High Release: or, why it's okay not to be okay at your summer intensive

 For the past five years, I have attended the artÉmotion Adult Ballet Summer Intensive.  This one-week program, which began the year before I joined, is led by Allison DeBona and Rex Tilton, first soloist and principal dancers (respectively) at BalletWest, artists, teachers, and human beings extraordinaire. They bring together an impressive faculty of professional dancers and dance teachers, including many of their colleagues from Ballet West, and they pour their considerable energy and ingenuity into providing a herd of adult amateur dancers with the kind of experience normally reserved for teenaged pre-professionals. As a person who once attended ballet summer intensives as a teenager, and who has now attended more intensives as a grownup, I think I can confidently say that while the physically intensive part is similar (e.g. you think you're going to die of exhaustion by the end), the emotionally and mentally intensive part is totally different. As an adult, with a different set of expectations, and with (one hopes) a more evolved sense of compassion for oneself and others, the mental intensity actually feels (to me) pretty damn good.

That's me in the yellow skirt.
Photo by Logan Sorenson (@lmsorensonphotography)

This year was special, of course. All of us have suffered through eighteen months of pandemic-related stress on top of all the other crap that flies through the air in this monkey-house of life. We're adults, so people have had children (Allison and Rex have two-year old son), lost children, lost parents, lost partners, lost jobs, moved, come out of the closet, had surgery, struggled with their mental health, been injured, undergone chemotherapy, dropped out of school, gotten divorced, gotten married, fallen in and out of love... and these are just the stories that I heard in my various conversations with other students at the intensive this year. What really blows my mind, in the long view, is that any of us showed up at all, and that Allison and Rex were able to pull it off, and that for six days, we were all able to dance through it.

So, a bunch of traumatized people, together in a dance studio for eight hours a day for six days in a row. You would think that there would be high potential for disfunction and friction, right? And sometimes, it does get real. People end up sitting on the floor in tears. People get angry and walk out. People go quietly into the bathroom at break and vomit from the stress of struggling to learn some new choreography. However, unlike my experience as a teenager at intensives where girls could be actively mean or casually callous, I found that when these things happened, and when someone was clearly struggling, the group would come together and respond with compassion and support. And I think that this happens partly because people are fundamentally inclined to be compassionate to their tribe (and in the ballet studio, we are a tribe) but also, and more importantly, because Allison and Rex have consciously created an environment that builds kindness into the experience.

Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in Black Swan

One of the stereotypes about the ballet world and about ballet dancers is that it's a dog-eat-dog, competitive, back-stabbing world in which everyone is out for their own main chance.  And maybe there's an element of truth in that, sometimes. At the level of professional or even pre-professional dance, the competition is intense, and one person's success is often gained at the cost of someone else's disappointment. But still, from what I've seen of Allison and Rex working with their colleagues both from Ballet West and from other dance companies, collegiality, mutual support, and friendship are really the main theme. Who would want that life if there were not some kind of esprit de corps that counterbalances the incredibly hard work, poor pay, uncertainty, and risk?

For amateur adult dancers like myself, of course, the landscape is much different. There is risk, of course: risk of getting injured, risk of feeling bad about oneself, risk of embarrassment, risk of feeling like you wasted your precious vacation days and your hard-earned money doing something unsatisfying. Our very futures do not depend on the outcomes of these risks we take (well, injury can be pretty influential, as I and many others have learned to our cost -- middle aged bodies do not bounce back so quickly). Yet, in the moment, they can feel like a pretty big deal. When I can't seem to learn a bit of choreography, I sort of want to cry or throw a little tantrum. When my hip hurts, I tend to snivel. When I look in a mirror or at a photograph and I just don't see an image that matches the picture in my head, I feel angry and disappointed. I guess that makes it sound pretty negative, but wait for it. I actually think these moments, when I want to pout, whine, stomp my foot, shake my fist, throw in the towel, are good. 

Good? But these are BAAAAD feelings, right? Well. Recently, I enrolled in a digital weight-loss coaching program that advertises itself as based on psychology, and one of the best things I learned from it was to be a little more in touch with my emotions (and yes, it helped me lose the 25 lbs had put on over the last five years). Like a lot of people (especially people in my demographic, perhaps), I grew up with a pretty deeply entrenched habit of emotional avoidance. Negative feelings were bad, and so you should let go of them, deny them, push them away. Of course, this is completely bonkers. It's like saying that if I ignore the gushing wound on my leg it will just go away without any further attention from me.

Negative feelings are a survival mechanism, as anyone who has ever watched a nature documentary or a horror movie knows. The gazelle's twitchy nerves save her from the lion, the survivor of the psycho killer is the one who listens to her "bad feeling about this." So they're not morally bad, nothing to be ashamed of, just your body or your brain alerting you to the fact that you need to do something, for example RUN LIKE HELL! But as my weight-loss app taught me, they can also be useful signals to change one's behavior in more subtle ways. For example, when I'm feeling super bummed out because I "can't" learn choreography, I can step back and change the narrative (e.g. "do something") -- it's not that I can't, it's that I need to give myself a little more time, I need to ask for more help, I need to take a short break and come back to this... that kind of thing. Psychologists call this "emotional acceptance." Back when I was seeing a therapist after my dad died, she worked on this with me (this was almost 25 years ago, so it's nothing new).

On the second day of the workshop, a couple of the dancers in the intermediate group that I was part of were feeling pretty frustrated and disappointed with our choreography. We had just begun to learn it, but the style was pretty clearly not classical ballet, and the music was also more funk/electronica than Debussy. I sympathized with their feelings, though I did not share them. You come to a ballet intensive expecting to do ballet, right? These dancers took their concerns to Allison. At the end of rehearsal, she joined us, and spent a good hour listening to people's different perspectives, sharing her own experiences, and proposing some different solutions. What really struck me was that there was no judgment. Nobody was "bad" for having reservations or doubts about the direction things were going. Nobody was asked to feel ashamed. She really set the tone of "we're all in this together."

Was it the pandemic year at work? Was it Allison's wisdom and experience as a veteran director of intensives for adults and children? Was it the fact that the choreography itself was actually pretty challenging and interesting? I think it was probably a combination, but the outcome was that most everyone stuck with our group, learned the very unclassical choreography, and over the next three hours of rehearsal on day three, infused it with something very personal and very profound. It went from being a bunch of steps to being a chorus made up of individual voices, together, but each one unique. I can't claim that I performed the steps perfectly even once, but with Allison's guidance, and the patience of our young, but extremely calm and kind choreographer, Noel Jensen, we made it through, each of us kind of winging it as need be. And to me, that was cause for satisfaction and pride. 

This is Jose Limon, doing the thing
From the Limon company's twitter

I usually struggle a fair amount with the jazz, modern, and contemporary choreography -- I just don't dance in those ways often enough to pick it up quickly. But I'm learning. Each time I go down to Salt Lake for the intensive, I gain a few steps. Two years ago, I remember that we had a class with a guy trained in the Limon technique, and he really worked with us on the high release, this moment when you let go of your groundedness, release the contraction of your core, and float, for an instant, above the call of gravity. I loved that feeling, and sometimes, when I'm by myself, I just go for it. In the end, I guess what I'm saying is that my annual pilgrimage ritual, attending artEmotion, is kind of like that. It's the high release of my year, the moment when I let go, and I see what happens, and I feel all the feels. This year it seemed particularly necessary, and particularly moving.  I am full of gratitude and humility.

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.

Si dolce é’l tormento

I do not live alone. I have a cat, and two kids still (or again) at home, and a partner. Our house is not large, and it has a nice, open plan (e.g. not a lot of privacy). So, that’s my situation, along with a space about 6 feet long and 20” wide for practicing ballet, doing my Pilates workouts, and stretching. As winter grudgingly gives way to spring, there are sunny days, sometimes, and I get out for walks when I can. Eventually, I’ll probably take my bike down and start riding it for exercise, something I haven’t done regularly since we moved to Utah (weird, I know, but I sort of gave up mountain biking when I had young kids, and then I developed a hip thing, and then… well, you get it).

pas de chat

I’m really very fortunate, and I am grateful and humbled about this daily as I watch the news or read stories about people living on the streets, being forced to go to their Amazon warehouse jobs, or to work extra shifts as EMTs without even having health insurance. Last week, I had to have an outpatient surgery, nothing major, but just being at a hospital, and seeing all those people hard at work after several weeks of working from home myself was food for thought.

The ballet community continues to cohere and persevere – all kinds of opportunities are out there, and some are even for people like me, enthusiastic and not particularly talented adults. Some women I met last summer at the Artémotion adult ballet intensive are involved in this cool, international adult ballet intensive online: https://www.adultballet.co/blogs/adult-ballet-collective-online-intensive

That said, I haven’t taken a single live class since my last post. I don’t know, I’m just suffering a bit of Weltschmerz if Weltschmerz is something you can experience in “bits.” I am basically an introvert, but when I move, I like to move with people around; whether it’s rowing, yoga, ballet, hiking, I just prefer to do it in company. Dancing by myself is not all that entertaining, contra Billy Idol.

Too cool for me.

Part of my lack of motivation has to do with the weather, which has turned cold and grey again. Part has to do with the aging body I inhabit, I suppose. And part has to do with the webcam on my electronic devices. I had been filming myself taking class, so I could provide myself with some feedback that I’m not getting when I’m following a live class with a world-class dancer somewhere in their glam apartment in Paris or whatever. And I did not like what I was seeing. I won’t bore you with the details, but whereas I’m pretty critical of myself in the mirror when I’m in the studio, I can also sometimes see something that looks good. The video recordings I made of myself were not that forgiving. NOTHING looked good. Literally, nothing.

To make matters worse, I was going on Instagram or whatever and seeing people I knew – other adult ballet people, posting videos of themselves doing the same classes, and they looked great. High extensions, nice turnout, pleasant and appropriate facial expressions, non-awkward seeming port-du-corps… something nice. Some of them even put on real ballet clothes, or pointe shoes, and still looked impressive, not lame. I haven't put on a leotard in weeks. Last time I did, I made the mistake of taking a picture of myself in it, in my bathroom, and it was not flattering. 

I literally haven’t spent this much energy thinking about how much I suck at ballet since I was a teenager.

This studio will never seem small again.

As a grownup, I realize this is completely unproductive and ridiculous. I stopped (mostly) filming myself and started doing the easier online classes I found on Kathryn Morgan’s and Lazy Dancer Tips’ YouTube channels. This has helped a bit. But I don’t have a mirror, and it really is hard to do things right or even sort of right when you can’t check your form from time to time. I also don’t have a barre, just a chair, and my floor is very slippery and small, and a million other things, wah, wah, wah. I just want to get back to the studio and be in that happy place, where the walls are pink (why?), the floor is Marley (yay), and I know which mirrors to avoid (funhouse effects).

Before I “saw” how really bad I actually am (and please, this is not an invitation for contradiction, because it’s not about facts one way or the other, just the psychic damage of watching videos of myself), I had this idea I wanted to choreograph a short piece to a piece of music I really like, a Monteverdi aria called “Si dolce é’l tormento,” and I thought I would perhaps set it on myself. The lyric, by Francesco di Leonardis, is about the pain of loving an unobtainable beauty, which is pretty much my relationship to ballet, come to think of it. Now, I’m thinking perhaps I need a more lithe and accomplished body to work with, since what I want to say is how very sweetly agonizing it is to desire the beautiful that is out of reach, or, to throw another German word in there, Sehnsucht. Hard to say that when it looks like you're holding hamburgers in your hands, you have a dopey, yet intensely concentrated expression on your face, and you are two beats behind the music.

Here is the lyric:

Si dolce è'l tormento              

Ch'in seno mi sta,                  

Ch'io vivo content      

Per cruda beltà.                     

Nel ciel di bellezza                 

S'accreschi fierezza               

Et manchi pietà:                     

Che sempre qual scoglio

All'onda d'orgoglio                

Mia fede sarà.                        

La speme fallace                    

Rivolgam' il piè.                     

Diletto ne pace

Non scendano a me.

E l'empia ch'adoro

Mi nieghi ristoro

Di buona mercè:

Tra doglia infinita,

Tra speme tradita

Vivrà la mia fè.

Se fiamma d'amore

Già mai non sentì

Quel rigido core

Ch'il cor mi rapì,

Se nega pietate

La cruda beltate

Che l'alma invaghì:

Ben fia che dolente,

Pentita e languente

Sospirimi un dì.

So sweet is the torment

that lies in my heart,

that I live happily

because of its cruel beauty.

May beauty's fury

grow wide in the sky

without compassion;

for my devotion shall hold

like a rock against

pride's unrelenting wave.

False hope,

keep me wandering!

let no peace

nor pleasure befall me!

Evil woman, whom I adore,

deny me the rest

that compassion would give;

amidst infinite pain,

amidst broken hopes

shall survive my devotion.

There is no rest for me

in the warmth or the cold.

Only in heaven

shall I find rest.

If the deadly strike

of an arrow injured my heart,

I shall heal still,

and change my destiny,

death's very heart

with the same arrow.

If the frigid heart

that stole mine

never has felt

love's ardour;

if the cruel beauty

that charmed my soul

denies me compassion,

may she die one day

by me pained,

repenting, languishing.

(1624)

And here’s a link to a performance by Philippe Jaroussky, a fabulous countertenor; I think it’s my preferred version, played on “period” style instruments, and so haunting (I saw him perform it in Paris once, and it’s not something one easily forgets). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woh1d7QxIKA

I have some vague sketch in my mind of what this might look like, but I won’t commit anything here. I think instead, I’ll just make some notes (not videos!) and when I can, I’ll set it on someone with some actual grace and poise. But it is definitely a solo dance, a pas d’une (or in the case of Jaroussky, d’un), the ultimate vehicle for Einsamkeitserleben.

Home, practice

The "studio" COVID-19 style

Like almost everyone else in the whole freaking world, I'm stuck at home. I'm grateful that I have a home, food to eat, my family and my cat to interact with, and a whole slew of other things. I'm not sick. Nobody I love is currently sick. Knock on wood. Lots of people are sick. A guy I knew in college, just 52 years old, died yesterday from COVID-19. He was a pretty well known musician, and Variety reported on his death, which is why I know. There might be other people from my past or present who are sick or dead, and I won't know for weeks. That's the nature of this damn thing.

So, it's a weird time. The ballet community is in a particularly weird space, or perhaps better said, everybody is in their own weird spaces, doing what they can in their garages, living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and in at least one case I know of, their master bathroom. The upside of all this downside is that lots of really awesome artists are sharing their home practice with the great unwashed (who showers when they never go out?). I took a ballet class today from Christopher Stowell, who oddly enough was on my younger brother's soccer team back in the day (we lived in the same neighborhood as the Russell-Stowell family, doyennes of PNB). He was in his living room in Toronto (I presume), holding on to the back of an upholstered chair, being elegant. His pianist was somewhere else, but somehow they made it work. If you want to take this class, it is recorded and available on the Zarely website. It kicked my butt. (https://www.zarely.co/pages/live-streams).

The class was free, as are most of these unprecedented opportunities to literally dance with the stars. But let’s not forget that these people are mostly currently going unpaid, and the future of the companies that employed them is uncertain. The big companies have links now on their homepages to donate, but some smaller companies do not, and our local civic ballet had to cancel all its spring classes and performances, so teachers are out of a job, too. Consider making a donation to your ballet school or local company. If you have season tickets, or a refund due on spring classes, you could also donate those funds to the company or school. I'll be donating the remainder of my spring tuition to my school, and I've already made a donation to several regional dance organizations. If you're looking for a place to lend your support, first ask around in your local dance community, or explore one of these general funds:

• Dance NYC COVID-19 Emergency Fund: https://www.dance.nyc/about/donate
• The Dancers' Fund (Chicago): https://chicagodancersunited.org/the-dancers-fund
• Performing Arts Worker Relief Fund (San Francisco/Northern California): https://www.theatrebayarea.org/page/COVID-19relief-fund
• Americans for the Arts has a list of arts relief funds -- scroll down to find it: https://www.americansforthearts.org/by-topic/disaster-preparedness/coronavirus-covid-19-resource-and-response-center

Also, don't forget to keep bugging your local, state, and federal government representatives to include the arts in their thinking about disaster recovery. As I said in a keynote talk I recently wrote for a virtual student research symposium at another university (my first guest speaking gig of that sort, for sure), science will help us address the immediate crisis, but the arts are what will allow us to process the grief, recover our sense of humanity, and rediscover joy.

Quarantinewhile, as Stephen Colbert says, I've been working out a lot, even though I'm still working full time from home. In addition to being an art history professor, I'm in university research administration, which means a lot of things right now. We have to have plans: plans for when the campus completely locks down to ensure that valuable research materials aren't lost, and multi-million dollar equipment is safely maintained, plans for the lab rats if all the vet techs who care for them get sick, plans for our human-subjects researchers whose grants are predicated on working directly with, well, humans. So it's a lot. The working out helps mitigate the stress and the fact that I'm working at a tiny desk that I put next to my dresser in my closet (it has a skylight, so it's not as dreary as it sounds).

I usually do Pilates two or three times a week. I'm up to five, partly just to keep my trainer, who owns her own business and has rent to pay on her studio, in business. At some ungodly hour each morning, I get up, change into my "work" outfit of leggings, a sports bra, and a t-shirt, and "go to class" on Zoom. It's not the same as the Reformer, but we'll deal with it. My butt and shoulders seem to be working harder than ever. And I get to stay in my Pilates clothes all day long. At first, this seemed like heaven. Now it's just a little scungy, and sometimes I actually clean myself up and put on a real shirt and jeans.

As for ballet, I've been taking these online classes, and filming myself while I do them. It is Absolutely Horrifying. I have no illusion that I'm "good at ballet" or anything, but crap, I had no idea how bad I am! Especially my port-de-corps -- arms, upper body, head, they all suck. Oh well, things to work on. My feet make me want to weep. And what happened to my turnout (oh, yeah, hip surgery and 51 years of living on earth).

Today, the little piece of Marley floor that I ordered came. It's really little. I think I can just about get my size 7.5 feet into first position on it. The problem is that my actual floors are so slippery they're no good for practicing pointe work, and I like to practice pointe work, because if I don't, I go from bad to just execrable. So I'll be doing my daily Katherine Morgan pointe class on this tiny patch of studio like surface for now.

Anyway, there's no particular point to this entry, other than to remind everyone to take care of our professional dancer and dance teacher friends, and just an effort to follow through on my commitment to restart TightsUp. Maybe I'll have some Deep Thoughts presently. For now, it's just #Stayathome and #practice.

See you at the barre, on IGTV or wherever.

Return of Tights Up

Well, it has been a very long while, but I think I want to try to come back to the semi-regular posting of my musings on ballet, on being an adult ballet student, and other (semi) related topics.

First, though, here is an entry I wrote three years ago and never posted, but I think it will provide some useful context going forward...

July, 2017

Balancing Acts

I’ve taken a long hiatus from the blogosphere, partly because I’ve been working on my second book, and partly because, well, life gets busy and middle-aged people get tired. But recently, I had an experience that inspired me to write again. Just to put the plug in up front, the experience in question was participating in Allison Debona and Rex Tilton’s Artémotion Adult Summer Intensive (https://artemotion-summerintensive.com/) at the studios of Ballet West in Salt Lake City. But more on that in a minute…

My mother, a pianist, was always fairly involved in the classical music scene in Seattle when I was growing up. Occasionally, as a wide-eared child listening in on adult dinner table conversation, I’d hear a scene that went like this:

Guest (apropos of a recent Seattle Symphony “pops” concert or the like): It seems so, I don’t know, middle-brow. It’s pandering to the general ignorance about classical music.

Mom: Well, perhaps, but you’ve got to admit, it sells out, and the conductor did slip in some more interesting stuff…

Guest: But it demeans classical music, don’t you think? All people want to hear is Ravel’s Bolero, or that sort of thing. There’s no sophistication.

Mom: Have you noticed that the season-subscribers are on average about eighty? I think that’s because the younger generations haven’t had the same quality of music education, and the older people were trained to appreciate music composed before about 1850.

Guest (snorts)

Mom: While I’d love to hear more twentieth-century music, and a wider range of composers, I think the first thing we’ve got to do, as a musical community, is get the word out that classical music is cool and fun. Kids are big part of this, but their parents – people in their twenties and thirties, are part of it too. And it can’t just be middle-class and upper-class white men…

Guest (shakes head at this radical, lefty, feminist opinion)

The point being, of course, that my mom is an incredibly cool, enlightened person. But also, she had a point, one that has been argued many times and in many ways by cultural critics struggling against the tendency to ossification and elitism in the realms of “high culture.” Namely, that for any “classical” art form to continue to thrive and develop, it needs an audience, and not just an audience, but many audiences. It needs cognoscenti, sure, but it also needs people who just like an occasional dose, people who thought it wasn’t for them, but discovered it was, young people, people of color, people who can’t afford the price of a standard ticket, people who will be inspired to make their own foray into the art form… it needs plurality. Back in the day, that is to say, when classical music, ballet, theater, and visual art were taking shape, there was certainly an element of elitism (patronage, class concerns determining content and form), but there was also the “pit” – the rowdy, diverse public that not only provided an audience for spectacles, but also frequently reproduced these art forms in new venues, radically reimagining and refashioning them.

Students learning puppetry at Northwest Puppet Center, Seattle, March 2016

This is something I came to appreciate last year, during my blog-sabbatical, when I co-produced, with a musicologist colleague, a seventeenth-century opera with a cast of student singers and musicians, and buratini, that is, giant, Italian, rod-puppets (and obviously, puppeteers). The puppetry tradition to which the buratini belong is a folk art, that is to say, an art “of the people” in which heroic narratives about Charlemagne and his paladins are told with a distinctly comic and satirical twist. The traditional southern-Italian and Sicilian puppeteers were “of the people,” meaning, not aristocrats, but peasants and laborers, often without formal schooling, often illiterate. Although the tradition can only be traced back to the eighteenth century in the historical record, it is in fact likely to be much older (my third book project, just taking shape, will deal with this question).  The point is, that these possibly illiterate, working-class people took the high-falutin’ literary tradition of the Charlemagne legends (as embodied in the opera we produced, which was written for the Medici court in 1625), and turned it into something wonderful and new, giving birth to a new audience, and a new way of knowing these stories and their characters.

What this all has to do with the summer intensive is this idea of audiences that do not sit passively and well-behaved on their butts in their seats, but that actively participate in the shaping and reshaping of an art form. Ballet, like so many other classical arts, has the problem that it is hugely appealing to those “in the know” but a bit hermetic and daunting to those on the outside. What Allison and Rex (and their many collaborators, more on them shortly), are doing with this adult program is inviting their audience (people interested in ballet, who may be occasional ticket buyers or season subscribers or even key members of the company’s volunteer group, and who may or may not have any experience with dance as an activity in which they themselves engage) into the temple, so to speak. In doing so, they offer an incredible opportunity to their participants to experience, albeit in a “light” form, the sheer effort, mental, physical, and emotional, that goes into making art.

Summer 2018 participants, Artemotion Adult Workshop SLC (photo: Artemotion website)

For some of the participants, the younger ones, the dance majors, and the dance teachers, I’m sure the workshop was more an episode in professional development. For me, and for some of the other middle-aged people who were part of it, though, it was like nothing else we’ve experienced. No matter how “serious” I was about ballet at fifteen, or even when I flirted with returning to dance in my early twenties, I never got this close to the flame. I just was not good enough, according to whatever standards I knew at the time. Maybe if I had been exposed to this kind of thing, I would have been more motivated to stick to it. Or maybe not. It doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is that now, when I go and see dance performed, I will be that much more aware of the backstory, that much more engaged in what I am experiencing not as a product, but as a moment in much larger process. Also, I now know people who are involved in the company’s volunteer organization, and I have a personal connection to some of the dancers, so when I go I will feel less anonymous. Quite frankly, the whole experience has led me to thinking about how I can be more involved, whether by giving time, or money, or both. I’m no longer just a “customer.”

If more people, and by that, I mean people unlike me, people without the immense privilege I’ve had in terms of early exposure to dance and other “classical” arts, in terms of my race, class, body-type, and nationality, etcetera, could be afforded a week of intensive exposure to the back-story of art-making, I think that the arts, as a whole, would be in much better shape in terms of attracting audiences now and in the future. And it’s not just the economic vitality of the arts at stake; their very reason for being, their relevance, depends on being “living” entities, open to change, development, iteration and variation, always in conversation with their own pasts while looking forward to the future.

So, props to Allison and Rex. And props to Adrian Fry, company principal, who made a dance on a rag-tag baker’s dozen of recreational and aspirational dancers ranging in age from 20 to 63, and who got us to work harder than I think many of us thought we had the strength to do. And props to Justin Bass, Patrick Cubbedge, and all the others who put us through our paces. We are grateful, and incredibly sore.

Dancing Past

Humans dance. Who knows? Maybe someday it will be discovered that deep in the DNA of human intelligence, communication, brain function, dance is even older than speech, older than tool-making. For about the last ten years or so, evolutionary biologists and psychologists have returned to an idea first given scientific shape by Charles Darwin, that human language finds its origins in music. They have been gathering a growing body of evidence that suggests musical thinking preceded language and even optimized the neurological and social conditions for its emergence. (For a quick summary, see this story from NPR in 2010).

The kid on the right performs the
Neanderthal version of the
"Locomotion"

If our hominid ancestors were humming, my guess is that they were also tapping their toes. They were dancing. The two -- singing and dancing -- are pretty inseparable, despite western culture's insistence on people sitting still and facing front while listening to classical music. Most musical cultures are also cultures of movement; groove, as they say, is in the heart (and the hands and feet and arms and legs).




If you look at Greek representations of the Maenads or the Muses dancing, often as not they are also providing the musical accompaniment for their gyrations, so I think it is pretty safe to say that the song and dance,  the singer and the dancer, were at least notionally of one body.


These reflections emerge from a little experiment I did last week with a colleague who teaches a course on historical dance in the department of theater. I am teaching a medieval art class this semester, with the theme of transgression. Dancing, in the Middle Ages, was both decried as lust-provoking and dangerous, and practiced as a sacred art form, so it makes for a nice, messy problem to contemplate, a kind of model for other conflicted practices. We cooked up a week of lectures and activities around early dance that culminated with my students (mostly designers and artists) joining hers (actors) for an hour and a half of dancing together.

One of the articles I had my students read suggested that while dance was often described in histrionic terms as sexually arousing and therefore undesirable in a Christian society, at the same time it allowed for a public, formalized enactment of proper relations between the sexes in society. The carole, or circle-dance, emulated the movements of angels in heaven, a kind of harmony of bodies. More complex dances, involving figures and patterns, could of course be read as allegories.

Something else I read as I was preparing for the class really stuck with me; it gave an account of a thirteenth-century student at the University of Paris, a future cleric and theologian of some renown, who wrote rather smugly of his attainment not only as a "finder" (trouvere) of clever tunes and lyrics (in other words, a singer-song-writer), but also as a leader (e.g. choreographer and performer) of dances. It gave me a very lively image of medieval student life, in which all these young fellows would go out and dance around holding hands while their disapproving masters looked on jealously from the shadows of the cloister.

From the Queen Mary Psalter

Holding hands with someone who is neither a family member nor a mate nor indeed necessarily even a close friend is a little weird, as my students and I were reminded while we danced the carole, etc. on Thursday. But it also reminds you, in a pretty immediate and potent way, of the common fleshliness of all bodies, the shared materia of humanity. And the dancing makes it less uncomfortable -- we join our hands, we join our bodies to the music, we join the dance.

But let's not kid ourselves... dance is about the body and the body is about sex (especially in the medieval view of things). The hand holding must have made some clerics, itchy under their cassocks, very tense indeed.

On Tuesday, I closed my lecture with a clip from the film Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett and Joseph Fiennes; it may not be absolutely historically accurate, but it is wonderfully suggestive and captures the very thing that moralists of the era objected to, namely the "clipping and culling," and worse, "smouching and slabbering of one another"

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.