Failing (and Falling) Forward

For the last couple of decades, John Maxwell’s concept of “failing forward” (title of his 2000 best-selling self-help book) has provided a kind of mantra for business school types, and its influence has spread into almost every other realm of endeavor, from elementary-school teaching to the performing arts. 

In a nutshell, Maxwell argues that great achievements are the result of failure, not success; for every triumph there must be a history of failing, getting up, trying again, failing, getting up, trying again, and so forth. Those who succeed do so because they refuse to translate a failure into “I am a failure,” and because they hold on to a belief in themselves and the value of what they’re doing even when nobody else believes. 

 As a general framework, I have no problem with this. It is true that the only successes worthy of the name are those that one had to strive for, the ones that did not come easily. And maintaining one’s self-worth in the face of negativity and rejection is indeed a gift. But. But sometimes you try, and try, and try, and there’s just a limit, set by nature, or society, or whatever, to your ability to fail forward. 

 As an adult ballet student, this hard fact remains – if you define success by the terms of the high art form (180 degree turnout and extensions, perfect lines, high, soaring jumps, flawless enchaînement, etc. etc.) you are going to fail. And not forward, just in an endless cycle. That is because the few, godlike creatures who actually succeed as professional ballerinas and danseurs have trained from childhood, virtually every damn day of their lives, and spend fifty or sixty hours a week, almost year-round, working their bodies and minds into form. They are not perfect humans, because nobody is. The art doesn’t come easily to them, because if it did, it wouldn’t be art. They are just particularly physically and mentally well suited to it, and gritty enough to compensate for their (less than normal) shortcomings so far as its ridiculous demands go. 

I want to emphasize this – they have failed in order to succeed, at who knows what psychic and physical cost, but their success is not attainable by everyone, or even very many ones. It is also not sustainable long term without growth away from the role of dancer into other roles (mentor, coach, arts entrepreneur, choreographer, teacher, artistic director…). Last summer, on a kick of reading dancer autobiographies, I was struck by the narrative arc that united them – the kid with dreams of dancing overcomes a lot of crap to make the most of their natural gifts, flourishes for a brief period as a young artist, encounters inevitable challenges of injury and illness (physical and/or mental), workplace bias, personal demons, interpersonal bad juju, works through these things, makes bad decisions and some good ones, gets chewed up in the press at least once, and finally emerges a more fully formed human and artist, but with very few to no years left in their active performing career as a ballerina/danseur. Just for reference, the books I read were by Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, Jennifer Ringer, Misty Copland, David Hallberg, and Allegra Kent. I also watched the great documentary about Wendy Whelan, Restless Creature, which to me is one of the most poignant depictions of success, and its attendant failures, in the whole genre of artist biography. 

Biscuit Ballerina's "Falling Fridays" remind us that every swan has her bellyflops

So, thinking about this, and refreshing myself on Maxwell’s seven (why is it always seven with these self-help types?) principles for failing forward, I set out to try to understand how, as an adult ballet student, I can avoid the unjoyful and unhelpful tendency to adopt an unrealistic set of criteria for “success” in my dancing, and still embrace the possibility of moving forward and progressing in ballet. I don’t know how helpful this will be for others, but I am sharing it in the hopes that no matter what your level or your physical capacity, it at least suggests that there are alternatives to feeling frustrated and discouraged. 

 1. Reject rejection 

For Maxwell, this is all about founding your self-worth not on performance (that is, how well you complete a task in a given instance), but on confidence that when you screw up, you can learn from it and do better next time. Barre provides a magnificent opportunity to reject rejection. I would say that at least fifty percent of the time, when I’m doing a complicated barre exercise on the right side, I get something wrong and lose the thread for a moment, at least. But since we always turn around and do the same thing on the left side, those right-side screw ups can be the prompt for goal setting. “I forgot the port-de-bras in the middle section on the right – I will really focus on the left and make sure I do it in sync with the footwork this time.” On the other hand, if the thing I’m sucking at is something that I find technically difficult, for example, balancing in retiré, I cannot always just get over it that easily. I really beat myself up about balancing; it’s so rare for me to be “on my leg” despite all the drills and tips and practice I have sought out. So, for this, it’s all about setting a realistic goal for success; if I hold the balance for three seconds, where before I wasn’t holding it for even one, then good. It will have to do. 

 2. Don’t point fingers 

Well, do point your fingers, a bit, especially in allongé, but don’t play the blame game, is what Maxwell means by this. Own your failures. For reasons having to do with my family history and my personal wiring, I am all too good this. I am very willing to take the blame even when things aren’t my fault. However, in ballet class, I do find myself thinking, “I can’t do this because the choreography is too difficult” or “This music is way too fast (or slow),” or “That wasn’t explained very clearly!” Before his ignominy, Lance Armstrong wrote an autobiography called, It’s Not About the Bike, meaning that success or failure as a pro cyclist was not in his view about the equipment, but about certain characteristics of grit and ferocity (though in his case it was about the performance enhancing drugs, so…) Back to the pointing fingers: it certainly may be the case that the choreo is difficult and complex, the tempo challenging, or the instructor’s commentary a bit vague. That is not my fault, but it is on me to solve it for myself. Because this is adult class and not NYCB company class, I have options: ask for another marking, ask if we can take it at a slightly different tempo, request a clarification. Or I can do some self-talk and convince myself that I actually CAN do that particular enchaînement if I really keep my head in the game and anticipate the next step in the sequence all the way through. That the tempo is not a problem, it just requires either quickness or adage to be turned all the way up. Or I can go in the second group and watch the other dancers for their interpretation of the poor instruction. 

 3. See failure as temporary 

Never gonna be me.

Here it takes some work to get your mind around the problem, as articulated above, that you’re never going to be Polina Semianova (or pick your prima) or even the lowliest coryphée at a regional ballet company. I run across this a lot when I’m talking to other adult ballet students who at some period of their dancing lives thought they would pursue it as a career. Frankly, that ship has sailed, and you were not on it. Which is fine, because probably you have now and in the future will have further successes in other areas of your life. But the urge to fixate on what could have been, the almost-was, the unrealized dream… that’s not helpful and puts you in a permanent state of failure. 

Maxwell suggests that the goal is to view failure as an event, not a permanent state of being. Okay, so you failed to become a professional ballerina, or you were briefly there did not stick for whatever reason. Now the stakes are completely different. Now it’s about something else. The thing is to figure that out. Why are you doing this? And what are the terms of success under the current situation in which you find yourself dancing? 

 4. Set realistic expectations 

This is one of those obvious pieces of advice that so much easier to say than to do. Every Friday, as I’m wrapping up my work for the day (okay, most Fridays when I’m not scrambling to tie a bow on the messy package of the work week), I take a little time to write my goals for the next week. Over time, I have gotten less and less ambitious with what I put on my whiteboard. But even this week, as I was erasing the past week’s goals, I was looking at about a 50% completion rate.

 

In ballet, I try to set myself some goals too, and often it feels like I’m not even getting to 50%. For example, a couple of years ago, I was really frustrated and struggling with petit allegro. Speed, and just remembering the damn combinations, these were both difficult. Often, I felt like a really bad dancer after petit allegro, and the air would just go out of the rest of class for me. There’s nothing like tripping over your own feet and zigging when everyone else zags to make you feel like a clod. However, at some point, maybe it was last year when we were all taking classes on Zoom, I was doing petit allegro in my basement, in sneakers (concrete floor), and something flashed through my brain. “I am doing this? Yes! I am doing this!” This was probably a primo example of failing forward, or (since it had literally involved falling flat on my ass more than once) falling forward (or backward as the case may have been). 

5. Focus on strengths 

In Maxwell’s world, this means that while it is great to work on areas of your performance where you could improve, you should also take time to capitalize on and invest in the things you already do well. If you’re a great turner, enjoy those pirouette and pique combos and dance them up for all they’re worth. If you jump like a bean, milk it. One of the women I’ve been taking class with forever can balance unto the end of days. She just hangs out there in arabesque or whatever, and the music ends, and she’s still there, and basically, she could stay there forever. She’s the least self-aggrandizing human I’ve ever met, so it’s not a case of showing off. It is simply that she is so good at balancing, and she enjoys it, and she lets herself enjoy it. I admire that. Another way of thinking of this is that while it’s incredibly important to work and to fail, sometimes you can also coast on your skills, and enjoy the easy parts. Heaven knows there are few enough of those in ballet. 

 6. Vary approaches to achievement 

The Maxwellian exemplum for this is four millionaires who all made their fortunes young. Each of them, before the age of 35, tried seventeen different things (businesses, jobs, etc.) before achieving “success” (if you define success in dollar amounts, as business folks tend to do). Now, I tend to think that dollars in the bank is a pretty crappy measure of success unless it’s accompanied by other things like having added something of beauty or utility to the world in an ethical way, but either way, the point is that messing about a bit is a good idea. In dance terms, this is why one should always jump at the opportunity to take a class with a different teacher, or in a different style from ballet even if you “suck at hip hop” or “hate modern dance.” And when you’re in that Limon technique class and rolling around on the floor, you kind of have to “vary your approach to achievement” because just finding your way back to your feet without groaning and flopping about is a pretty big deal. 

 7. Bounce back 

There is a ton of evidence that people who frame failure as a learning opportunity rather than a condemnation tend to recover faster. Moving on and putting the misstep in the past, not dwelling on that bad thing that happened, this is a good mental habit. You could say that failure is just a plié; you need to go down before you can spring up. But if it were really that easy, Maxwell would not have made so much money reminding people of this basic reality. It is much more difficult to forgive and forget one’s own failures than just about anything else. 

In ballet, where a failure might result in an injury or humiliation, the burn can take a long time to subside. Last winter, I fell pretty hard and very fast (too fast to break the fall) on my face in a pirouette, and though I keep thinking that’s behind me now and it did not matter that much (all I got were some bruises and a fat lip), I find this little devil sitting on my shoulder sometimes, telling me I am going to fall again. The only thing I have found to do is to tell it “Okay, thanks for letting me know, now shut up.” I am hoping it eventually goes away. 

Just keep going...

As the ballet world becomes more accepting and open to the experiences of adult ballet students, maybe this will help change the game. Right now, there is a lot of attention being paid to the ways in which the culture of professional ballet is damaging to its most essential workers, the young, hardworking, poorly paid artists who make up the backbone of most companies. The different abilities, goals, and perspectives of adult students might provide some models for how younger, pre-professional students and their teachers, and professional dancers and their bosses could rethink success. For instance, asking students and emerging professionals to identify their own goals and develop strategies for achieving them, rather than always telling them what their goals ought to be. In my experience, this kind of reflective exercise is way more common in adult ballet than in other settings, and it has been incredibly helpful for me, even when it has taken years for me to reach a goal. I think it also helps teachers and coaches to understand what someone wants from the experience of being in class. 

Ultimately, each of us has to define the terms of success for ourselves, and be flexible about what that’s going to mean. At my age, getting to class on a regular basis, avoiding injury, dancing like I mean it, gaining one new technical skill in a year – this is about as much as it’s going to be. For a younger, more talented adult student it might be more ambitious. If I’m still dancing at seventy, it will surely be less so. At that point, it might just be not forgetting to bring my slippers to class!

Foot Work: thoughts on inclusion, The Perfect Pair, and evolution

Feet. They are literally the most fundamental (as in fundament, as in foundation) part of the body when it comes to being an upright, bipedal great ape, such as we humans are. I am currently reading a book about the evolution of the homonins (that is, the apes that became enough different from chimpanzee ancestors to be classified as human ancestors), and the author talks a lot about feet, and how the bones of the feet are really important to paleontologists trying to determine if they're looking at an upright walking (or dancing on two legs) creature, or a knuckle-assisted walker, like a gorilla or chimp.

I am also in that all-too-familiar phase of the adult ballet student's life: the quest for the Right Shoe. Not the shoe that fits on the right foot, mind you, but the pointe shoe that perfectly conforms to the singularities of my feet, right and left.

Below is a fairly recent photo that I took in a brand-new, freshly sewn pair of Capezio Kylie point shoes, a make I came across in a local dance shop about two years ago (and immediately purchased all five pairs in my size that they had in stock). They are pretty good shoes -- they do not last particularly long, but they break in fairly quickly, mold to my arch, break in the right place, and rarely give me hotspots or blisters if I tape my little and big toe and wear just a minimal bit of anti-friction padding. I am personally quite uncomfortable with thicker toe pads such as are popular with many dancers. I don't know why, but I feel like my feet are muted or muffled when I wear them, and I can't really sense where the floor is.

Pointe shoes by Capezio, legwarmers by Pam

As you can see, I do not have the perfect feet for ballet, but that said, they do the trick, most of the time. I have been (back) on pointe for about 7 years now, and I've had some really good shoes, some bad shoes, and some total stinkers. Still, I'm constantly searching for That Perfect Pair. Recently, candidates who have auditioned for the role include the new, European Gaynor Mindens, some Mirella Advanced, and the newest thing from Russian Pointe, the "En L'Air -- Echappe" model. None of them really quite cut it, though with some adjustments I think any of them might work. I half-shanked the Mirellas (definitely an improvement) after first practicing on a pair of bargain-basket Fuzis. I was really nervous to cut the shanks on a pair of expensive shoes, and so I decided that a cheap pair would allow me to experiment with that, and also all the other weird things I've seen people do but been afraid to try. Of course, the fact that I had never worn un-altered Fuzis means that my experimental design is pretty flawed.

In tinkering with the Fuzis I took a leaf from Kathryn Morgan and took up some of the extra fabric in the heel pocket (it's tip #7 in this video) and I also pancaked them, just to see how that would look. They're kind of ugly, honestly, but I'm rather fond of them. Sadly, all these adaptations mean that they really didn't live that long, but perhaps that's the shoe, too. I've never used a Fuzi before, so I have no expectations about its longevity. If you do decide to buy Fuzis, definitely buy some pancake makeup for them. They are just about the ugliest color of pink satin ever made.

From Gaynor Minden: pointe shoe colors available

The pinkness of pointe shoes is really their whiteness, of course, or rather, the way that the whiteness of ballet has long been emblematized. I am a fairly light-skinned white person, but even I, in the summer, am a lot darker than pointe shoe pink, even when it's the yummy rose-gold of those Kylies. Over the past year or so, a lot of companies have at last begun to produce pointe shoes in skin tones other than "pink," a long-overdue acknowledgement of the reality that Black and Brown dancers exist. This is not my territory, so I won't expound, but I have to say, seeing skin-tone matched pointe shoes on dancers of color at the summer intensive this year was profoundly moving. Ballet has a long way to go to address its problematic relationship to race and racism, but this is a small structural change with enormous implications. Talking to some of my friends who have been coloring their shoes and tights for decades, the relief is enormous, but, as one of them pointed out, "I still have to special order my shoes, wait for weeks, and hope that the model I need actually comes in something other than pink." So, more foot work to do.

Building the strength of the ballet community through inclusivity is a lot like other kinds of strength building in dance: everyone has to do it,  it takes a lot of time and work, and you're never "done." And sometimes it takes facing your fears. I've been doing a bit more center work in pointe shoes of late -- one recent class involved a combination that went jete, temps leve en releve x7 right and left, jete, temps leve en releve x3 right and left, then jete, temps leve en releve x1 right and left, and even before the music started playing I was struggling with anxiety, or really fear, about whether I could do it without hurting myself. I could all too easily picture myself falling and breaking my supporting ankle. But I sternly reminded myself that I just had to visualize doing it, and I did it, after a fashion. I don't think it was particularly graceful, but no broken ankle, so. Releves on one foot in center will continue to be a challenge, but good preps at the barre will help: one thing I've noticed that the professionals who teach the artEmotion summer workshop classes always do is spend a lot of time working on the 3/4 pointe to full pointe movement, really strengthening the metatarsals and stabilizing the leg and ankle through the upper range of the movement. There are tons of great videos online to help with this.

Human feet evolved for upright walking (and running, and dancing). The great apes who were our forebears lived in forests, and had to be able to climb efficiently -- it was advantageous, from an evolutionary perspective, for them if their big toes splayed out and could be used to grasp against the sole of the foot, more like a hand.  Modern apes all have this same basic foot form. At some point, probably about 7 million years ago, some apes started spending a lot more time in grassy, open country, and their climbers' feet were no longer so useful. A straighter alignment of the big toe was an adaptation suited to long-distance walking, and bipedal walking is about 75% more energy efficient than walking on all fours as our great ape cousins tend to do. Although foot adaptations weren't the only things that made upright bipedalism the homonin norm, they were crucial. And so began the journey of a thousand steps...

What really fascinates me about the evolution of human feet is how beautifully it illustrates the fundamentally random character of genetic mutation, and the incredible force of natural selection. Not all human feet look alike, right? It's pretty safe therefore to assume that not every bipedal early hominin had identical looking feet. There was a general pattern, but some had longer toes, some shorter, some were flatter, and some had high arches (beginning about 3.5 million years ago, according to this article from Yale). "Good enough" is really the guiding principle of adaptive evolution, and Darwin never talked about "survival of the fittest," only "survival of the fit." Which leads me to believe that even if dancing classical ballet en pointe were a fundamental survival characteristic in humans, there would still be people with perfect ballet feet and other people with good enough feet.

Greek feet, bronze

You often hear people talking about the different general foot types in ballet as "Greek," "Egyptian," and "Peasant" (or "Giselle," if you want to be nice). Sometimes "Roman" and "Celtic" are added into the mix for... cultural diversity? Greek feet are so called because they resemble the feet of Greek classical and Hellenistic sculptures, with the second toe longer than the big toe. Although many will claim that this is because real ancient Greeks had real feet that looked like this, as an art historian I can assure you that this is almost never the case with classical Greek aesthetics. Everything, and I mean everything, about Greek sculpture, no matter how "real" it looks, is actually idealized (even if it's "ugly"). Greek philosophers emphasized the idea of proportion and commensurability, seeing in rational systems of proportion a glimpse of the divine. Thus, the "Greek foot" with its diamond-like footprint is really just a visualization of an idealized, geometrically proportional form. I'm pretty certain that ancient Greeks had a variety of foot shapes. That's just the way human populations are.

Big Egyptian Feet

The story is the same for the Egyptian foot -- in Egyptian art, the foot always conforms to the same pattern, with the big toe longest and the lesser toes sloping away. Like the Greeks, the Egyptians had strict, religiously significant ideas about beauty and proportion. Sculptors and other artists were taught to make proper representations of human and other forms, and deviation from the norm was a kind of heresy. That's why, when the rogue king Akhenaton came to power and imposed a new, monotheistic religion during the 18th Dynasty, the whole canon of representation also changed (the foot shape remained the same, but the toes got really long). In the weird gnosis of people who believe that foot shape is indicative or determinative of personality, it is held that the Egyptian foot denotes introversion, secrecy, and mystery. Could it be that these traits are associated in popular culture in the West with the mysteries of Ancient Egypt? Hmm... I haven't actually met anyone who buys into this crap, but I'm sure they're out there, or at least the Internet is sure they are.

"peasant"

Peasant feet (sigh) and Roman feet are pretty similar, in that they have toes of more even length, the difference being that Roman feet are a little more tapered down to the little toe, and peasant feet more square. I think the moniker "peasant" is a little rude -- perhaps it arises from the idea that peasants are plain, earthy folks who go barefoot a lot, and therefore have wider-appearing feet? IDK. The "Celtic" foot is basically the same as the peasant, but with a longer second toe. You will find all kinds of hooey out there on how your foot shape reveals your ethnic heritage, but let's be clear -- that's baloney. There is no scientific evidence for a correlation between foot shape and ethnicity. No matter the ethnicity, bigger, taller people tend to have larger feet (both width and length). Smaller, shorter people tend to have smaller feet. The variety of foot shapes is pretty much the same across populations, evidently (this is based on a short search of creditable sources online). Makes sense. 

I sort of feel like it's not helpful to classify feet this way, since there's so much coded judgment classist (and Eurocentric) bias in it. Doesn't ballet culture already do enough to make us feel worried and anxious about our bodies? What if we just called feet "tapered" (Egyptian), "rounded" (Greek), and "square" (peasant/Roman/Celtic) and then dealt with the individual peculiarities of each foot separately? Indulge me: let the foot be a metaphor for ballet as a whole. Isn't it better if we look at each dancer as an individual, with a whole array of characteristics (high extension, great adage, needs work on carriage, etc.) that could include things like height, skin tone, or gender, but aren't limited to or definitively constrained by such factors. Likewise, each foot is unique -- even on a single body, the left and right foot are subtly different, and dancers are often hyper aware of these differences. 

To conclude this rambling discussion about feet, I leave you with a video that I find at once nauseating and beautiful (disgust and attraction are forever bedfellows, and feet are certainly in the category of repellent/attractive, as any foot fetishist can tell you); Alessandra Ferri's feet are pretty much the Platonic ideal of ballet feet, and she is so lyrical. Sting plays the guitar beautifully. But his "I'm a yogi" vibe is just so extra. One should wear one's yoga practice lightly and humbly, or it isn't really yoga, but that's a rant for another time. Enjoy!

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.