just feel … eeeee.
Then S, my classmate, figured it out: my body was busily trying to ballet when it was supposed to modern. Or, well, my head was.
Later, my body also rebelled against the entire concept of this sort of side-curve/under-curve chassé thing we were doing. It kept turning into an arabesque. Needless to say, this made for an awkward transition to the next step, which actually was an arabesque (albeit a modern one).
In both cases, once I understood what was happening, I really had to concentrate to correct it, which was challenging—but correcting the glitch in question made the whole movement easier.
I think this explains some of the difficulties I consistently encounter in modern dance. I failed to account for the power of the ballet wiring; the wiring that says when your arm is doing this, your head does this.
Since all of the ballet stuff is pretty much automatic, I don’t even notice that I’m doing it … which is fine, when I’m supposed to be doing ballet.
Ballet—especially classical ballet—has pretty specific rules about how the head and the body go together. These rules result in the establishment of motor patterns: this is how technique becomes more automatic over time.
Modern uses those patterns, too, but it also uses other patterns. Some modern motor patterns are essentially the opposite of patterns that are essentially hard-wired into anyone who has accumulated years of ballet training.
The funny part is that I still tend to think of my head as having no idea what to do with itself in ballet, but that’s not exactly true. For the most part, my head does what it’s supposed to these days, with a few glaring exceptions. When it’s doing what it’s supposed to do, I just don’t notice it. I only notice it when it’s doing something wrong and weird, because usually that either screws up my lines or throws off my balance.
Since the body tends to follow the head, if your head is pointing the wrong way in a given combination, there’s a fairly reasonable likelihood that you’re going to do the combination backwards in some way or another. I feel that I’m rather amazingly good at getting things backwards in modern class, and this gives me a bit of insight into why.
Anyway, so that was today’s Insight of the Day: if things are going wrong, check and see what’s going on with your head.
In case you need something to help you remember, here:
Callbacks ‘n’ Sech
Today was a long day: class at 10:30 (with a smidgen of rehearsal afterwards); teaching at 1 PM; suspended meditation at 2; callback at 3:30 (ended a little past 6:30).
Class was … erm. Like, barre was great? And the rest of it was … yeaaah. Erm. I had issues. On the other hand, I did manage one not-very-good triple, and except for the points at which I actually screwed up, things looked okay.
All three members of my Ballet Girl Posse were in class, and two of them stayed after, so we ran through our choreography … and I actually learned all their names. YAY! So at least I’ve accomplished something today. BG was still around, so he ran us through our bit a couple of times, and we decided that we like fourth arabesque better for my bit of the first partnering piece (a series of supported fouettés).
I begged off the last ten minutes of the modern dance portion of the apprentice-teaching class because my legs were a bit angry at me and I was going to need them for the audition. I used the time to foam-roll the crap out of them.
During meditation, I fell asleep. Given that I am the world’s worst napper (seriously, I can normally only nap when I’ve been awake for at least 48 hours straight), that’s saying something. Evidently, I was pretty tired.
The callback turned out to be the highlight of the day. It was more like a dance-and-theater workshop than an audition—we did some partnering stuff, then learned a dance and performed it in groups, then played theater games and ran some sides. Honestly, it was a hell of a lot of fun with a great group of people (both judges and fellow auditionees), and if every audition was that much fun, I’d audition for everything.
It turns out that I know the guy who’s directing the production. I met him at a party (which happened to be at his house) and felt instantly very, very comfortable with him, which speaks very highly of him. Also: proof that my world is incredibly tiny, heh.
We’ll hear back in a week or so about roles and such. Fortunately, I have too much going on to have much time to chew my nails about it, though I don’t have class with BW on Thursday this week.
Regardless, BW gave me homework—jumping rope to improve my cardio as well as the usual Turns Homework and … erm. I’m supposed to be doing something else, too, I think? Fehhhhcccckkkk. I can’t remember. It’s in my notes somewhere.
Anyway. I will miss BW’s class this week, but I suspect my body will welcome the extra rest. The fitness is returning, but my body hates me so much right now.
Romeo & Juliet at Lexington Ballet
I’m pretty sure almost everyone in the English-speaking world can recite the synopsis of Romeo and Juliet by heart. Say it with me:
Boy meets girl.
Boy gets girl.
Everybody dies.
…And one does not, in general, expect grand departures from that script. I suppose you could do it Bourne’s Swan Lake-style:
Boy meets boy (who is, erm, also a swan?).
Things get complicated.
Everybody dies anyway.
…And then you could call it Romeo and Julio, and probably sell lots of tickets to the right audiences, but it would still be the same basic plot, because Shakespeare isn’t (arguably) the best-known playwright in the history of the English language for nothin’.
Anyway, regardless, I don’t really need to explain what happens. You can read the whole play for free on the internet (or watch any of countless film adaptations), and the ballet hews very closely to the play.
So! Lexington Ballet is a small, regional company that manages to do some pretty great stuff on a tiny little budget. Their core company comprises twelve dancers; corps roles are filled from the student company, and community dancers also take roles—C, my partner in crime from Summer Intensive, played both Lord Capulet and Friar Lawrence. He got to dance a swordfight, and y’all, I am so jelly.
Given that it’s a ballet based on a play, acting is of fairly central importance to any production of Romeo and Juliet—and both D and I were, in fact, pretty damned impressed with the calibre of acting on the part of the dancers.
First, I’d like to give a shout-out to everyone who died. Honestly, I found myself actually saying to D, “I don’t mean this ironically at all, but he’s really good at dying!”
In fact, it’s not easy to die convincingly on stage—especially when you’re Mercutio or Tybalt and you’ve just been dancing your brains out whilst trying not to actually murder anyone with your prop sword (yeah, they’re not live steel, but you know what they say about ballet—it’s all fun and games until someone loses an “I” … no, wait, that’s Scrabble; in ballet, it’s “eye”).
Everyone who died did a phenomenal job at it. Like, they died, and convincingly stayed dead without anyone being like, “Hurr, the corpses are breathing!” and remained convincingly limp and lifeless whilst they were poked, prodded, picked up, and occasionally danced with by the remainder of the cast. And, seriously, I intend no irony at all: I really was impressed.
Being dead is hard y’all. (At least, it is for living people. So far, there hasn’t really been much commentary from actual dead people on what it’s like for them.)
As Juliet, Ali Kish does a particularly impressive job of being Not Dead Yet and still dancing (but not appearing to dance, because we’re supposed to think she’s dead) a pas-de-deux with Jake Lowenstein as her grief-stricken Romeo in the final act. She also does a great job being Actually Dead.
Her ability to die convincingly, however, is not the greatest of Kish’s accomplishments.
Simply put, Juliet is a hard role to pull off. Not only does she demand the kind of skill required for any principal part, but she’s thirteen years old, and … well, there’s your problem.
Most of the time, actual thirteen-year-olds aren’t dancing the part of Juliet to Prokofiev’s masterful score. Instead, the role usually goes to someone a little older.
Not everyone, however, remembers what it was like to be thirteen—impetuous but unworldly, part child and part blossoming young woman. This can end badly in any number of ways. Let me count (a few of) them, in fact:
- Manic Pixie Juliet … I’m not sure I even need to explain this one. Which is good, because honestly I’m not even sure I can. Have you seen Elizabethtown? No? I know nobody agrees with me, but I’d say it’s actually worth a seeing at very least for the truly glorious funeral disaster. Anyway. Yeah. Manic Pixie Juliet is just, you know, not right.
- Why Are These Middle-Aged People Still Living At Home? Yes, so the noble single ladies didn’t generally go out on their own and make their way in the world of Shakespeare’s famous play. Still, when Juliet comes across as a middle-aged lady subject to her parents’ TOTALLY UNFAIR RULEZ!!! and marital hand-wringing, it feels sorta weird. You just want to be like, “Surely, at this point, she’s sensible enough to figure out that she could just settle for Prince What’s-His-Face and keep up her thing with Romeo on the side? Maybe even get them to, ahem, join forces? I mean, they’re both pretty cute.”
- Terrifying Lolita Juliet. This is another one I’m just going to put over here for you to parse as you will.
- Excessively Tragic Juliet. Yeah, Juliet is one of the great tragic roles of the Western canon … but she’s also THIRTEEN. Like, think about the thirteen-year-olds you know: they have real, legit life problems—sometimes really big ones—but they still get all squee over those really cute new earrings and whatevs. It is, in fact, entirely possible for Juliet to skew way, way too far into the I AM SO TRAGIC OMG territory. I mean, Emo hadn’t even been invented yet back then (or, well … I dunno; Ben Jonson’s “Song to Celia” [aka “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes”] is pretty freaking Emo, though also totes beautiful).
Kish is both a gifted dancer and a gifted actor, and she clearly remembers what it’s like to stand at that incredibly awkward cusp of young adulthood, when suddenly you’re of marriageable age and your parents are like YOU WILL MARRY THIS RANDOM DUDE NOW BECAUSE ALLIANCES (middle school, amiright?).
Okay, so maybe her own lived experiences was not quite that, but at any rate, she fully embodies the complexity of our teenage tragic heroine. Also, wow, holy 6:00 penché, Batperson. And dat cambré.
Ayako Hasebe Lloyd also knocks it out of the park as the Nurse, a role which demands that one first serve as comic relief and then as a sort of pin in the map to tragedy: things go south very visibly for the Nurse right about the time they begin to go south for everyone.
More importantly, in terms of character development, Hasebe Lloyd convincingly portrays the Nurse’s love and sympathy for her charge and her conflict at doing what she believes will make Juliet happiest. Her dancing, crisp and expressive, shifts fluidly from the lightly comic to the deeply moving.
Among the men, Lowenstein plays a very serviceable Romeo, attempting to make peace after his marriage on the down-low and struggling visibly and admirably with the aftermath of his hot-tempered slaying of Tybalt. He is a man caught up in the tides of fate and in the wreckage of his own impetuousity; he is also, unfortunately, not given as much room (maybe literally; the stage at Lexington Opera House is on the small side, which limits the grand allegro pyrotechnics) to develop that role as one might hope for, given his skill as a danseur.
In fact, this production really plays more as Juliet & Romeo—so much of the story happens in the ladies’ end zone. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: we get a window into the domestic struggles of the Capulet family, and exciting balletic swordfights are soundly balanced with touching balletic drama.
We see Romeo at his best in the famous balcony scene, lovingly rendered against a backdrop of LED stars: Artistic Director Luis Dominguez wisely leaves in many of the elements familiar to fans of ABT’s version of Romeo and Juliet and makes excellent use of Lowenstein’s considerable skill in partnering. Here, Lowenstein leaps with power and grace through Romeo’s fluid and joyful choreography; in the Love Dance pas de deux, he shines parterning a Juliet who is the personification of delight (and not even Mostly Dead yet).
However, outside of Romeo’s surprisingly-few scenes with Juliet, the men’s portion of the script largely takes place in town scenes that do double duty as balletic placing shots and exposition. There simply isn’t as much room for the men to become three-dimensional people (with the exception of Cal Lawton’s roles—as both Lord Capulet and Friar Lawrence, he is clearly and touchingly a man struggling with his own decisions).
For one thing, they have an unfortunate habit of murdering one-another, which doesn’t really leave them enough time to turn into well-rounded individuals. Don’t blame them, though—blame the Bard, who wrote the book, and Prokofiev, whose score favors domestic scenes and sword fights (and grand battement … I can’t hear the iconic “Dance of the Knights” without my legs wanting to jump straight into grand battement).
In the end, one rather feels for poor Paris, who falls for Juliet, has no idea what’s going on with her, and winds up dead (like everyone else) for his troubles. Littlejohn does much to bring this oft-overlooked role to life: honestly, I had rather forgotten about him prior to this, but Littlejohn’s portrayal of him as an apparently sweet-natured and mystified admirer (with a reasonable expectation of a wedding in the works) makes him memorable.
And lest I overlook the corps, the student company really did some lovely work as an assortment of townsfolk, ladies-in-waiting, knights, and gypsy girls. One never knows what one might get when a student company serves as the corps-de-ballet, but Lexington Ballet’s student company really has its act together.
Lastly: for parents concerned about the violence of this particular ballet, Lexington Ballet’s production (though still riddled with sword-fights and heavy on the Death and Dying) was one of the least violent versions I’ve seen. The version I saw as a small child involved the death of a little girl in a crowd scene quite early on; in this version, no one gets trampled.
However, it’s still a tragic story of star-crossed love, and if you take your kids to see it, you’ll be doing them (and everyone else) a favor by talking about the story (and the importance of tragedy in literature) first.
Oh, really lastly: the music is recorded, but it’s one of the best recordings I’ve heard of Prokofiev’s score (which can, in the wrong hands, be nigh unlistenable in spite of the fact that it’s a beautiful piece and a real masterwork).
Variations on a Theme
When I was fourteen, I read Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story for the first time. His potent image of all later loves as an elaboration on the theme of the first love; a “crab canon,” stuck with me—not so much because I agreed with it (I knew enough to know that I didn’t know anything about it), but because the language was so powerfully evocative.
Anyway, I still don’t know if I agree with White’s narrator about the nature of first love (honestly, it’s been a while since I last read A Boy’s Own Story; I’m due for a re-read). I can, however, say that it’s a pretty good description of ballet.
BW and I talked about this last night (while I walked in circles with my hands on my head, attempting to catch my breath, after the second round of the second petit allegro). As dancers, everything we do do is essentially an elaboration on one of a handful of basic themes.
I look at my ballet notes from a year ago, and sometimes they literally say exactly the same thing I wrote down the day before yesterday. The literal content doesn’t necessarily change much, but the meaning changes immensely.
Something you’ve been working on for a year can feel like a revelation when your brain suddenly fires up a proliferation of shiny, new synapses in just the right pattern. So you write it down—lift and rotate from under the hip—only to realize later that you had already written it down a million classes ago.
But back then, it didn’t bear the same freight. You hadn’t yet learned to feel the individual muscles of your deep rotators. You didn’t yet know how to isolate and activate your adductors to the same extent you can now. Rond de jambe en l’air meant, simultaneously, exactly what it means now and something completely different.
Which is to say that the goal never changes. The goal, always, is the perfect execution of technique; mastery coupled with musicality, with expression.
The image in your head remains the same, but your sense of how to achieve it evolves.
What was conscious a year ago is automatic now, 15o or so classes (and countless repetitions) down the line. What is conscious today, presumably, will be automatic a year (200 classes or more, because you take class more often now) from now.
I find myself returning to the idea that the bodies of dancers are supremely educated bodies: just as years of (good) academic schooling hones our abilities to analyze and reason and helps us learn to activate the fibers of our minds in powerful and subtle ways, years in the studio help us find muscles most people never notice and use them to create beauty.
Dancer’s bodies (and minds) become fluent in movement the way the minds of mathematicians are fluent in math. Just like mathematicians, we achieve our fluency through repetition; through exercises that awaken capacities latent within us until, suddenly, we achieve new understanding.
So we continue: nearly three years (and G-d alone knows how many tendus and pliés and ronds des jambes) into this adventure in rediscovery, I continue to discover anew the things that I thought I already understood.
This might be the most powerful ballet lesson of all: we never achieve perfection. The goalposts will always recede.
No matter how much we have learned, there’s still learning to be done. Ballet forces us to be honest and keeps us humble (well, sort of). When I’m 80, and I’ve done more tendus than there are particles of dust in the desert of the Great Basin, I still won’t know everything. I still won’t be perfect.
That’s a powerful thought for someone who is, by nature, a bit of an overconfident know-it-all and a relentless perfectionist.
Lastly: right now, this body of mine is still gaining ground. Ballet tells me that. I am stronger and fitter and faster and more flexible than I was a year ago.
Someday that will change. Ballet forces us to acknowledge that reality, too, and either to evolve with it or run from it.
I’m a jumper. For me, the ability to simply get off the ground is a G-d-given gift (though also the reason it’s bleeding hard to find trousers that fit). Age can be hard on jumpers: a day will come for every one of us in which we begin to feel our power slipping away.
I hope that day is still far off for me—but also that when it comes I’ll accept the lesson that comes with it: that there are subtler arts that age invites us to master; that the power and brilliance of youth are not the only or even the greatest power and brilliance.
These, too, are variations on a theme: one has little choice in the matter of aging (in short: we can age or we can die), but one can choose how to execute the movement that is age.
I hope that when I’m older, instead of being consumed by mourning for the loss of this power, this particular gift of flight, I’ll be able to be glad that I had it once and content to explore other, subtler gifts.
Either way, my ballet notes will probably still read, “Lift and rotate from under the hip*.”
*Or, if I’m really honest, “Litt und ritoti frim uder tte hip”
danseur ignoble 