And sometimes it's just no fun at all

Last night, one of my lovely and inspiring adult beginner ballet students, who has just graduated to taking the intermediate/advanced class, spoke to me and the I/A instructor about how she feels that despite the fact that she recognizes that her skills have grown in the eighteen months she has been taking class, she just isn't feeling very confident. Now, this young woman (who is in her early twenties), is absolutely one of the hardest working adult students I've ever met, either as a teacher or as a peer. And, as serious as she is, she also celebrates the joy that dance has brought to her life, and the healing space it has become for her (I do not know what her trauma is, but I know that it is there, in the background). But like a lot of adult dancers, she's struggling with the disconnect between "Dance feeds my soul," and "I hate how I did that."

I can relate.

When I last wrote for this blog, reflecting on my then recent experience with artEmotion's summer adult intensive last June. I was feeling challenged and inspired, and as I read back over what I had to say then, it occurs to me that shortly thereafter, I lost my way and let the "I hate how I did that" overwhelm the "dance feeds my soul" piece.

Some of it had to do with the ongoing struggle to accept the facts of living in an aging body, and some to do with the larger environment of catastrophe in which we have all been living. Also contributing to my malaise was a bad ballet experience. Or maybe, I should really say a ballet experience that was not what I hoped for that as I processed it afterwards became framed in a narrative of "badness."

Normally, I'd say I'm pretty accepting of my limitations. I dance because it gives me pleasure, because it is a great outlet for my fairly stressful day job, and because it keeps my body and my mind healthy. Would I like to be better? Yes. Do I do the necessary cross training to get better? Sometimes. Do I normally beat myself up about how I'm not making progress on whatever little goals I've identified? No.

But this was different. I signed up for this very expensive, rather fancy "big name" adult intensive -- I had been following the principal instructor's instagram stories and getting some pretty useful tips and things to work on from them, and I had even taken a couple of live virtual classes with them. I liked their messaging, that with hard work adult dancers can attain pretty amazing results, and that artistry is as important as technique. But even before I flew out to the destination to join the program, I began to have doubts. Communications didn't really happen in an optimal fashion, and several people with insider knowledge of the industry expressed concerns about the program.

One of the memos I had missed in the communication breakdown was that we could prepare a solo variation and get individualized coaching; and, since that coaching was one of the big selling points and presumably a factor in the rather high price tag of the program, I thought, well, let's see what I can contrive at this late date. So I spent two long sessions in the studio working on a variation, the chief Dryad, from Don Q chosen for reasons I cannot even recall (not too childish, I like the music, seemed challenging but something I could do). 

When I arrived at the studio on that Monday morning, things seemed pretty organized and well set-up. We had class with the principal instructor, and it was challenging but adult-appropriate, also respectful of the fact that many of us were not trained in Vaganova technique, and so we needed some of the differences and particularities explained. I was having fun, feeling like I was pushing my envelope, and looking forward, tentatively, to the rest of the workshop. It did make me a little uncomfortable that there was always someone with a video camera going around and around, but I guess I understood that the social media content is a big part of their business model, so I just thought, "oh well," and figured they wouldn't focus on me because I definitely was not the best dancer in the room.

Technique class was followed by pointe, and that was also nicely adjusted to adults and appropriate in length and difficulty for a pretty diverse group of intermediate and advanced students.

Then it was lunch time, and it quickly became apparent to me that while there were some perfectly nice people there, a lot of them already knew one another, and many had come with a group of friends. Others were solo as well, but several of them seemed weirdly competitive and verging on aggressive, and they were talking in this performative way about a) how they "hadn't done any preparation on a variation" but b) how they had brought a professional grade costume in which to perform said impromptu choice of variation. 

After lunch, there was a rehearsal for the choreography for an ensemble piece that we would all perform at the end-of-program showing. That was when I started to get a bad feeling. The choreographer/instructor spent approximately half of the rehearsal informing us that there is only one "scientific" and "authentic" way to approach ballet, that being the Vaganova Method, and that the various other schools, especially the French school, are sloppy and essentially, not so great. Another quarter of the rehearsal involved him condescending to the less experienced performers and dancers in the group, and putting anyone larger, older, or less conventionally pretty and feminine in the back two rows. He also made some really inappropriate remarks, of a teasing nature, but nevertheless gross, to one of the women. She did not outwardly appear to mind, but as the week went on and he kept teasing her about her "fiery" nature and her need for her husband to discipline her it grew more and more uncomfortable for the rest of us, and I have no idea if she just took it in stride because culturally, that is what women from her part of the world, social class, etc. do. We had this person as an instructor for classes as well, and he repeated his messaging and his misogyny endlessly, until I was at times on the verge of just walking out of the classroom (though he would certainly have mocked me after I had gone, as he did to other students who dropped out of the choreography).

The individual coaching sessions followed; there were a lot of us, and people had prepared to a great variety of levels, so for example, there was me, with about four hours of figuring things out from a video, and there was another woman who had clearly spent months learning her variation, had competed with it before, and had a full costume (she was one of the ones who claimed to have just thrown it together, but later she mentioned having performed in an adult ballet competition). Despite these differences, everyone supposedly got the same ten minutes, which meant if your slot in the rotation was toward the end, you hung around for a Looooooong Time waiting. It was interesting, especially on day 1, to watch and listen to the coaching, and I wished I had brought a notepad with me. But at the same time, I was quite nervous and unsure of my own choreography, and there wasn't really anywhere we could go to practice and stay warm.

I backed out from doing my variation on pointe because I wasn't at all confident that my chronic right-foot injury would sustain the demands of the variation, which I think already kind of turned the coaches off to me as "not serious" and then of course, I also didn't know it very well yet. The first day, I did get some good pointers on basic choreographic choices (there are a couple different versions of the end of the variation). But after that, I felt like I received a lot of contradictory instructions (we had different coaches every day), and I started to have the sense that I had been given up for hopeless by about day 3. I had thought I'd switch into my pointe shoes when I felt confident about the choreo, but by that point I was completely disheartened.

I will freely admit that a big part of this was all the internal narrative, the things I was thinking and feeling that had more to do with me and my insecurities than with any external factor. BUT, and this is important, when that negative self-talk starts to come up for me at other times, for example at other ballet workshops but also in my daily life as a working professional, I am quite good at acknowledging it and committing to more helpful and constructive internal narratives. I've worked really hard, both on my own, and with professional help, to build this skill. So I would say I have more than average resilience, when it comes to these situations. The fact that over the course of six days I grew more and more vulnerable to negative feelings and perceptions strikes me as at least in part due to the environment. I also managed to get food poisoning, strain a muscle in my back, and have a terrible string of insomniac nights; it felt like my body/mind connection was really under assault from all quarters. 

It's not worth unpacking every negative emotion I experienced that week, and in fairness, there were some things that I took from the workshop that were really quite valuable in terms of my dancing. But on the whole, it was not a joyful or fun time for me. That final day, when we performed our variations for an audience and a panel of judges, I spent the whole time wanting to go home, wishing I were not there, and actually contemplating just walking away. I have rules for myself about quitting, so I did not, but seriously? It was a very real possibility. I certainly hightailed it out of there as soon as I could without being unpardonably rude.

Afterwards, people asked me about how I liked the program. At first, I was circumspect. I said, "It was okay, but it wasn't really for me." But then, when one of my ballet mentors asked me why not, I had to explore it a little further. I think there were three main things that made it a bad experience from my point of view. The most salient was the condescending and sexist tone of one of the primary instructors. The second was the "adult ballet competition" atmosphere, partly the result of the structure of the program, but to a pretty big extent also produced by the type of people who came because that's what they want and what turns them on as dancers. The expensive costumes, the full stage makeup (for a studio showing!), and the "I could've been a contender" rhetoric are not the fault of the program organizers, but they are a byproduct of a program that emphasizes individual coaching and frames it in terms of ballet competition dynamics. I don't hold the organizers responsible, but I definitely would think twice about attending any such program again -- as I told people vaguely at first "It wasn't for me." I'm just not doing ballet for those reasons (though I do enjoy learning variations and getting better at them). Thirdly, and this is also food for thought for me, as a "lifer" with another program, and someone who now has a posse when I attend that program, I didn't really meet people that I felt that deep kinship of making something artistic together with. A week is a long time not to make any new friendships, not to meet anyone with whom one really connected. I am generally a pretty sociable person, and I find other people interesting, but it was hard to get past some of the social barriers that I encountered. 

I wanted to write this now, six months on, because I am just beginning to recover, spiritually and artistically from that experience. I have been way too focused on "I hate how I did that" and way too out of touch with "dance feeds my soul." But two weeks ago, I was able to get a little bit of my groove back when I attended a pas-de-deux workshop with artEmotion. Did I nail Odette? No, I did not. Are there cringeworthy moments in the video my friend took of my last run of the Act II pdd? Oh, yes, many. Do I watch that video and think, "I'm a terrible dancer"? Surprisingly, no! I think, instead, "Sheesh, I can do that and I'm 57 and I was never a professional or even close to it," and I also think, "My partner is such a hero -- he really supported me and validated what I was doing even though he is used to dancing with actual professional ballerinas." This artistic generosity, and that of Rex for imagining that non-professional adult dancers might enjoy and benefit from the experience of pas de deux with professional partners is an enormous boon.

This revival of spirit has given me the energy to work on the things I can improve, and to be more kind and forgiving to myself of the things I cannot. That is why, when my student said, "I just don't feel like I'm very good," my heart broke a little. That pain, of wanting so much to be better, and working so hard for it, is really inextricable from art. I guess the challenge is to put that emotional pain, and the resilience built when we acknowledge it and process it, back into our work as artists. All art is yearning, in the end, and in ballet, the balance between the yearning and the joy is so fine.

Moving sideways

Screenshot from the 2023 artEmotion

 "Night to Remember" (I had difficulty

remembering the choreography, sadly)...

Which is why I'm posting a screenshot

and not the video of the beautiful piece

choreographed by Rex Tilton. That's me,

on the far left, in front.

I got back from my annual favorite week of the year at the artEmotion adult summer intensive about two weeks ago, and I've been processing the reality of what it means to keep dancing as my body and mind age and respond to the practice differently. I had a pretty good week, body wise -- I went in without serious injuries or limitations beyond my usual persistent functional issues, though I was recovering from a really dire respiratory virus that had put me out of commission for about a week the week prior. Having signed up for the advanced level this year (I vacillate between Advanced and Advanced Intermediate from year to to year). Unlike some previous years, I was able to keep my achy hip and my troublesome right foot reasonably happy. 

Towards the end of the week, my low back really started to protest, but I just adapted to that and accepted that my arabesques were going to be at about 45 degrees. But I hated that. I have been hating my low arabesques for a while. They used to not be so low, I will think, so why should I accept this now? I'll come back to this in a moment, but first, the choreography thing.

Which is this: every year at this workshop, we have an original ensemble piece set on us by a professional choreographer. This year, our group worked with Jazz Kai Bynum, one of the Ballet West company dancers who has recently begun to have some success as a choreographer as well. She introduced the concept of the piece to us on the first day, framing it in relation to "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated," by William Forsythe, which, if you have ever seen it, is a fantastically demanding piece; set to electronic music, it incorporates a series of classical ballet phrases that are repeated in various sequences, linked by non-classical movements that are at once deceptively casual-looking and physically demanding. Her piece similarly employed electronic music (so, a very high tempo), constant movement, complex patterning, and repeated sequences. 

The movement patterns were all really interesting, and I enjoyed learning them individually. The trouble for me came when we started putting them together, and also moving across the stage in very specific formations, and bringing them up to tempo. I was definitely struggling. I feel like I just don't have two skills that would have really let me dance, rather than just make an attempt to execute, her fantastic choreography. The first of these is just plain mental stamina, to hold a whole, 5-minute long set of sequences and variations in my brain and body. The other skill is shaking off the ballet class mentality and letting myself move in ways that fall outside the traditional vocabulary. I just feel very awkward at times, and when I watch other people executing the movements with fluidity and power, I get discouraged because I know I am not doing that. I'm just not very experienced when it comes to non-ballet forms of dance.

Immediately after the workshop, I found myself frequently googling things like "how to learn choreography faster," and "online contemporary ballet class" or "hip hop classes for adults near me." Also, "How to improve your arabesque." Just for funsies.

I like to set intentions in my practice as an adult dancer. Some years ago, it was getting on top of petit allegro -- still a work in progress, but I can absolutely say that by focusing on that above all else for about a year, I did make a big improvement. Over the past year, it has mostly been about pirouettes; and endless drilling and work on spotting and landings has in fact given me a pretty solid triple to the right en dehors and a more or less reliable double to the left. But these are very discrete skills. Something like "get better at learning choreo" is such a vague and vast ocean of things, it is harder to imagine how I get there.

Which is where moving sideways comes into play...

In Jazz's piece, when we travelled across the stage, instead of walking or running or doing any one of a hundred other more expected ways to get there, we moved sideways, doing repeated, traveling, plie-releves in second, arms en haut, with wrist flicks in a specific sequence. It felt sort of lame, but apparently it looked amazing, because the first time the whole ensemble (there were 18 of us) moved together using this unusual traveling step, we'd get applause every time. In retrospect, thinking about that metaphorically and in relation to my current frustrations with my limitations, I want to say that sometimes, sidling up to something really works better than taking the linear, straight-ahead approach. 

So, what does this mean for my desire to get better at learning choreography, to integrate different ways of moving into my dance practice, and yes, to get that arabesque back up to >90 degrees? Well, I guess what I'm saying is that given the particular constraints of aging, having a day job, having some chronic injuries, perhaps instead of charging right at these goals, I might have to approach them a bit crab-wise. Maybe I don't have time or opportunity to take a full year of hip-hop or jazz class, and certainly, I don't have much opportunity to learn choreography outside the relatively short enchainements of ballet class. But there's a world of YouTube videos out there, and it could be fun to get a group of friends together to meet the latest dance challenge online occasionally. And as for that arabesque... I plan to ask my Pilates teacher to help me sidle up to that.

I'll keep you posted, and maybe, eventually, put some before and after videos up here!

A professional shot of Jazz's piece this year (by Joshua White)
Anouk (L) and Piper (R) killing it, me, in the corps
sidling across the stage behind them in the middle (somewhat eleve)

Spot -- the difference

A lot of things in dance are difficult, and a lot of things in ballet are hard to teach. But of all of them, turns are the hardest to do well, and the hardest to teach, in my opinion. I am not a super turner myself. I have a slipped disk in my neck which limits my range of motion to the right, and because of my hip issues, getting up over my right leg is challenging.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, stimulated by two factors. The first is internal to my own practice (as the yogis say), namely, I spent a lot of time working with my teen/adult beginner students last semester on setting up for the pirouette from fifth en dehors with the exercise I'm demonstrating in the video below. The thing I really focus on with the students is coordinating the arm movements to the legs, so that the whole thing is integrated. Anyway, after a semester of doing this twice a week every week, I found that I was turning better myself. Not radically better, but more consistently, and with greater ability to sustain through a double and occasionally a triple.

The other factor is a young dancer by the name of Melanie McIntire; she is approximately the same age as my younger child, and is currently a professional trainee at Ballet West, but basically, she's an internet phenomenon. This kid can turn. She trained at Master Ballet Academy in Arizona (which is a whole thing unto itself), and they seem to be okay there with their star students really leaning in on internet celebrity, so I know a weird amount about this person, such as that she uses very degraded toe pads, and that she once completed 20 rotations. Twenty. What the actual?

I mean, feats such as that are not necessarily ballet. They're just... amazing physical feats. Just like Evel Knievel jumping his motorcycle over nineteen cars (not twenty!) is a truly astonishing, heroic, and memorable feat, but it's not motorcycle racing. But still, just like Evel Knievel must have had boss bike handling skills that would have served him well when riding at performance speeds, I feel like McIntire also must have boss turning skills that serve her well when she is actually performing ballet choreography (I have watched footage of her doing real ballet, and she does). So, I've been watching videos of her turning and trying to see what she's doing.

And the thing you can really see when you watch her videos is this: girl can spot. Her spotting is so good that you literally aren't seeing the back of her head at all -- you just see her face. Of course, she's right over her leg, her core is absolutely still and supported, her turnout is perfect, but ultimately, it's the spotting that seems like it's the key. And this is also what other multiple turners I've talked to emphasize. Kathryn Morgan, when I took class from her, made us practice spots again and again without even attempting the full pirouette. Finis Jung, from whom I took a whole class on turns, made us shout out "spot! spot! spot!" in order to put spotting front and center in our brains. He also doesn't believe in just doing "preps" -- I can understand his point that a prep just teaches you NOT to turn, but I still feel like for my adult beginners it helps them find the body position they need in order to successfully turn. IDK.

Spotting is for some reason the most difficult skill for some of us to master. For me, I put a lot of my tension into my neck at the best of times, and the stress of turning en pointe (or even en demi pointe) definitely drives me to tuck my chin and stiffen up my neck even more. So I have to consciously relax it, while also consciously not relaxing my core. Phew. 

But just as a technical skill, spotting is, I think, under taught, especially in a lot of adult classes. I mean, you might get a quick explanation once or twice, but it's actually something that takes a lot of practice before it's ingrained in the brain and body. I feel like this was a problem with my early training -- they just said, "and spot and spot and spot!" but we never stopped to talk about it. And I've heard a ton of conflicting advice... leave your gaze on your spot as long as you can before you go, or get your head around as fast as you can? Physiologically, what makes sense is that you would keep your spot for the first quarter turn, then use your head to bring you around to the opposite quarter (where you find the spot again. The reason you don't really register the back of McIntire's head is that she times it just so that as she turns her head, her rotation already brings her face back around to the front.

This video by Runquiao Du gives a good spotting exercise that I think really gets down to the crux of the issue: what is the timing of the spot? When in the turn, otherwise, is the moment to whip the head from one side to the other? He makes it look super easy, but in fact, having practiced this, I find that it is not all that straightforward.

I like another KM trick, which is that you count your spots (in your head or aloud) down. That is, if you're going for a triple, you count 3,2,1. It's aspirational, to be sure, but there's something in it.

One more spotting trick that I learned from Catherine Batcheller of Ballet West Academy is to say your full name out loud while you turn, which basically has the effect of relaxing your mouth and therefore jaw, I think. Anyhow, it feels stupid, but it kinda works.

Okay, so here I am in my Saturday morning sweats demonstrating the thing. Usually I also have them do quarter and half turns, but in my dining room there really isn’t room to execute those safely!

Homework for the Holidays

I have a love/hate relationship with December. End of the semester and no more student papers to grade, yay! Holiday festivities of all sorts, yay! The Nutcracker, yay! Socializing with friends and family, mostly. yay! Short, cold, days, meh! No ballet classes on offer around here for three weeks, boo!

What's a grownup bunhead to do?

Here I'm sharing with you the strategies that help get me through the ballet wasteland that is "Winter Break." This is unscientific, and just what has helped me, as a dancer living in a mature body, come back to class in the New Year full of energy and vim, rather than groaning and creaking. Well, there's always going to be some groaning and creaking.

1. Daily drills: even if you don't have space or the inclination to do an at-home barre, you can do some basic exercises daily, even while you are, for example, watching the holiday episodes of the Great British Baking show, or in some cases even while you do dishes from the Great Latke Blowout (our family tradition -- but you will probably find yourself with a sink full of dishes at some point). My daily list includes

• Calf raises and/or eleves in parallel (20x rest a bit, repeat 2x)
• Eleves in first position (ditto)
• Eleves in coupe (15x each side, rest a little, repeat 2x) NOTE: after this part of the series I spend some time stretching out my calves!!!
• Lunges with or without hand weights -- not great for doing in the kitchen, but certainly compatible with television. I do three sets of ten (that's both sides = 1 rep). If I'm feeling up to it, I do a port-de-bras from first to en haut with it.
• Side lunges (aka Sumo lunges), sometimes with a resistance band (15 each side times three)
• Clamshells with a band (15x each side, three sets)
• Mountain climbers (as many as I can do in 45 seconds, rest 14, repeat twice)
• Lie prone, resting forehead on ground. Raise opposite arm and leg, alternating, 15 reps 3 sets
• Lie supine, turned out. Do slow retire, developpe front, lower straight. 15 times each side, 3 sets.

I'm sure there are tons of other great exercises, but this little set keeps all the major muscle groups and joints moving and is surprisingly. effective at keeping your metabolism ticking along too; all the better for that extra slice of figgy pudding (I have no idea what figgy pudding is, btw).

2. Keep moving, keep stretching: during the winter of 2020, my spouse and I took long walks nearly. every day to combat the inertia of the lockdown (we live in a fairly low-density town, so risk of exposure to the virus out of doors was minimal). I was astounded at how effectively this kept me from getting the creaks, especially if when I came back inside to the warm coziness of my house, I took some time to stretch. So even if you can't get to ballet class, or the most you do is amble up and down the mall (this is a hypothetical mall, since the one mall in my. town was demolished about a year ago, and nobody cried any tears over it), once you're warm, take advantage of the situation, and do some stretching. Here's my standard routine post-winter-walk.

• Stretch up with hands over head, then fold from hips into a forward bend. Place hands on floor, ankles or shins, and slowly shift weight side to side, working the stretch up into the glutes.
• Step the right foot back into a high lunge. Unfold the upper body. You can support yourself with your hands on your thigh, or you can raise your arms overhead again, Hold this pose for a couple of breaths, until you feel your psoas softening up, and then you can drop into a low (runner's) lunge, hands on the floor. Again, hold the stretch for about 4-5 deep, relaxing breaths. 
• Now, shift through a "triangle" pose and (if it's comfortable for you), settle back on your folded right leg, extending your left in front of you with the foot flexed, toes pointing up. Fold forward over the leg if you need more stretch. Hold 4-5 breaths.
• Move through triangle pose back to your low lunge. Now, you can either let your left butt, thigh, and calf lie down flat on the floor in a turned out position aka "pigeon" or you can start to move into your splits.
• Repeat on the other side.
• After this sequence, I like to do a seated straddle stretch (my hip mobility is not such that I can do center splits unless I'm very, very warm, like hot yoga warm). I sit in a straddle, and then I go forward with a flat back. When you're doing this at first, it can be helpful to prop your butt up on some yoga blocks. I try to get my chest down to the floor, rather than my head. Then I walk my finger tips over to one side, then the other... this is an intense stretch for me. I always counter it with some butterfly sitting and a "cow's head" stretch (where you sit with your legs bent at the knee in front of you, one over the other).

NEVER STRETCH WHEN YOU ARE NOT WARMED UP

3. Take "online" class: it's definitely not the same as taking a class in a studio, but there are numerous options ranging from free, pre-recorded content to live zoom classes. Here are a few of my favorites:

Pre-recorded and free:

• My all-time favorite is this series from the Dutch Het Nationale Ballet (don't worry, it's in English)
• A close second is Kathryn Morgan's content. A big bonus is that she also has a ton of workouts and strength-building exercises, as well as some fun chatty content about life in the ballet world. As a former NYCB and Miami City Ballet principal and an expert teacher, Morgan is delightful to learn from. She also has more premium content behind a paywall, and you can take live online classes from her and her "friends" as well.
• The Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) has a wonderful series for mature dancers ("silver swans") that is really appropriate for anyone wanting to drill down on their technique.
• Also geared towards adult learners, Broche Ballet is emerging as one of the big voices in the adult ballet community, and Julie's classes are fun and easy to follow, with great explanations of technique. Although a lot of her content is behind a subscription paywall, and again, as with Morgan, she offers live classes online as well as recorded classes.

This is a really short list. I also have enjoyed free classes and "challenges" by Claudia Dean, who has the most entertaining Australian accent, and Ballerinas by Night is a fun channel run by Jana, whom I met one summer at ArtEmotion, and who is very adult-focused in her teaching.

Live online classes and pay-to-view prerecorded material:

Most big studios now offer zoom options, but here are just a few favorites of mine:

• Joffrey Now (Joffrey School, New York)
• Alvin Ailey Extension (all genres)
• Mark Morris
• American Ballet Theater (adult specific classes)

4.  Reach out to your teacher and see if there are opportunities to do a couple of private or semi-private lessons over the break. Getting some one-on-one coaching shouldn't be a luxury just for pre-professional students. Anyone, at any age or level, can benefit from some personal attention. One winter, I did a couple sessions with one of my teachers that really helped solve a problem I was having with petite allegro (it had to do with not closing my fifths). I'm thinking this winter may be the time to tackle my mental anguish over pirouettes en dehors to the left en pointe (I took a bad fall a few years ago and I find that it comes back to haunt me). So, if you decide to invest in this, make sure you target some things you would like to work on and communicate those to your teacher.

Happy dancing (or sort of dancing)! Enjoy the break from routine.

What is a ballet body?

Ballet is about bodies. Right from its origins, this was an art form concerned with the presentation of a specific, highly curated vision of the human form. The body of the aristocratic man was a subject of great fascination to aristocratic men (and probably also women, but we hear a lot less from them) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is an enormous amount of scholarship on masculinity in this period, but you don't need to be an academic to recognize that Baroque-era Europeans were OBSESSED with the beauty and suavity of the aristocratic male body. In the famous Rigaud portrait of Louis XIV, the original premier danseur, of course we have the assiduous attention to the Sun King's gorgeous gams, clad in snowy stockings, exposed to the thigh, and framed by his ermine-lined doublet of blue silk brocaded with the fleur-de-lys in gold and his frilly trunk hose. He stands in a relaxed fourth position, the better to show off his white satin shoes, with their red heels, diamond buckles, and coral ribbon bows. There's another Rigaud portrait of Louis in the Prado in Madrid, less often cited in ballet histories, but identical in its fixation on Louis' sexy legs. Here, he's wearing armor, standing in essentially the same pose, looking essentially the same, a bit like the 63-year-old Mark Morris (Louis was 63 when both portraits were painted in 1701); now the legs are shiny steel and the shoes are black, but just as in the other portrait there's a lot of visual attention to the tops of his thighs and his pelvis -- here, it's achieved by an absolutely fabulous, theatrical sash worn low on his hips, fluttering between his thighs and puffing out over his ass.  

Mark Morris, photographed at the Mark Morris
 Dance Center in Brooklyn, NY, August 9, 2019
Photo by Chris Sorenson for the Wall Street Journal

Hyancithe Rigaud, Louis XIV of France,
1701. Prado, Madrid (photo: Prado)

Louis' panache, his cocked leg, his inscrutable gaze, the jut of his elbow, add up to his ineffable physical expression of power and assurance. He is not just a (very manly) man, but The Man. Rigaud imagines Louis very much as one supposes Louis imagined himself, the ideal instance of the divine right of kings, his body with its ease, its beauty, and its mastery of everything from dancing to horsemanship the arts of violence (war, hunting) an expression of God's favor. 

The sexuality of a figure like Louis, or of many of the male courtiers with whom he surrounded himself, is almost irrelevant here; to call these super-powerful, hyper-masculine aristocrats "queer" would be doing an injustice to the term, though certainly some (most? many?) of them had more fluid notions of what constituted "normal" sexual appetites than your average 21st century conservative. They were certainly fairly polyamorous -- while the Catholic Church would not marry you to more than one person, for a king to have a mistress (or two or three) as well as (on the q.t.) male lovers would surprise exactly nobody. It was an expression of a man's dominance and potency to be literally, sexually, dominant and potent in that way.

The sexiness, or just the sexuality of the ballet body is one of those things that people often feel uncomfortable discussing. In some parts of the popular imagination, the body of the dancer, or specifically, of the ballerina, is a kind of pink-washed blank spot on the map of human sexuality, a sugar-coated vision of innocence and prettiness. This is of course ridiculous and a product of the infantilization of women generally, and of ballet dancers specifically. One of the things I really struggle against as an adult dancer and now dance teacher is this idea that ballet is specifically for children, when nothing could be farther from the truth, from the 17th century up to now.

Ballet is intrinsically about the most fundamental human impulses and emotions: desire, loss, love, heartbreak, hope, despair, joy, hatred, grief, envy, cunning, delight, dreaming... And since ballet is an art form that speaks through and with the body, it falls upon the dancing body to express and represent these states. While there are some ballets that are literally all about sexual desire, lust, fulfillment, and kinks (Petite Mort being the prime example), most of the major story ballets trade in this coin at some level as well. Swan Lake, anyone? Romeo and Juliet? Manon? Even La Fille Mal Gardee (after all, what does she need to be "gardee"d from?). The simple fact that the pas de deux joins two human bodies together in a very intimate way means that you simply cannot scrub sex and sexuality from the picture.

Okay, so here is where things get kind of weird, and what I've been thinking about since the 2024 Olympics wrapped up. This was the first Olympics in which break dancing was a medal sport, which led to a lot of talk about whether ballet would ever be considered (I hope not), and in the run-up to the games, there was a public barre session led by the POB dancers that looked like fun, but that is not the connection that has me ruminating. Rather, it is the brouhaha over the women boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, who were accused (by other competitors) of being "men," which then sparked a whole firestorm of commentary from anti-trans celebrity voices who jumped on the bandwagon of saying that these two women were men (they're not), and then people from the trans-positive community also claiming them as intersex or trans people (they are women -- it's a matter of public record). 

What does boxing have to do with ballet? At the most basic level, they're both about bodies, and about the relationships between bodies. They're about grace, and in their own ways, violence, and a kind of stylized movement. As this rather fluffy piece from GQ notes, Muhammad Ali, in old videos, moves with "the nimbleness of Nureyev." They require extreme physical fitness for those who engage with them at a competitive level, and they are both styled as art forms with connotations of nobility -- indeed, one epithet for boxing is "the noble art." This term came about in the 19th century, and it coincided with the British aristocracy's adoption of boxing as one of the legitimate forms of upper-class masculine sport, along with the longstanding martial arts of swordsmanship and marksmanship, and of course, things like etiquette and yes, dancing. More relevantly to this little thought piece, they both began as explicitly masculine pursuits, but were "invaded" early on by women of the lower social classes; by the 1720s, both female ballet dancers and female boxers were scandalizing these bastions of male, aristocratic expertise, and titillating audiences that included large numbers of those same male aristocrats. 

Hattie Madders, London, 1883

Marie-Anne de Camargo, flashing her ankles in about 1730

But there's a huge difference between these early women on the stage and in the ring: the dancers were highly sexualized, becoming sought-after partners for upper class men, whereas the boxers were generally thought of as unfeminine and frightening (indeed, Hattie Madders, shown above, bore the title, "Scariest Woman in England" for a time).

As ballet choreographers and companies grow more adventuresome about and comfortable with representing and exploring a plurality of genders and a range of sensualities and sexualities, I am hopeful that this classical art form will evolve, as the sport of boxing is evolving, and as other sports traditionally. gendered feminine or masculine (ice skating, gymnastics, rugby...) to be not only more inclusive, but also, more fertile as spaces for the imagination of what gender and sexuality can and might look like or feel like. I'm particularly hopeful about the work of choreographers like Christopher Rudd and Adriana Pierce, and companies like Ballez, or even Pacific Northwest Ballet, which numbers among its corps de ballet the gender fluid dancer Ashton Edwards, who performs both in traditionally male and female roles. 

But at the same time, I am terrified. I have a transgender child, and I have seen how unbelievably cruel and difficult the world can be towards people whose sexuality and gender identity don't match up with the binaries of western patriarchy. If ballet and sports can help by presenting the wider public with a humane view of the plurality of gender and sexuality that exists out there, fantastic. But by the same token, when the mass media phenomenon of something like the Olympics brings attention to the frailties and fracture points of the binary system, there are bound to be those who will exploit this exposure to whip up anxiety, fear, and hatred. These can and do have very real, very embodied consequences; violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people is escalating even as public acknowledgement of their existence rises -- one study by UCLA Law School found that transgender people are four times as likely to become victims of violent assault (sexual or otherwise) than gender-conforming people. And among these victims, the overwhelming majority are trans women of color. 

I think that institutions, like the Olympics, need to be extra cautious about how they manage the discussion around and representation of gender and sexuality. And they need to get out ahead of the ball so that athletes like Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting are not exposed to the truly life-threatening hostilities that they are now dealing with as a result of the Games' failure to provide preventative measures around an issue that officials must have known would arise, given that both athletes had already been the target of persecution. There's also the whole way in which most Olympic sports are so adamantly gender-binary, purportedly for reasons of fairness; but what if athletes could elect to compete in non-binary events? Just a thought, and a thought inspired, at least in part, by the complex gender history of classical ballet, an art form about bodies, but also about their mutability (swan maidens, rose-spirits, and all that...)

Looking back over my first year of teaching teen-adult ballet

When I started teaching teen-adult beginning ballet last fall (after subbing and doing some occasional private group lessons for a year or two), I approached it very much the same way I approach my teaching work as a college professor. I started with an objective -- the "big thing" I wanted my students to learn,  and I worked back from there, breaking that big objective down into its component parts. I did a lot of reading around adult learners, and especially around teaching dance to adults, but I also brushed up on dance anatomy and terminology, cross training for dancers, and more general ways to build the mind-body connection in people who aren't used to moving that much, or whose movement patterns have been very repetitive for a long time.

The objective I set was for my students to experience the pleasure of ballet while training their bodies and minds to the movement vocabulary of the art form. In short, I aimed high for them.

Breaking this down into a bunch of more concrete and measurable outcomes, I began thinking about the elements of ballet, and I came up with this schematic:

Once I had gone through this exercise in mental organization, I started to look at that big review I had done of the literature on teaching ballet to adults (and I use the term "literature" quite broadly here to include my own experiences of being instructed, videos and blogs by those giving and receiving instruction, books about ballet instruction more generally, and conversations with people far more knowledgable than myself). I was very attracted to a syllabus for total beginner adult students developed by Liane Fisher of Fisher Ballet Productions. Ms. Fisher is a Cecchetti trained, multiply credentialed expert in ballet and dance instruction, so it's no surprise that she has a really well-informed practice, and also no surprise that many elements of her syllabus mapped well to the schema I had created based on my own knowledge of ballet and my reading. 

Because her syllabus is geared to total novices in a seven-week course, and I would be teaching a mix of novices, those with a year or two of experience, returners (those who used to dance and are coming back after a hiatus), and more advanced students just wanting to work on foundations, and because I had a full 15-week semester for three hours a week, I treated her syllabus as a point of departure, adding to it elements drawn from other syllabi and my own interest in floor work as an essential part of ballet training. One of the things I've noticed about adult learners (and this could be true of children as well -- I just haven't taught that many kids) is that often, they have a lot more physical capacity than they think they do, but they're pretty out of touch with their bodies, especially in relation to space; for this reason, spending some time lying down or sitting on the floor at the beginning of class (or even between barre exercises) can be very illuminating for them. 

So, basically, what I did was start by introducing three new "subjects" a week from the schema above. Thus, in the first week, I focused on alignment, positions of the feet, and articulation of the feet. What this translated to was lying on our backs on the floor experimenting with turnout, core engagement, isolating the part of the body that was moving from the trunk, pointing and flexing our feet, then standing up and facing the barre to essentially repeat all of these movements in a vertical orientation. I really stressed, especially for those with a little more dance experience, that what we were doing was "tuning our instruments" -- just as every violinist has to start every practice session by tuning the strings of the violin to the standard GDAE sequence, so the ballet dancer has to start each practice session by tuning the body to ballet alignment.

We didn't even really do tendus until the second week, but the crazy thing is that even with just three positions of the feet (1st, 2nd, 3rd), tendu en avant and à la seconde, plié , relevé, and a few positions of the body, I could actually get them off the barre, into center, and doing combinations that looked pretty darn good, considering some of them had never done even ten minutes of ballet a week earlier. We also had a lot of fun towards the ends of these classes, when we would do different ballet walks, which I used to introduce concepts of musicality and expression. 

And so it went, through the first semester (fall), gradually building up skills and confidence. I learned as much from my students as they learned from me, probably more. I gained an appreciation for all the different kinds of bodies and minds that people bring tot he studio, and I got better at planning lessons and remembering my choreography. With beginners, one real trap is doing every single combination with them so they have someone to follow. I am still working on how to wean people from that dependency! Fortunately or unfortunately for me in the regard, I'm currently nursing tendinitis in my right foot, so I can't really go all out. One or two of my students are really struggling without having me there to visually cue them, but most of the time it seems like if I get them started they can take it from there.

Second semester was a chance to go back to the drawing board a bit, since I had a lot of turnover -- of about twelve students only four returned (the others moved away or had injuries or family obligations), and the new crop of beginners included everyone from a woman my own age who had never done ballet, though she had been a pretty sharp ballroom dancer at one time, to some college students and one young teen. I probably did not spend quite as much time slowly building the foundations for this group, but that seemed to work okay.

My spring group was able to perform at the end of the year. Rather than do a "recital" piece where they showed off their movement vocabulary, I decided to really let them dance. I set the choreography to an instrumental version of "Eliza's Aria" from the contemporary ballet suite, Wild Swans, by the composer Elena Kats-Chernin, and incorporated a lot of the classical/romantic movements that denote "swan" in ballet. I was so proud of them in the end, because they just clearly had so much fun performing it, and also, it looked really cool, if I do say so myself. There was this one bit where I had them run in two spiral patterns in opposite directions (clockwise, counterclockwise) weaving through each other, and at first it was just awful chaos, but then, like magic, about a week before the performance, it clicked into place, and it was such a spectacular effect, like a flock of birds wheeling in a murmuration (I know, I know, swans do not do this, starlings do, but it's art, so there's room for artistic license and it never pays to be too literal). 

My amazing swans, photo by Sierra Nicole Lippert

Some of my students came back for the five-week summer session, and it has been fun to see them grow into the role of "experienced dancer" as new people join in. Some of them will be back in the fall, and I'm sure there will be a fresh draft as well. I just have so much fun seeing them develop confidence, artistry, skill, and above all, joy in motion. I hope that even those that don't continue with ballet will always have this little, pleasurable memory of our time learning together.

For the new school year, I've identified a few big things I want to accomplish as a teacher, so that my students can have the best possible experience.

1. I want to help them identify and achieve simple, skill-based goals that are realistic for them, and then do regular check ins to see how they feel they are progressing.

2. I want to give my fall students an end-of-term performance opportunity so that they don't fade away towards the end of the semester as family holiday obligations start to outweigh just going to class. I've noticed that adults seem to like to have a project they're working on, like learning a piece of choreography.

3. Once a month, throw in a class that focuses on conditioning and returning to our sense of turnout and alignment (e.g. floor barre, center barre, even conditioning ball work)

Mostly, I want to keep learning and improving as a teacher and finding ways to extend this "side hustle" of mine into a thoughtful, reflective, and life-affirming practice. We're in for a rough time ahead in the world, I think, and it's important to keep tending the gardens where we can step away from the furor.

Cracking on...

It's that time of year in ballet land when no matter whether you're in the big leagues or at the proverbial Dolly Dinkle School, there's a purple-pink shimmer, candy-cane scented, wafting through the air. Nutcracker Season is upon us!

If you haven't already read the excellent Nutcracker Nation by Jennifer Fisher, I urge you to find a copy right now! It's such a great, and loving, exploration of the whole Nutcracker phenomenon, especially in North America, and especially in relation to our multicultural landscape. Essentially, Fisher demonstrates that the popularity of The Nutcracker Ballet in North America has a very distinct cultural and economic history rooted in the rise of television and the development of suburban leisure values in post-WWII US and Canadian culture. And as anyone doing the books for a ballet-based school or company in North America knows, it's the moneymaker and the parent-pleaser that you almost cannot do without.

But there is not just one Nutcracker, there are instead Nutcrackers, one of the things Fisher explores towards the end of her book. The variability, the mutability, and the adaptability of this phenomenon to all sorts of audiences and communities is really fundamental to its lasting appeal. This is so perfectly illustrated in the documentary Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, which chronicles the 2019 production of Debbie Allen's studio's amped up, multi-genre tribute to the classic. It's a great film (Shondaland, natch!), but it also really explores how this weird German Romantic story filtered through French and Russian lenses and then commercialized in the twentieth century can be transformed to mean something to a group of Black and Brown kids from some pretty impoverished backgrounds who have been offered the opportunity, by Allen and her amazing team, to become artists. I got a little misty.

I've seen a lot of Nutcrackers in my day; it was an annual ritual when I was a kid in Seattle, and sometimes we'd even go to two in one season -- the PNB production and a visiting company. Then I saw it in Boston at one point, and I'm pretty sure I saw the SF Ballet production a couple of times. Unlike other ballets where I'm always tempted to say, "Oh, this version is the best," I don't feel that way at all about the Nutcracker. It's really the case that each version has its own logic, its own raison d'etre.

Well, MOST versions. I feel a lot less openhearted about some of the film versions. As a young mom, I was subjected to frequent replays of the Barbie version. It's... odd and awkward, sort of like the doll herself. And then, I was not a huge fan of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, which was weird in a way that seemed appropriate to the source material, but also weirdly boring (too much CGI?). I'm not counting filmed versions of stage productions, or even the Baryshnikov/Kirkland film from 1977. Those are not film versions of the story, just filmed ballets, if you know what I mean?

Although I was a baby bunhead, and took ballet pretty seriously from age 9 to 16, I actually was never in a Nutcracker production as a kid. My friends who went to PNB would get to be party children, or mice, or soldiers, but I never even went to an audition. I think my parents felt like it would be a hassle, and they were not wrong. One year, a girl in my class at Cornish was chosen as one of the Claras, and we were all so insanely jealous, until she told us that it was basically a lot of sitting around -- in the PNB production at the time, Clara and the Nutcracker Prince spent the entirety of Act II sitting on a throne. Still, I would have loved to be a mouse or a soldier... Instead, I got to be a villager, or once the old woman, in our school's production of the Snow Princess. Thanks, Nellie Cornish.

My eldest child loved ballet for a while (and still talks about wanting to go back to it, but that's another essay altogether), and really, really wanted to be in the civic ballet's production. Sadly, the only part they ever got was "Sleigh Page" -- basically, stagehand in an angel costume pushing the sleigh with Clara and the Nutcracker Prince on and off stage. Not exactly anyone's idea of a star turn. However, since my kid was in the show, I did makeup and helped out backstage, which was fun, but madness, given a cast of mostly kids under the age of 15.

In fact, being a mouse is still an ambition of mine. I would really love to play the Mouse King! First of all, there's the anonymity of wearing a giant mouse head, and second, it's such a campy, feisty part. I hope that someday my turn will come. I've been practicing my whisker cleaning and my lying-on-my-back-and-dramatically-dying moves.

Just once, I have been on stage for a Nutcracker, as a party parent (specifically, as "Party Mom #1"), and it was soooooo fun. I've also enjoyed being backstage and helping the kids with their costumes and makeup. It's just a treat to be part of the ritual, I suppose. And who doesn't love the Snow Scene, watched from the wings, while the local children's choir "Ah ah ah ah ahhhhs" from the balcony?

Anyhow, whatever your Nutcracker plans for this winter, may they prosper (and be free of weird, gross, culturally inappropriate stereotypes).