Onegin at Ballet West

A couple of million years ago (e.g. right before the pandemic), I went to see Ballet West's first production of John Cranko's Onegin, which is a three-act narrative ballet based on the verse novel (Yvgeny Onegin) by Alexander Pushkin. The novel was also the basis for Tchaikovsky's opera of the same title, and the score for the ballet is also the music of Tchaikovsky, but not the same music, which is a little confusing. Tchaikovsky did not write two separate Onegins, however -- it's just that Cranko chose a variety of pieces by the composer to set his ballet to, instead of commissioning a ballet suite based on the opera. 

Anyway, it so happens that Onegin was the first opera I saw as an adult. I was backpacking through Europe after my junior year of college, and in Vienna I went to get standing room tickets to whatever opera was on that night at the famous Wiener Staatsoper. It just happened to be 3+ hours in Russian with no supertitles, but whatever! I don't remember that much about it except that I cried when (spoiler alert) Onegin shot Lensky and then howled "Nyet" many many times (howled operatically, of course).

If you want a brief plot summary, watch this fun promotional video from Ballet West.

So, this weekend, I went back to see Onegin again, and I carried with me very fond memories of my first experience, which was with my eldest child who remarked that Rex Tilton as Onegin was "as iconic as Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, in much the same way, but more Gothick." I feared that nobody could come close to that iconicity. There was something just so... insidious about his portrayal of masculine self-regard and self-serving drama.

Trepidations aside, the performance I saw on Saturday was just brilliant, simply put. Lensky was one of my favorite rising stars, Vinicius Lima (aka Vini), and while he seemed quite joyous for a poet (not particularly romantically brooding), there was something refreshing in his youthful high spirits so that when he drops dead of a bullet wound, I actually felt sort of stabbed, myself. Olga, danced by Chelsea Kiefer, was right on key -- a little frivolous, a little wild, and very, very sorry for flirting with Onegin even though she was obviously attracted to him.

Jenna Rae Herrera, from
the Ballet West website with the
caption: "Balanchine’s Tarantella 
© The George Balanchine Trust"

Tatiana for this performance was Jenna Herrera, whom I absolutely adore as a dancer, a teacher, and a person. She is the closest thing to a ray of light that a human being can be, and her stage energy is fizzy like champagne, so I wondered if she could pull off the bookish, shy, vulnerable, and romantic girl of Act I and II, and the emotionally mature and complex woman of Act III, since the two are as different from one another as they are from how I normally perceive Jenna as a dancer. But fear not! There were very good reasons for Jenna's promotion to Principal Artist at the end of last season; she has enormous technical ability, but her acting also has incredible range, and she was utterly convincing as the young Tatiana, but devastating as the mature Tatiana. The audience literally burst into applause when she finally (spoiler alert) rejected Onegin -- one woman sitting near me cried out, "You tell him, sister!" It's a dramatic moment, choreographically (see the video linked above), but something about the way this tiny, fierce woman did it just connected for people. One of the corps dancers who I talked to the next day told me that the whole cast was weeping in the wings.

I was skeptical about the dancer cast as Onegin -- partly, I had hoped to see one of my favorites, Adrian Fry, in the role, but my season tickets are for Saturdays and he was in the Friday cast. No matter, but it definitely made me more inclined to be critical when it came to Brian Waldrep, who is new to the company. I had never seen him perform before, and so had no sense of what to expect. Furthermore, I had that "iconic Mr. Darcy" thing in the back of my mind.

Well.

When he first came on, all snooty nose in the air and affected boredom, I felt like maybe he was underplaying the character a little, and that it would be hard to imagine a dreamy young girl falling for him; she's so wrapped up in her own fantasy life, after all. Yet, as soon as he started interacting with Jenna's Tatiana, I changed my mind. He chose a very restrained demeanor for Onegin, but it almost made the character seem more sinister and colder, which worked, because it underscored how much of Tatiana's sudden passion for him came from her own imagination. He was great in the acting scenes, and in the scene where she fantasizes dancing a very romantic pas de deux with him in her bedroom, he had just the right sonambulisitic (is that a word? sleep-walker like?) air to keep the sense of the whole thing being in her head; later, when the mature Onegin dances ("for real") with the mature Tatiana, the contrast was really notable -- this was the actual man, a bit violent, domineering, and intemperate in his passion, rather than tender. He also handled the demanding and somewhat repetitive choreographic elements with a great deal of precision, the hallmark of good technique being that you don't even notice that the dancer is working for difficult enchaînements because instead you're seeing them as expressive of a thought, a mood, or an idea. He pulled that off expertly.

Iconic Mr. D

So, it was basically a big, dark, beautiful thing, a story ballet for grownups led by two principals who are both at the top of their game both dramatically and technically; they are ballet dancers for grownups. And honestly, even though the score is a pastiche, it doesn't sound that way. During one of the intermissions I overheard a woman saying to her companion, "It's like Jane Austen, only Russian, and sexy." That reminded me of the Colin-Firth-as-Mr.-Darcy thing, and also (as a habitual reader of the oeuvre of Jane Austen on a pretty regular cycle every couple of years), it made me think of the darker things that lurk beneath the polite surfaces of many of Austen's novels. Violence, betrayal, and ruin: my particular favorite novel is Persuasion, in which the heroine herself is guilty of rejecting the love of a man she herself loves, but a man whose entire livelihood is killing (he's a naval officer in wartime), and who is almost trapped into a loveless marriage by another woman over a matter of honor. Anyway, no duels (onstage) in Jane Austen, but we know that they do happen. And they did happen, IRL, too, as the ghost of Pushkin, who died as the result of one such duel (with his wife's lover, who was also her brother-in-law) at the age of 37, could tell us. Like Austen, Pushkin is often credited as being the progenitor of a whole genre of socially realistic novels in his native tongue. 

So when do we get the ballet of Persuasion? (It would be soooooo much better than the recent, dreadful film version with Dakota Johnson, which I couldn't even watch. And it would have to have music by an English composer, maybe Holst?)

After all, there's lots of dancing in Austen. And actually,
if you google "Jane Austen Ballet" you will find that
American Repertory Ballet in Princeton, NJ, has a
"Pride and Prejudice" in their repertoire. Interesting...

Appropriate or Appropriation?

 Every summer, I teach character dance at our little local ballet school’s summer intensive. My qualifications to do so are not profound – I got a “pass plus” on an RAD character exam approximately five thousand years ago, and I always got cast in character roles when I was in the school company back in the day. Many is the babushka I had to don.

I like the way character dance combines the control and elegance of ballet with more unrestrained and exuberant kinds of movement, and I enjoy getting into “character” as well. I think it’s good for the kids to experiment with a slightly different dance form that gives them space to inhabit a different kind of persona, ham it up a bit, and have fun. 

But there’s a little problem. Character is based on the movements of traditional dance forms often practiced by the lower classes at the same time that classical ballet was taking shape as an art form associated with the elite. In other words, it’s a balletified version of “folk dance.” As RAD students, we learned that it’s called “character dance” not because it helps you get into a character in the dramatic sense of a distinct persona, but rather because it relates to the “national character” it represents: the fiery Spaniard, the hectic Neapolitan, the haughty and impulsive Hungarian, and so on down the increasingly uncomfortably essentializing, culturally snobbish, and nationalistic road. 

And indeed, character dance variations began to appear in ballets during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a product of Romanticism and nationalism. For audiences and impresarios of the time, ballet was European, and belonged to the courtly and cosmopolitan elites. Folk dance was associated with “low” types: peasants and the urban poor, people who were thought (by the elite) to represent the wild strain of whatever ethnicity or nationality. Thus, elements of folk dance, incorporated into the balletic movement vocabulary allowed choreographers to enhance their storytelling – the mazurka in Act I of Coppélia situates the ballet in Poland. By the time you get to the late nineteenth century, character variations were almost de rigeur: Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Don Quixote, they all use character dance to enrich the narrative and break up the monotony. 

Anyone who has ever seen The Nutcracker in particular can appreciate how character becomes, in itself, a goal – a huge chunk of Act II is just one darn character dance after another, each one designated in the original libretto by a type of sweet or treat that like the stylized “folk” dance of the movement has an iconic relationship to a particular nationality: chocolate from Spain, coffee from Arabia, tea from China, candy canes (!) from Russia, mirliton cakes from France. And this is hugely problematic, as many recent critics from within and outside of the ballet world have pointed out. Most glaringly, the dances representing Arabia and China trade in orientalist cliches about the exotic east and racist and sexist stereotypes about “the Orient” that were deeply woven into the culture of European imperialism by the time Tchaikovsky and his collaborators came along. Until quite recently (and in some cases still) ballet companies have blithely put white dancers in yellowface and brownface for these roles, trading on the worst racial stereotypes imaginable, or they have only cast their Asian and Black or Brown dancers in these roles, reserving the starring parts for white people.

Therein lies the problem: at its foundation, character dance was an act of cultural appropriation, defined as “The unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.” The cultures being appropriated were often those of Europe – but the poorer, less cosmopolitan, less privileged segments of European society in the nineteenth century. Peasants in the burgeoning nation-states of nineteenth-century western Europe lived in a manner that their medieval forebears would not have found entirely alien, far more so than their wealthy countrymen. The life of the urban poor described in the novels, for example, of Dickens or Zola, or in the lithographs of Honoré Daumier was also a pretty far cry from “modern” and “comfortable.” So when the dance forms endemic to those populations were borrowed, gussied up, and performed on stages to audiences of the privileged, it was a form of theft and erasure no less than when white musicians in the mid-twentieth century adopted the musical style of Black American blues and gospel and performed them for all-white audiences (often in clubs that excluded the presences of Black bodies except in servile roles). 

Which is complicated, right? Because even if cultural appropriation was happening, art was also happening, and it can be incredibly hard to disentangle the bad faith and crappy ethics and thoughtless plunder from the aesthetic or sensual or intellectual merits of the thing being created. To put it another way, Elvis was clearly engaging in cultural appropriation, even if what he thought he was doing was honoring the musical traditions he had grown up admiring, but he was also making some pretty great art himself. I mean, you can’t listen to him growling his way through Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” and remain unmoved. I mean, maybe you can, but you’re missing something, in that case. Likewise, I defy anyone – and by anyone, I mean not just the typical balletomane, but anybody with eyes and ears that work, to watch a good performance of the Trepak (aka Russian or Candy Cane) variation in a well-crafted Nutcracker and not be stirred. That’s just exuberance, made manifest.

But it is also a Trepak, which is a very old dance of the Cossacks, a semi-nomadic minority group indigenous to the region of eastern Ukraine even now under assault by the resurgent Russian empire. At the time of The Nutcracker’s creation, the Cossack homelands were firmly under Russian control, and the people themselves were subjects of the Tsar. Ethnic Russians viewed them warily, and understood them as exotic outsiders, definitely not European, but part of the empire’s Asiatic heritage (the Cossacks are of Turkic origin). Cossacks were associated with violence and barbarism (not without reason, since their arrangement with the Russian state required military service by the men), but also with a kind of wild, ecstatic dance that was half martial art. Those deep plies, split jumps, and squat-kicks are great for building the kind of thigh muscles you need to control a horse at full gallop with your legs alone, leaving your hands free to wield your weapons. 

[Fun fact: Rudolf Nureyev was Tatar Muslim (not Cossack), another minority group from the Black Sea region of the Soviet Union, but he studied Cossack dance as a child and liked to dress up as a Cossack, since that was a more glamorous thing to be than Tatar, apparently.]

Phil Chan and Georgina Pazcoguin, the founders of Final Bow for Yellowface, have spent the last half decade as activists from inside the world of professional ballet working to change the way the art form represents Asia and Asians. They point out that for audience members, board members, dancers at all stages of their training, and families of dancers, narrow, racist, and colonialist depictions of Asians on stage are deeply alienating. That said, their goal is not to eliminate things like the “Tea” variation from The Nutcracker. Rather, as they say, “It’s time to replace caricature with character.” 

As we head into Nutcracker season, I hope that we’re all watching out for the ways in which character dance can be deployed with sensitivity and grace, with respect for the history of the art form as well as for the living human beings who inhabit it and who come to theaters as audience members, and with awareness of the troubled and complex history of Eurocentrism, nationalism, class oppression, and colonialism that is bound up in the history of ballet. This isn't about "cancelling" it's about evolving; if you have access, do read Jennifer Fisher's excellent essay in the Los Angeles Times on this subject. And she literally wrote the book on the Nutcracker in North America (Nutcracker Nation, Yale University Press, 2004).

And in the meantime, I will be thinking about how I talk about the character styles I’ll be teaching my students in my fall workshop. They’re kids, so I don’t want to get too heavy, but at the same time, they are developing artists, and I want them to really understand the art form in which they are training. I am pretty sure that thanks to the people who are leading the charge to rethink ballet’s problematic history with race and class are saving ballet for the future, and I want to be part of that.

Comparison Kills Joy

So, I just got back from my sixth ArtEmotion Adult Summer Intensive. This is a week-long, six-hours a day program that immerses the adult ballet student in the life of a professional; morning class, followed by either pointe, or men's variations, or jazz, modern, contemporary... whatever, followed by a three hour rehearsal dedicated to getting an original piece of choreography shaped up for presentation at a Saturday showing. Intense is definitely the right word.

Over 100 students gathered for the 2022 intensive!

 

 I am fifty-three years old. That probably puts me in the oldest quartile of participants, though there are certainly those older than I am. Mostly, though, it's younger people -- people in their twenties, thirties, and maybe forties. Some of them are former professionals or aspiring professionals or semi-professional or dance teachers, but others are accountants, librarians, nurses, physicians, attorneys, CEOs, PR professionals, university professors, and so forth. We range in ability and experience from total beginners to (as mentioned) former pros. We come from all over the country and even the world, and we come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. What's really cool about it is that as diverse as we are, and as brief a period as we are brought together, we really do gel into a supportive, slightly chaotic community, united by our shared love for dance. I know that sounds a bit corny, but it's true -- every year, on the last day, I get all weepy about how great it is to see all these humans who commune through movement.

Kelsey and me 

 

The story goes that Rex Tilton, one of the two founders, had this thought that he really preferred teaching adults to little kids, so if he and Allison DeBona, his life- and business-partner were going to run summer intensives to support themselves in the off season, they should include at least some opportunities to teach the grownups. They introduced the adult program in Detroit in the summer of 2016, and it was a success, so the next year they moved it to Salt Lake City, where they were (until they both retired this year) both company dancers with Ballet West. I joined that year, and we were a pretty small group of intermediate-to-advanced students. I was blown away with the quality of the instruction, and maybe a little starstruck to be taking class from (and sometimes with) the dancers who I admired on stage during the BW season. Our choreographer that year was Adrian Fry, who is a principal dancer with the company, and someone whose choreography is quite witty, quirky, and smart, which is kind of his personality as well. He did a fantastic job of involving us as dancers in the process of creating the piece, something that was possible because there were only a dozen of us that year. I left that week feeling like I had really grown as a dancer -- I had pushed myself in styles of movement that I was not as comfortable with, including contemporary and modern dance. I had survived a jazz class, my first ever. I had managed to make it through three pointe classes despite bruising my big toenail in modern on day two. But more than any of that, I had really grown close to the other dancers in my group, and even some of the people in the beginner group -- we were a dance family, and when I saw some of those folks at the performances during the year it felt like a reunion. 

The next year (2018), the program grew enormously -- this was great for Allison and Rex, but also tough, because they were expecting a baby, dealing with the challenges this presented for Allison's career on stage, and all the other implications of impending parenthood. Fortunately, they were able to call in their dance families (actual relatives, in their case) to support them. Thus, we took class from Rex's two brothers and one of his twin baby sister and his sister-in-law, and Allison's younger sister Delaney acted as the cruise director, keeping us all on schedule and in the studios, despite the much larger number of students; we were now three groups, beginning, intermediate, and advanced. It was a little harder to get to know people as a result, but the groups for the choreography section were still pretty small, maybe 15 people in the intermediate group I signed up for. From that year, aside from the fun, almost competition dance that Abby Tilton set on us, what I remember most vividly are 1) Allison's pointe class, which literally changed the whole way I thought about my feet and turnout and 2) an amazing modern class in the Horton technique from Justin Bass (at the time he was with RDT, though he is now working independently in Brooklyn and teaching at 92nd St. Y). Justin's class really inpsired me to take more modern classes that year, which led me to a master class the following spring with Alvin Ailey II, which was probably one of the most memorable classes I've ever taken, even though I was a total mess! That year, I also took an amazing hip hop class from Chris Fonseca, a British dancer who is Deaf, and teaches purely through movement. I don't think I would have gone out on a limb and tried these things if it hadn't been for artEmotion, honestly. 

In 2019, I decided I was ready to take the advanced level. This was ambitious, and perhaps a little stupid, but I really wanted to challenge myself. I had reconstructive hip surgery in the summer of 2017, so in 2018 I was kind of on my way back to full function, and I figured that two years post surgery I was good to go. It's always interesting to push yourself to the limit. I was about to turn 50 and kind of freaking out about that too. Anyway, it was a rough year for me; I really struggled to learn choreography, my body hurt constantly, and the much larger size of the classes and the choreography groups meant that I wasn't getting the kind of individual attention I had come to expect. On the other hand, the classes were really fun and super challenging. So. Much. Petite allegro. Rex set a very complex, multi-movement piece on the advanced group -- all of us had at least one moment in the limelight, and I had to do a double pirouette twice, which ordinarily is not a huge deal for me, but somehow, when one is front and center it's much more intimidating. I think maybe that was also the year that Patrick Cubbage, who taught contemporary, had us do all these weird improvs, which felt a little awkward but actually was quite liberating. Again, pushing oneself to the edge of one's comfort zone, and then going a little beyond it, is always beneficial if painful. Perhaps partly because that year was so challenging for me, and because the choreography was difficult, even though our group was quite large, I really felt that social bond forming with the other dancers in my group. It was probably the most intense intensive week I've experienced, but I also made some of the best connections with others, including the lovely Lisa Faye Strauss, who had better come back to artEmotion one of these days -- I really miss her sense of humor and her amazing dance skills! And of course the amazing Kelsey Wickman, my dance idol and good friend, a summer intensive die-hard who has been coming since 2016. Also, it was awesome seeing Allison, who was coming back from having a baby, being totally honest about her struggles. I think that helped me put my own challenges in perspective! 

The intensive, virtually...

 As one might imagine, 2020 was kind of a disaster for artEmotion -- but they managed the disaster gracefully, serving up to us dance-starved adult dancers an all-virtual workshop. My Cache Valley Ballet buddy Kacy and I were able use a room in the community center where we usually dance and stream the classes there, which was way better than trying to do it in my basement, alone. Because it was virtual, Allison and Rex were able to recruit many of their dance-world friends from afar to teach. So, we took jazz from Rachel Schur (whom I recently saw on Broadway as Roxy in Chicago!), character from Inna Stabrova (the queen of character), variations from Beckanne Sisk (Ballet West principal), and ballet from Daphne Lee (Dance Theater of Harlem) and Luisa Diaz Gonzalez (the only Mexican ballerina ever to have graduated from the Paris Opera ballet school). It was really cool to "meet" these luminaries, even if it was weird and sort of difficult to learn choreography on Zoom. It did convince me, however, to try more online classes, which really kept me sane and fit during the pandemic. Basement ballet is the worst, honestly, but it's better than no ballet at all. Low point -- trying to take a Horton class on the cold basement floor in December of 2020. But that's a first-world problem for sure. 

 The following year, it seemed iffy whether the workshop would take place in person or online, but as the date approached, I took the plunge and reserved an AirBnB with Kelsey, planning on spending the week in SLC. With vaccinations, masking for the unvaccinated, and frequent COVID testing, Allison and Rex were able to run the intensive face-to-face. It was positively joyous to be dancing in a studio with other people. We had great instructors, many of them Ballet West dancers, including some of the up-and-coming company members, e.g. Hadriel Diniz, Vinicius Lima, Jenna Herrera, and Noel Jensen. Noel was the choreographer for the intermediate group (I signed up for intermediate, since once again I was coming off a fairly recent major surgery, and also I remembered struggling in advanced) and he was just delightful, even when some of the people in the group became upset about the very modern style of the piece he was setting on us (understandably, some people would prefer a more classical piece, since it's the style of dance they're more comfortable with). I was super impressed with how calm he remained in the face of some pretty strongly expressed criticism -- I kept thinking, "this kid is barely an adult, the same age as my own oldest child, but he has this maturity that manifests as a kind of mellow surfer-dude chill vibe." And lo, it turns out he really is a surfer dude from San Diego. As a surfing fan (I've only tried it once, and it was really brutal), I feel like the sport really trains the mind to a kind of resignation and patience, mixed with courage and decisiveness, that makes for what appears, at least, to be Zen-like calm in the face of turbulence. Anyhow, I think we were all pretty emotionally tender, having just been through the first phase of the pandemic; there were lots of feelings all over the place, and that was fine, because one of the things dance does, at least when it's good, is connect us to our emotions through the medium of our bodies moving in space and time. Having a fabulous roomate who is both realistic and positive, funny and thoughtful was an enormous boon. Each day, Kelsey and I would loll about on the floor in the evening, stretching, icing, and generally trying to assuage our many pains, and kind of talk through the mental stuff as well. Previously, I had always stayed at a friend's house in the city, and been pretty much on my own. Having a roomie who was going through the experience too made a huge difference to the emotional load. I felt calmer and more capable of handling the ups and downs that are the inevitable business of doing something so physically challenging and mentally focused for six days. 

This past year, I've been dancing more -- four days a week instead of the two I was previously doing. So I think I've made some technical gains, and certainly my stamina has improved. But I'm also getting older, and things seem to break more easily and take longer to repair. I decided to sign up for advanced back in December, when I was feeling pretty strong and confident. Then I injured my foot in January and that took a long time of dancing in sneakers to heal. I could have changed to intermediate, and probably I should have, especially since I knew I was coming into the week jet-lagged and exhausted from two weeks in the UK on a work trip. Nevertheless, there I was, the last Monday in May, at the barre in my cute new leotard, taking class with Rex, and feeling... not bad! Then came pointe class with the lovely young Ballet West artist Lillian Casscells, who taught us the second-act variation from Raymonda with such brio and lightness that the really fricking difficult Balanchine choreography seemed almost possible. I was feeling prety confident and awesome. Our choreographer was Emily Adams, a BW principal whose dancing and choreography both have left me pretty much speechless with awe in the past, so I was excited and a little intimidated -- we were also a huge group of almost thirty dancers. She had chosen a very complex piece of Baroque music (Vivaldi, La Stravaganza, op. 4, Violin Concerto no. 2 in E minor, allegro and largo movements), and her style is very contemporary, with lots of interesting ports de bras and interwoven turns. I have to admit, the brain fog set in pretty fast for me, and I didn't concentrate very well that first day. However, since most of what she set on day one went out the window on day two, that should not have been a problem. Yet, perhaps due to jet lag, perhaps due to age, perhaps due to the fact that I'm not really an advanced dancer, at least not at that level, I continued to struggle all week, and never really got solid on some of the more complex enchainements. Oh well. 

The roomies and Allison, Saturday morning.

I think that I definitely began to struggle more and more as the week went on, exhaustion setting in. But I still had fun, and at a certain point, I just let go of worrying about the fact that I was clearly on the lower ability end of the advanced group. Something Vini said to us in class on maybe Wednesday really struck me. "Comparison kills joy," he told us, when he sensed that a lot of us were feeling frustrated that we weren't as good as the person standing near us at barre, or whatever. That really reminded me why I was there -- to dance, to feel that joy it gives me bubbling up from the ground into my limbs, into my head... Just dance, stupid!

The week ended all too soon, before I'd really had a chance to internalize Emily's wonderful choreography, before I had a chance to pick up the pieces of my pointe confidence (shattered by a really ouchy foot on Friday), before I had a chance to really spend some more quality time with all the friends I've made over the years of returning each summer to the program. But there is always next year, always another class, always another step. I'm going to hold Vini's little nugget of wisdom in my heart, and try to dance each step as if there were no other steps to compare it to, take each class as its own distinct thing, breathe each breath equitably, and just look for the joy in it all. Because otherwise, what's the point?

Ouch!

Blisters. The bain of every ballerina, from the kids in their first pointe shoes to the pros (well, apparently except for Skylar Brandt, who, according to Pointe Shop video I recently watched on YouTube never gets them), and certainly including old farts like me. Last night, during a piroutte combination that I went into blister free, I experienced that unfortunate self-awareness that on turn one, something in my shoe shifted, meaning that now my tender little-toe metatarsal joint was uncomfortably situated, and on turn two, this discomfort started to feel like a hot spot. By turn three, there was definitely a blister forming. I won't bore you with turns four, five, and six, but suffice to say, after finishing the combination (because... ballet class?), I took off my shoe to investigate and sure enough, not only did I have a blister, but I had torn the top right off it, so I had one of those nasty, if shallow, weeping wounds. Naturally, I just tugged my toe pad back into place, slapped my tights over it to hold it more firmly in place, and put that shoe back on to finish class (we are working on the Kitri variation from Act I, and I really wanted to do that in my shoes). My current shoes, a pair of Capezio Kylees (8W if you care to know) that are nearing the end of their life, are pretty comfortable, for pointe shoes. They're nicely broken in and really move with my foot, but they're not so soft that I'm falling off them. As with every pair of shoes, except maybe for the Gaynor Mindens I sometimes buy, this pair has opened up in the box as I've worn them, meaning that when I start with a new pair, there isn't really room for much more than some toe tape and a jelly sleeve or just some Spenco second skin for my big toe, but by this point, I'm wearing a very thin gel toe pad (namely, a Skinny Dip by Danz Tech, size small -- I hate these when they're new because they're too juicy, but once they're seasoned (meaning beat to heck) they're awesome). Normally, the transition to the toe pad brings a cessation of all threat of blisters, but when the pad (being old and kind of worn out) slips, sometimes the edge lands right on that key point (little toe bunion spot) and rustles up a new blister.

When I was a kid (paper towel over bare toes in a Freed Classic), the inevitable blisters were dealt with harshly: pour hydrogen peroxide over them, do the silent scream dance, let air dry before taping with some of that really harsh white athletic tape. These days I'm a little kinder to myself. I trim away the torn skin, clean the boo boo, and then paint it with New Skin, which is some kind of finger-nail polish like stinky, stingy stuff (actually, it's a salt, Benzethonium Chloride 0.2%).

Once it dries, I find that it really protects the owwie and helps it heal more quickly, and it doesn't get gross and sweaty the way a sticky bandage would. Once, when I was about fifteen, I got a really bad blood blister on my big toe, and it being summer at the time, I went around barefoot with a small bandage on it. Naturally, it got infected. I mean, really infected, like blood poisoning infected, and my dad took me to the ER where they gave me a giant needle full of penecillin in my butt. So, I am extra uptight about keeping wounds clean. And when I need to tape up, I use a kinder tape, namely the Russian Pointe brand. But don't get the purple color, pretty as it is, or you will have magenta stains in your shoes and/or on your tights and feet.

In the service of grownup bunheads everywhere, I am here compiling top tips for avoiding getting blisters and treating them from a variety of sources:

GET FITTED

Allison Debona, Ballet West first soloist, co-founder/artistic director of artEmotion, and newly-minted Principal of the Ballet West Academy Park City tells me she just doesn't get blisters. She posits that this is probably because her shoes fit really well. A professional ballerina like Allison has the advantage of years of experience knowing what works on her foot, access to custom shoes if needed, and loads of communal wisdom from peers and mentors to help her dial it in. I do remember her introducing a bunch of us amateurs at one summer workshop to her technique for a glove-like fit: it involved taping some second skin over the big toe nail and putting a box liner in the shoe to really prevent any slipping and sliding. Ultimately, that snugness of fit translates to fewer blisters. I find I only get blisters when my shoes are really on the verge of dying, that opened up box... time for a box liner?

TAPE IT UP

"Usually duct tape, otherwise athletic tape," says Vivian Taylor, my primary ballet teacher, friend, and a former principal ballerina with Cache Valley Civic Ballet. Just a note, however, on the dangers of duct tape -- it's great because it's super tough and sticky, but if you leave it on too long or remove it carelessly, it can damage your skin, especially if you have a callus from previous blisters which has softened up under the tape and just pulls off when you rip the tape off your foot (trust me, a former duct-taper, on this one). One bonus of duct tape is that it comes in fun colors and patterns and tears easily by hand! I think duct tape with kittens on it might lure me back into the cult of duct-taping one's feet.

KEEP IT CLEAN

Also in the tape camp, but perhaps in a slightly more medically-inclined way is Isabelle Bateson Brown, French teacher, archivist, and New York State certified dance teacher, who writes, "Cloth tape for prevention. Opening blisters with a sterile needle every time! Comfrey lotion and a bandaid on open skin." She also recommends washing your toe pads frequently. The built-up salts from sweat can actually increase skin irritation and cause micro-abrasions.

DEAL WITH IT

Kelsey Wickman, @artemotionusa veteran and ambassador, company member of @syncopationdanceproject, and media relations manager for @radpowerbikes is equally at home in ballet, contemporary, and jazz. She says, "Frankly, I kinda prefer to just get them out of the way... like if I know I'm going to get a blister no matter what tape, bandaid, padding combo, I just let it happen so that the callus can start to build." Honestly, this won't work for everyone, but Kelsey is seriously fierce and feisty, and I've seen her grit her teeth through some pretty gnarly stuff, so I can believe that she powers through blisters too!

BABY IT

Terrel Lefferts, a Pacific Northwest Ballet trustee and author of some great books about dance and movement for younger readers (check out Once Upon a Dance), recommends protecting the blister spot with "something with a hole in it" (like a corn pad) covered by a sterile bandage. Karyn Hansen, another former CVSB prinicpal and my ballet mentor extraordinaire, has a typically (for her) sensible and detailed routine. Note that she worked in a GP's office as a medical assistant for a long time, so she has a fair amount of clinical knowledge. She says, "If I get a blister is make sure to drain it before it pops or goes too deep to get all bloody. Then do an Epsom salt foot bath to dry it out. Once the outermost layer is skin is dead I like to trim it off so that it doesn’t continue to rub and create another blister. To cushion after a blister I use a small bandaid and wrap the paper tape around to keep it in place so it doesn’t rub. You can also do a small piece or gauze between the paper tape and blister (so the tape isn’t sticking to the sore area)." If I had followed this advice at age 15, I could have saved myself a big pain in the butt!

And finally, for a classic take on the intrinsic grossness of ballet feet

Skirting the issue

I learned to sew when I was a kid. I always wanted to make very specific outfits for myself and my dolls, and my mom, who is pretty handy with a sewing machine, taught me. I was never all that good at it. It is very, very frustrating to go from a vision in one's head where everything is just so, to a sketch, to drafting a workable pattern, to fitting the garment on an actual moving body (or in the case of a doll, just a moveable body), to having something someone would actually want to wear.

Yep, my mom's handiwork, ca. 1975

When I was very young, my ballet school had an annual recital in full tutu. These were the real deal: little girls wore short classical tutus with a basque and everything. Big girls wore romantic tutus. My mom sewed the first few tutus herself, which having attempted just the skirt part of that that some years ago (see the post), I can only shake my head about now. After a while, though, she hired a guy who was a costume designer that she knew through her connections to the weird and wonderful world of experimental theater and dance, and he would sew them for her. Either way, it is pretty crazy that every little girl at Cornish had a custom, handmade tutu every year!

Over the years, I've sewed a lot of things, but never a complete tutu. Probably, other than my kid's "Maria Tallchief" history fair project, the closest I came were the dresses that I used to sew to fulfill the kid's annual request to "the elves" for the hybrid of Christmas, Hanukkah, and Solstice that we celebrate in our house (complete with the Festisaurus, a large, wooden dino skeleton that we decorate with ornaments and lights). I'd get presented with a drawing, and then, at about midnight the night before the gift was expected to appear in the morning, I'd start sewing. 

My kids both loved the
 elf-made dresses!

I also started sewing ice-skating costumes and gymnastics leotards around this time. I just could not bring myself to pay the prices that were being charged for little tiny skirted leotards covered with bling that were required for the child's ice dreams (blessedly short lived), and I refused to shell out the three-figure sums that were standard for leos for my kid's approximately 15 seconds of fame as a gymnast. The homemade versions I produced were decidedly inferior, but fortunately the kid either did not notice or did not mind.

So the ground was laid... fast forward half a decade and about five thousand yoga classes. I decided to go back to ballet after a very long hiatus. I rousted out my old leotards (I had kept two, both very early-90s, high-cut legs, rather unstretchy cotton), full-sole ballet slippers, and a pair of tights that sort of resembled ballet tights, and took myself off to my first class in forever. Anyone who has ever "gone back" knows how awkward it feels to stand at the barre in first, ready for plies when one has not done so in over 15 years. It is bad enough, when you are not wearing The Wrong Outfit. Which I was. Those horrible high-cut leotards! Those tights with the tell-tale "garter" around the thigh, those ancient, stiff pink slippers, and worst of all, the lack of a skirt. Every single other woman in that class was wearing a skirt. As a student, I was never allowed a skirt, so it had not occurred to me that as an adult one could wear whatever pretty thing one wanted. All my leos were black or burgundy, but that class was full of people in fun colors, fluttering wrap skirts, playful legwarmers... I felt very bare, and very frumpy.

The first thing was to buy some more pleasing, colorful leotards (which I did), and to stock up on real ballet tights and a pair of split-sole slippers. Then, a skirt! I decided to make one. I found a pattern online, and cut into some chiffon. To be honest, it was a disaster -- it just did not fall right, because I had not yet learned how to use the bias. I gave up, plunked down $20, and bought a skirt from the local dance shop.

Gradually, I've become more and more of a leotard and dancewear connoisseur and collector. I really like to buy my gear from small, often dancer-owned businesses, and as someone familiar with the difficulty of sewing well, I am willing to pay a little more in order to support these often dancer-owned enterprises. I have leotards or other dancewear from Olly Designs (she is doing more streetwear these days), Cheval Dancewear, Lucky Leo, Label, Chameleon, RubiaWear, Jule, and Class In. I like that when I purchase from these sellers, I'm really directly supporting artists and their families and contributing to the culture of small business. 

Oh, another one I really like, though so far I've only purchased a t-shirt and a pin (Only cried a little. Yay!) from them, is Cloud and Victory. I appreciate their inclusive view of ballet, and the leotards I've seen one of my classmates wearing is very, very good looking and flattering on her curves. So, link through to these small business sites if you're looking for unusual, beautifully made, and even custom dance clothing. I am not being paid to advocate for any of them, nor do I receive any benefit from doing so in the form of discounts or free merch. 

The whole skirt thing, though. I knew that it could not be that difficult to make pretty skirts, and after a friend gave me a skirt she bought in Germany, I thought, "I want another one like this!" I bought some georgette (similar to chiffon but drapier), and got sewing.

This super-long skirt
is an experiment...
and I kind of like it!

As a grownup, I do like a longer skirt a lot of the time. I like the way it flows and ripples with movement. I like that it covers my butt and upper thighs. Rehearsal skirts, or those with a front hem about mid-thigh and a back hem just at the knee or a little below, are really elegant and flattering on most bodies. So I started with those, modeled on my German skirt. It turns out to be easy, once you figure out how to sew on the ribbon waist tie (sew on with the right sides facing, turn, press, stitch in the ditch). I have a pretty decent hobbyist's sewing machine -- a Pfaff -- and if I edge the selvage of the fabric with zig zag twice, it's a pretty good approximation of a rolled hem, which is way too advanced a technique for me. All in all, I think my homemade skirts are pretty nice -- if you're interested in one, you can private message me on Facebook ($30 with shipping included in the US, but please don't ask me to do black... so boring to sew and hard on my eyes).

Another cute Lucky with
one of my shorter skirts

I also like the shorter skirts made by Bullet Pointe, and so I've produced a few in that style as well. The fabric I can find isn't quite the same as theirs, and I'd still choose their skirts over mine any day except when I want something with a fun print, but the advantage of DIY is it's sooooo much cheaper. And you can make a matching skirt/legwarmer combo if you want. Legwarmers from stretch fabric are ridiculously easy -- just a tube of fabric with a hem.

Legwarmers: me
Skirt: Cheval Dancewear
Leotard: LuckyLeo

It's fun to have cute outfits to dance in, though of course it does not make me a better dancer. I also really find the process of making pretty satisfying. Because ballet skirts and warmups, unlike princess dresses and tutus, are quite quick and easy to sew, the gratification to work ratio is high. I can generally produce two or three skirts in an hour, depending on distractions and how many times I jam the bobbin. For me. ballet is about finding some purely creative, positive space in my life, and making pleasing things so that I can do pleasing things feels kind right. I don't wear most of the skirts I make -- I just like the idea that I could, if wanted to, or that someone else will. 

These were our uniforms. Not cute.
That's me in the back with the too-crooked arm.

When I look at my over-full drawer of ballet gear, I know I'm deep into the territory of "too much stuff," but at least I'm in good company. When I go to my summer intensive, one of the common conversations begins with someone guiltily admitting to having brought two dozen leotards for six days. This will lead to mass confession, plus show-and-tell. Not everyone there can afford to or is interested in accumulating leotards, skirts, warm ups, etc. but it does seem to be a pretty widespread phenomenon amongst adult ballet dancers. Maybe like me they were forced to wear a rather boring and ugly uniform as kids, or maybe they just like fashion, or maybe we are all victims of capitalist acquisitiveness. When I'm dancing away in my colorful togs, for a moment, I don't really care.

Bal Masqué

Well, the school year has begun here in Utah, where our legislature has made it illegal for school districts and public universities to require mask wearing in the classroom. Naturally, some of us are quite concerned -- children under 12 cannot be vaccinated against COVID-19, and fewer than half of students in high school and college are vaccinated, so opening the doors to our fully-occupied, unmasked schoolrooms means that the virus will have rich fields for the reaping.

I take adult ballet two times a week in a rather small studio. I assume, but I don't know, that some of my adult classmates are vaccinated. Still, the studio is, as I said, small, and not particularly well ventilated, so I will be wearing a mask. Ideally, it would have some filtration built in, but so far I have not been able to tolerate a KN95 for more than about 15 minutes while exercising. Two further days a week, I take class with a mixed group of teens and pre-teens (some of whom were my students this summer, so that's a little weird, but it gives me the opportunity to take class from a teacher I haven't had before, and to work on my pointe technique). This class is in a large gymnasium type space, with a high ceiling and good ventilation. BUT, there are so many unvaccinated kids in Utah, and they're spending 6+ hours a day in packed classrooms with other unvaccinated kids, and so I am also wearing a mask and taking extra care to put some space between myself and my young classmates in this setting.

I really do not enjoy dancing in a mask. It is stifling, and my face gets very sweaty. I also think it interferes with my peripheral vision and therefore messes with my spotting and balances. But I do not to be the vector, and so I wear it. I've found that the "sports" version of the masks sold by Old Navy are the most comfortable, and since they are also 2-layer and tight woven, and they have a bendable nose wire to fit them to my face, I assume they're as effective as such a light mask can be. (I think they may be phasing them out, as they only have a single colorway left). I have also tried masks by Athleta (too thick) and LuckyLeo (cute, but I don't like the tie-behind the head style, and they're a bit clingy to the face). A lot of people recommend the UnderArmour sports mask, but I haven't tried it. I guess I should try it, given their support for Misty Copeland alone.

I hope that at some point in the not too distant future, I could feel comfortable going maskless. The face is part of the dance, after all. But until people in my region start behaving responsibly, until our leaders do their ethical duty to protect public health, and until there is a vaccine for children, I guess I'll be the lone masked ranger in my classes.

Character Building

For the past two weeks, I have been teaching a beginning character class for the summer intensive at our local ballet school. I am not a professional dance teacher, and my only formal training in character happened 30 plus years ago when I was in the RAD curriculum as a pre-vocational student. But last summer, I sort of jumped in and said I would do what I could, and I must not have been too big a disaster because I was asked to come back this summer.

I taught three different levels, meeting with each group twice; a beginner group of 9-10 year olds (I had these kids both weeks, so four times), a more intermediate group of 11-12 year olds, and an advanced intermediate group of 12-14 year olds. Since they were all pretty much new to character, I basically only needed to develop 2 lesson plans, with some latitude for responsiveness to their skills, abilities, and maturity.

Since I'm not a trained character teacher, I did what any noob would do, and turned to the web for help. There's not a ton of content out there that's particularly helpful (watching videos of Vaganova examinations with preprofessional Russians is fun, but really exists in another universe), but I was able to find some videos by Finland International Summer Ballet School that gave me some inspiration, and what with one thing and another, I was able to assemble a pretty basic barre that felt more or less like what I remember from my RAD days. For center, I relied on memory, my ancient RAD notebooks, and the classic Lopukov/Shirayev book, Character Dance, my much annotated copy of which I still have.

One of the things I've always liked about character is the music and the way it demands musicality -- since a lot of the steps are quite simple, if you don't do them with panache, you're basically not doing them right. So I found some albums on iTunes that were appropriate:

Jose Gallastegui's 2013 Music for Ballet Class has a whole set of tracks just for character; the tracks are on the longer side, which makes them great for more advanced students and complex enchainements.

Nina Pinzarrone's 2016 Music for Character Class has shorter tracks, ideal for very simple barre exercises that introduce the fundamentals.

I spent some time with each group, at the beginning, talking with them about what character dance is, and where they've seen it before... most of them have seen, and many of them have performed The Nutcracker, so we started with that. They all knew some steps from the Russian and Spanish variations, which was nice. I also had a couple of kids with ballroom dance experience (it's HUUUUGE in Utah), so they could demonstrate the carriage of the body from that, which is pretty similar to character port de corps. We did some marching around with our hands on our hips, getting into the spirit of things. 

I also made sure they all had skirts to wear (they were all girls). I think the skirt is always what made me conscious, as a student, that I was in character class, and that I needed to live up to the gear. They didn't have character shoes, most of them, but I found that did not really matter. It might have been more fun for them to have a heel, but it certainly made it quieter and less headache inducing that they did not!

So, beskirted and in the spirit of things, we took our place at barre. What I did not realize, never having taught kids that young, was that one basically has to do the whole barre with them when they're learning something so new to them. This makes it hard to give corrections, so it was laborious (and exhausting). Also, nine year olds? They are so WIGGLY!

Barre was sort of torture, but we managed to get through it all eight days, and then move out to center. I think one of the best exercises I gave all the classes was a Verevochka, just because they enjoyed it so much, it looked like a real dance, and they got to spin (in those skirts, it was super fun). My two more advanced groups got the chance to learn a flamenco-inspired bit of choreography each. The more experienced dancers got extreme tempo changes and lots of quick footwork and the intermediates got a chance to really ham it up with their fans. I think they had fun. At least, they were still smiling when they went away, and that at the end of a six hour day of intensive.

I have a lot to learn about teaching dance, about character, about choreography... but it was fun. I feel like I suffered a bit, but that like most things that don't kill you, it made me stronger!