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).

Gentle and Soft (and fun)

But are they having fun?

A very young friend asked me the other day for advice on his first Nutcracker audition (and his first dance audition) ever. I am not an expert on this topic by any stretch of the imagination, since I've never auditioned as an adult and I don't play any role in our civic company's auditions. I do have some experience, having done my share of auditions as a young dancer and having consistently had, well, disappointing outcomes. But, in the intervening years I have learned a thing or two about how to deal with situations which are definitely NOT judgement-free-zones; job interviews, teaching college freshman a required class, giving a plenary lecture... and if there is one single thing that stands out it is that if you just decide to focus on what's fun or at least mildly pleasurable about what you're doing, it tends to go better. Let the thing happen, but be gentle with yourself and go soft on the self critique.

In that spirit (the spirit of fun, which by the by is the inspiration for the title of this post, the mockumentary Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee, which is pure brilliance IMHO), I am encouraging my gentle readers to think about what's fun in their dancing lives, and to shed some of the self-seriousness that tends to accompany the study and practice of a classical art form. To that end, here's my "top five" fun things about adult ballet (as a learner and more recently also as a teacher).

1. People -- I meet so many interesting, life-enriching people through my classes, summer "adult ballet camp," and workshops. Some of my most valuable friendships have been formed through these experiences, and I always get such a kick out of discovering that the person who has been struggling through some crazy petit allegro combo with me is, in her spare time, an ICU nurse, an attorney, a radiologist, a professional chef, or the comptroller general of a big federal agency. Weird, huh? As an academic, even though I'm in university administration these days, most of the people I meet at work come from backgrounds similar to my own, e.g. they went to college, then to grad school for a PhD, and so forth. Ballet connects me to a whole different population, and it has really broadened my worldview in ways that go far beyond the art form itself.

Slightly punchy after a long day at artEmotion

2. Music -- I come from a really music-oriented family, but to be honest, music had started to play less and less of a role in my life as I concentrated on my academic career and raising a young family. And then, about fifteen years ago, I jumped back into ballet. I was disappointed, at first, that the classes I was taking were not taught with a live accompanist. In my youth, I had never taken a class without a pianist in the room (my ballet school, after all, was part of an arts college). And there is still nothing like a live accompanist. However, even with CDs and now streaming music, ballet class gives me a daily chance to reconnect to my music brain, and sometimes (about once a week) I do get to dance with an actual live accompanist. Whether it's the ubiquitous pop-hits reimagined as ballet class music (the strange afterlife of Gotye's "Somebody that I used to know"), or arrangements of Chopin or Bach, it's good just to feel the music in my fibers, and channel it through movement. With my adult beginner students, one thing I keep bringing their attention back to is the importance of the element of musicality in their dancing. You don't have to be a fantastic principal ballerina to express yourself through dance. In fact, expression of ideas, thoughts, and feelings is the whole purpose of dance, and music is a huge part of that. Furthermore, doing ballet leads me to listen to music (all sorts) more carefully as some quiet background awareness in my mind imagines what could be danced to it.

Here's Kathryn Morgan making the most of the whole Star Wars as ballet music phenom (in honor of May 4th, as in May the 4th be with you)

3. Sweat -- I've always felt there are two kinds of workouts. The ones that hurt so good and the ones that just hurt. Ballet class, for me, usually falls into the "hurt so good" category. Even if I've totally muffed it, the dizzy, zippy, panting and sweating aftermath of a really intense allegro combination, or the trembling legs of a post-adagio moment are as close to ecstatic as I feel most days. When I used to run, I would sometimes get to that higher plane after a really long "on" run, but I had a lot more "off" than "on" runs, and my knees just ached constantly. Ballet much more consistently delivers that exercise (I suppose endorphin-induced) high for me, and partly it's because while I'm pushing my body physically, I'm more aware of the mental challenge of remembering choreography and moving expressively with the music (see #2)

4. Creativity -- Here's the thing about dance. Even if you're not the one setting the choreography, each time you execute it, you recreate it, you make it new. I love the idea that even if I'm just doing tendus at the barre, I have the opportunity to interpret, and then reinterpret the sequence, and to put something into it that makes it my own. This might not be visible, outwardly, especially if the enchainement is particularly technical in its focus, but it's more a mental operation realized through the attentive connection of mind and body. Or really, more like, the body itself thinking. Anyway, it's the pleasure one takes in making something (a great sandwich, a successful party, a song, a machine that works, etc.) and then refining it, making it better, making it satisfying. I want to convey this facet of ballet to my students, and not just teach them "this is the right way to do X, the wrong way to do Y..."

Swan Boys being unique (from Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake)Credit...Caitlin Teal Price for The New York Times

5. Non-attachment -- What's fun about the spiritual state of non-attachment, one might ask? Well, it's more a case of the self getting out of the way of fun. That is to say, when I told my young friend to just have fun at his audition, what I think I was really saying was, don't let your anxiety or your awareness of other people looking at you, or any of that crap, become an obstacle to your authentic experience in the moment of the dance. If you're really present in the moment, then it's difficult to be all twisted up in the usual crap that makes us miserable. To really dance, one has to be present, and not attached to the many things that pull at us if we allow them to do so. Or perhaps, as Martha Graham said, “All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.” Just. Be. There.

Yup, that's MG

So, here's my message for today for all you adult ballet dancers: it's FUN!

Demi Goddesses (and two Demi Gods)

 

iconic sylphyness

Dazzling feats of pointe work are, without a doubt, one of the aesthetic pleasures of watching ballet. Charles-Louis Didelot, the early-nineteenth-century French dance master of the Russian Imperial Theaters in Saint Petersburg knew how to wow an audience – in 1815, he deployed his new “flying machine” (a kind of wire and pulley trapeze system) to hoist ballerina Geneviève-Adélaïde Gosselin up on her tippity toes in a performance of his ballet, Flore et Zephyr. Now, Mlle. Gosselin had already been experimenting with reinforcing the toes of her ballet slippers to rise past demi-pointe, so while Didelot (a man) commonly gets the credit for “inventing” pointe work, in all likelihood it was actually amongst the ranks of female dancers competing for the newfound celebrity afforded ballerinas who pushed ballet in the direction of dancing en pointe. At first it must have been just a breathtaking stunt, but in 1832, when Filippo Taglioni choreographed the ballet La Sylphide for his daughter, Marie, it became part of the visual repertoire of ballet denoting the Romantic-era ballerina’s light, sylph-like essence.

Much ink has been spilled about pointe work and the history of the pointe shoe; a Google Scholar search of the term “ballet” and the term “pointe” together yields over 30,000 results. Many of these are from physical therapy and medical journals, which perhaps suggests something, but there are also a healthy (if you want to call it that) number of scholarly works dedicated to the “phallic symbolism” and other metaphorical and semiotic implications of ballet’s longstanding gender divide around the pointe shoe. It’s all very interesting, all the more so in 2023, when the idea that a man might dance en pointe and do it seriously (as opposed to satirically) has taken root. I mean, why not ? (Well, because they’re not trained to it, and this could be dangerous for them, but on the other hand, if we did train boys on pointe, then it would probably be safer.)

As my title for this entry suggest, however, I’m not really wanting to think about pointe shoes. It’s bad enough that at fifty plus years old I still put them on my poor feet several times a week. So let’s talk instead about dancing without pointe shoes.

I’m teaching adult beginner ballet this fall with a bunch of women and two guys, and I’m really taking them down to the brass tacks, using a curriculum I adapted from a couple of different sources I found online that are specifically concerned with the training of adults starting ballet. One theme for the class is feet – how to articulate them, shape them, use them to maximum effect, and keep them healthy. The killer exercise we did in week one, and will come back to throughout the semester, is one I remember from my RAD days – slowly rising to quarter, half, and three-quarter pointe and then equally slowly lowering back down. It’s a brute, and also a bit boring, but adults are fully capable of recognizing what it’s doing in their bodies. The calves begin to burn, the arches feel it, and if you’re not holding your core, you wobble all over the place. 

I have a persistent joint problem in the big-toe metatarsal of my left foot, and sometimes it really squawks at me as I lower from three-quarter to half pointe, which in this context serves to remind me that this is not a particularly comfortable or habitual way in which most people move their bodies. We wear firm-soled shoes that cradle and cushion our feet, reducing the amount of finer adjustments and movements that they make all day long, so the muscles get atrophied. Twenty-first century footwear is the equivalent of the office chair – it is ruining our bodies’ range of motion and balance of strength!

The other footwork we’ve been doing is moving (all of this in first position, btw) from standing on two feet to one foot, with the working leg going to sur le cou de pied. While a big point of this exercise is feeling the turnout turn on (you literally cannot do slcdp without fully engaging the turnout muscles in the underbutt and pelvis), it’s also amazing how well it embeds the proprioceptive identity of the properly shaped foot. Since you cannot sickle when in this position, and since the structure of the standing leg gives tactile feedback to the sole of the working foot, it “trains” the mind-body connection to go “oh, that’s how my foot is supposed to be shaped"). I also pointed out to them last night that if you turn sideways to the mirror with your working foot towards the mirror, you can see that despite the fact it feels, at first, as if you’re really winging your foot back in this position (that is, contracting the muscles on the outer side of the ankle disproportionately while extending those on the inside), the inner anklebone and the big toe are almost perfectly aligned with the shin and the knee. That’s why it makes such a pretty line – a gentle, relatively flat curve, no kinks.

If you take that “wrapped” foot away from the supporting let and rest the tip of the longest toe on the floor, then flex the toes, the foot is positioned exactly how it ought to be for optimal placement in demi-pointe. Or, if you just stretch the knee to the extended position to the second, without changing anything else, you have a perfectly placed tendu. It was fun to watch them experiment with this, and then have the lightbulb visibly go on in their bodies and minds. After we did that, I really noticed that all of them, even those with very limited ankle movement, were pointing their feet, and not sickling!

Yay for demi-pointe and the old soft-shoe!

The Summer Doldrums

The dread summer doldrums of adult ballet have arrived. Summer intensives are over (more on that, shortly); summer session at our local ballet school has ended; next week the kids get a local intensive, but there's nothing for adults. What's a grownup bunhead to do?

Basement ballet, December, 2020

Thanks to the pandemic (did we ever imagine that would be a thing we could say, even sardonically, which, if you can't tell, is how it is intended here?), there are now a wealth of online options, from expensive live one-on-one coaching sessions to free videos where you can plié to your heart's content along with dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet led by Andre Klemm on the Pont des Arts in Paris. So, there’s the whole phenomenon of rec room or basement or kitchen counter barre. Which is… okay, I guess.

Earlier this summer, in the short spell between spring and summer sessions, I solved the problem for my peers (but not really for myself), by volunteering to lead some informal classes twice a week. It was fun, but kind of exhausting, despite that I did not really get to dance all that much myself. Probably, it was good practice for this fall, when I’ll be teaching adult beginners regularly for the first time. I’m excited, and not a little nervous, to take this on. My only “training” as a ballet teacher is the thousands of hours I’ve spent in class as a student, a very small amount of substitute teaching, some reading, and of course my background as a very different kind of teacher (e.g. college professor). I like that teaching makes me think about the movement more analytically, and it really challenges my brain to come up with intentional kinds of barre work that prepares people for specific exercises in center. Suffice to say, I have a lot to learn, and a lot of imposter syndrome (although, is it a “syndrome” when you really are, for all intents and purpose, an imposter) to get over.

I am taking inspiration from Julie Gill, however; she is sort of a guru of adult ballet, a real advocate for having an adult-specific approach that helps dancers progress through skills in a similar fashion to the way kids are taught, but with age-appropriate adaptations and acknowledgement of the reality of adult lives (e.g., we don’t operate on a “semester” cycle unless, that is, we are teachers or academics ourselves). I like her essay/podcast “Adult ballet training, philosophy, & inspiration” which is part of her “Facets of Ballet Series” which anyone who enjoys the brainy side of ballet (that is, the thinking about how it all works rather than just going with the flow of it, which is also cool) will find a rewarding listen.

Everybody loves floor barre!

I am also taking a page out of the book of a teacher I took class with at Joy of Motion in Washington DC about a million years ago (okay, ten). She was a former Graham dancer, but she was teaching ballet. I should add that she was over eighty years old. The first thing she had us all do (and this was an advanced/intermediate class) was lie down on our backs on the floor and “find” our bodies, moving through pliés and tendus front and side, so we could “house” our center in our pelvis (her words). It really is remarkable how something like that gives one a kind of physical sensation that can serve as a reference point later, when you’re standing at the barre or in center. If, that is, you remember to think about it. So I’m going to incorporate some floorwork into every class.

Finally, I’m of course inspired by all the wonderful teachers that I’ve been so fortunate to take classes from over the years. Aside from the stalwart ballet heroes at Cache Valley School of Ballet (Karyn! Vivian! Jaimie! Pam!) I’ve had some really transformative encounters elsewhere. 

Aaron Jackson at Washington Ballet made a huge impression on me – he was not afraid to push mature adult students to attain the kind of rigor that is ordinarily only expected of pre-professional students. “No, that’s not right. Try again,” was his motto, it seemed, and it worked – I made progress in my technique there, particularly in petite allegro, that I had not imagined possible. His classes were fun, too, the choreography hard enough to make my brain work, but not so hard as to completely defeat the mind-body connection. 

Another teacher I constantly return to when I can is Kat Wildish in New York City. She is a huge advocate of giving adult dancers the chance to develop and train seriously, and she also creates performance opportunities that sound amazing. As a drop-in student, I’ve never had the chance to do the shows, but I’ve learned a couple really useful things, including my favorite barre stretch, which is totally crazy, and so satisfying (it cannot be described, only demonstrated). 

In Seattle, I always try to drop in for a class with Annie deVuono at ExitSpace Dance. She brings this fun, slightly salty energy to class, and her choreography really compels one to focus on dance quality. The enchainements are interesting, but not weird, so you can really double down on the expressive elements. She makes great use of a somewhat limited space, and her classes are small, so you get a ton of personal attention. She has a way of giving corrections that make you feel like a “real” ballerina.

Honestly, it’s very seldom that I take an adult class that totally leaves me frustrated and sad; occasionally, when I’ve taken at big company studios, where there are thirty or forty people in an open class and the pre-professionals and company dancers get all the attention, I feel sort of marginal and uninspired, but that’s kind of to be expected, I think, as a class cannot be all things to all people.

With the incomparable Allison
(and baby Tilton #2)

Which brings me back around to summer intensives. This year, once again, I went to SLC for ArtEmotion, Allison DeBona and Rex Tilton's super awesome summer intensive for real grownups, and once again, it was transformational. I’m not saying I made huge advances in my ballet technique; I’m getting kind of old for that. Rather, I felt like I learned a lot about my body, about dance, and about how to work with what I’ve got. One highlight was the amazing series of pointe classes with Liz Wheldon, who is literally the kindest ballet teacher I’ve ever had, who just infuses the room with love and light and makes you think you’re nailing it even if you are a fifty-something-year-old woman clonking around in pointe shoes. 

It was also a huge privilege to be in the group that Rex Tilton set choreography on – we were definitely a challenging bunch, and the piece was way more lovely and sophisticated than you would think that a bunch of adult intermediate-to-advanced types could pull off, but it came together and, I’m told, looked pretty amazing (the videos haven’t been sent to us yet, so I’ll have to wait for confirmation on that). For me, the choreographic piece is always the greatest challenge both mentally and physically. It’s just outside the norm of what I do with dance, most of the time. 

Finally, I have to mention the last ballet class of the whole week, which we took with Ron Tilton. He had this little tip for turning that has literally changed everything for me. It has to do with using your off-side arm to whip across your body, farther than you think you need to, in order to actually just get your shoulders square. Again, it’s easier to demonstrate than to describe, but it seriously makes the rotations just come so much more smoothly. 

So, as I drift in the dance doldrums, I am directing my thoughts towards three goals for the coming year:

• Dance mindfully, applying the things I’ve learned and hopefully growing them.
• Teach holistically, taking into account the realness of adult ballet
• Embrace risk in both teaching and dancing – try new things, get down on the floor and up in the air, and learn some really challenging choreography

Alright, cue up that basement ballet video, I’m ready to start!

Onegin at Ballet West

A couple of million years ago (e.g. right before the pandemic), I went to see Ballet West's first production of John Cranko's Onegin, which is a three-act narrative ballet based on the verse novel (Yvgeny Onegin) by Alexander Pushkin. The novel was also the basis for Tchaikovsky's opera of the same title, and the score for the ballet is also the music of Tchaikovsky, but not the same music, which is a little confusing. Tchaikovsky did not write two separate Onegins, however -- it's just that Cranko chose a variety of pieces by the composer to set his ballet to, instead of commissioning a ballet suite based on the opera. 

Anyway, it so happens that Onegin was the first opera I saw as an adult. I was backpacking through Europe after my junior year of college, and in Vienna I went to get standing room tickets to whatever opera was on that night at the famous Wiener Staatsoper. It just happened to be 3+ hours in Russian with no supertitles, but whatever! I don't remember that much about it except that I cried when (spoiler alert) Onegin shot Lensky and then howled "Nyet" many many times (howled operatically, of course).

If you want a brief plot summary, watch this fun promotional video from Ballet West.

So, this weekend, I went back to see Onegin again, and I carried with me very fond memories of my first experience, which was with my eldest child who remarked that Rex Tilton as Onegin was "as iconic as Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, in much the same way, but more Gothick." I feared that nobody could come close to that iconicity. There was something just so... insidious about his portrayal of masculine self-regard and self-serving drama.

Trepidations aside, the performance I saw on Saturday was just brilliant, simply put. Lensky was one of my favorite rising stars, Vinicius Lima (aka Vini), and while he seemed quite joyous for a poet (not particularly romantically brooding), there was something refreshing in his youthful high spirits so that when he drops dead of a bullet wound, I actually felt sort of stabbed, myself. Olga, danced by Chelsea Kiefer, was right on key -- a little frivolous, a little wild, and very, very sorry for flirting with Onegin even though she was obviously attracted to him.

Jenna Rae Herrera, from
the Ballet West website with the
caption: "Balanchine’s Tarantella 
© The George Balanchine Trust"

Tatiana for this performance was Jenna Herrera, whom I absolutely adore as a dancer, a teacher, and a person. She is the closest thing to a ray of light that a human being can be, and her stage energy is fizzy like champagne, so I wondered if she could pull off the bookish, shy, vulnerable, and romantic girl of Act I and II, and the emotionally mature and complex woman of Act III, since the two are as different from one another as they are from how I normally perceive Jenna as a dancer. But fear not! There were very good reasons for Jenna's promotion to Principal Artist at the end of last season; she has enormous technical ability, but her acting also has incredible range, and she was utterly convincing as the young Tatiana, but devastating as the mature Tatiana. The audience literally burst into applause when she finally (spoiler alert) rejected Onegin -- one woman sitting near me cried out, "You tell him, sister!" It's a dramatic moment, choreographically (see the video linked above), but something about the way this tiny, fierce woman did it just connected for people. One of the corps dancers who I talked to the next day told me that the whole cast was weeping in the wings.

I was skeptical about the dancer cast as Onegin -- partly, I had hoped to see one of my favorites, Adrian Fry, in the role, but my season tickets are for Saturdays and he was in the Friday cast. No matter, but it definitely made me more inclined to be critical when it came to Brian Waldrep, who is new to the company. I had never seen him perform before, and so had no sense of what to expect. Furthermore, I had that "iconic Mr. Darcy" thing in the back of my mind.

Well.

When he first came on, all snooty nose in the air and affected boredom, I felt like maybe he was underplaying the character a little, and that it would be hard to imagine a dreamy young girl falling for him; she's so wrapped up in her own fantasy life, after all. Yet, as soon as he started interacting with Jenna's Tatiana, I changed my mind. He chose a very restrained demeanor for Onegin, but it almost made the character seem more sinister and colder, which worked, because it underscored how much of Tatiana's sudden passion for him came from her own imagination. He was great in the acting scenes, and in the scene where she fantasizes dancing a very romantic pas de deux with him in her bedroom, he had just the right sonambulisitic (is that a word? sleep-walker like?) air to keep the sense of the whole thing being in her head; later, when the mature Onegin dances ("for real") with the mature Tatiana, the contrast was really notable -- this was the actual man, a bit violent, domineering, and intemperate in his passion, rather than tender. He also handled the demanding and somewhat repetitive choreographic elements with a great deal of precision, the hallmark of good technique being that you don't even notice that the dancer is working for difficult enchaînements because instead you're seeing them as expressive of a thought, a mood, or an idea. He pulled that off expertly.

Iconic Mr. D

So, it was basically a big, dark, beautiful thing, a story ballet for grownups led by two principals who are both at the top of their game both dramatically and technically; they are ballet dancers for grownups. And honestly, even though the score is a pastiche, it doesn't sound that way. During one of the intermissions I overheard a woman saying to her companion, "It's like Jane Austen, only Russian, and sexy." That reminded me of the Colin-Firth-as-Mr.-Darcy thing, and also (as a habitual reader of the oeuvre of Jane Austen on a pretty regular cycle every couple of years), it made me think of the darker things that lurk beneath the polite surfaces of many of Austen's novels. Violence, betrayal, and ruin: my particular favorite novel is Persuasion, in which the heroine herself is guilty of rejecting the love of a man she herself loves, but a man whose entire livelihood is killing (he's a naval officer in wartime), and who is almost trapped into a loveless marriage by another woman over a matter of honor. Anyway, no duels (onstage) in Jane Austen, but we know that they do happen. And they did happen, IRL, too, as the ghost of Pushkin, who died as the result of one such duel (with his wife's lover, who was also her brother-in-law) at the age of 37, could tell us. Like Austen, Pushkin is often credited as being the progenitor of a whole genre of socially realistic novels in his native tongue. 

So when do we get the ballet of Persuasion? (It would be soooooo much better than the recent, dreadful film version with Dakota Johnson, which I couldn't even watch. And it would have to have music by an English composer, maybe Holst?)

After all, there's lots of dancing in Austen. And actually,
if you google "Jane Austen Ballet" you will find that
American Repertory Ballet in Princeton, NJ, has a
"Pride and Prejudice" in their repertoire. Interesting...

Appropriate or Appropriation?

 Every summer, I teach character dance at our little local ballet school’s summer intensive. My qualifications to do so are not profound – I got a “pass plus” on an RAD character exam approximately five thousand years ago, and I always got cast in character roles when I was in the school company back in the day. Many is the babushka I had to don.

I like the way character dance combines the control and elegance of ballet with more unrestrained and exuberant kinds of movement, and I enjoy getting into “character” as well. I think it’s good for the kids to experiment with a slightly different dance form that gives them space to inhabit a different kind of persona, ham it up a bit, and have fun. 

But there’s a little problem. Character is based on the movements of traditional dance forms often practiced by the lower classes at the same time that classical ballet was taking shape as an art form associated with the elite. In other words, it’s a balletified version of “folk dance.” As RAD students, we learned that it’s called “character dance” not because it helps you get into a character in the dramatic sense of a distinct persona, but rather because it relates to the “national character” it represents: the fiery Spaniard, the hectic Neapolitan, the haughty and impulsive Hungarian, and so on down the increasingly uncomfortably essentializing, culturally snobbish, and nationalistic road. 

And indeed, character dance variations began to appear in ballets during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a product of Romanticism and nationalism. For audiences and impresarios of the time, ballet was European, and belonged to the courtly and cosmopolitan elites. Folk dance was associated with “low” types: peasants and the urban poor, people who were thought (by the elite) to represent the wild strain of whatever ethnicity or nationality. Thus, elements of folk dance, incorporated into the balletic movement vocabulary allowed choreographers to enhance their storytelling – the mazurka in Act I of Coppélia situates the ballet in Poland. By the time you get to the late nineteenth century, character variations were almost de rigeur: Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Don Quixote, they all use character dance to enrich the narrative and break up the monotony. 

Anyone who has ever seen The Nutcracker in particular can appreciate how character becomes, in itself, a goal – a huge chunk of Act II is just one darn character dance after another, each one designated in the original libretto by a type of sweet or treat that like the stylized “folk” dance of the movement has an iconic relationship to a particular nationality: chocolate from Spain, coffee from Arabia, tea from China, candy canes (!) from Russia, mirliton cakes from France. And this is hugely problematic, as many recent critics from within and outside of the ballet world have pointed out. Most glaringly, the dances representing Arabia and China trade in orientalist cliches about the exotic east and racist and sexist stereotypes about “the Orient” that were deeply woven into the culture of European imperialism by the time Tchaikovsky and his collaborators came along. Until quite recently (and in some cases still) ballet companies have blithely put white dancers in yellowface and brownface for these roles, trading on the worst racial stereotypes imaginable, or they have only cast their Asian and Black or Brown dancers in these roles, reserving the starring parts for white people.

Therein lies the problem: at its foundation, character dance was an act of cultural appropriation, defined as “The unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.” The cultures being appropriated were often those of Europe – but the poorer, less cosmopolitan, less privileged segments of European society in the nineteenth century. Peasants in the burgeoning nation-states of nineteenth-century western Europe lived in a manner that their medieval forebears would not have found entirely alien, far more so than their wealthy countrymen. The life of the urban poor described in the novels, for example, of Dickens or Zola, or in the lithographs of Honoré Daumier was also a pretty far cry from “modern” and “comfortable.” So when the dance forms endemic to those populations were borrowed, gussied up, and performed on stages to audiences of the privileged, it was a form of theft and erasure no less than when white musicians in the mid-twentieth century adopted the musical style of Black American blues and gospel and performed them for all-white audiences (often in clubs that excluded the presences of Black bodies except in servile roles). 

Which is complicated, right? Because even if cultural appropriation was happening, art was also happening, and it can be incredibly hard to disentangle the bad faith and crappy ethics and thoughtless plunder from the aesthetic or sensual or intellectual merits of the thing being created. To put it another way, Elvis was clearly engaging in cultural appropriation, even if what he thought he was doing was honoring the musical traditions he had grown up admiring, but he was also making some pretty great art himself. I mean, you can’t listen to him growling his way through Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” and remain unmoved. I mean, maybe you can, but you’re missing something, in that case. Likewise, I defy anyone – and by anyone, I mean not just the typical balletomane, but anybody with eyes and ears that work, to watch a good performance of the Trepak (aka Russian or Candy Cane) variation in a well-crafted Nutcracker and not be stirred. That’s just exuberance, made manifest.

But it is also a Trepak, which is a very old dance of the Cossacks, a semi-nomadic minority group indigenous to the region of eastern Ukraine even now under assault by the resurgent Russian empire. At the time of The Nutcracker’s creation, the Cossack homelands were firmly under Russian control, and the people themselves were subjects of the Tsar. Ethnic Russians viewed them warily, and understood them as exotic outsiders, definitely not European, but part of the empire’s Asiatic heritage (the Cossacks are of Turkic origin). Cossacks were associated with violence and barbarism (not without reason, since their arrangement with the Russian state required military service by the men), but also with a kind of wild, ecstatic dance that was half martial art. Those deep plies, split jumps, and squat-kicks are great for building the kind of thigh muscles you need to control a horse at full gallop with your legs alone, leaving your hands free to wield your weapons. 

[Fun fact: Rudolf Nureyev was Tatar Muslim (not Cossack), another minority group from the Black Sea region of the Soviet Union, but he studied Cossack dance as a child and liked to dress up as a Cossack, since that was a more glamorous thing to be than Tatar, apparently.]

Phil Chan and Georgina Pazcoguin, the founders of Final Bow for Yellowface, have spent the last half decade as activists from inside the world of professional ballet working to change the way the art form represents Asia and Asians. They point out that for audience members, board members, dancers at all stages of their training, and families of dancers, narrow, racist, and colonialist depictions of Asians on stage are deeply alienating. That said, their goal is not to eliminate things like the “Tea” variation from The Nutcracker. Rather, as they say, “It’s time to replace caricature with character.” 

As we head into Nutcracker season, I hope that we’re all watching out for the ways in which character dance can be deployed with sensitivity and grace, with respect for the history of the art form as well as for the living human beings who inhabit it and who come to theaters as audience members, and with awareness of the troubled and complex history of Eurocentrism, nationalism, class oppression, and colonialism that is bound up in the history of ballet. This isn't about "cancelling" it's about evolving; if you have access, do read Jennifer Fisher's excellent essay in the Los Angeles Times on this subject. And she literally wrote the book on the Nutcracker in North America (Nutcracker Nation, Yale University Press, 2004).

And in the meantime, I will be thinking about how I talk about the character styles I’ll be teaching my students in my fall workshop. They’re kids, so I don’t want to get too heavy, but at the same time, they are developing artists, and I want them to really understand the art form in which they are training. I am pretty sure that thanks to the people who are leading the charge to rethink ballet’s problematic history with race and class are saving ballet for the future, and I want to be part of that.

Comparison Kills Joy

So, I just got back from my sixth ArtEmotion Adult Summer Intensive. This is a week-long, six-hours a day program that immerses the adult ballet student in the life of a professional; morning class, followed by either pointe, or men's variations, or jazz, modern, contemporary... whatever, followed by a three hour rehearsal dedicated to getting an original piece of choreography shaped up for presentation at a Saturday showing. Intense is definitely the right word.

Over 100 students gathered for the 2022 intensive!

 

 I am fifty-three years old. That probably puts me in the oldest quartile of participants, though there are certainly those older than I am. Mostly, though, it's younger people -- people in their twenties, thirties, and maybe forties. Some of them are former professionals or aspiring professionals or semi-professional or dance teachers, but others are accountants, librarians, nurses, physicians, attorneys, CEOs, PR professionals, university professors, and so forth. We range in ability and experience from total beginners to (as mentioned) former pros. We come from all over the country and even the world, and we come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. What's really cool about it is that as diverse as we are, and as brief a period as we are brought together, we really do gel into a supportive, slightly chaotic community, united by our shared love for dance. I know that sounds a bit corny, but it's true -- every year, on the last day, I get all weepy about how great it is to see all these humans who commune through movement.

Kelsey and me 

 

The story goes that Rex Tilton, one of the two founders, had this thought that he really preferred teaching adults to little kids, so if he and Allison DeBona, his life- and business-partner were going to run summer intensives to support themselves in the off season, they should include at least some opportunities to teach the grownups. They introduced the adult program in Detroit in the summer of 2016, and it was a success, so the next year they moved it to Salt Lake City, where they were (until they both retired this year) both company dancers with Ballet West. I joined that year, and we were a pretty small group of intermediate-to-advanced students. I was blown away with the quality of the instruction, and maybe a little starstruck to be taking class from (and sometimes with) the dancers who I admired on stage during the BW season. Our choreographer that year was Adrian Fry, who is a principal dancer with the company, and someone whose choreography is quite witty, quirky, and smart, which is kind of his personality as well. He did a fantastic job of involving us as dancers in the process of creating the piece, something that was possible because there were only a dozen of us that year. I left that week feeling like I had really grown as a dancer -- I had pushed myself in styles of movement that I was not as comfortable with, including contemporary and modern dance. I had survived a jazz class, my first ever. I had managed to make it through three pointe classes despite bruising my big toenail in modern on day two. But more than any of that, I had really grown close to the other dancers in my group, and even some of the people in the beginner group -- we were a dance family, and when I saw some of those folks at the performances during the year it felt like a reunion. 

The next year (2018), the program grew enormously -- this was great for Allison and Rex, but also tough, because they were expecting a baby, dealing with the challenges this presented for Allison's career on stage, and all the other implications of impending parenthood. Fortunately, they were able to call in their dance families (actual relatives, in their case) to support them. Thus, we took class from Rex's two brothers and one of his twin baby sister and his sister-in-law, and Allison's younger sister Delaney acted as the cruise director, keeping us all on schedule and in the studios, despite the much larger number of students; we were now three groups, beginning, intermediate, and advanced. It was a little harder to get to know people as a result, but the groups for the choreography section were still pretty small, maybe 15 people in the intermediate group I signed up for. From that year, aside from the fun, almost competition dance that Abby Tilton set on us, what I remember most vividly are 1) Allison's pointe class, which literally changed the whole way I thought about my feet and turnout and 2) an amazing modern class in the Horton technique from Justin Bass (at the time he was with RDT, though he is now working independently in Brooklyn and teaching at 92nd St. Y). Justin's class really inpsired me to take more modern classes that year, which led me to a master class the following spring with Alvin Ailey II, which was probably one of the most memorable classes I've ever taken, even though I was a total mess! That year, I also took an amazing hip hop class from Chris Fonseca, a British dancer who is Deaf, and teaches purely through movement. I don't think I would have gone out on a limb and tried these things if it hadn't been for artEmotion, honestly. 

In 2019, I decided I was ready to take the advanced level. This was ambitious, and perhaps a little stupid, but I really wanted to challenge myself. I had reconstructive hip surgery in the summer of 2017, so in 2018 I was kind of on my way back to full function, and I figured that two years post surgery I was good to go. It's always interesting to push yourself to the limit. I was about to turn 50 and kind of freaking out about that too. Anyway, it was a rough year for me; I really struggled to learn choreography, my body hurt constantly, and the much larger size of the classes and the choreography groups meant that I wasn't getting the kind of individual attention I had come to expect. On the other hand, the classes were really fun and super challenging. So. Much. Petite allegro. Rex set a very complex, multi-movement piece on the advanced group -- all of us had at least one moment in the limelight, and I had to do a double pirouette twice, which ordinarily is not a huge deal for me, but somehow, when one is front and center it's much more intimidating. I think maybe that was also the year that Patrick Cubbage, who taught contemporary, had us do all these weird improvs, which felt a little awkward but actually was quite liberating. Again, pushing oneself to the edge of one's comfort zone, and then going a little beyond it, is always beneficial if painful. Perhaps partly because that year was so challenging for me, and because the choreography was difficult, even though our group was quite large, I really felt that social bond forming with the other dancers in my group. It was probably the most intense intensive week I've experienced, but I also made some of the best connections with others, including the lovely Lisa Faye Strauss, who had better come back to artEmotion one of these days -- I really miss her sense of humor and her amazing dance skills! And of course the amazing Kelsey Wickman, my dance idol and good friend, a summer intensive die-hard who has been coming since 2016. Also, it was awesome seeing Allison, who was coming back from having a baby, being totally honest about her struggles. I think that helped me put my own challenges in perspective! 

The intensive, virtually...

 As one might imagine, 2020 was kind of a disaster for artEmotion -- but they managed the disaster gracefully, serving up to us dance-starved adult dancers an all-virtual workshop. My Cache Valley Ballet buddy Kacy and I were able use a room in the community center where we usually dance and stream the classes there, which was way better than trying to do it in my basement, alone. Because it was virtual, Allison and Rex were able to recruit many of their dance-world friends from afar to teach. So, we took jazz from Rachel Schur (whom I recently saw on Broadway as Roxy in Chicago!), character from Inna Stabrova (the queen of character), variations from Beckanne Sisk (Ballet West principal), and ballet from Daphne Lee (Dance Theater of Harlem) and Luisa Diaz Gonzalez (the only Mexican ballerina ever to have graduated from the Paris Opera ballet school). It was really cool to "meet" these luminaries, even if it was weird and sort of difficult to learn choreography on Zoom. It did convince me, however, to try more online classes, which really kept me sane and fit during the pandemic. Basement ballet is the worst, honestly, but it's better than no ballet at all. Low point -- trying to take a Horton class on the cold basement floor in December of 2020. But that's a first-world problem for sure. 

 The following year, it seemed iffy whether the workshop would take place in person or online, but as the date approached, I took the plunge and reserved an AirBnB with Kelsey, planning on spending the week in SLC. With vaccinations, masking for the unvaccinated, and frequent COVID testing, Allison and Rex were able to run the intensive face-to-face. It was positively joyous to be dancing in a studio with other people. We had great instructors, many of them Ballet West dancers, including some of the up-and-coming company members, e.g. Hadriel Diniz, Vinicius Lima, Jenna Herrera, and Noel Jensen. Noel was the choreographer for the intermediate group (I signed up for intermediate, since once again I was coming off a fairly recent major surgery, and also I remembered struggling in advanced) and he was just delightful, even when some of the people in the group became upset about the very modern style of the piece he was setting on us (understandably, some people would prefer a more classical piece, since it's the style of dance they're more comfortable with). I was super impressed with how calm he remained in the face of some pretty strongly expressed criticism -- I kept thinking, "this kid is barely an adult, the same age as my own oldest child, but he has this maturity that manifests as a kind of mellow surfer-dude chill vibe." And lo, it turns out he really is a surfer dude from San Diego. As a surfing fan (I've only tried it once, and it was really brutal), I feel like the sport really trains the mind to a kind of resignation and patience, mixed with courage and decisiveness, that makes for what appears, at least, to be Zen-like calm in the face of turbulence. Anyhow, I think we were all pretty emotionally tender, having just been through the first phase of the pandemic; there were lots of feelings all over the place, and that was fine, because one of the things dance does, at least when it's good, is connect us to our emotions through the medium of our bodies moving in space and time. Having a fabulous roomate who is both realistic and positive, funny and thoughtful was an enormous boon. Each day, Kelsey and I would loll about on the floor in the evening, stretching, icing, and generally trying to assuage our many pains, and kind of talk through the mental stuff as well. Previously, I had always stayed at a friend's house in the city, and been pretty much on my own. Having a roomie who was going through the experience too made a huge difference to the emotional load. I felt calmer and more capable of handling the ups and downs that are the inevitable business of doing something so physically challenging and mentally focused for six days. 

This past year, I've been dancing more -- four days a week instead of the two I was previously doing. So I think I've made some technical gains, and certainly my stamina has improved. But I'm also getting older, and things seem to break more easily and take longer to repair. I decided to sign up for advanced back in December, when I was feeling pretty strong and confident. Then I injured my foot in January and that took a long time of dancing in sneakers to heal. I could have changed to intermediate, and probably I should have, especially since I knew I was coming into the week jet-lagged and exhausted from two weeks in the UK on a work trip. Nevertheless, there I was, the last Monday in May, at the barre in my cute new leotard, taking class with Rex, and feeling... not bad! Then came pointe class with the lovely young Ballet West artist Lillian Casscells, who taught us the second-act variation from Raymonda with such brio and lightness that the really fricking difficult Balanchine choreography seemed almost possible. I was feeling prety confident and awesome. Our choreographer was Emily Adams, a BW principal whose dancing and choreography both have left me pretty much speechless with awe in the past, so I was excited and a little intimidated -- we were also a huge group of almost thirty dancers. She had chosen a very complex piece of Baroque music (Vivaldi, La Stravaganza, op. 4, Violin Concerto no. 2 in E minor, allegro and largo movements), and her style is very contemporary, with lots of interesting ports de bras and interwoven turns. I have to admit, the brain fog set in pretty fast for me, and I didn't concentrate very well that first day. However, since most of what she set on day one went out the window on day two, that should not have been a problem. Yet, perhaps due to jet lag, perhaps due to age, perhaps due to the fact that I'm not really an advanced dancer, at least not at that level, I continued to struggle all week, and never really got solid on some of the more complex enchainements. Oh well. 

The roomies and Allison, Saturday morning.

I think that I definitely began to struggle more and more as the week went on, exhaustion setting in. But I still had fun, and at a certain point, I just let go of worrying about the fact that I was clearly on the lower ability end of the advanced group. Something Vini said to us in class on maybe Wednesday really struck me. "Comparison kills joy," he told us, when he sensed that a lot of us were feeling frustrated that we weren't as good as the person standing near us at barre, or whatever. That really reminded me why I was there -- to dance, to feel that joy it gives me bubbling up from the ground into my limbs, into my head... Just dance, stupid!

The week ended all too soon, before I'd really had a chance to internalize Emily's wonderful choreography, before I had a chance to pick up the pieces of my pointe confidence (shattered by a really ouchy foot on Friday), before I had a chance to really spend some more quality time with all the friends I've made over the years of returning each summer to the program. But there is always next year, always another class, always another step. I'm going to hold Vini's little nugget of wisdom in my heart, and try to dance each step as if there were no other steps to compare it to, take each class as its own distinct thing, breathe each breath equitably, and just look for the joy in it all. Because otherwise, what's the point?