What's the word for that?

I have this observation to make: one of the handiest tools for adult ballet students must be the online video dictionary of ballet steps. When the video clips feature professionally-trained dancers executing steps with precision, they not only inform you of the correct execution but also give a sense of how the big picture (posture, attention to the carriage of the head, arms, and hands, etc.) fits together. Furthermore, a good video dictionary teaches you how to spell the terms and pronounce them correctly.

My favorite video glossary is Insight Ballet Dictionary from the Royal Opera House: it features Akane Takada, Dawid Trzensimiech, Romany Pajdak, and other First Artists in a black-box studio, dancing to simple piano arrangements (check out the Greensleeves arrangement for "arm positions" -- sublime), executing steps and ports-de-bras with perfect, typically Royal Ballet-ish, form:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7E40E6E2DAB561B5

Another resource, perhaps a little less visually engaging but quite helpful nonetheless, is American Ballet Theater's online Ballet Dictionary. Some of the terms are accompanied by very short video clips of ABT principals and soloists performing the step defined; the image quality leaves something to be desired, and there is no sound, but still, the steps are isolated, so it is very clear what they are.
http://www.abt.org/education/dictionary/index.html

If you want to invest in a DVD, the Video Dictionary of Classical Ballet, from the mid-1980s is a good choice -- two discs and lots of big name American dancers (of that period) performing a variety of steps in combination, with a narrator who explains what the dancers are doing. It is organized in chapters, beginning with fundamental movements and positions. I like that the narrator actually has a decent French accent. This is probably the most comprehensive resource and is organized more like a textbook (thematically) than a dictionary; it is really helpful if you are trying to get a global grasp on describing ballet movement (e.g. if you're studying choreography). You can watch about 15 minutes from the beginning on YouTube (though I doubt this is a totally legitimate link, so it may get removed at some point)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib8KOU2CyJo

While these video resources are great because they show well-trained dancers actually doing the steps, it's also fun to own a good ballet dictionary. The one I keep in my dance bag is Gail Grant's

Technical Manual and Dictionary of Classical Ballet, which helpfully gives the alternative names of certain pas that are called different things in the Russian, French, and Italian traditions.

My one real reservation about most print ballet dictionaries is their puzzling lack of illustrations. Though some do have line-drawings or photographs (usually grainy, black-and-white), these are often less helpful than you might hope. However, there are exceptions to this: the Royal Academy of Dance has a book-version of its syllabus with good line drawings that can be quite helpful, while Lincoln Kirstein's Classic Ballet, with over 800 drawings by Carlus Dyer is widely thought to be the classic illustrated book. As the illustration here suggests, there is an element of Leonardo-esque idealism to the book. But all those swooping curves do make for fantastic visualizations.

The one thing that neither the print nor the digital resources seem to be able to help me with is  reverse-defining a step. That is, identifying a step that I have seen, but do not know what to call. For example the other day I was watching this video of the "female variation" from Flower Festival at Genzano:

I wanted to know the name of the step that Natalia Bolshakova makes repeatedly between :43 and 1:00, where she does a jump that begins with a degage-envelope, and ends in plie pointe tendue devant. What is that? So far, nobody has been able to tell me, though they all go, "Oh, that's a great step... we should do that more!" I agree, but we need a name for it.

So if you can help me out here, please, illuminate me. I'm sure that anyone who is a REAL balletomane or ballet professional will know exactly what it is, but I'm stumped.

Plié in first

 Recently, I taught my first ballet class. I have taught all sorts of things in my time; I have been a certified ski instructor, a Red Cross swimming instructor, an SAT coach, a rowing coach, and, for the last twenty years, an art history teacher. Despite this, I did not go calmly into my first class as a ballet teacher.

The voice in my head kept saying, “Come on, who do you think you’re kidding? You were never even good enough to be a professional at the lowest level!”

I told the voice to shut up, reminding her that I was also not an Olympic-caliber skier (in fact, I never won a single race), or swimmer (I was always in the “slow lane”), and even my SAT scores weren’t perfect. Certainly, as an art historian, I do okay, but mine is not the name on everyone’s lips when asked to “name a famous art historian.” (But whose is, outside the little world that is art history? Probably the most famous art historian out there is that squid-faced guy, Zoidberg, from Futurama).

So, I steeled myself. I bought a new CD of ballet-class music (Ballet Divas – piano arrangements of pop-songs ranging from “Holding Out for a Hero” to “You’re Still the One”). I got a fresh notebook and wrote out the combinations and track choices I had made. I re-read most of Agrippina Vaganova’s Basic Principles of Classical Ballet. I made flyers and announced the class on social media.

And nobody showed up, except my fourteen-year-old daughter, whom I forced to come with me to that first class. After tendus, she was fed up with my corrections, and went off in a huff.

For two weeks, I had the studio to myself. That was okay; I used the time to work on a variation I am learning, and to practice things I’m so bad at that I don’t like to do them in class, with other people watching (brisé vole, anyone?). But I felt sad and rejected, all the same.

Then I decided to move the class an hour later, and last week, when I had basically given up on the idea, five whole students showed up. All of them were beginners, though some had a little ballet experience, or had danced as kids. All were actual adults and not just teenagers getting a late start. The whole reason I wanted to teach this class (which is free – I’m not experienced enough to charge for my instruction, in my view) was to give people curious about trying ballet but intimidated by even the relatively mellow atmosphere of the teen-adult classes offered by the ballet school in town. Older people, people who feel like they have the wrong body type for ballet, people who consider themselves awkward, people who do not want to wear pink tights EVER… these people are my target audience.

No thanks!

Ballet, it must be admitted, has a tendency to scare people. Whippet-thin women who actually look good in skin-tight white leotards and flesh-toned tights, heads held haughtily upon their long necks, swan-like arms and gazelle-like legs giving them a preternatural grace that makes the ordinary human feel lumpen and clumsy can be intimidating. The obscure, French vocabulary of the art form puts people on thin ice – many a well-trained dancer I know still struggles to say “développé” correctly (DEV-loh-pay being the most common American pronunciation). Also, ballet asks the body to do things that it just does not do, in the common choreography of most people’s lives; turnout is weird, walking toe-to-heel even weirder.

Understanding this, I want to open the door to ballet just a little wider and let the people who have been standing there at the threshold, hesitating, step inside, even if they never get much farther than one foot in the studio. Actually, I’d love it if I could also lure in some people who don’t even want to approach the threshold, but who might actually enjoy it if they gave it a try. But then I would have to trick them into coming by calling it something else, such as, say, “dancercise.” Euch.

The first question with beginners is how to begin. Something I read in Vaganova struck a chord with me; she says (here I paraphrase) that we begin with first position, and we call it first position, for a very good reason. It is not the easiest position (that would be second), nor is it the most difficult (a fully closed fifth), but it is the position in which we are most aware of the body’s relationship to the space in which we dance, up/down, left/right, forward/back, because it aligns the body symmetrically relative to these directions. With the legs rotating towards 180 degrees from the hip, the lateral axis enters the body. The head, neck, spine, and pelvis stacked above the heels manifest the vertical axis. The squaring of the hips and shoulders, the forward gaze, and the rotation of the inner planes of the legs towards the front engender an awareness of the third dimensional axis (front-back). The plié in first, Vaganova informs us, constitutes the fundamental building block of the whole art form. Everything else you will do, every tour en l’air, every grand jeté, begins here.

A whole hour-long class entirely devoted to the plié in first position would only interest a ballet-geek like myself. I very much doubt that it would seduce a group of adult beginners. So, while I did spend quite a bit of time playing around with the idea with my five brave students, I did not only do pliés in first. We did, however lie down on the floor, on our backs, let our extended legs fall into our natural degree of turnout, and do what I call “air pliés” – that is, pliés without any weight-bearing.

I learned this exercise from a somewhat zany, seventy-five-year-old former Martha Graham dancer last summer. At first I was annoyed to have dragged my tired ass all the way out to Bethesda just to lie on a dirty floor and do endless knee bends, but then as she began to talk about how we should not think of bending our knees, but rather of lifting the long muscles of the inner thighs up towards the ceiling and towards our heads, something clicked. The great thing about doing pliés while lying on one’s back on the floor is that all the stuff that gets wobbly and uncertain in the upright position goes away, and one’s brain can totally tune into the fundamental muscular process without a bunch of static.

In Inside Ballet Technique: Separating Anatomical Fact from Fiction in the Ballet Class, Valerie Grieg writes that two things – an understanding of the anatomy and kinesiology of specific dance movements, and an ability to visualize the correct muscular sequences – lie at the heart of the dancer’s discipline. This plié on the floor thing is a perfect illustration of that – once I’ve done it a few times, when I get up to plié at the barre, I feel hyperaware of the muscles that should be doing the active work, and I can see, in the mirror, that my whole form, meaning my alignment in the three axes, has vastly improved.

I wanted my adult beginners to feel this confidence in their first pliés, and I think it actually did work, because even the student who had never taken a single ballet or dance class in her life and who described herself as ungainly took her first pliés with remarkable aplomb (and I am using the term as it specifically applies in ballet – carriage, assurance of movement).

Alignment is of course fundamentally important – adults in particular can injure themselves so easily if they attempt to dance ballet steps in poor form. However, I want my students also to enjoy dance and to feel like real ballerinas (they were all women, no surprise). So the other thing we worked on (as we did tendus, degagés, ronds-de-jambe, and a little port-de-bras combination in center) was interpreting the music, and not being afraid to be a little schmaltzy. I mean, why not teach them that instead of just holding one’s arm rigidly à la seconde, one can breathe through the arm, let it flow a little, let the head follow the hand? They are grownups, after all, and they want to dance, not just perform a routine set of calisthenics.

In order to encourage them to let themselves go, expressively, I gave them the visualization that my fantastic teacher in Pasadena, Patricia, proposes. Imagine that in your hand you hold either a perfect latté, a dry martini, or a Platonically ideal glazed doughnut (whatever is your poison). You gaze upon it in rapture, never letting it out of your sight for a moment, except when in the allongé positions you pause to contemplate the perfect, sparkly diamonds you wear as rings upon every finger… This adoring absorption can of course be carried to extremes – in real-life dance situations, one sometimes looks at another dancer, or spots a turn, or even gives the audience a bold and saucy glance, but the adult beginners got it – I caught a few of them looking longingly at their own palms as they performed the final port-de-bras. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s ballet.

Big and Small

I am coming to the end of a two-month stay in Washington DC. The time has passed quickly for me, and it has been productive in terms of my work; three chapters and an introduction to my book finished, two more taking firm shape, a clear sense of how the whole thing will look in the end. But all work and no play makes Grownup Bunhead a dull girl, so I have also been drinking deep at the wells of culture. Museums, performances… even a major league baseball game. And of course, dance, doing and seeing it.

Dancing on the bar!

I had the opportunity to see the Royal Ballet perform at the Kennedy Center early in June. The program was Don Quixote, which has never been my favorite ballet, but it’s one of the RB’s signatures. This particular production featured Carlos Acosta’s take on the choreography, and on the whole, it sizzled like no production I’ve ever seen. Instead of a long, hammy prologue with endless antics by the Don and Sancho Panza, there was a lovely scene between the Don and the apparition of Dulcinea, who floated in on a beam of bluish light in her Romantic tutu with a veil over her head like a Wili. The character dancing was effortless and un-corny, a reminder of one of the things that makes the Royal one of the world’s great ballet companies; they really have fantastic specialists in this under-appreciated area of the art form.

Carlos Acosta, as Basilio, and Marianela Nuñez as Kitri were joyful and great fun to watch. I sat way, way, up in the third balcony, but even at that distance, their energy communicated, and the intricate, precise footwork carried. For the first time in my life, I got through the whole first act without feeling a bit impatient with the endless “come on, everyone, let’s dance for no particular reason” pacing of it. The best scene was in the tavern in Act III, when Basilio and Kitri danced on the tables and on the bar – Kitri and the Street Dancer did a very sensuous female pas-de-deux that spiced up what can otherwise feel like a very kitschy “peasants in a tavern” schtick.

Third balcony, a little right of center.

I walked out of the grandeur of the Kennedy Center (and into the grandeur of a truly spectacular evening on the Potomac) with a new appreciation for the scale of Don Quixote – Minkus’ score opened up hugely in that huge space, and the scale of the sets, the complexity of the lighting and scenery effects, and the BIG dancing made sense. Maybe my problem with the ballet before was that I had seen productions that wanted to make it a smaller, more intimate thing; but it has no really compelling storyline or psychological development. Like the picaresque novel from which it draws inspiration, it wanders from one spectacle to the next, from the curious to the hilarious to the outrageous to the bizarre, and you just have to go along with it, which proves easier when the production does justice to the grandiloquence of the concept.

Yes, he is holding her up one-handed.

Oh, and it helps to have some of the best dancers in the world to dance it.

On the other end of the spectrum of scale, Chamber Dance Ensemble, a seasonal company directed by Diane Coburn Bruning, resident now in DC (she started the group in New York). Coburn Bruning is a choreographer with a strong commitment to the integration of dance and music – in her pre-performance talk she made very clear that she will have nothing to do with dancing to recorded music. Her company includes six dancers and four musicians (a string quartet); thus the “chamber” in its name. They performed in the Lansburgh Theatre, a 441 seat theater that was for many years the mainstage for the Shakespeare Theater Company (they now have a larger, more modern theater as well). This small venue suited the size of the company and the chamber music well. The quartet was on stage with the dancers and the choreography had clearly taken this into consideration, since even from my seat, on the left aisle of the center block of seats, which is to say right in front of the quartet, I could see almost everything. I could certainly see the sweat fly off the male dancers when they performed barrel turns!

That's Diane Coburn Bruning on the left, and a few of her company members, including the violist!

The level of technical ability on the part of the dancers and musicians was very high – and the program was very demanding of all of them, especially the violinists. They were only offstage for the first piece, a spoken-word performance work by Ann Carlson, called Four Men in Suits (which pretty much describes the cast). But after that they played an Astor Piazzolla tango, and then the dancers came on for the first piece, which had a commissioned score by Chia Patino and choreography by a young up-and-comer named Darrell Grand Moultrie. The Wild Swans of the title were nothing like Petipa swans – no feathers, no pulsing allongé arms; men and women both, they had an angular, birdy quality that had more to do with the actual behaviors and body forms of these strange, prehistoric creatures than with a romanticized notion of their serene beauty. Not to say that the choreography ignored the whole history of balletic swanning around; there were moments when the archetypical movements surfaced, but only to splash away. The costumes were very subdued, deep violet for both men and women, and even though swans aren’t purple, somehow the color, like wild plums or wild flowers, or a summer sunset, seemed right. The music, too, had this eerie, untamed quality, lots of sighing slides and airy harmonics.

Slightly creepy, very cool.

That music, so shimmery and rustling, flowed right into the next piece, by Arvo Pärt, with Coburn Bruning’s choreography on the three women. Dulcinea’s white veil was diaphanous – even from the third balcony I could see the ballerina’s face vaguely through it. In “Arranged” the women wore much heavier lace veils, white leotards, and nothing else. They sat on a row of seven or eight spindly white chairs placed at an angle across the stage, their bare feet covered by a mound of rose petals. I can’t quite describe what made this such a fascinating piece to watch – they didn’t actually do a lot of movement and the movement they did was very small, very controlled, most of the time. One woman spent probably five minutes holding a modified boat pose (!) while sifting through rose petals with her fingers as the other two did a strange, winding pas-de-deux downstage. But like the music, in which the second violin played the same double-stopped drone the entire time, the restraint of the movement was what kept me interested – the smallest gestures seemed significant.

The second half of the program was as varied and challenging for the performers as the first; a “structured improvisation” for the dancers was matched with an exercise in which the quartet were given a piece of music to play which they had not played together before, or seen until they walked out on stage and were handed the score. Then the two violinists performed a movement from Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins, and the final piece, also by Coburn Bruning, was an homage to her teacher, set to Baroque music, and wonderfully athletic and playful. It reminded me of Balanchine with some of the strings cut loose, a little bit of Twyla-Tharpish zing thrown in. One leitmotif was what I guess you'd have to call the "en pointe slide" -- a dancer would literally skate on the tips of her shoes, like a kid sliding in her socks on a polished floor. Only on pointe. On pointe!

Big ballet, small ballet – they both have their appeal. I think, however, that it is the Chamber Dance Project I will continue to reflect on and draw inspiration from for longer. I will never be a Kitri, nor do I have any desire even to try to accomplish the level of athleticism of the CDP dancers, but there is something in the way that the contemporary choreography embraces the music, the way the dancers, on stage, make eye contact with the musicians, as well as with the audience, that makes me think this is really the future of the art form. Which is funny of course, because it is the past of the art form as well – when Louis XIV danced at court, he did so with his orchestra in the arena with him, not hidden away in a pit. But there will always be an audience, too, for the big ballets – when they’re good, their like a four-course meal with flights of wine for each course, heady and delicious.

Le roi danse

If one knows anything at all about the history of classical ballet, one knows that it began, more or less, with the court dances of the Ancien Régime, in France. In particular, Louis XIV, the brilliant young “Sun King” while a still a teenager raised the art form from polite entertainment to a shock-and-awe spectacle that made manifest his divine election. In 1653, at the connivance of his Italian chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, he appeared in a suite of dances called Le Ballet de la Nuit, with music by Lully, culminating (as the night generally does) with the break of day, when the king, dressed in golden armor of the Roman style and sporting a corona of golden rays, “rose” from beneath the dancing floor, in the persona of Apollo. 

Gérard Corbiau’s film, Le roi danse, from 2000 is hard to get hold of in the US, but you can at least watch his reconstruction of the thrilling moment on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMvpvDjFvHA. Aside from the slight whiff of fromage it provides quite a convincing picture of how impressive this apotheosis would have been. 

Vaux-le-Vicomte: a pocket Versailles
(for those with deep pockets)

And Louis took dance very seriously; in 1661 he actually arrested (and subsequently imprisoned for life) his finance minister, in part because of a ballet. Nicolas Fouquet had commissioned a work from the great dramatist Molière, Les Fâcheux (“The Unfortunates” or "The Annoying Ones" – a cruelly apt title given what became of its patron). It was performed on a hot August evening in the gardens of his magnificent castle at Vaux-le-Vicomte, and tout le monde attended. The King was the guest of honor. He applauded Molière’s accomplishment, but he was not amused by the pretense of his CFO. Fouquet had dared to rival the king as a patron of both architecture and ballet – the means by which Louis perceived his divine prerogative should be made manifest.

 

But why dance?  It all has to do with power and message. The dancer’s body speaks persuasively, viscerally, and that means that whatever message it conveys exercises persuasive force. An absolute monarch absolutely must control the messages that bodies in motion express. Mark Franko, a dance historian, writes, “In 1661, court ballet was still a vast metaphor for social interaction. In order to exert control over the medium of dance, which was indirectly a control over his courtiers, he (Louis) institutionalized dance by founding a Royal Academy of Dancing.” [Franko, 2015]. 

He's got legs and he knows how to use them.

Louis was the Dancing King, and the King of Dance as well (and he had the gams to prove it, as his famous portrait by Hycinthe Rigaud shows). Ballet would not be the same without him. But he was not the only monarch to stake his power on dance performance. 

Today I went to Dumbarton Oaks, a small museum that specializes in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art. The collection was assembled by Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss, a wealthy diplomatic couple, who gave their house (which they had designed with an eye to its future existence as a museum), collections, and gardens to Harvard University in 1940 as “a home for the humanities.” It is a little corner of Paradise in Georgetown. 

The Johnson Pavilion

After spending a very long time ogling the exquisite objects in the Byzantine collection (oh, the jewelry!), I wandered into the new part of the building (the original house is a Federal-style brick mansion); this addition was built by Philip Johnson in the early 1960s, and it is, in true Johnson fashion, more glass and light and air than anything else. It takes the form of a ring of domed pavilions encircling a simple fountain. I overheard a woman saying, “Ah, still more beauty!” as she looked about.

In the pavilion dedicated to the Maya, I eavesdropped while an erudite man explained to his companion the differences between alphabets, syllabaries, and ideographic systems. It turns out that when paleographers are trying to decipher an ancient form of writing, they use basic statistical analysis to begin to understand whether they’re looking at an alphabetical system in which each character corresponds to a single sound, a syllabary, in which character represents a syllable (consonant/vowel grouping), or a pictographic or ideographic system, in which the characters represent whole words. It turns out (according to Mr. Smarty Pants, who sounded pretty credible to me) that if there are about 20-40 frequently repeated characters, you are looking at an alphabet, 40-70, a syllabary, and over 70, usually over 100, an ideographic system. 

When he had moved on I walked over to see what had prompted his little disquisition; and it was a limestone panel, about six feet tall, dense, yes, with Mayan glyphs (which are a combination of logograms and syllabic characters, as it happens). But at the center, almost life size, stands a figure. Or rather, not stands, but dances. His body faces front, though he turns his head sharply to the left, so his face appears in full profile.

For a zoomable hi-res image go here

Young, lithe, and slim as any Greek kouros, he also shares their suspension between aristocratic detachment and action. 

He lifts one heel off the ground, cocking his knee and raising his hip and shoulder on that side. His corresponding arm also rises, his elbow just a little lower than his shoulder, his hand held up at the height of his head, his fingers curled around the slender, serpentine handle of his very nasty looking axe (I had just been checking out the evil-yet-beautiful jade axe blades in the neighboring vitrine). On the other side, he holds his hand low, by his hip, and in it he clutches some kind of handled pot and a docile-looking viper. According to the museum’s wall label, this little bucket is labeled “darkness” and symbolizes a massive, light-killing thunderstorm.

The glyphs give us his name –  K’an Joy Chitam – and inform those who can read them that here he performs a dance in which he becomes Chaak, the Mayan god of bad weather and blood sacrifice. His parents kneel to either side of him, as the panel has some kind of genealogical significance. 

He wears an elaborate costume. His head-dress, ear-ornaments, necklace, and pectoral seem to be made up of serpents’ coils, turtle shells, and beads. He wears cuffs with inlaid patterns that look a great deal like the flashy golden arm-rings embedded with precious stones that I saw in a case a few yards away. Then he has this pleated kilt of sorts, high-waisted, falling just to the tops of his thighs, and close fitting, showing off the trim line of his waist and the swell of his thigh muscles. Over this he wears a belt with two enormous strap-work bosses over the hips and a long, long, sash hanging down right in the center, pinched between two enormous beads between his thighs, and then descending to the space between his ankles in their striated cuffs. 

I would guess that originally the panel belonged to some tomb or temple complex built in honor of this short-lived king, and that it would have been painted brightly (I’ve watched my share of documentaries on Nova); but even isolated and bare, it conveys a sense of this muscular, lithe, young deity in human form, using his rigorously disciplined body to bridge the gap between this world and that of the gods.

Dance, like other art forms, is instrumental; that is, it enacts, rather than just relates, knowledge, states of being, and power.  Matthew Looper explains the function of dance in rituals of kingship in the Classic Maya world thus, “Such displays did not merely represent rulers’ control over divine forces, but actualized this power, making it real through aesthetically grounded experience” (Looper, 2009).

That the human brain has some intrinsic aesthetic capability, similar and perhaps related to the capability for spoken language, has emerged from recent neuroscientific research, so that perhaps now people will begin to take seriously what humanists have been insisting ever since Kant (at least), namely that aesthetic experience is substantive, real and powerful. Although I cringe at any universalizing theory that seeks to put all humanity in one tidy explanatory box, I would like to think that K’an Joy Chitam and Louis XIV would have recognized themselves in one another despite the vast gulf of time, space, and culture between them. For both, the body of the king in all its youthful virility, its splendidly costumed pomp, its skillful, technical command of precise movement, made real and present their special relationship to their respective deities.

Perhaps Merce Cunningham said it best: “If a dancer dances – which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body someone else’s dance – but if the dancer dances, everything is there. . . Our ecstasy in dance comes from the possible gift of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing of the bare energy can give us. What is meant is not license, but freedom.” So maybe that is why the king must lead the dance... otherwise, people might think that freedom belongs to them!

To read more about the Dumbarton Oaks dancer:

http://museum.doaks.org/Obj22738?sid=4548&x=79539&port=2652

Matthew Looper, To Be Like Gods: Dance in Ancient Maya Civilization, University of Texas Press, 2009

For more on Louis XIV and ballet:

Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet, Random House, 2011

Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, Oxford University Press, 2015

Back to the (Advanced) Beginning

Washington, DC, today

I started writing this blog back in the fall of 2011. I was on sabbatical, and I had a fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I left my darling children and my dear husband, and lived rather monastically for two months in an apartment with a depressing, dingy kitchen located near the splendid downtown of Pasadena. The weather that fall remained warm well into October, and Pasadena and San Marino charmed the heck out of me. 

I had a bicycle, a lovely, elderly Schwinn for which I had paid far too much, and this I rode about, discovering the town and checking out the many different dance and yoga studios. I started blogging because I wanted to share with my ballet friends back in Utah (and elsewhere) a little insight on the options, from the butt-busting “barrefly” workout to Patricia Godfrey’s and Francisco Martinez’s excellent adult classes at Pasadena Conservatory of Dance. I even went to “Day of the Dead” yoga, which was… interesting.

Now, once again, I am far from home, spending three months on the East Coast as a fellow at various art-historical institutions while I (try at least to) finish a book manuscript. I arrived in Washington, D.C. yesterday afternoon, and moved into my far-from dingy apartment with its sparkling kitchen stocked with Eva Zeisel ceramics. 

This morning, despite an urge to sleep in after a rough first night (city noises, too much light in the apartment, who knows what anxiety attacks), I made myself get up and get dressed and get on the Metro to Townley Center, and then to walk to the Washington Ballet studios for an Advanced Beginner class.

You see, dear reader, I have learned; when first I started going to adult open classes in new venues, I would inevitably show up for the intermediate class, and then I would proceed to feel (in this order); overwhelmed, klutzy, stupid, and ashamed. There is no reason to feel this way, when one is taking adult ballet, so eventually I figured out, start at the advanced beginner level, and see what happens.

What happened today was that the instructor, a very lovely (and by this I mean both aesthetically lovely and personally lovely) young man named Aaron (what a great name, two A’s to begin with… have I ever mentioned that my nuclear family all have names that begin with A? They call us A⁴, sometimes), anyway Aaron, greeted me very personably and warmly. And then proceeded to kick my butt, in the nicest possible way.

Partly, I am just a little out of shape; with my chronic hip problems, I’ve probably been slacking a bit lately. And while I am not complaining, because heaven knows I’m lucky to have the opportunity to dance ballet at all in a town as small and as remote as mine, I do sometimes find that the adult intermediate-advanced level class could be just a wee bit more challenging, and I could certainly use a lot more correction. Bad habits have a way of creeping in, and once in, they’re mighty stubborn.

Just can't not.

Partly, every time I take a class from a new instructor, the initial learning curve feels steep. They have their individual things; in Aaron’s case, he wants you to begin the combination with your supporting-side arm on the barre already (as opposed to the usual prep), and while working at barre he wants you to look straight ahead, until at least rondes-de-jambes. He explained why he does both of these things, and his explanations made sense to me (arm: ensures that you start out the right distance from barre and that you are aligned before you begin, head: allows you to focus on your form and watch yourself in the mirror, though in my case, standing behind a Very Tall Lady, not so much). But they were HARD for me. That lizard-brain part of me that got beaten into a particular shape by RAD all those years ago almost cannot not do the head positions. 

In a deeper way, each new place I dance teaches me something different about the way the body moves in space. Aaron has very elegant port-de-bras – as I said, he is lovely – but as he explained what he was doing with it, it suddenly dawned on me that this is the most natural thing in the world (of course it’s not, but it seemed that way); the arms, he said, are the mysterious part of the choreography. They lag just infinitesimally behind the precise, on-beat movements of the feet and legs. 

The mystery of the port-de-bras

Choreographically, the class suited my energy level and skill just fine; no new steps, certainly, but lots of unusual (to me) combinations of well-worn favorites. I loved the pacing of the class as well; he does not waste time on overly wordy explanation. Mostly, it’s a quick setting of the work, then bang, execution, no marking, no repetition. This keeps one focused and sharp, and is also, I suppose, why this is and “advanced” beginner, and not a beginner-beginner class. Having a live accompanist, of course, makes all the difference in the world, since the music is always perfectly suited to the movement and there is no fiddling around with a CD or MP3 player. The pianist today was very good, I should mention.

The class was large, but I definitely noticed that Aaron made an effort to speak to each dancer individually at some point, and he knew most of the students by name. It’s a very diverse group, ranging from an absolutely glittery, technically gifted young woman whose birthday it was to the usual crowd of forty- and fifty- and even sixty-something amateurs with all levels of skill and experience. People were friendly, as well, which is not what outsiders expect of ballet people, but what I have learned is the norm amongst adult ballet students and professional dancers, at least, even if it wasn’t back in my student days. Maybe it is the shared sense of ineptitude that builds our kindness to one another. Maybe it's just the communal act of sweating.

Sure I do!

So begins my new adventure in ballet-tourism. I am thinking I will definitely go to Aaron’s classes when I can (the studio is not at all convenient to get to, sadly), and I am toying with the notion of taking a flamenco class at a more accessible studio as well. I will blog about all this periodically, when I can, but since I will be spending my weekdays doing my “real” writing, I may just want to dance, dance, dance the weekends away!