Passed Over

A more somber than usual blog tonight, in memory of the three human beings who lost their lives in the shootings in Kansas City on the eve of Pesach. It would be disrespectful to their memory to call it mere irony that none of them were Jews, when the gunman was a vitriolic anti-Semite whose choice of venues was clearly motivated by his hatred of Jews, but it does remind me of the famous lament of the German Protestant minister Martin Niemöller, “First they came for…” Every time one of these crimes occurs, in which the cocktail of readily-available arms, tolerance of sociopathy cloaked as political opinion, and a twist perverted vigilantism, explodes into yet another utterly shocking and yet predictable bloodbath, I think of how he concludes his condemnation of his own and other’s indifference to Nazi genocide: “and then, they came for me.” 

What, if anything, this has to do with ballet, I do not rightly know, though on Saturday I am going to see Ballet West perform Jiří Kylián’s Forgotten Land, along with a couple of other things (like, for instance, Rite of Spring). Last fall I saw his earlier Return to a Strange Land, a tribute to his own mentor, suddenly dead, set to Janacek’s haunting cycle of piano pieces composed as a lament for his daughter, and Forgotten Land (according tonotes on the Joffrey Ballet website) “explores memories, events, and people that over time are lost or forgotten.” The echo of the title of the earlier work cannot be a coincidence. Also, it is set to Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, which, while not as heartbreaking as the Janacek, is nevertheless not a cheery piece of music, taking as the implicit text of its three movements the Lacrymosa, the Dies Irae, and the Requiem aeternam of Office of the Dead.

Dance and mourning are old partners; you can see them going down the road together at any New Orleans-style funeral, or along the walls of some old churches in Scandinavia, or following along behind the mummy in Egyptian tomb paintings. The dancers may be sending the departed off in style, celebrating the life lived, or using their living bodies in motion as a talisman against the stillness of the grave. 

There is no talisman, no Tau painted in the blood of a lamb, that can spare any of us from the fate of all living beings – that is, to die – but one can certainly imagine things we might do to lessen the risk that a fourteen-year-old boy aspiring to compete in a teen talent contest and his grandfather, a physician and a family man, would be shot by a former KKK official armed with legally-obtained guns and an excess of perverted self-righteousness (the guy was still shouting “Heil Hitler” when they arrested him). One can certainly imagine laws and safeguards that would have helped prevent the senseless death of Terri LeManno, who was visiting her elderly mother at a Jewish-run retirement home (LeManno was Catholic). It may be true in a limited and highly disingenuous way when NRA boosters say, that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” but last week when a deranged teenager went on a rampage at Franklin Regional High School with a pair of knives, nobody died. A physician who treated some of the patients observed that if the boy had been shooting instead of stabbing, the situation would have been far worse. So people with guns do kill people much more effectively than people with sharp objects. It is one of the things guns are for and one of the reasons people no longer go to war armed "only" with spears. 

So what to do, not to fall victim to quietism or despair? This week, looking for some more socially and politically relevant way to celebrate Passover with my kids, I came across an opinion piece by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a Jewish activist and Occupy Wall Streeter from New York City, that ran in the Huffington Post in 2012. He proposes ways that people of different faith traditions can enrich their celebration of the season’s holy days (Pesach and Palm Sunday), by linking the ancient rituals to present day issues. It is pretty standard stuff in terms of connecting the sufferings of the poor and oppressed today to the fundamental messages of social justice that both Judaism and Christianity can be understood to contain, but I really like way he concludes. He says that the world is undergoing an “earthquake” at all levels, from the disruption of basic biological systems to the technological redefinition of the self and sociability, and that we have three choices; ignore the quake and get crushed in the rubble, cling to the past as something immovable and become hopelessly reactionary, or learn to dance in the earthquake. He urges us to “attempt to dance in the midst of our earthquake.”

It is a metaphor, I know. But it is a metaphor with a groove, and maybe we can dance our way out of this sad mess to it.

The Hip Speaks

See page 550

I am forty-five years old, so it never comes as a complete surprise to me when my body just will not go along with the plans I have laid for it. I had early training in not being surprised, anyhow: at fifteen the state of my knees meant that I had to stop ballet for long enough that I lost my desire to pursue it as a career. At twenty, I damaged a disk in my back putting a rowing shell in the water and learned that even a young, fit, body has to be treated kindly in order to keep it in working order. At thirty-two, my doula-scripted birth plan for my first child had to be thrown out when I developed HELPP Syndrome, one of those really nasty diseases of pregnancy that you read about in the back of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and think “thank goodness that’s not me!” I would not say that my experiences in this regard are significantly out of the norm, either. Our bodies may be ourselves, but they are also oddly opaque to the conscious mind. 

Eloquent profanity (preferable to tears)

Our bodies speak to that mind, of course, primarily in the form of sensation. Pleasure, pain, hunger, satiety, exhaustion, exhilaration, the fight or flight response… The last may be impossible to ignore, but it is remarkable how often one can be a bit out of touch with the others. Pain, in particular, is an odd thing. Some kinds are just so insistent that they cannot be ignored, but from early childhood one gets the message that a certain amount of denial of pain is called for in the practice of life. That is to say, the repression of the pain response is a mark of maturity, so when I stub my toe badly, instead of crying and howling like a baby quite sensibly would, I instead utter some unprintable string of filth, and then hobble on my way to the next thing I must do (the laundry, generally speaking).

Ignoring a certain degree of inconsequential pain, or at least suppressing one’s response to it is probably not a terrible habit in itself. It gets you through life without being too much of a whiner. Plus, it allows you to put things in perspective. Stubbed toe? Painful, but hardly as painful as that liposuction procedure you watched on TLC last week. However, I do think it shapes a pattern of ignoring the body’s voice that may not be so helpful.

See Chapter 5

Case in point. Last fall, I began to notice, maybe not for the first time, but in a really consistent way, that my right hip has a tendency to sort of hang up, or get kind of jammed, so that it feels as if a bit of connective tissue right down the front of my groin has frozen in place. This could occur after I got up from working at my desk, or while I was washing dishes, or more often than not, in ballet class, usually right in the beginning of class on the initial grand plié in first position. Once it happened, then it would not go away for some time, even if I continued trying to articulate my hip and warm up the joint. This was annoying and uncomfortable, but not what I would call painful, so I figured it was just one of those things that happens when one is forty five and not twenty. One gets what the great Zen master, I mean children’s book author and illustrator Arnold Lobel, called “the creaks.”

Pretty soon I started noticing, but not really wanting to acknowledge that my hips kind of ached, especially on the right side. I thought this was just because I was really working out the muscles and the soreness was of the “good” sort that results from exercise. As a lifelong athlete, I am pretty used to that feeling, and it did not strike me as an omen. It was.

As I discovered yesterday, when I finally dragged my aching, really more than aching now, but actively hurting hip to the orthopedist, I have what is called, in the biz, “femoacetabular impingement” which has resulted in the ominous-sounding phenomenon of a “labral tear.” 

This is how it is all supposed to hang together.

A tear, as it happens, can be mended, either by rest and time and strengthening of the supporting tissue, or by surgical means. The other thing, which for the sake of brevity is called FAI, is structural. I could see it so clearly in the x-rays he took and it looked so wrong. Remember elementary-school anatomy, in which one learns that the head of the femur is the ball in a ball-and-socket joint? Well, what if that ball is not round, but instead has a sharp ridge that runs around its outer edge? Imagine the sharp ridge nudging up against the nice, squishy cartilage gasket (labrum) that seals the joint, keeping the precious synovial fluid inside so that bone never rubs directly against bone (instant recipe for arthritis). Imagine that happening over and over again, say, during grands battements, or grands anythings, for that matter. Got the picture? 

So, with my frayed labrum and my deformed femoral head, what is to be done? For now, physical therapy, anti-inflammatories, and only baby ballet. Having made the mistake of googling the terms “labral cam tear” and “FAI,” I am quite concerned that most of the people who comment on their own experiences with these things seem to have ended up having surgery to debride the frayed cartilage and to reshape the femoral head. All I can say to that is yuck.

You gotta love this one. Or, rather, I gotta love it. Twenty times a day.

I would give up every pretty leotard I have ever bought not to have this problem, but since that was not one of the medical options presented to me, I will dutifully do my exercises and hope for the best. Notably, all the exercises and stretches I have been assigned are my least favorites, probably because they stretch the quads and hip-flexors (that thing that seems to hang up is evidently the hip flexor) and strengthen the hamstrings, the imbalance of which, the good Dr. C tells me, lies at the root of the problem. I distinctly recall the orthopedist I saw thirty years ago for my ballet-battered knees telling me essentially the same thing, that like most ballet dancers I had powerful quads, tight iliotibial bands, and relatively puny hamstrings. 

And if you don't listen to your body, at least listen to Shaq!

So, gentle reader, listen to your body, especially to its rich and varied vocabulary of discomfort and pain. Anything persistent is serious, even if it seems little more than a whisper. Take care of it now, not later, when it is worse. And while you are at it, stretch your quads and strengthen your hamstrings. Then you may not have to waste four or five hours a week when you might have been dancing hanging around the PT office having your butt massaged with some stinky icy-hot gel that make you smell like a cough drop or Shaquille O'Neal for the rest of the day. There it is, my wisdom for the ages.

Ballet is hard, change is harder

In a recent interview (http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/feb/12/ballet-grand-dames-gillian-lynne-bery-grey-push-dancers-limit) , Beryl Grey and Gillian Lynne, former Royal Ballet stars now in their eighties, criticized the culture of contemporary ballet for coddling dancers, for making them soft through such pampering treatment as nutritional counseling, physical therapy, and rest days. Never mind that more dancers are maintaining longer careers and retiring with mental and physical health intact these days than ever in the past; these lionesses protest that they worked longer days and longer seasons on starvation wages and were glad to do it. “Ballet is hard,” they say. 

Beryl Grey

I have immense respect for these women, who were indeed tough-as-nails swans in their day; it takes a certain degree of fortitude to compete with Margot Fonteyn. However, their griping is just more of that “in my day, we had to walk uphill in the snow BOTH ways,” self-aggrandizement that Saturday Night Live made such good fun of years ago. In fact, dance has changed in ways that would make the hours they worked crippling and I find it hard to regret that artists are now accorded the some of the same prerogatives as other working athletes. I cannot imagine a retired NBA player decrying the fact that players today have access to ultrasound therapy for strained muscles. And as for the talk of dieting and the valorization of anorexia, I am sorry, but how does being physically weak and mentally ill make you a better, more expressive artist?

The athleticism of modern ballet also comes under fire from Grey and Lynne on the grounds that dancers, though technically more skilled and versatile today, are less “soulful.” Codswallop! This is another one of those commonplaces rooted in cheap nostalgia and, I suspect, an insidiously anti-feminist, class- and race- based set of expectations about the ballerina. She should be delicate, pale, trembling, a veritable wraith (a Sylphide!). Visibly muscular women, women of color, tall women, none of these have a place in the Victorian imaginarium in which traditional classical ballet was for so long invested. But more and more, the color of the ballerina, and along with that, the range of acceptable body types, is becoming more open to difference.

This week, I am in Chicago, and I was able to sneak away from the conference I am attending to see a performance by the Joffrey Ballet at the historic Auditorium Theater, just a few blocks from the hotel. All three works performed on the triple bill http://joffrey.org/contemporary were of relatively recent genesis: Crossing Ashland, by Brock Clawson, Continuum, by Christopher Wheeldon, and Episode 31, by Alexander Ekman. Each of them had a distinctly different relationship to classical ballet, with Clawson closest in his investigation of using the body as an emotional glyph to European choreographers, like Jiri Kylian,  Wheeldon typically hewing close to Balanchine’s starker neo-classical idiom, and Ekman more kindred in spirit to Bob Fosse (if Bob Fosse took speed and went clubbing in the 1990s).  What all three works shared is that incredibly technical and percussive athleticism that I have commented on before in writing about contemporary ballet. 

Ballet dancers today, unlike in Grey and Lynne’s time, are routinely asked to use their bodies in a huge variety of very risky and unfamiliar ways, hurtling through space, colliding with the floor, dragging and dragged, stomping, falling… For example, in Ekman’s piece, the central pas-de-deux involves two men in stocking feet, moving to a spoken-word recording of children’s poetry that sounded like it was from the 1950s, and their interactions compound martial-arts-like combat, contact-improv like rolls, and lifts drawn from the classical repertoire, except made more challenging by the fact that one is lifting a 150 pound man, not a 100 pound woman. Yet this strange passage was, for me, the most compelling part of this odd, wacky ballet; it got at the desire and the anxiety at the heart of ritual combat (wrestling, boxing, dance-offs) between men while at the same time infusing this potentially murky stew with a dash of peppery self-mockery. In other words, it was emotionally, as well as physically challenging for the dancers.

Karel Cruz and Maria Chapman, PNB, in
Wheeldon's After the Rain.

I am surprised that Grey and Lynne and the legions of other more conservative dance observers who repeat the same old saw about today’s athleticism in dance coming at the cost of emotional expression can overlook the entire oeuvres of such choreographers as Pina Bausch (on the one hand) and Christopher Wheeldon (on the other). Wheeldon’s work, in particular, has always struck me as sailing dangerously close to the wind in terms of soppy romance. I will not lie. I adore watching After the Rain, especially the more sensual second act, but that enjoyment is always tinged with my awareness that this might just be the corniest and most sugar-coated ballet romance since, well, since Giselle. Plus there is the whole weird racial thing; it is usually cast with a white woman and a dark-skinned man (it was originally set on Wendy Wheeldon and Jock Soto) -- I would like to see this discussed and maybe challenged a bit more. What about casting say, Misty Copeland in the woman's role, or just ANY different pairing than white woman/"black" man? Alistair Macauley has criticized Wheeldon for his heterosexism in his preference for the pas-de-deux, but even he doesn't plumb the really troubling race politics at issue in the bizarrely conformist casting of After the Rain.

Barnett Newman, The Beginning, image from
The Art Institute of Chicago website

It is possible, indeed even probable, within the modernist idiom of any art form, to tend toward a kind of dewy-eyed romanticism, and Wheeldon is for me the dance-equivalent of Mark Rothko; deeply saturated fields of emotional color thinned out and merging into dark tones around the edges, the classical core breaking up into cloud-wisps, the light fading. Continuum, set to Ligety’s unrelentingly modernist piano music, has the same structural rigor as a painting by Rothko, or actually, more like something by Barnett Newman, that echt-technician of Abstract Expressionism, whose 1946 The Beginning I had seen earlier on the same day that I saw the Joffrey. It is, like Continuum, both spare and lush. Oh yes, and it shares the same color palette.

If you take So You Think You Can Dance as a gauge of “what dance has become” it is indeed the case that athleticism and technical prowess have trumped the deeper, affective and intellectual pleasures of the art form. However, that is a product of the particular strictures of the television dance-competition form; those young dancers (many of them no doubt deeply engaged with dance and capable of far more reflective and mindful expression under other circumstances) have to learn new choreography very quickly, and they are not given time to develop much of a relationship to either the movement or the music, both of which are in any case often vapid. Any "emoting" they do is very superficial and often tied to the uber-cheesy "lyrical" pieces set to pop ballads.

However, in real contemporary dance, athleticism is just one brush in an ever expanding (and ever more physically and intellectually demanding) quiver that artists are expected to bring to the studio. When you think about the disconnect between the ballet training that most kids get in this country, with its emphasis on traditional forms and technical mastery, and the feats of imagination and strength that are asked of professionals in a company like the Joffrey, the fact that dancers can identify and make visible the affective qualities of the very difficult choreography they are asked to perform is all the more impressive.

"Bah, humbug!"

Not all of them can do it. There was one dancer in the Wheeldon piece who seemed too happy; she just grinned and beamed like a showgirl the whole time and it drove me nuts since it meant she did not engage with her pas-de-deux partner so much as with the audience. But that lack of emotional sensitivity is in fact so rare among dancers I have seen in recent years that it stood out. 

In the end, as we age, we have choices. We can look at what the world is becoming and marvel at it, try to wrap our minds around the possibilities it offers, try to articulate the challenges it presents, and try to stay relevant. At forty-five, no longer young but facing what I hope is a long future of being not-young, I can only hope I have the courage to take this route. Having spent a week at this conference where the up-and-comers in my field look so bright and fresh and daring, I have had to be quite firm with myself about singing that tired old tune of “Well, back in my day…”

And that is option number two: we can turn up our noses and sniff about the inferiority of the moment in which we now live to the world of our youth. There is nothing so repellent as an old snob.

Back to the Barre

Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins
at Bennington College, 1938. Silver gelatin print.
Haggerty Museum, Marquette University, Milwaukee

 

The Bunhead has been on ballet vacation for three weeks and it is just about killing her. Okay, she did a little home-cooked version of barre and lots of stretching and sit ups over the holidays, but the number of cookies, slices of tart, and second helpings of all-too-delicious dinners far outstrips the number of pliés and tendus, I fear. Most winters, I have turned to my sizeable collection of workout videos, but because we recently moved our television into a room with a large picture window that faces the street, I no longer feel comfortable working out in front of it. And, let me be frank, I hate workout videos. There, I said it.

Monday, however, signals the resumption of ballet normality, and it simply cannot come soon enough. Somehow, shopping for leotards online does not give the same satisfaction as sweating through grand allegro in the studio.

In the interim, I have tried to do some reading about dance. Joan Acocella has an article in this week’s New Yorker about talent, new and old, choreographic and performative, at the Alvin Ailey Company (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/dancing/2014/01/06/140106crda_dancing_acocella ).  And I just pre-ordered CarlosAcosta’s first novel, called Pig’s Foot from Amazon for my Kindle (makes reading while husband sensibly sleeps feasible). We shall see! 

Also, I bookmarked both Dance Magazine and Pointe, and started reading articles there. Three things I have learned are:

 1.      Rolling on one of those foam cylinders before you stretch can really help break up adhesions and loosen fascia, making one more limber. 

2.      Wendy Wheelan is only a year younger than I am (!) 

3.      These are not really very profound sources of information or criticism about the dance world; while more substantial than say, People, they are a little on the fluffy side.

 # 3 sent me looking (on JSTOR, Project Muse and farther afield) for better, more in-depth things to read. I found that Carol Lee’s Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution  was oft-cited, so I think I will find a copy of that to plow through at some point.  

Inspired by a free copy of Dance Research Journal that I acquired at a publisher’s bookstand at a conference last year, I also browsed through back issues. My favorite is Volume 42, number 1, Summer 2010, a special issue dedicated to “States of the Body.” In it, an article by Henrietta Bannerman (whose author biography states that she “is head of research at London Contemporary Dance School” and has a PhD in Contemporary Dance… wow, they actually take dance seriously over there in the UK) entitled “Martha Graham’s House of the Pelvic Truth: The Figuration of Sexual Identities and Female Empowerment,” really caught my attention. 

Evidently, Martha Graham’s company members and students facetiously called her studio “the House of the Pelvic Truth,” a phrase coined by Graham, more seriously, to describe the way in which she conceptualized the “seed” of her movement vocabulary. Bannerman relates her own experience as a Graham student of coming to terms with the floor exercises that emphasized contraction and release. I remember feeling so embarrassed when we were instructed to do those pelvic thrusts in modern dance class when I was an adolescent. I wish someone had explained the purpose of the drills to me then as lucidly as she does. She writes, “Within the neutralized context of the dance studio, one aim of the contraction during the floor work is to sensitize the body for emotional expression—the acts of laughing, sobbing, anger, fear, but not necessarily sex.”

And sometimes a pelvic thrust is just comical.

One thread that runs through the scholarship  in DRJ is iconology, that is, the assumption that the forms of dance are symbolic, meaning rich, socially embedded, and (probably also) unstable. Bannerman’s ultimate argument, it seems to me, is that while there is something distinctly louche about the phrase “house of the pelvic truth,” in fact Graham’s modernist project is far more sophisticated than much of the reductive reportage tying her sexuality and her libidinous activities to her choreography and her technique might indicate. Sometimes a pelvic thrust is erotic, indeed, but just as often, it alludes to grief, to budding self-awareness, to determination in the face of adversity, all depending on context.

Ballet, of course, has an entirely different relationship to the pelvis, which is less engine than fulcrum of movement. I like to think that in classical ballet the pelvis is the point of caesura between the dense and complicated prose of the legs and the lyric verse of the torso, arms, neck, and head. Its stillness is not passive, but purposeful, and in its way just as expressive and allusive as the dynamism of the Graham pelvis. 

Snap! Crackle! Pop!

As for me and my pelvis, I fully expect those first pliés on Monday night to be crepitous, as I contemplate whether I ought to have rolled on my foam cylinder some more before class and marvel that Wendy Wheelan, at nearly my age, gets up and does this every single morning, and all day long. I doubt very much I will be thinking of the emotive, expressive potential of my hips, sacrum, or any other body part. Instead, I will be ruefully remembering all those second helpings and gingerbread biscuits and slices of Brie, and wondering if just maybe that leotard I ordered online will arrive by Wednesday night’s class.