Agon

That's right! Give it the old "red x through it" treatment and see if it works.

For two whole months now I have not gone to ballet class or even done a barre session at home. Instead, I have done innumerable (but still not sufficiently numerous) boring exercises and stretches designed to elongate my psoas and quadriceps muscles and strengthen their antagonists, the hamstring and the gluteus muscles. And? Well, my hip seems to be less creaky and cranky than before. But tonight I will put it to the test.

I am going to class.

The first and most important question is of course, what shall I wear? I’m thinking all black, a sort of ninja-stealth approach, so that perhaps nobody, myself and my body included, will really notice that I have crossed the “do not dance” line.

The second, and almost equally gripping quandary: how much do I want to tell the instructor? On the one hand, it seems the prudent thing to let the teacher know that one is coping with or recuperating from, or whatever it is I am doing with it, an injury. On the other hand, one does not want to go about making excuses for one’s low extensions and sloppily-closed fifths. And then, on the third hand (my metaphor here is growing extra arms), one does not want to bore the woman with one’s woes, or sound self-pitying. 

Ah, the sweet self-doubt of ballet! The familiar feeling comes reassuringly back to me. 

After all, the whole thing is really about struggle, about the contest between the mind’s conviction that one simply cannot do a triple pirouette en dehors from fifth and the body’s conviction that maybe one can. About the weariness with which one contemplates petit allegro and the verve with which one executes it. About the need for the tailbone to point to the earth and the crown of the head to yearn for the heavens. About the forward cant of the torso balancing the long counterweight of the leg in arabesque without assuming a pose reminiscent of Superman flying stiffly through the air in the comic books. 

Agon.

When George Balanchine chose that title for his 1957 ballet set to the music of his good buddy Igor, the man knew what he was doing. In its classical sense (according to the OED), agon is literally “A public celebration of games, including athletic, dramatic, and musical contests, in the ancient Greek or Roman world; a contest for a prize at such games.” The clip of an NYCB production from the early 1990s that I embedded here, I think, gives a good sense of the element of serious play at work. Megan LeCrone’s commentary on her “special relationship” to Agon  expands on the athleticism of the piece. Take that, Discobolus!

Also, in a more figurative use, the term can mean “A painful struggle, esp. a psychological one; a conflict, fight, competition,” and the score, as well as the choreography has elements of that, too. Watch Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams perform the pas-de-deux in this 1957 clip, and the angsty-ness comes right through (all the more so in 1957, when the shock of seeing a biracial pair perform such a sensuous, if not erotic, piece on stage must have been terrific).

And so, off to the (ninja ballerina) games.