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.
No comments:
Post a Comment