Het me some of that!

Jan Vermeer, The Art of Painting

For some time now, I have had a crush on the Netherlands. The seed was planted many, many years ago, when as a kid I read Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, which is about authentically Dutch as the windmill at your local mini-golf establishment. However, it implanted in my mind the idea that Dutch people were good at heart, hardworking, honest, and healthy, which is sort of their national image anyway. Even though Mary Mapes Dodge (the author) had never been to what she called "Holland," she had somehow absorbed that idea. Other literary factors in my generally warm and fuzzy feeling about the Dutch included The Diary of Anne Frank (not the fault of the Dutch that the Germans took her away, in my young view of things, see below for a corrective), and every single painting ever by Vermeer (discovered in a coffee table book my mom inherited when my grandparents died, the pages of which smelled a little damp).

David the Psalmist (and dancer), Vivan Bible
Paris, BnF ms. latin 1

I lived in northern Europe for a substantial number of years in my 20s, I only visited the Netherlands once in that entire period, in 1996, when the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht had an exhibition of all the greatest Carolingian manuscripts, including the Utrecht Psalter, and the First Bible of Charles the Bald aka the Vivian Bible. I have only the most fleeting memories of the town (beautiful, bicycles, canals, bricks), because the illuminated pages of those 1200 year old books pretty much blew my mind. I still get breathless thinking about the way the color seems to project itself forward from the page, right into the back of your head.

Finally, in November of 2018, I made my way to Amsterdam. If you have not been there, or thought about going there, consider it. I have been to a lot of Europe's "great cities," and lived in both Paris and Florence for extended periods of time. Amsterdam puts them all to shame. It's clean, but not too clean; it's big, but not too big; it has canals (all the best cities have them, just ask Venice, or Milan, or Bruges, or Alappuzha); it has soooo many bicycles; the architecture is beautiful, and not fake; it has all the things (museums, places to get great coffee, "coffee shops," shopping, beer and weird appetizers); the Rijksmuseum; the Rijksmuseum; the Rijksmusem. I pretty much died and went to heaven, even though it was extremely cold (I'm against being cold). 

I ate literally the best meal of my life (and I've eaten some pretty good meals at some pretty famous places) at a little restaurant off the Prinsengracht called DenC (Dik en Cunningham), which specializes in wild game and seafood. I can't even describe how delicious, unusual, and intoxicating the food was, how perfect the service, how reasonable the prices. Just go there and taste it for yourself.

"What has this all to do with ballet, adult bunhead?" you may ask. Well, during these strange days, dear reader, as I've mentioned, I have been trying to take online classes with some regularity. I was good at first, and then I got depressed and I was not so good. 

This week I've been a little better about it. I did a full hour and a half of Kathryn Morgan on Sunday, including 30 minutes of pointe. She has some new stuff coming out this week, and I am definitely going to devote some weekend time to it. However, I had already committed to a variety of other things, with actual, live humans on Zoom for this week, so I had to squeeze in barre here and there. Then, it happened. I discovered this:

Het Nationale Ballet, the Dutch national ballet company and school, is offering free, prerecorded online barre, with a real pianist in a real studio with a teacher. Sometimes, you can even take a live class with the company!!! Or as they say, "We zijn weer live tijdens een balletles met al onze dansers vanuit hun huis!  Doe gezellig mee of kijk mee, geniet ervan en blijf veilig." 

My first foray was into this short TUTUrial (their wordplay, not mine), with Wendeline Wijkstra (I love Dutch names), in Dutch. Now, I speak some German, but no Dutch, and yet, you know, I could basically follow along. Dutch, as my son observed, is pretty much someone speaking English with a German accent and some German words thrown in (I didn't disillusion him: English as it happens is really someone speaking Dutch with some French and Norse words thrown in).

Today, I tried out a full barre with Ernst Meisner, artistic coordinator of the Junior Company at HNB. It was literally the best barre I've taken online (excluding live lessons). I mean, I love all my other standbys, but this one just clicked for me. It wasn't particularly easy, but it was just so clean and precise and good for working on all the stuff I'm terrible at. Also, he is freaking lovely to watch: he has the most elegant, understated port-de-corps, and the pointiest feet. Also, the pianist is named Rex Lobo, which is like a character out of a Dutch idea of an American western (okay, Karl May was German, but I'm imagining what a Dutch version of a western would be like, and it would definitely have a character named Rex Lobo).

Obviously, this is not me

I think it sort of helped me get through a really awful day of working from my closet (aka my "home office") knowing that I had Ernst and Rex to meet me at 5 pm. I changed into my brand-new Sansha overalls (yes, I've been doing some quarantine shopping), and put on little sockies (sometimes I do get out my slippers, but I just wasn't feeling it), and danced away the cares of the day (which included things like hearing from an epidemiologist that we'll probably have a surge of COVID-19 again in October, when flu season hits, and learning that a project I entrusted to someone else didn't get done, and that a person in leadership punted a really serious problem into our office, probably so that if we handle it in a way that makes people mad, that person won't take the blame). Anyway, it was good for the soul, and it really did nothing to dispel my romantic idea that Dutch People Just Do Things Well.

Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, founded 1602
It wasn't all pepper and porcelain.

Caveat: No European country has an unsullied history when it comes to colonialism, anti-Semitism, or autocracy, and the Netherlands are no exception. Along with the Portuguese and the Spanish, they basically invented the brutality of colonialism (if you're American, you probably did not learn about the violence of the Dutch East India Company in Indonesia in the 17th and 18th century, but it was literally genocidal, and the mass murder kept going at least until 1947); and while they admitted the Jews driven out of Spain by the Inquisition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and out of Poland by the Thirty Years' War, there were always restrictions on Jewish freedom, and Jews typically made up the underclass, a situation that was maintained through discriminatory laws -- when the Nazis showed up, while some valiant Dutch Christians hid and protected their neighbors, many more must have collaborated, since something like 75% of Dutch Jews were deported or dead by the end of the occupation. The Dutch pride themselves on their democratic tradition, but like most democracies, there is some hypocrisy involved; more than one critic has pointed out that for the Dutch, democracy is not incompatible with maintaining a strict class system and a titled aristocracy (it wasn't incompatible for the inventors of the idea, in Athens, 2,500 years ago, either).

So, I'm not really an uncritical fan of the Dutch tout court, just an enthusiast for the generosity, aesthetic sensibility, arts-friendliness, and liberality of their national culture. And their ballet people. But generally, I think ballet people are on the balance (ha!) generous and community-minded. Not all of them (don't watch interviews with Sergei Polunin if you want to enjoy his artistry with uncomplicated feelings), but most, and this collective experience of trauma seems to have made this increasingly, publicly visible. Silver lining?

PS: If I ever get another cat (the current feline does not tolerate same-species company), I will call her Wendeline if she's a girl, or Rex Lobo if a boy.