Blog Archives
Danseur Ignoble: Returning the Last Books
Yesterday, I went to Margie’s class, where we had 3 new dancers (one complete newbie, another with a dance-team background, and a third with extensive ballet experience who hadn’t danced in a long time. Margiesuggested that I do Tawnee’s class, but my calf is still regaining strength, so I opted for a “rehab” day.
l think intermediate-class-plus-bike-commuting probably calls for light exercise (maybe a walk?) on the following day to reduce soreness. l should, come to think of it, treat myself like I’d treat a horse on the mend – follow an over-fences or dressage day with light walk-trot hacking, probably on trails, possibly in-hand (that means leading, rather than riding, the horse). I probably wouldn’t turn me out in a field with my buddies yet on days off – too much risk of horseplay (they call it that for a reason) and re-injury.
So while I need the workout l get in Brienne’s class, I should be smarter about days off, so I won’t be sore as long. l should also probably wear a compression sleeve.
After class I purchased the last of Denis’ anniversary gifts (the only one that cost more than $7) and returned ny last lUS library books – my first visit to campus as a graduate, but also final undergrad business. That felt weird.
Margie and Taunee keep gently nudging me towards Tawnee’s class, so it looks like
Essentials Forevar! plan night, in fact, not happen. I do think my calf could use another week or two, though.
That’s it for now. It’s raining at last.
Danseur Ignoble: Milestones
Today, I did Margie’s class. We began with the usual easy plies, combined tendus and degagees to save time, and then she changed it up and gave us a challenging fondu-et-rond de jambe combination and did our grand battement en releve. The fondu-et-rond de jambe combination also involved circular port des bras, which is finally starting to look like ballet instead of like some kind of terrible spasm.
During our floor stretch I still couldn’t get the right-side split all the way down. My right hamstring has been tight since I’ve been riding the bike a lot, and I think I just figured out why — as a long-time equestrian, I tend always to mount and dismount on the left, and as a result I also tend always to put the left foot down at stop signs, lights, and so forth — which means that the right leg does more than its fair share of the pushing-off-from-a-dead-stop work.
The left split, on the other hand, went right down, no sweat: boom, here I am on the floor. So, of course, Margie wandered over and gave me additional stretches (and reminded me to square my hips) — flat back forward; cambre back. I want to say I’ve probably done cambre back in a split before, but certainly not since I was, like, 13 or 14.
I also was able to pretty much pancake during center splits. That’s another thing I probably haven’t done since middle school (or, at the latest, high school, during my Modern Dance phase).
We also did turns from fifth at the barre, and a few of mine came out rather nicely.
Going across the floor, we did a really-rather-wicked balance exercise — two different versions, really.
Version A was what one might describe as a pique-passe-fondu walk (and here’s the hard part) without putting the working foot down and with control on the supporting leg. No hopping. No schlumpnig. Just one smooth motion: pique; working leg comes through passe towards tendu as the supporting leg melts into fondu. Repeat on opposite leg; no step in between. Easy enough on the flat foot; much harder on releve (we used coupe rather than passe en releve).
Version B, on the other hand, started with pique first arabesque, then came through attitude to passe to extend forward and provide the working leg for the next side (en releve the whole time, no steps between, no hopping, no schlumping). I was able to do this really well maybe twice, when (surprise, surprise) I stopped thinking so hard about my supporting leg.
Apparently, there’s no crying in baseball, but there’s no thinking in ballet.
Needless to say, I shall be practicing this at home! This is the first thing that’s caused me to say, “Wow, that’s hard” in the ballet studio. Not to say things are never challenging — but this is the first time something has been sufficiently challenging to warrant mentioning.
After class, Denis took me to a nearby thrift store, where I actually found three really, really nice shirts in my size. Huzzah! It is not particularly easy to find a size small or 14 – 14.5 mens’ dress shirt at a thrift store in this part of the country, let alone three really sharp ones in excellent condition.
I took a chance on one that I wasn’t sure about — a casual button-up with a large plaid pattern in mulberry, several browns, and a couple of other shades. I tried it on in the changing room, and was really surprised to find that I really like how it looks.
The others are both proper dress shirts, one in a crisp black poplin and the other in a French-blue stripe with French cuffs. I’ll see about finding some inexpensive cufflinks that suit it (my current pairs are red and purple, neither of which would be a great match for most occasions, though the red ones could work for Independence Day or Bastille Day :D). Come to think of it, silver (or stainless steel) would go nicely either either the blue shirt or the black one.
Hmmmmmmm.
Okay. That’s enough for now. I have to go sort out some web stuff, do some homeowork for the MOOC I’m taking, and otherwise attempt to be a responsible adult. Ha!
I’m working on it.
Danseur Ignoble: Intermediate Class Again
Made it through Brienne’s class by the skin of my teeth. The first (read: slow!) part of barre was good — graceful, fluid, combinations hanging together. The middle was mediocre — I haven’t done quick footwork in weeks, really (bonus: Margie’s class will seem easy on Friday! :D).
The last part — the slow, grueling, “I’m only doing this to you because I love you all so much” part, with all the fondues and développés was … Well, it could have been worse.
Heck, it has been worse. But it still made abundantly clear how much core strength I’ve lost and so forth. Time to get back on that . I got a specific correction about keeping my abs engaged o.O I was as swaybacked as a retired army mule (as Denis pointed out, back to sitting on the exercise ball!).
Going across the floor, I was fine to the right and … not so fine to the left. For whatever reason, I kept losing the combo going left. I did, however, toss out some nice turns (though no doubles today), as if I knew what I was doing 😉
I also discovered that when Brienne says, “Good!” to me, I panic and fall apart! Gotta work on that, too. I have been dancing too long to fall apart on a sauté arabesque, sauté passe, sauté arabesque, sauté passe, tombé, pas de bourrée, glissade, assemblée zig-zag combo.
All told, not a terrible showing for my first full intermediate class (correction:… since February). I expect to do better next week, and not be such a clenching, gripping, sweat-dropping idiot during fondue adagio.
That’s it for now.
Life: Stepping Onto The Stage
A little more than a year ago, I returned to the ballet studio after a long break from all forms of theatrical dance (note that I didn’t say all forms of dance, period: historically, every time an opportunity to own the floor has arisen, I’ve grabbed it by the horns and spun it like a top).
I didn’t see that as the Beginning of Something, because of course we almost never* spot the Beginnings in the ongoing string of serial novels that comprise our lifetimes, but that’s what it was: a Beginning.
It was a beginning that had been much-rehearsed and much-prepared-for, in a way.
I’d made a lot of changes in the three years prior: met the love of my life; figured out I was unhappy not just with my job, but with my entire career path; left a stable job with decent pay and fair opportunities for advancement; left the field in which I’d accrued all of my meaningful professional experience; returned to school; got married (another Beginning); finally started to get my head around the fact that bipolar disorder was a thing in my life whether I admitted it or not, so I’d better just admit it; etc.
I had been doing a lot of foundational work on myself. Returning to ballet was the outgrowth of that foundational work.
What I didn’t expect was the transformative effect of that return to the studio.
If you’d asked me before I returned to ballet what kind of dancer I expected to grow into, I probably would have pointed to the most fluid, most gender-bending member of the Ballets Trockaderos and said, “I’m going to be him.” If you’d asked whether and how I expected ballet to transform the rest of my life, I might have said, “I dunno, I’ll be more fit, I guess?”
Instead it turns out that, as a dancer, my style is traditionally masculine in the balletic sense (I’m trying to figure out how describe what I mean, here), and that ballet has sent its tentacles into every nook and cranny of my life. Surprise**?
I suppose I can’t be entirely surprised that ballet just kind of took over. That’s how I roll. I don’t do hobbies; I do consuming passions.
That said, I was quite surprised when ballet almost immediately eclipsed cycling. Somehow, I expected them to coexist. Instead, cycling has been recast in a subservient role — still wildly fun, still great for keeping up the cardio and getting from here to there, but let’s not overdo it, because it’s bad for the turnout. Casual centuries are still A Thing from time to time, but racing? Not so much.
Perhaps more genuinely surprising is the fact that I — perhaps not the most incendiary of flamers, but still sufficiently alight to say of my husband, “His steadiness allows me to be the airy-fairy faggot I was built to be” — feel so at home and “right” and comfortable as a danseur.
Historically, I’ve found it kind of awkward to be who and what I am: this boy who is not “straight acting” and has no desire to be, but who nonetheless doesn’t fit neatly into the “total flamer” box either.
I recognize that this is mainly because the limits we’ve drawn around that box are, well, silly — and, actually, quite sexist, in a “flamers are like girls and girls aren’t bold and athletic” kind of way. I’d like to see someone tell Misty Copeland or cycling great Marianne Vos that girls aren’t bold and athletic!
I can’t help but toss an eyeroll at the over-compensating “straight acting” types — not the ones who are just being themselves, but the ones who are trying too hard; the ones who make “masculinity” into some kind of cult object and wear its trappings like ill-fitting trousers while cloaking their own feminine or androgynous sides in shame. The problem is, I also don’t quite fit the mold at the opposite end of the spectrum … and, curiously, queer culture seems to leave precious little room for the recognition of anything else (okay, except bears, wolves, and otters — but I’m not any of those).
I am someone who by his nature likes categories and wants to belong to at least one, but I am also someone who appears to have been created specifically to defy categorization. I am eternally consigned to some kind of purple area, when all I want much of the time is to know whether I’m red or blue. Yea verily, this hath vexed me: I have really, really always wanted to fit somewhere. It never occurred to me that maybe part of what I missed about ballet was that I fit.
Ballet embraces a kind of bouyant masculine grace (which, by the way, doesn’t necessarily have to be constrained to male dancers; more on that in another post; G-d help me, I am backlogging myself with “…in another post” posts lately!) that is at once strictly counter-cultural in our modern age of male buffoonery and strictly classical in the sense that gentlemen were expected, Once Upon A Time, to know how to cut a caper or a rug and how to recognize a well-cut suit.
So I am learning to live into this kind of weird masculine grace that’s apparently a native part of my being — I say “weird” because I have, of course, thought of myself as male, but not particularly as an exemplar of any flavor of masculinity; that has, simply put, never been one of my aspirations. And, in so doing, I am learning to live into the whole of my being more thoroughly.
In short, I am feeling at once more whole and more real and developing a burgeoning sense of agency that threatens to topple my lifelong assumption that I would live out my days as a sort of domestic, dependent figure.
Scary stuff.
I say all this by way of a discovery: earlier today, I read a really cool article on Serious Eats called Friday Night Meatballs, immediately Had A Sad because it reflected something I’ve always wanted to do but felt I couldn’t because The House and Where Will People Park and Nobody Wants To Visit Our Neighborhood and Nobody Ever Comes To Our House, etc…
Then, immediately, I thought, “Well, why don’t I do something about that?”
Like, point the fourth, there? Of course nobody ever comes to our house. We never invite people to our house. Maybe if we invited people over on a regular basis, people would come to our house. Maybe that’s how all this works!
You guys, what the heck is happening to me?
It used to be that I would get to, “…but the house” or whatever and stop.
This isn’t to say that our current house is ever going to be ideal for entertaining. It’s not: but that’s life. I can’t practice big jumps in my basement, either, even though it’s the largest clear-span space in the house (our living room, meanwhile, is roughly one tour-jete across, if I keep it small). I make do: turns in the kitchen (because that, as we have established, is what kitchens are for), the occasional big jump in the living room, adagio in the basement. Balances everywhere, on every possible surface.
So packing ten people in for a sit-down meal in our dining room probably isn’t going to happen, at least not unless we get rid of the china cabinet and buy a different table. So what? Who cares? That’s why the human race invented this little thing called “the buffet.” It worked a treat for our family holiday shindig, and I’d like to do more of that: china and food on the dining room table, however many people arrayed on sofas and loveseats and chairs and giant ottomans in the living room. It works, and it actually feels rather nice and friendly.
I’m going to give this a spin, though first I’ll have to get off my butt and finish the Great Spring Break Cleaning.
I’m feeling this way about my life in general. You figure out what you’ve got and you go from there; there’s no point in worrying about what you don’t have right now. I don’t know if coming from a background in which I pretty much had everything made this harder or easier to learn — like, seriously, it seems like it should be easy to learn how to live on a much smaller income. You just spend less, right? But, in fact, it’s actually not all that intuitive when you’ve grown up never really having to worry about the expense of anything.
The difference is that when money really is no object, you can usually make things happen the way you envision them by just laying out some cash. When money is an object, you have to be a little more flexible and a little more creative. You have to learn how to work with what you’ve got.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
You take what you’ve got and you make the most of it, and while you’re doing that you figure out how to make the next step towards realizing the whole of your vision. Except in the most dire of circumstances, you cancel out the negative side of the equation (our dining room is definitely too small!) by recognizing a positive (but our living room is a really fun place for a group of people to hang out!). Then you figure out how to use that positive to meet your goal.
That’s the secret, apparently. That’s what keeps the here and now from seeming like nothing but a grinding wait ’til you get to where you want to be (now, if I can just figure out how to apply this kind of thinking to our bathroom, which I despise with the fire of a thousand suns, and to the fact that our kitchen feels like the most isolated room in our house…).
It’s like the principle of keeping Shabbos: from every Friday at sunset to every Saturday at sunset, the perfected kingdom of G-d is already present; sacred time descends upon and perfects our imperfect world. We invite the Perfect Someday to be here with us, now, and for a little while even our imperfect world is lifted up and perfected. Things still get spilled and little kids still burst into tears for mysterious reasons, but those things happen in the context of the Perfect Someday, and they too are sacred events.
In a way, Sarah Grey’s Friday Night Meatballs, with its recognition that the house is going to be messy and that you might be asked to read picture books, is its own Shabbos***. The world doesn’t stop being imperfect and chaotic (this isn’t to say that having to read picture books, by the way, is imperfect: it just probably isn’t what people think of when they think “Friday evening dinner party”), but for a little while, a different kind of perfection — a transcendent perfection — is invited in.
I’d like to live my life a little more like that. I realize that’s what I’ve been hunting, in my endless journey for a spiritual practice that answers the calling of my soul: something that lifts up the Holy Sparks in all things. I just didn’t realize that it’s been sitting right here in front of me all along. (Voila! Isn’t that always where it is, though?)
It really helps to have an Organizing Principle, of course: Zen, or Yiddishkeit, or Catholic mysticism, or Quaker discernment, or secular humanist discernment, or bike racing, or ballet. Some organizing force that helps you untangle the threads and gather them together and weave them into a tapestry (and to know with ease that there will be imperfections in the tapestry). For whatever reason, Bike Racing didn’t really work for me — perhaps because it wasn’t my Vocation, in the old-school sense of the word.
Ballet has become exactly that in my life. Ballet is, at the moment, a kind of functional Kashruth. It is the thing that helps me decide, and at the same time it’s a sacred aspiration. This is, I think, the heart of the ballet aphorism, “I can’t; I have class.” What we are saying when we say, “I can’t, I have class,” is that we serve a higher calling, and that calling comes before so many of life’s distractions****.
I am not living the kashruth of ballet perfectly, of course, because I am human and because I am just learning: but still it is working in my life, opening roads for wholeness that weren’t there before. It’s like pruning a tree, in a way: you prune away the suckers and the weak branches, and you are left with a strong and graceful tree that bears good fruit.
Ballet is the thing for which I am willing to shove everything else to the side, to make sacrifices that a year ago I wouldn’t have thought possible (Give up bike racing? Take any old job just so I can afford my training? Do :::shudder::: upper-body work?!).
I don’t think I would actually have bothered seeking out medication for my ADHD if it weren’t for ballet — but I realized that I need to get better at handling the other stuff in my life so I can keep dancing and so I can achieve my long-term goal of becoming a Dance-Movement Therapist, and I realized after a while that I wasn’t going to be able to do it without help.
I don’t know if, without ballet, I would have ever been as comfortable being who and what I am. I would have continued to feel weird, out of place, even in the outsider community that is the queer universe. I would have continued to hem and haw about having surgery for my gynecomastia, forever suspended between “living with this body limits me and makes me uncomfortable” and “the whole idea of surgery both makes Denis uncomfortable and reinforces the idea that there is only one right kind of male body.” I would have gone on not deciding until the accumulation of years rendered a decision for me. Ballet makes that decision easy: this is the thing I need to do to be able to move with freedom and strength. I can’t imagine regretting it, but I can absolutely imagine regretting not doing it.
Then again, that was the first bit of wisdom I learned from Denis: in the long run, you rarely regret what you do — instead, you regret what you don’t do.
So, yeah. I think I’m going to finish cleaning the house and try my own Friday Night Meatballs experiment, though maybe I’ll do something other than meatballs (but maybe not). We’ll figure out where to put people and where to put people’s cars and so forth (and if my friends come, they’ll probably come on bikes anyway).
I also think I’m going to keep working on moving forward, on stepping out onto this stage. Because, bizarrely, that’s what this all feels like: so much of my life, up until this point, has been rehearsal.
Now we step onto the stage. Now we take our place before the eyes of the world.
Now we begin to dance.
Danseur Ignoble: The Elephant in the Room — On (Not) Talking About Diet In Ballet
First, though, a quick question for my fellow bloggies:
How do you manage ideas? Like, when you come up with a good idea for a post, and you really want to write about it, but you don’t have time to address it just now, what do you do with it? Do you add it to a list? Start a new post, pop your idea in there, and save it as a draft?
In short, right now, I’ve got lots of ideas, but also a rather strangely large number of things to accomplish, and I’m not sure I’ve hit on a good idea-management strategy. Right now, I seem to be using the “start a draft” approach, but I’m not sure whether that’s wise. For whatever reason, my list of unfinished drafts actually sort of fills me with dread. Go figure.
~~~~~
Okay, now for the sensitive stuff.
In the Default World, as it were, there’s an ongoing conversation about body size and weight, about food as a source of pleasure and as a source of fuel — and while it’s still largely dominated by voices of what one might imagine as the Body Establishment, we’re starting to hear a lot more from other corners — for example, from fat activists like Ragen Chastain at Dances with Fat and Kath at Fat Heffalump, from members of the medical community who are saying, “Hold on, maybe we’re looking at the wrong parameter; maybe we can’t directly measure health by measuring body size,” and even from plain old regular people who are tired of all the hoopla and just want to figure out how to enjoy their lives and be as happy and healthy as they can.
However, in the Ballet World, we’re still not really talking about it much, and we’re really, really not talking about food.
I should stipulate: professional companies tend to have advisors that address these issues, as do pre-pro schools. However, those of us in the Adult Amateur Ballet Community At Large, the area — especially where diet is concerned — is still largely Verboten. Like, we all acknowledge that, in ballet, Body Size is A Thing, but we also don’t want to give anyone a complex about it; meanwhile, we’re terrified that any specific thoughts we share about eating will spawn a rash of anorexia diagnoses.
We’re all very aware of some of the problems that can and do arise around the question of weight in the Ballet World. We’re all very aware that, for whatever reason, the modern Western world doesn’t beget too many people who fit the current Classical Ballet Body Type mold. We’re all very aware of the temptation to use drastic means to squeeze into that mold. We’re all afraid of accidentally pushing vulnerable people over the line and into those drastic means.
And yet, as a result, we also find it difficult to discuss the very measures that might, for a great many of us, act as prophylaxis against resorting to drastic measures: we find it difficult to discuss fueling strategies, difficult to discuss the challenges that different body types bring to the studio or the stage (and I’d argue that there are unique challenges associated with almost any body type, including the one currently enshrined as the Classical Ballet Ideal), and difficult to discuss how to cope with those challenges (whether they be joint strain, risk of osteoporosis, or just possessing a set of knobtastic knees that sometimes seem like they won’t get out of the freaking way — oh, wait, I might be projecting, there).
I suspect that we’ve developed a sense that acknowledging the challenges unique to a given body type sort of delegitimizes that body type as a vehicle for dance. There are too many stories out there of people being told they should simply quit dance because they weren’t blessed with the right body for it — people who loved dancing, who wanted to keep dancing, but who too often weren’t able to find a place where they could continue.
We’re all afraid, I think, of touching those nerves. For adults, ballet is already a counter-cultural pursuit. It’s neither “useful” in the purely-practical “this is going to make me lots of money” sense (though, in fact, ballet offers immense health benefits for dancers of any shape), nor is it casual (with rare exceptions). It tends to turn into a life-consuming passion, one for which non-dancers kind of look at us askance. Somehow, to them, watching TV for ten hours a week doesn’t seem strange, but dancing for ten hours a week does.
To be fair, part of the argument in favor of TV is that you can do it at home with your family at relatively little expense — I get that. But the long and short of it is that, as adult dancers, a lot of us already feel like we’re always fighting an uphill battle to prove to the universe that we have a right to belly up to the barre.
When we start addressing some of the problems of body type, we’re already coming from a defensive posture. We’re already fighting against a societal claim of illegitimacy — one that comes from both outside the studio and sometimes from within, as well.
On one hand, from the outside, we get the message that we have no business dancing at our age, whether that age is 19 or 95, unless we’re professionals. On the other, from the inside, sometimes we get the whole “you’re not a real dancer” thing — especially if we’re truly raw beginners with absolutely no experience or if we diverge too widely from the standard Classical Ballet Body Type. This makes the whole idea of saying, “Hey, I have this body type, and I’ve noticed that people with my body type have this specific challenge in the studio…” exceedingly uncomfortable. It’s just a shade too close to that old message, “People who are built like me shouldn’t dance.”
~
Bike racing shares a few characteristics with ballet.
First, if you do it as a hobby, people think you’re nuts. To be fair, this is a label that most serious bike racers pretty much embrace publicly in a way that amateur dancers often don’t (though we do, within the confines of the Ballet World, acknowldge at regular intervals that We’re All Mad Here).
I suspect that, in the US at least, that particular flavor of Crazy is more broadly accepted if it involves competitive sports. While cycling isn’t as warmly embraced in the US as it is in much of the world at large, it’s still clearly a competitive sport, one with well-defined competition opportunities for people of all ages (and one in which people in the higher age brackets are often formidable competitors). Nonetheless, cycling as a sport is still fringe-y enough in the US that people are shocked to learn that you spend twenty hours a week like, you know, riding a bicycle? And you don’t get paid for it?
A few years ago, people felt similarly awkward around amateur MMA or Muay Thai enthusiasts (I know, because I was one at the time; I loved Muay Thai and wouldn’t mind taking it up again, if the day were only, like, six hours longer); now that everyone’s doing P90x (which seems to be somehow loosely associated with the world of combat sports), tough mudders, and so forth, a fanatical embrace of combat sports has gained a kind of legitimacy.
It doesn’t hurt that it’s something you do in a community: we learn MMA and Muay Thai skills in classes at organized schools, and the best part is that we can usually bring our spouses and kids along for their own classes. Like cycling, meanwhile, combat sports also offers plenty of competition opportunity for adult amateurs. Sure, it’s expensive and time-consuming: but you can win, like, a trophy or a belt buckle or something! To the American mind, that kind of makes it all make sense, I suspect.
Meanwhile, ballet is fringe-y without offering any overarching structure by which adult amateurs can measure our achievements. We don’t have our own Prix de LAAusanne (see what I did there? AA for Adult Amateur?). We don’t even have the equivalent of the weird competition-dance circuit that those of us in the High Art World of Ballet (myself included) kind of love to hate. We might walk away from our hours in the studio with exceptional poise and grace, and sometimes even with very lean and fluid bodies — but we don’t get “ripped” in the way that people who go to the gym and lift weights for fun do.
And, just like in cycling, we spend what the rest of the world perceives as an inordinate amount of time in the studio. Ballet is a harsh mistress, but we love her so. That’s suspiciously close to the way cycling aficionados tend to describe their bikes.
Second, cycling culture has powerful, deeply-ingrained standards about body type. Professional cylicsts, like professional dancers, tend to be extremely lean. Amateur cyclists — racers especially, but also those who don’t race — are subject to a sort of inherited pressure to be lean.
Seriously, in no other American sub-culture are you likely to hear someone kvetching about his arms being too muscular. The demands of training at anything beyond the entry-level both select for and produce lean bodies; in very competitive areas, even the most rank Cat 5 amateurs tend to be far leaner than their non-cyclist peers (seriously; hit up a cyclocross race in the freakishly competitive Ohio Valley Cyclocross Series, and you’ll see what I mean).
Combat sports enthusiasts, meanwhile, don’t have quite the same problem: yes, weight is a legitimate concern (since competitions are organized by weight category), but the hard-and-fast upper limits are still very much in line with people of average build, and how your body’s shaped matters a whole lot less in the gym than how much ass you can kick with the body in question. Or, at least, that was my experience.
Meanwhile, competitive bike racers really are kind of expected to cap out at around 170 – 180 pounds, and the selection pressures only increase as you progress through the ranks. A lot of high-end racing equipment isn’t designed to handle riders heavier than that. The idea is that the lighter the total weight of bike, rider, water bottles, kit, and whatever else you might need to have on hand, the easier your job as a racing cyclist will be. Moreover, the slighter you are, the less wind resistance you’re going to create — and simply pushing through the air is actually where you do the vast majority of your work as a cyclist.
Third, bike racing culture is a niche culture within a niche culture: just as there’s dance culture, and then there’s ballet culture, so there’s cyclist culture, and then within it, racer culture. A lot of non-racing cyclists think all racers are arrogant, jerk-faced wankers (to be fair, some racers regard all randonneurs as grade-A weirdopaths and all commuters as dirt); some non-ballet dancers seem to think all ballet dancers are uptight, arrogant, jerk-faced wankers (to be fair, some ballet dancers regard those ballroom-dance types as plebian socializers and all modern-dance aficionados as wannabes whose technique couldn’t cut it in ballet).
In short, to the outside world, both amateur bike racers and amateur dancers are the Weird of Weirds. You’re not just weird, you’re an especially devoted, obsessive flavor of weird that owns a lot of suspiciously fancy stuff and uses a lot of foreign words. Mon dieu!
Lastly, both cycling and ballet share high energy demands and a history of disordered relationships with food.
The major difference, as far as I’ve seen, is that bike racing culture is really pretty free to discuss food and diet, and does so constantly, sometimes in nauseating detail. There is, perhaps, less sense of illegitimacy imposed upon individual riders — and, as such, less risk of being cast out of the circle if one admits that one is a few pounds (or even many pounds) heavier than one would like to be, or that one resents one’s muscular arms. The discussion of how best to fuel for training, for performance, for recovery, for the off-season, for the pre-ride, for the post-ride — that discussion never, ever, ever, ever ends. Food may be the only thing cyclists talk about more often than bikes.
Dancers, meanwhile, also need to think about how best to fuel their bodies — but forums for discussing how to do so are almost impossible to find. Some of the best online communities for adult amateur dancers have explicit rules against talking about diet, for fear that the discussions in question will devolve into “How To Starve Yourself And Still Keep Dancing.” The standard answer is more or less, “Eat a balanced diet and bring your specific concerns to your health-care providers.”
That’s a very legitimate approach, I think, to dealing with nutritional questions from adolescents in pre-pro programs. In short, the nutritional needs of growing dancers are immensely complex, and most of us have no business trying to advice them; likewise, adolescent dancers are just as subject to the immense pressures to maintain the Classical Ideal as adult dancers, but generally less-equipped to cope with those pressures. They are more likely to lack the resources and experience to make well-informed decisions about whose advice to follow; they may not yet have acquired the critical-thinking skills that will later help them distinguish between a sustainable plan for healthy eating and what amounts to a quack diet, but they are more likely to have people in their lives to help them with these decisions.
Meanwhile, amateur adult dancers (who my very unscientific analysis suggests tend to be self-possessed individuals with pretty good minds) are less likely to have people in their immediate lives who have both the time and expertise to offer any kind of insight into fueling their bodies, but are more likely to have critical thinking skills to help them distinguish between sound fueling strategies and wacky starvation plans.
Perhaps part of the problem is that ballet is an art first, an athletic endeavour second. As an erstwhile half-baked bike racer, I’d go so far as to say that bike racing is an art, but I’d be remiss if I failed to state plainly that it’s an athletic endeavour first. Dancers are encouraged to think of themselves as artists; cyclists as athletes.
Athletes are free to regard their bodies as machines and to think about them accordingly.
Artists? Well, maybe not so much. We are invited to transcend the limitations of our mortal frames: but we are not explicitly invited to examine those limitations, especially not as adult amateurs who must already combat the idea that we’re not “real dancers,” and therefore not “real artists.”
Perhaps it follows from there that we can’t freely discuss what is, ultimately, an immensely important topic: what kind of fueling strategy will help us feel the best in the studio, on the stage (if we’re so lucky), or after class? What works? What doesn’t work? What works for some, but not others? Flatly put, how much should we be eating, anyway, when we’re dancing six or ten or sixteen hours each week?
Inevitably, some of us will want to trim down a bit; others might want to build some muscle or fill out our curves. It would be good if we could talk to each-other about these things: in part because sometimes it’s that very possibility that allows people who are slipping in to the realm of Drastic Means — of disordered eating — to get help before the problem gets out of hand.
It would be good to know that there was a forum where we could ask what might seem like stupid food questions (“Okay, I just did two hours of class. It really is okay for me to have an ice cream cone, right?”) and ask about other dancers’ strategies (“Guys, do you find you get less sore if you eat after class?”) or even to figure out who to talk to about specific questions that might need input from a professional (“As a male dancer who spends two hours a day dancing and does a fair bit of throwing other dancers around, who do I ask about making sure I’m getting enough protein? Dietitian? Family doc? Personal trainer? Wizard?”).
One of the strengths of the bike-racing community is the way it handles questions like these. There’s a huge aggregated knowledge-base out there pertaining to fueling strategies for racers at all levels, and bike racers are free to talk about it all they want. They even talk about eating disorders (which kind of makes sense in a sport that has itself more than once been described as “a very expensive eating disorder”) and reach out to help members of the community who struggle.
I think we, as adult amateur dancers, are mature and wise enough to do that for each-other. True, dance-specific nutritional strategies are less broadly-studied than sport-specific nutritional strategies — but a lot of us in the Adult Amateur Ballet World are pretty good researchers. We are capable of putting our peer-reviewed journals where our mouths are (though, guys, just so you know: there are better fueling strategies than eating peer-reviewed journals, and besides, they tend to be kinda dry and dense).
The question is, where do we start talking about this, and how?
Danseur Ignoble: Summer Intensive — It’s Not Too Late! (Maybe.)
If you’re a dancer, an adult (or adult-esque … or, at any rate, at least 18 years old), and you’ve always wanted to do a Summer Intensive but have never had the chance, take heart! A small but slowly growing cadre of programs offer SI experiences for you! (And, I hope, for me!)
While this year is a non-starter for me (I’m scheduling a surgery over the summer, and by the time I’m recovered, we’ll be off to Burning Man, where I’m apparently running what we’ll call a “Summer Relaxive” — I’ll cover that in its own post), I’m planning to attend and review as many of these as I can in coming years. For now, though, if you have some vacation time coming your way and haven’t already made plans, here are a couple of links to get you started.
These programs can fill up fast, but you might still have time to grab a spot.
I’ll continue to update this list as I find reputable programs.
Summer Intensives for Adult Dancers
Boston Ballet
When: August 3 – 14
Where: Boston, MA
Duration: 2 Weeks
Schedule: Evenings, 6:30 – 9 PM
Housing: Make your own arrangements
Tuition: Unknown; will try to find out
Performance Opportunities: Unknown; will try to find out
Boston Ballet’s program could be a great option for anyone who wants to combine a ballet camp experience with a New England vacation adventure. Since classes take place in the evening, you’ll have the daytime hours free to explore historic Boston and the surrounding area. This might make Boston Ballet’s program a good fit for dancers who need to combine ballet camp with a family trip.
Boston Ballet’s Program would also be a great choice for people who live in the Boston metro, of course.
Pros:
Affiliated with an established company with a strong pre-pro school.
Hours of instruction allow dancers to combine vacation adventures with Intensive ballet training.
Two weeks’ practice, 2.5 hours per day, offers an excellent opportunity to create lasting improvements in technique
Cons:
You must make your own housing arrangements.
Two weeks in Boston could theoretically be expensive!
Not everyone will be able to take two whole weeks off in a row.
Sun King Dance
When: Varies
Where: Richmond, VA; Saratoga, NY; Vancouver, WA; Waldorf, MD
Duration: 5 – 7 Days
Schedule: Days, approximately 9 AM – 6 PM; varies with individual program and track chosen
Housing: Sun King makes group-rate arrangements with nearby hotels and provides roommate-matching
Tuition: $730 – $1025; varies by program and track; lunch included. Housing not included.
Performance Opportunities: Yes, except Waldorf program
Sun King is the Grand Matriarch of adult summer intensives.
Now in its fourteenth (fifteenth?) year, Sun King has built an excellent reputation and offers several different programs. Dancers can choose short-day, all-ballet, or full-day tracks. The short-day options offer a few more free hours in the afternoon for dancers who might like to get out and explore, while the full-day option adds restorative sessions and additional stretch classes.
Curriculum includes a number of elements that adult dancers often miss out on, like character dance, pas de deux (my tablet’s autocorrupt really wants this to be “pas de derp!”) , and men’s technique.
Perks include rate agreements with local hotels, roommate-matching (optional; you can room solo if you wish), lunch included with tuition, and the real highlight for me — a chance to perform (or, at the Waldorf program, a chance to see a world-class performance).
Pros
Well-established program with an excellent reputation
Roommate-matching makes housing more affordable
Lunch included (dancers gotta eat!)
Performance opportunity!
Cons
Not as family-trip friendly (you can bring your non-dancers, but they’ll have to fend for themselves!)
Only one week long (le sigh!)
Spaces are limited, so you need to register early!
Danseur Ignoble: Music for Dancers, Music for Movies
When my sister and I were very small, our parents bought a copy of the London Symphony Orchestra’s seminal recording of Holst’s The Planets, recorded under the masterful baton of Sir Colin Davis. We immediately established it as our preferred improvisational dance music: so much so that we regarded it as ours, not as theirs.
When it came with us to Mom’s new house after the divorce, the capacious living room allowed us the freedom to improvise wildly theatrical “performances,” most of which took place when Mom was out. We would dance our way through the whole thing, incorporating every shred of ballet training we had (and making up the rest from whole cloth).
There was something in that music that really spoke to us. It was magic: old, wild magic.
Imagine, then, my shock and dismay when I hit up Prime Music for the recording and found the old, wild magic gone!
I found myself questioning my musical memory (which is very, very accurate). Had my child’s brain imagined the expression, the passion? Had the playing always been this, well, bland? Where were the dynamics, the shifts in tempo that lent such expressive elan to the LSO’s work?
And then “Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity” came on, and I got it: This wasn’t the same recording. Couldn’t be.
And, in fact, I was right: in my late-evening fumblings, I’d tapped the wrong album — the recording I had been listening to was produced as a movie soundtrack (it appeared right next to the London rendition on my tablet’s screen; evidently, my aim was untrue).
Of course!
It all made sense. Movie soundtracks, by necessity, can’t always be as expressive as the London rendition. They’d upstage the action on screen if they were. Their purpose is to help to move the story along without getting in the way of the words spoken by the actors (and to surge, when called upon, in sorrow or triumph — or in order to facilitate a montage).
I stopped the recording, fired up the London version: yes, there it was, in all its glory, exactly as I remembered it. Dynamics, tempi, and all.
There’s a lot of dance implicit in that music — and that’s missing from the blander soundtrack rendition.
The London recording is music for dancers (well, really, for musicians, but it comes out the same in the final analysis): it can afford to be expressive. Dancers feed on that.
It can afford to pay with tempi, with fermatae, with caesurae (if you’re not a musician, those are all modes of expression related to timing); it can afford to swell through mighty crescendi and ebb through delicate diminuendi. Like orchestral music, dance is more interesting when the timing is dynamic; dancers, meanwhile, enjoy a symbiotic relationship with changes in volume dynamics.
Dance performance depends on counting, of course, and technique — but, in the end, the dancer’s ability to feel and interpret music is what makes or breaks a performance. We can forgive the cavalier for not quite making that lift if we believe him; Odile can miss a few fouettées if she makes us believe.
That belief is founded in expression.
Holst isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (who is?) — but he wrote dignified, playful, magnificent music; the kind that, in the hands of a good orchestra, lays a great foundation for ballet. It’s voluble; it’s expressive.
In the end, that and a good beat are what most of us look for in music for any kind of dancing. Maybe not so much in music for movies — but for a ballet, an East Coast swing, or even just a good old-fashioned booty shake, that’s it.
To borrow a phrase from a movie: Kinda makes ya feel like riverdancin’.
Meds: The New Frontier…? (This One Is Loooong. Also: Explicit Lyrics Warning, Because Apparently I Haz A Feelz)
Yesterday, after an entire adventure that should’ve had its own laugh track, I finally picked up my new (generic) Adderall* prescription. As I said to WeDoBallet, it sometimes seems like they specifically design the ADHD-Rx pickup process to be as difficult as possible for people with ADHD!
Yeah, my imagination is a weird place to live.
Getting back on meds for ADHD has been a tough decision for me — less because I wanted to prove I Can Do It My Own Self! (seriously, I really kind of hit rock bottom with that once I started dancing again; more on that in a sec) than because I’m an old-fashioned Yankee, and we’re all about Independence and Self-Reliance (and also about frugally recycling our neighbors’ discarded Windsor chairs) and it’s just a knee-jerk habit. It persists long after we realize it’s not rational.
Also a little bit because there’s a risk of ADHD meds (which are stimulants) kicking off manic episodes and because I have a history of anorexia and I wasn’t sure I trusted myself (more on those in a sec, too). And also, also because I’m just plain paranoid about meds. I’ve had bad, bad experiences with side effects, you guys.
WRT mania: I have a really good doctor, Dr. B: I feel like I can talk to her, she “gets” me, etc. She’s been Denis’ doc for years, and I’ve been seeing her since 201…3? I think? Anyway, for a while.
I started seeing Dr. B during my most recent IM’MA GO TO MED SCHOOL AND SAVE DA WORLD! phase, and she knows that I know what I’m about (and also knows when I don’t know what I’m about but think I do), so we have a really good working relationship.
She also knows that I know how to do research and have access to scads of peer-reviewed research resources through school**, so she expects me to come in well-briefed on everything and acts accordingly. She also doesn’t freak out when I, say, stop taking a daily allergy medication and switch to only taking it on the days I need it the most: in short, she trusts me to generally make pretty good decisions, and knows Denis will steer me right if I don’t.
Likewise, Dr. B hasn’t steered me wrong yet in terms of medication options. So, basically, I trust her to make sound calls when prescribing. She’s starting me off at an Adderall dose that’s on the lower end of the middle of the dosage spectrum. I’m cool with that.
Adderall IR, 10 mg.
…Mostly because I figured a post this long could use some pictures, and I couldn’t come up with an excuse to put a picture of Sergei Polunin or David Hallberg here.
Which brings me to the bit about mania: stimulants can tip off manic episodes in people with bipolar disorder.
Look, a header!
Mania
The whole stimulants-kicking-off-manic-episodes thing has certainly happened to me, though normally it happens as a result of a sort of insomnia cascade effect, which goes like this:
- I decide to chug a little coffee or Coke Zero to help me focus on something (or just because I’m out for dinner; I’m dumb like that)
- The focusing effect wears off too quickly so I chug a little more.
- Later I can’t sleep because my brain won’t STFU, but I still have to get up in the morning, so I wind up sleeping for 2 or 4 hours or whatever.
- The next day I have to function (seriously, if you think I’m distractible and impulsive on a normal day, you should see me when I’m sleep-deprived! … so I suck down more caffeine.
- Then I can’t sleep again.
- The next day, EVEN MOAR CAFFEINE!!!
…and then BOOM! I’m in ManicLand, because (for me) lack of sleep is like an express train to Electric City.
So I was worried about that, but it Dr. B prescribed the short-acting version of Adderall, which should help reduce the likelihood of sleep disturbances.
For what it’s worth, this might be an upside of the whole Insurance Disaster related to acquiring my meds.
Here’s how that went down:
First, Dr. B prescribed Concerta, a long-acting methylphenidate formulation.
For whatever reason, my insurance plan only covers short-acting methylphenidate. You have to take it, like, four times a day.
Dr. B and I agreed that four pills per day is probably more than I can remember to take (and definitely more than I want to carry around with me). Likewise, a longer-acting agent is less likely to wear off just when I need it.
I hunted through Humana’s formulary to see what was covered, and it turns out that Adderall is, and that the generic form — while shorter-acting — is only $20/month (the longer-acting form is still under patent, and thus would run me $200/month for the first three months).
Dr. B felt that this would be a reasonable choice, and we swapped out the prescriptions (further hilarity ensued as I learned that my local CVS pharmacy doesn’t keep my prescription in stock, though — thankfully — the one near ballet class does).
At this juncture, I’m thinking that the short-acting version might actually be a better fit for me: I’ll still only have to take it twice per day, and I suspect it will be less likely to lead to insomnia … which, in turn, will reduce the likelihood of going Full Manic Jacket or what have you.
Likewise, while it’s called “instant release,” the effective half-life is much longer than that of caffeine — so I won’t be constantly topping-up over the course of the day (though I will either have to get used to drinking plain water at restaurants that don’t have seltzer/soda water/club soda — I like plain, still water fine, but not so much with food). In short, I will be adding a lot less stimulants to my system and doing so in a way that will be more even-handed and consistent, which should help ward off the danger of the manic spiral.
Obviously, careful symptom-monitoring is still called for, especially since I really can’t take most of the mood stabilizers currently on the market (that’s a post for another time). I’m willing to try one of the newer ones if push comes to shove, but given my history of serious side-effects, I’m really hoping it won’t. Fortunately, Denis is an exceptional spouse — very able to help me monitor my moods, and both willing and able to notify me when I’m heading for a derailment.
So, in short, with good monitoring and some help from Denis, I’m actually pretty optimistic about avoiding Adderall-induced mania.
I am, however, a touch more worried about (oh, look, another header!)…
Anorexia
I don’t talk about my history with anorexia all that often. There are any number of reasons for that: it’s sort of a Forbidden Topic for dancers; it’s an ongoing struggle that I’m not sure will ever end; sometimes it’s just One More Thing***. I mention it in passing from time to time, usually when I’m touching on points about what it’s like to have lived all over the BMI spectrum. But I rarely discuss it depth.
I guess the other thing about anorexia is that it doesn’t stay contained. It touches every single corner of my life, and sometimes that frankly pisses me off.
And, then, there’s the fact that I’ve had good treatment and I largely have the behavioral end of things basically under control (I don’t starve myself anymore, generally speaking, though I do still do some of the other behavioral things that are associated with anorexia. It’s been a long time since my BMI was <18.
None of this means that the thought process is gone. It just means that I have tools to fight it.
Ballet, curiously enough, is one of those tools — and yet, at the same time, it’s a complicating factor.
On one hand, you can starve yourself and dance — but not for very long, and especially not as a male dancer who is expected to command explosive jumps and sooner or later pick up other dancers and haul them around and stuff. You can only perform so long before your body just says, “Fuck you, no.”
On the other hand, as a dancer, you spend a lot of time looking at yourself in mirrors, and a lot of time looking at other dancers. Even if you don’t already have serious body-image problems, you’re going to wind up thinking about your body, comparing it other bodies, and so forth. If you do have serious body-image problems, chances are good that sometimes that’s going to exacerbate them.
I’m walking a fine line, right now, between performance and obsession. In short, my leg muscles are pretty hypertrophic, so extra fat on my legs can interfere; likewise, while my legs are very capable of adapting to the load required of them, weighing less makes their job easier — it’s easier to launch 160 pounds than it was to launch 174, which means higher, cleaner jumps****.
The thoughts that could lead to excessive restriction are still there. Fortunately, dancing is hungry work; so is cycling. I’ve pretty much managed to stay on top of maintaining a balance, but there’s a part of me that wants to obsess, that wants to restrict.
There’s a voice in my brain that argues against the rational, sane one that tells me to eat enough to sustain my strength and so forth; that voice still tells me I’m weak and undisciplined when I don’t do all the behavioral stuff I used to do when I was surviving on 600 calories a day (which was my target for several months when I was 19) and you could count every rib and vertebra in my body.
Seriously, looking like this does not help you dance better.
Source: This file comes from Wellcome Images, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom. Licensed under Creative Commons 4.0.
Here’s the thing: stimulants are appetite-killers, and I’m a tad concerned that it’s going to be too easy to take advantage of that. Like, “Oh, I’m not hungry, I don’t really have to eat.”
Denis doesn’t think I’ll fall prey to that: he trusts me to be rational about it and remain cognizant of the fact that ballet requires fuel.
I hope he’s right.
I think the problem is subtler than that, because I know myself pretty well. In the past, my pursuits always required fuel: but I would do this thing where I would figure up what the daily caloric requirements were, then shave it back a little, then (when, inevitably, my body didn’t immediately implode) I’d shave it back a little more, and so forth. It was an insidious process.
I realize that by saying all this I’m kind of building a framework for letting myself off the hook if this does go down: but I’m also making an effort to be frank about this and sort of keep it in front of my own face.
Like, I’m saying, “I know this is a Thing. I know I need to pay attention to it.”
And, honestly, I’ve figured out at this point that between dancing, school, my household responsibilities, and work, I really, really do need help. My coping mechanisms are awesome, but they only let me handle a very limited amount of responsibility at a time — and that’s kind of how I got here.
(Look, one more header!)
About Hitting The Bottom
I’m gonna go ahead and admit it: I’ve trotted out my ADHD high horse once or twice in the past (though not in a long time).
I struggled unsuccessfully through most of my primary and secondary education, then I figured out how to be a good student in the last two years of high school. (I’ve written a bit about this before.)
Somehow, I thought that meant I had ADHD licked: like, I had it all figured out.
Never mind that once I left home, unless I was living alone in an environment I could completely control, my house was always in chaos. Never mind that I had terrible trouble making appointments and dealing with the vagaries of Grown-Up Life. Never mind that I couldn’t handle having more than three or four bills. Never mind that planning things like shopping and budgets was, like, completely beyond me, or that I would completely lose all the important stuff I needed to keep track of (wallet, keys, phone) if I didn’t set it down in Exactly. The. Same. Place. every time I came home.
I was able to remain in denial pretty well because I did fine when I lived alone and lived very simply — but that’s the thing. When I lived alone, I could choose to live as simply as I wanted — so I had almost no furniture, minimal clothing, minimal dishes, and so forth. I had only one income stream.
I even kept the bills to a minimum — I had one credit card for things that might require such a thing, and other than that it was just rent (which, happily, included water), gas/electric, a pre-paid phone, and cable internet (but not cable TV). My ideal apartment would’ve included all utilities in the rent, just to make things even simpler. I used cash for most purchases, so I was able to track my finances in my head: I just kept a running total, subtracting as needed, and checked my balance online once a day to make sure I was on track.
Grocery shopping for myself was easy: I know what I like, and I don’t mind eating the same thing day after day. $50 was more than enough to feed me very well for a week, and (unless I felt like going on a shopping adventure) I could do my marketing on the way home from work.
Once a week, I’d treat myself to a dinner out, and going home was always nice because my apartment was always impeccable. When you live alone, you don’t watch TV, and you don’t have a lot of furniture to navigate around, it’s actually pretty fun to sweep and mop and so forth. I didn’t have any carpet or a lawn to worry about. I did have a nice, deep bath tub and my own water heater so I could read in the bath all I wanted.
All of that made it possible for me to manage. It was actually a really nice way to live, and it’s totally how I’d choose to live now if the choice was mine alone — but living with other people, even one other much-adored person, really complicates things unless that person is willing to live the same way.
Predictably, as someone who needs to live an incredibly minimalist lifestyle in order to maintain, well, order, I married a self-professed slob with mild hoarding tendencies and complicated finances (as a self-employed healthcare professional, he has a zillion income streams; you guys, that turns budgeting into a straight-up nightmare). Said self-professed slob had also already been living in the same house for twenty years, so he’d had time to accrue lots of stuff.
Suddenly, there were tchotchkes, nicknacks, and bills (oh, my!). Turns out I hate tchotchkes, and I really hate having to move them to clean around them. But it would take me a while to figure that out.
In my naievete, I offered to take over managing the finances, because Denis hated doing it. I also naively assumed that because I’d been great at managing my apartment by myself, I’d be great at managing the housekeeping around here.
Um, oops?
It turns out that clutter fills me with nerve-shattering despair. It also turns out that I find it distracting as hell. It turns out that people with ADHD have trouble tidying up after self-professed slobs. It turns out that I have trouble putting stuff away when I have to move other stuff to do so, partly because WTF, but also partly because that involves more working-memory resources than I normally have for that kind of thing.
In short, it turns out that I’m, like, horrible at everything I signed up for.
And then I added school.
There was chaos. The bills got paid on time, the finances got reconciled (eventually), and the house stayed … well, sanitary, more or less, and would get de-cluttered a couple times each semester.
And then I added ballet.
And then I stepped up the ballet schedule.
And then everything went to hell in a hack (though I was much, much happier than I’d been for a while, because, hello, ballet!).
Then I realized I wasn’t managing anymore. Not even close.
I’ve been making noises for a while about needing meds for ADHD before — there’ve been a number of times that I felt like I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth.
Last semester, I managed to totally screw up the paying-the-bills, tracking-the-finances, keeping-the-house-livable part of my job.
I also accrued the first non-A grade I’ve taken in my post-secondary education: a B- in precalc. I could have done much better, but I had a hard time focusing, getting the homework started when I should have, getting in enough practice, and keeping my head together on exams. It was like grade school all over again (I didn’t wind up with a D because at least I have coping mechanisms now).
I did, at least, succeed in pulling down an A+ in senior seminar, which is kind of a big deal — and at the time I sort of took that as evidence that maybe, somehow, I could still arrange my waterfowls in a linear array under my own power.
You guys, I tried hard. I really did. Sometimes you try all you can, and you still find out that you just can’t. Sometimes the best coping mechanism in the world, applied with discipline and diligence, only gets you so far.
Enter the meds.
Medication isn’t going to make my ADHD magically go away. Nor will it solve all my problems by itself. I still need my coping mechanisms. Medication isn’t magic.
It is, however, a tool. It’s like having a little electric assist for your bike if you have some kind of condition that means your legs can’t build strength very well: you want to be able to ride with your friends, so your electric-assist bike lets that happen. It doesn’t ride the bike for you. You still have to pedal; you still have to steer; you still have to think about what you’re doing. It just lets you keep up with your friends.
I am hoping the meds will help me handle all the stuff I’ve got on my plate right now.
Having taken my first dose this morning, I do feel like my mind feels more settled; more able to focus on the task at hand. I don’t feel like all of the WARNING! klaxons are constantly going off because of the clutter around me (which will really help when I get to work de-cluttering). I feel more able to, you know, keep a thought in my head (working memory is a huge, huge problem for me).
Edit: I’m also much, much more able to sit still. I learned last Friday that the uncomfortable, dysphoric feeling I get when I have to sit down for more than ten minutes a time is, in fact, a symptom of ADHD. I knew I was way out there on the hyperactivity scale, don’t get me wrong, but I always assumed everyone experienced that sensation.
Task-switching is easier (also a huge, huge problem for me): Denis came home to take care of a fashion emergency; a tech from the utility company came over to re-light all our pilot lights after doing some work that required them to shut off the gas to the neighborhood; I got up to do some laundry — I was able to do all of these things without enormous difficulties in returning to the main task I’m doing right now (which is writing this post).
These might seem like minor things, but the time I lose switching tasks adds up enormously over the course of any given day (especially since I sometimes lose the narrative thread entirely while doing so).
So, basically, my “mixed amphetamine salts” aren’t going to magically make everything okay for me. The house is still in chaos; the finances are still a mess. (Amazingly, when I took my first dose this morning, Disney Spirits did not appear and fix all that for me! THE MOVIES LIE, YOU GUYS.)
The difference is, I feel like the meds might actually help me both get caught up — which is literally impossible for me, otherwise: that was the first lesson I learned about how to be a student with ADHD — never get behind. EVER. They should also help me keep on top of things once I’m caught up, even though there’s a lot going on in my life right now, and even though there’s going to be even more going on in the near future (ballet! work! grad school!).
Speaking of which: this post is now officially long enough.
In future posts, I intend to write about:
- Treatment decisions (why we’re treating ADHD as the primary disorder, rather than bipolar, even though bipolar is arguably the more dangerous of the two)
- Mechanisms of action
- Anorexia (because I suppose eventually I do need to get around to that)
- How my ADHD meds impact ballet
…and similar related stuff.
I’ll also keep you posted on how the meds are working — in other words, not mechanism of action (literally how the meds work), but what kind of differences they’re making in my life, both the good and the bad (because it’s unrealistic to expect a medication to be perfect).
That’s it for now.
Today’s to-do list (I guess I’ll strike these off as I complete them; I’ve also added a few that I forgot before):
Entomology homework.Clean catbox.Take out trash.Fold ballet laundry.Wash andfold other ballet laundry.Invite Eric and Larry to Commencement.Create a resource to use for SI tomorrow.- Reconcile the November bank statement (yeah, I told you it was bad).
Start sorting the dining room.Make dinner.- Work on choreography.
- Watch that one Sergei Polunin video 6,000 more times. Oh wait, did I say that out loud?
…Not necessarily in that order.
Danseur Ignoble: Weaksauce
We failed to eat dinner tonight (long story involving the complications of filling ADHD prescription), and my blood sugar tanked somewhere in the middle of barre. I held it together almost to the end of class, but my chaînes weren’t great.
I should know myself well enough by now to prevent this from happening: energy bar in the dance bag; juice if a real crisis occurs. Failing to plan is planning to fail.
Figured out I’ve been cheating during barre stretch: not doing anything wrong, just not working the rotation and flexibility as hard as I can. So I worked on that.
I am definitely not a Squid anymore. The arms are Doing Their Thing.
Now, if the brain will just follow suit…
Danseur Ignoble: If You Can Describe It, You Can (Eventually) Do It
Or, The Enabling Nature of Formal Ballet Vocabulary
For those who find foreign languages challenging (full disclosure: I don’t), entering into the world of ballet can be daunting.
Suddenly, you’re learning not only a new way of moving, but also a foreign language — one that sometimes conflicts with itself (Are my arms in third or fifth? …I don’t know, are we doing Vaganova, Paris Opera, or Cecceti today?).
I felt like this point needed an illustration, with apologies to photographer Fanny Schertzer, whose awesome photos from Prix de Lausanne can be found here:
“Zecheng Liang – Le Corsaire – Prix de Lausanne 2010” by Fanny Schertzer – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
and here:
“Mingyi Liang – Giselle, Prince Albrecht – Prix de Lausanne 2010-3” by Fanny Schertzer – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
You have to memorize all these words (some of which already have more than one meaning in your normal, everyday language), and then you have to remember them and perform the corresponding actions in the right sequence when your teacher shoots a string of pidgin French at you at the end of class. And then you have to remember them again next class (which, in the beginning, often means “next week”) and probably learn some new ones.
On the other hand, with the exception of minor quibbles over whether one’s arms are in third or fifth (aided by the fact that every teacher and dance master in the history of ever pretty much automatically demonstrates which one they mean as they’re describing the combination — seriously, even if the rest of them is standing still, bras gonna port) and whether to say “B+” or “attitude a terre,” the upside of this whole conundrum is that in ballet, we understand each-other. (Well … Mostly.)
When someone says soubresaut, as long as you’ve learned soubresaut, you can do it.
When someone says pirouette en dehors a la seconde, once again, if you know what pirouette en dehors mean and you know what a la seconde means, you can figure out what’s intended — and, if you know you can execute both movements, you can probably even figure out how to do it. Maybe not well, at first, but learning is almost always a process of successive approximations of goal behavior (hooray for Applied Behavioral Analysis!). Chances are you looked kinda funny the first time you rode a bike, too. Dancers learn by doing.
Likewise, once you develop enough vocabulary, you can ask other dancers what the names of things are: “You know that thing that looks kind of like tour jete, only you’re kind of rotating around one leg that’s in attitude? What the heck is that called?” Of course, half the time, the name of the thing you’re looking for turns out to actually be “name of thing you already know” plus “a la seconde” or “in attitude” or “from fourth,” possibly with a modifier like “en dedans” or “en dehors” or “grande” or “petite.”
This doesn’t always work as well as it might: it took me, like, three separate searches to figure out what the “thing that looks kind of like tour jete, only you’re kind of rotating around one leg that’s in attitude” is called (ungracefully) a “barrel turn.” But almost everything else in ballet can be picked apart based on its technical name (and it’s possible that the so-called “barrel turn” — which, I’d like to point out, is neither a barrel, nor a turn, but is a jump that has a turn in it — has a technical name I just haven’t discovered).
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit in the context of choreography (in part because my project for this summer will involve explaining choreography to people who may or may not have a firm grasp of ballet vocab: yes, I plan to impart the names of things, but that doesn’t mean people will remember them).
Like, ballet choreography is maybe a bit easier to transmit than modern dance choreography, given that we have a standardized vocabulary from which we work. Admittedly, that vocabulary can’t transmit style. Watch some video from NYCB, some from the Bolshoi, some from the UK’s Royal Ballet, and some from the Dutch school, and you’ll see that there can be enormous stylistic differences, some of which — a la NYCB — trace back ot a specific choreographer. However, the basic elements of a dance can be transmitted intact, down to the beat (or even half-beat; the “and” bears great importance in dance).
Curiously, while I have some modern dance background, I’m not really sure how this works in that context. Like, my modern dance teacher was awesome, and because of that we always knew what she was talking about: but “Down, down, UP, down!” means one thing when you’re doing that frog-jumpy thing and a totally different thing when you’re doing what’s essentially a series of plies with a saute in the mix.
Different seminal choreographers have developed different vocabularies. They tend to be descriptive, but description doesn’t necessarily convey intention as well as we’d like. “Slash” (perhaps a term no modern dance choreographer employs?) could mean a lot of different things.
To be fair, ballet has been around for hundreds of years at this point, and it developed a tradition of formal codification pretty early (being as it was founded upon strictly-regulated court dance). It seems possible, even probable, that as modern dance (which is, what, a little more than a hundred years old?) evolves, it too will develop a cross-school choreographic language (rather like the way music has evolved a language of its own; all musicians speak at least a little Italian and/or German).
It’s at least equally likely, though, that it won’t — the coherence that exists in ballet reflects its foundations. It has evolved divergently (hence “Are my arms in third or fifth?”) rather than convergently.
Anyway, this is one of the things I like about ballet: sometimes I don’t know the name of a movement, but I can look at it and figure out what its component parts are, and then figure out how to string them together (likewise, I can often infer the name of a movement in the same way; nobody had to tell me what pirouettes a la seconde were called). Sometimes I know the name of a movement but not what it looks like, but if the name reveals the component parts, I can figure it out.
In short, if I can describe it, I can eventually do it (even though I’m actually a kinaesthetic learner, and therefore more often move from doing to describing than vice-versa; I figured out saut de chat — one of the less-descriptive things — long before I knew what it was called; likewise foutte [again, not the “black swan” variety”]).
Unfortunately, that doesn’t really help me with the barrel turn. I can turn, but I can’t barrel. Or, well, I can barrel, but more in the context that means “speed wildly,” like “barreling down the hill.” So I’ll just have to learn that technique the old-fashioned way, through demonstration, attempt, falling on my ass, and repetition — in other words, successive approximations of the goal behavior.
But not just yet.
danseur ignoble 
