Looking back over my first year of teaching teen-adult ballet

When I started teaching teen-adult beginning ballet last fall (after subbing and doing some occasional private group lessons for a year or two), I approached it very much the same way I approach my teaching work as a college professor. I started with an objective -- the "big thing" I wanted my students to learn,  and I worked back from there, breaking that big objective down into its component parts. I did a lot of reading around adult learners, and especially around teaching dance to adults, but I also brushed up on dance anatomy and terminology, cross training for dancers, and more general ways to build the mind-body connection in people who aren't used to moving that much, or whose movement patterns have been very repetitive for a long time.

The objective I set was for my students to experience the pleasure of ballet while training their bodies and minds to the movement vocabulary of the art form. In short, I aimed high for them.

Breaking this down into a bunch of more concrete and measurable outcomes, I began thinking about the elements of ballet, and I came up with this schematic:

Once I had gone through this exercise in mental organization, I started to look at that big review I had done of the literature on teaching ballet to adults (and I use the term "literature" quite broadly here to include my own experiences of being instructed, videos and blogs by those giving and receiving instruction, books about ballet instruction more generally, and conversations with people far more knowledgable than myself). I was very attracted to a syllabus for total beginner adult students developed by Liane Fisher of Fisher Ballet Productions. Ms. Fisher is a Cecchetti trained, multiply credentialed expert in ballet and dance instruction, so it's no surprise that she has a really well-informed practice, and also no surprise that many elements of her syllabus mapped well to the schema I had created based on my own knowledge of ballet and my reading. 

Because her syllabus is geared to total novices in a seven-week course, and I would be teaching a mix of novices, those with a year or two of experience, returners (those who used to dance and are coming back after a hiatus), and more advanced students just wanting to work on foundations, and because I had a full 15-week semester for three hours a week, I treated her syllabus as a point of departure, adding to it elements drawn from other syllabi and my own interest in floor work as an essential part of ballet training. One of the things I've noticed about adult learners (and this could be true of children as well -- I just haven't taught that many kids) is that often, they have a lot more physical capacity than they think they do, but they're pretty out of touch with their bodies, especially in relation to space; for this reason, spending some time lying down or sitting on the floor at the beginning of class (or even between barre exercises) can be very illuminating for them. 

So, basically, what I did was start by introducing three new "subjects" a week from the schema above. Thus, in the first week, I focused on alignment, positions of the feet, and articulation of the feet. What this translated to was lying on our backs on the floor experimenting with turnout, core engagement, isolating the part of the body that was moving from the trunk, pointing and flexing our feet, then standing up and facing the barre to essentially repeat all of these movements in a vertical orientation. I really stressed, especially for those with a little more dance experience, that what we were doing was "tuning our instruments" -- just as every violinist has to start every practice session by tuning the strings of the violin to the standard GDAE sequence, so the ballet dancer has to start each practice session by tuning the body to ballet alignment.

We didn't even really do tendus until the second week, but the crazy thing is that even with just three positions of the feet (1st, 2nd, 3rd), tendu en avant and à la seconde, plié , relevé, and a few positions of the body, I could actually get them off the barre, into center, and doing combinations that looked pretty darn good, considering some of them had never done even ten minutes of ballet a week earlier. We also had a lot of fun towards the ends of these classes, when we would do different ballet walks, which I used to introduce concepts of musicality and expression. 

And so it went, through the first semester (fall), gradually building up skills and confidence. I learned as much from my students as they learned from me, probably more. I gained an appreciation for all the different kinds of bodies and minds that people bring tot he studio, and I got better at planning lessons and remembering my choreography. With beginners, one real trap is doing every single combination with them so they have someone to follow. I am still working on how to wean people from that dependency! Fortunately or unfortunately for me in the regard, I'm currently nursing tendinitis in my right foot, so I can't really go all out. One or two of my students are really struggling without having me there to visually cue them, but most of the time it seems like if I get them started they can take it from there.

Second semester was a chance to go back to the drawing board a bit, since I had a lot of turnover -- of about twelve students only four returned (the others moved away or had injuries or family obligations), and the new crop of beginners included everyone from a woman my own age who had never done ballet, though she had been a pretty sharp ballroom dancer at one time, to some college students and one young teen. I probably did not spend quite as much time slowly building the foundations for this group, but that seemed to work okay.

My spring group was able to perform at the end of the year. Rather than do a "recital" piece where they showed off their movement vocabulary, I decided to really let them dance. I set the choreography to an instrumental version of "Eliza's Aria" from the contemporary ballet suite, Wild Swans, by the composer Elena Kats-Chernin, and incorporated a lot of the classical/romantic movements that denote "swan" in ballet. I was so proud of them in the end, because they just clearly had so much fun performing it, and also, it looked really cool, if I do say so myself. There was this one bit where I had them run in two spiral patterns in opposite directions (clockwise, counterclockwise) weaving through each other, and at first it was just awful chaos, but then, like magic, about a week before the performance, it clicked into place, and it was such a spectacular effect, like a flock of birds wheeling in a murmuration (I know, I know, swans do not do this, starlings do, but it's art, so there's room for artistic license and it never pays to be too literal). 

My amazing swans, photo by Sierra Nicole Lippert

Some of my students came back for the five-week summer session, and it has been fun to see them grow into the role of "experienced dancer" as new people join in. Some of them will be back in the fall, and I'm sure there will be a fresh draft as well. I just have so much fun seeing them develop confidence, artistry, skill, and above all, joy in motion. I hope that even those that don't continue with ballet will always have this little, pleasurable memory of our time learning together.

For the new school year, I've identified a few big things I want to accomplish as a teacher, so that my students can have the best possible experience.

1. I want to help them identify and achieve simple, skill-based goals that are realistic for them, and then do regular check ins to see how they feel they are progressing.

2. I want to give my fall students an end-of-term performance opportunity so that they don't fade away towards the end of the semester as family holiday obligations start to outweigh just going to class. I've noticed that adults seem to like to have a project they're working on, like learning a piece of choreography.

3. Once a month, throw in a class that focuses on conditioning and returning to our sense of turnout and alignment (e.g. floor barre, center barre, even conditioning ball work)

Mostly, I want to keep learning and improving as a teacher and finding ways to extend this "side hustle" of mine into a thoughtful, reflective, and life-affirming practice. We're in for a rough time ahead in the world, I think, and it's important to keep tending the gardens where we can step away from the furor.

Cracking on...

It's that time of year in ballet land when no matter whether you're in the big leagues or at the proverbial Dolly Dinkle School, there's a purple-pink shimmer, candy-cane scented, wafting through the air. Nutcracker Season is upon us!

If you haven't already read the excellent Nutcracker Nation by Jennifer Fisher, I urge you to find a copy right now! It's such a great, and loving, exploration of the whole Nutcracker phenomenon, especially in North America, and especially in relation to our multicultural landscape. Essentially, Fisher demonstrates that the popularity of The Nutcracker Ballet in North America has a very distinct cultural and economic history rooted in the rise of television and the development of suburban leisure values in post-WWII US and Canadian culture. And as anyone doing the books for a ballet-based school or company in North America knows, it's the moneymaker and the parent-pleaser that you almost cannot do without.

But there is not just one Nutcracker, there are instead Nutcrackers, one of the things Fisher explores towards the end of her book. The variability, the mutability, and the adaptability of this phenomenon to all sorts of audiences and communities is really fundamental to its lasting appeal. This is so perfectly illustrated in the documentary Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, which chronicles the 2019 production of Debbie Allen's studio's amped up, multi-genre tribute to the classic. It's a great film (Shondaland, natch!), but it also really explores how this weird German Romantic story filtered through French and Russian lenses and then commercialized in the twentieth century can be transformed to mean something to a group of Black and Brown kids from some pretty impoverished backgrounds who have been offered the opportunity, by Allen and her amazing team, to become artists. I got a little misty.

I've seen a lot of Nutcrackers in my day; it was an annual ritual when I was a kid in Seattle, and sometimes we'd even go to two in one season -- the PNB production and a visiting company. Then I saw it in Boston at one point, and I'm pretty sure I saw the SF Ballet production a couple of times. Unlike other ballets where I'm always tempted to say, "Oh, this version is the best," I don't feel that way at all about the Nutcracker. It's really the case that each version has its own logic, its own raison d'etre.

Well, MOST versions. I feel a lot less openhearted about some of the film versions. As a young mom, I was subjected to frequent replays of the Barbie version. It's... odd and awkward, sort of like the doll herself. And then, I was not a huge fan of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, which was weird in a way that seemed appropriate to the source material, but also weirdly boring (too much CGI?). I'm not counting filmed versions of stage productions, or even the Baryshnikov/Kirkland film from 1977. Those are not film versions of the story, just filmed ballets, if you know what I mean?

Although I was a baby bunhead, and took ballet pretty seriously from age 9 to 16, I actually was never in a Nutcracker production as a kid. My friends who went to PNB would get to be party children, or mice, or soldiers, but I never even went to an audition. I think my parents felt like it would be a hassle, and they were not wrong. One year, a girl in my class at Cornish was chosen as one of the Claras, and we were all so insanely jealous, until she told us that it was basically a lot of sitting around -- in the PNB production at the time, Clara and the Nutcracker Prince spent the entirety of Act II sitting on a throne. Still, I would have loved to be a mouse or a soldier... Instead, I got to be a villager, or once the old woman, in our school's production of the Snow Princess. Thanks, Nellie Cornish.

My eldest child loved ballet for a while (and still talks about wanting to go back to it, but that's another essay altogether), and really, really wanted to be in the civic ballet's production. Sadly, the only part they ever got was "Sleigh Page" -- basically, stagehand in an angel costume pushing the sleigh with Clara and the Nutcracker Prince on and off stage. Not exactly anyone's idea of a star turn. However, since my kid was in the show, I did makeup and helped out backstage, which was fun, but madness, given a cast of mostly kids under the age of 15.

In fact, being a mouse is still an ambition of mine. I would really love to play the Mouse King! First of all, there's the anonymity of wearing a giant mouse head, and second, it's such a campy, feisty part. I hope that someday my turn will come. I've been practicing my whisker cleaning and my lying-on-my-back-and-dramatically-dying moves.

Just once, I have been on stage for a Nutcracker, as a party parent (specifically, as "Party Mom #1"), and it was soooooo fun. I've also enjoyed being backstage and helping the kids with their costumes and makeup. It's just a treat to be part of the ritual, I suppose. And who doesn't love the Snow Scene, watched from the wings, while the local children's choir "Ah ah ah ah ahhhhs" from the balcony?

Anyhow, whatever your Nutcracker plans for this winter, may they prosper (and be free of weird, gross, culturally inappropriate stereotypes).

Gentle and Soft (and fun)

But are they having fun?

A very young friend asked me the other day for advice on his first Nutcracker audition (and his first dance audition) ever. I am not an expert on this topic by any stretch of the imagination, since I've never auditioned as an adult and I don't play any role in our civic company's auditions. I do have some experience, having done my share of auditions as a young dancer and having consistently had, well, disappointing outcomes. But, in the intervening years I have learned a thing or two about how to deal with situations which are definitely NOT judgement-free-zones; job interviews, teaching college freshman a required class, giving a plenary lecture... and if there is one single thing that stands out it is that if you just decide to focus on what's fun or at least mildly pleasurable about what you're doing, it tends to go better. Let the thing happen, but be gentle with yourself and go soft on the self critique.

In that spirit (the spirit of fun, which by the by is the inspiration for the title of this post, the mockumentary Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee, which is pure brilliance IMHO), I am encouraging my gentle readers to think about what's fun in their dancing lives, and to shed some of the self-seriousness that tends to accompany the study and practice of a classical art form. To that end, here's my "top five" fun things about adult ballet (as a learner and more recently also as a teacher).

1. People -- I meet so many interesting, life-enriching people through my classes, summer "adult ballet camp," and workshops. Some of my most valuable friendships have been formed through these experiences, and I always get such a kick out of discovering that the person who has been struggling through some crazy petit allegro combo with me is, in her spare time, an ICU nurse, an attorney, a radiologist, a professional chef, or the comptroller general of a big federal agency. Weird, huh? As an academic, even though I'm in university administration these days, most of the people I meet at work come from backgrounds similar to my own, e.g. they went to college, then to grad school for a PhD, and so forth. Ballet connects me to a whole different population, and it has really broadened my worldview in ways that go far beyond the art form itself.

Slightly punchy after a long day at artEmotion

2. Music -- I come from a really music-oriented family, but to be honest, music had started to play less and less of a role in my life as I concentrated on my academic career and raising a young family. And then, about fifteen years ago, I jumped back into ballet. I was disappointed, at first, that the classes I was taking were not taught with a live accompanist. In my youth, I had never taken a class without a pianist in the room (my ballet school, after all, was part of an arts college). And there is still nothing like a live accompanist. However, even with CDs and now streaming music, ballet class gives me a daily chance to reconnect to my music brain, and sometimes (about once a week) I do get to dance with an actual live accompanist. Whether it's the ubiquitous pop-hits reimagined as ballet class music (the strange afterlife of Gotye's "Somebody that I used to know"), or arrangements of Chopin or Bach, it's good just to feel the music in my fibers, and channel it through movement. With my adult beginner students, one thing I keep bringing their attention back to is the importance of the element of musicality in their dancing. You don't have to be a fantastic principal ballerina to express yourself through dance. In fact, expression of ideas, thoughts, and feelings is the whole purpose of dance, and music is a huge part of that. Furthermore, doing ballet leads me to listen to music (all sorts) more carefully as some quiet background awareness in my mind imagines what could be danced to it.

Here's Kathryn Morgan making the most of the whole Star Wars as ballet music phenom (in honor of May 4th, as in May the 4th be with you)

3. Sweat -- I've always felt there are two kinds of workouts. The ones that hurt so good and the ones that just hurt. Ballet class, for me, usually falls into the "hurt so good" category. Even if I've totally muffed it, the dizzy, zippy, panting and sweating aftermath of a really intense allegro combination, or the trembling legs of a post-adagio moment are as close to ecstatic as I feel most days. When I used to run, I would sometimes get to that higher plane after a really long "on" run, but I had a lot more "off" than "on" runs, and my knees just ached constantly. Ballet much more consistently delivers that exercise (I suppose endorphin-induced) high for me, and partly it's because while I'm pushing my body physically, I'm more aware of the mental challenge of remembering choreography and moving expressively with the music (see #2)

4. Creativity -- Here's the thing about dance. Even if you're not the one setting the choreography, each time you execute it, you recreate it, you make it new. I love the idea that even if I'm just doing tendus at the barre, I have the opportunity to interpret, and then reinterpret the sequence, and to put something into it that makes it my own. This might not be visible, outwardly, especially if the enchainement is particularly technical in its focus, but it's more a mental operation realized through the attentive connection of mind and body. Or really, more like, the body itself thinking. Anyway, it's the pleasure one takes in making something (a great sandwich, a successful party, a song, a machine that works, etc.) and then refining it, making it better, making it satisfying. I want to convey this facet of ballet to my students, and not just teach them "this is the right way to do X, the wrong way to do Y..."

Swan Boys being unique (from Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake)Credit...Caitlin Teal Price for The New York Times

5. Non-attachment -- What's fun about the spiritual state of non-attachment, one might ask? Well, it's more a case of the self getting out of the way of fun. That is to say, when I told my young friend to just have fun at his audition, what I think I was really saying was, don't let your anxiety or your awareness of other people looking at you, or any of that crap, become an obstacle to your authentic experience in the moment of the dance. If you're really present in the moment, then it's difficult to be all twisted up in the usual crap that makes us miserable. To really dance, one has to be present, and not attached to the many things that pull at us if we allow them to do so. Or perhaps, as Martha Graham said, “All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.” Just. Be. There.

Yup, that's MG

So, here's my message for today for all you adult ballet dancers: it's FUN!

Demi Goddesses (and two Demi Gods)

 

iconic sylphyness

Dazzling feats of pointe work are, without a doubt, one of the aesthetic pleasures of watching ballet. Charles-Louis Didelot, the early-nineteenth-century French dance master of the Russian Imperial Theaters in Saint Petersburg knew how to wow an audience – in 1815, he deployed his new “flying machine” (a kind of wire and pulley trapeze system) to hoist ballerina Geneviève-Adélaïde Gosselin up on her tippity toes in a performance of his ballet, Flore et Zephyr. Now, Mlle. Gosselin had already been experimenting with reinforcing the toes of her ballet slippers to rise past demi-pointe, so while Didelot (a man) commonly gets the credit for “inventing” pointe work, in all likelihood it was actually amongst the ranks of female dancers competing for the newfound celebrity afforded ballerinas who pushed ballet in the direction of dancing en pointe. At first it must have been just a breathtaking stunt, but in 1832, when Filippo Taglioni choreographed the ballet La Sylphide for his daughter, Marie, it became part of the visual repertoire of ballet denoting the Romantic-era ballerina’s light, sylph-like essence.

Much ink has been spilled about pointe work and the history of the pointe shoe; a Google Scholar search of the term “ballet” and the term “pointe” together yields over 30,000 results. Many of these are from physical therapy and medical journals, which perhaps suggests something, but there are also a healthy (if you want to call it that) number of scholarly works dedicated to the “phallic symbolism” and other metaphorical and semiotic implications of ballet’s longstanding gender divide around the pointe shoe. It’s all very interesting, all the more so in 2023, when the idea that a man might dance en pointe and do it seriously (as opposed to satirically) has taken root. I mean, why not ? (Well, because they’re not trained to it, and this could be dangerous for them, but on the other hand, if we did train boys on pointe, then it would probably be safer.)

As my title for this entry suggest, however, I’m not really wanting to think about pointe shoes. It’s bad enough that at fifty plus years old I still put them on my poor feet several times a week. So let’s talk instead about dancing without pointe shoes.

I’m teaching adult beginner ballet this fall with a bunch of women and two guys, and I’m really taking them down to the brass tacks, using a curriculum I adapted from a couple of different sources I found online that are specifically concerned with the training of adults starting ballet. One theme for the class is feet – how to articulate them, shape them, use them to maximum effect, and keep them healthy. The killer exercise we did in week one, and will come back to throughout the semester, is one I remember from my RAD days – slowly rising to quarter, half, and three-quarter pointe and then equally slowly lowering back down. It’s a brute, and also a bit boring, but adults are fully capable of recognizing what it’s doing in their bodies. The calves begin to burn, the arches feel it, and if you’re not holding your core, you wobble all over the place. 

I have a persistent joint problem in the big-toe metatarsal of my left foot, and sometimes it really squawks at me as I lower from three-quarter to half pointe, which in this context serves to remind me that this is not a particularly comfortable or habitual way in which most people move their bodies. We wear firm-soled shoes that cradle and cushion our feet, reducing the amount of finer adjustments and movements that they make all day long, so the muscles get atrophied. Twenty-first century footwear is the equivalent of the office chair – it is ruining our bodies’ range of motion and balance of strength!

The other footwork we’ve been doing is moving (all of this in first position, btw) from standing on two feet to one foot, with the working leg going to sur le cou de pied. While a big point of this exercise is feeling the turnout turn on (you literally cannot do slcdp without fully engaging the turnout muscles in the underbutt and pelvis), it’s also amazing how well it embeds the proprioceptive identity of the properly shaped foot. Since you cannot sickle when in this position, and since the structure of the standing leg gives tactile feedback to the sole of the working foot, it “trains” the mind-body connection to go “oh, that’s how my foot is supposed to be shaped"). I also pointed out to them last night that if you turn sideways to the mirror with your working foot towards the mirror, you can see that despite the fact it feels, at first, as if you’re really winging your foot back in this position (that is, contracting the muscles on the outer side of the ankle disproportionately while extending those on the inside), the inner anklebone and the big toe are almost perfectly aligned with the shin and the knee. That’s why it makes such a pretty line – a gentle, relatively flat curve, no kinks.

If you take that “wrapped” foot away from the supporting let and rest the tip of the longest toe on the floor, then flex the toes, the foot is positioned exactly how it ought to be for optimal placement in demi-pointe. Or, if you just stretch the knee to the extended position to the second, without changing anything else, you have a perfectly placed tendu. It was fun to watch them experiment with this, and then have the lightbulb visibly go on in their bodies and minds. After we did that, I really noticed that all of them, even those with very limited ankle movement, were pointing their feet, and not sickling!

Yay for demi-pointe and the old soft-shoe!

The Summer Doldrums

The dread summer doldrums of adult ballet have arrived. Summer intensives are over (more on that, shortly); summer session at our local ballet school has ended; next week the kids get a local intensive, but there's nothing for adults. What's a grownup bunhead to do?

Basement ballet, December, 2020

Thanks to the pandemic (did we ever imagine that would be a thing we could say, even sardonically, which, if you can't tell, is how it is intended here?), there are now a wealth of online options, from expensive live one-on-one coaching sessions to free videos where you can plié to your heart's content along with dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet led by Andre Klemm on the Pont des Arts in Paris. So, there’s the whole phenomenon of rec room or basement or kitchen counter barre. Which is… okay, I guess.

Earlier this summer, in the short spell between spring and summer sessions, I solved the problem for my peers (but not really for myself), by volunteering to lead some informal classes twice a week. It was fun, but kind of exhausting, despite that I did not really get to dance all that much myself. Probably, it was good practice for this fall, when I’ll be teaching adult beginners regularly for the first time. I’m excited, and not a little nervous, to take this on. My only “training” as a ballet teacher is the thousands of hours I’ve spent in class as a student, a very small amount of substitute teaching, some reading, and of course my background as a very different kind of teacher (e.g. college professor). I like that teaching makes me think about the movement more analytically, and it really challenges my brain to come up with intentional kinds of barre work that prepares people for specific exercises in center. Suffice to say, I have a lot to learn, and a lot of imposter syndrome (although, is it a “syndrome” when you really are, for all intents and purpose, an imposter) to get over.

I am taking inspiration from Julie Gill, however; she is sort of a guru of adult ballet, a real advocate for having an adult-specific approach that helps dancers progress through skills in a similar fashion to the way kids are taught, but with age-appropriate adaptations and acknowledgement of the reality of adult lives (e.g., we don’t operate on a “semester” cycle unless, that is, we are teachers or academics ourselves). I like her essay/podcast “Adult ballet training, philosophy, & inspiration” which is part of her “Facets of Ballet Series” which anyone who enjoys the brainy side of ballet (that is, the thinking about how it all works rather than just going with the flow of it, which is also cool) will find a rewarding listen.

Everybody loves floor barre!

I am also taking a page out of the book of a teacher I took class with at Joy of Motion in Washington DC about a million years ago (okay, ten). She was a former Graham dancer, but she was teaching ballet. I should add that she was over eighty years old. The first thing she had us all do (and this was an advanced/intermediate class) was lie down on our backs on the floor and “find” our bodies, moving through pliés and tendus front and side, so we could “house” our center in our pelvis (her words). It really is remarkable how something like that gives one a kind of physical sensation that can serve as a reference point later, when you’re standing at the barre or in center. If, that is, you remember to think about it. So I’m going to incorporate some floorwork into every class.

Finally, I’m of course inspired by all the wonderful teachers that I’ve been so fortunate to take classes from over the years. Aside from the stalwart ballet heroes at Cache Valley School of Ballet (Karyn! Vivian! Jaimie! Pam!) I’ve had some really transformative encounters elsewhere. 

Aaron Jackson at Washington Ballet made a huge impression on me – he was not afraid to push mature adult students to attain the kind of rigor that is ordinarily only expected of pre-professional students. “No, that’s not right. Try again,” was his motto, it seemed, and it worked – I made progress in my technique there, particularly in petite allegro, that I had not imagined possible. His classes were fun, too, the choreography hard enough to make my brain work, but not so hard as to completely defeat the mind-body connection. 

Another teacher I constantly return to when I can is Kat Wildish in New York City. She is a huge advocate of giving adult dancers the chance to develop and train seriously, and she also creates performance opportunities that sound amazing. As a drop-in student, I’ve never had the chance to do the shows, but I’ve learned a couple really useful things, including my favorite barre stretch, which is totally crazy, and so satisfying (it cannot be described, only demonstrated). 

In Seattle, I always try to drop in for a class with Annie deVuono at ExitSpace Dance. She brings this fun, slightly salty energy to class, and her choreography really compels one to focus on dance quality. The enchainements are interesting, but not weird, so you can really double down on the expressive elements. She makes great use of a somewhat limited space, and her classes are small, so you get a ton of personal attention. She has a way of giving corrections that make you feel like a “real” ballerina.

Honestly, it’s very seldom that I take an adult class that totally leaves me frustrated and sad; occasionally, when I’ve taken at big company studios, where there are thirty or forty people in an open class and the pre-professionals and company dancers get all the attention, I feel sort of marginal and uninspired, but that’s kind of to be expected, I think, as a class cannot be all things to all people.

With the incomparable Allison
(and baby Tilton #2)

Which brings me back around to summer intensives. This year, once again, I went to SLC for ArtEmotion, Allison DeBona and Rex Tilton's super awesome summer intensive for real grownups, and once again, it was transformational. I’m not saying I made huge advances in my ballet technique; I’m getting kind of old for that. Rather, I felt like I learned a lot about my body, about dance, and about how to work with what I’ve got. One highlight was the amazing series of pointe classes with Liz Wheldon, who is literally the kindest ballet teacher I’ve ever had, who just infuses the room with love and light and makes you think you’re nailing it even if you are a fifty-something-year-old woman clonking around in pointe shoes. 

It was also a huge privilege to be in the group that Rex Tilton set choreography on – we were definitely a challenging bunch, and the piece was way more lovely and sophisticated than you would think that a bunch of adult intermediate-to-advanced types could pull off, but it came together and, I’m told, looked pretty amazing (the videos haven’t been sent to us yet, so I’ll have to wait for confirmation on that). For me, the choreographic piece is always the greatest challenge both mentally and physically. It’s just outside the norm of what I do with dance, most of the time. 

Finally, I have to mention the last ballet class of the whole week, which we took with Ron Tilton. He had this little tip for turning that has literally changed everything for me. It has to do with using your off-side arm to whip across your body, farther than you think you need to, in order to actually just get your shoulders square. Again, it’s easier to demonstrate than to describe, but it seriously makes the rotations just come so much more smoothly. 

So, as I drift in the dance doldrums, I am directing my thoughts towards three goals for the coming year:

• Dance mindfully, applying the things I’ve learned and hopefully growing them.
• Teach holistically, taking into account the realness of adult ballet
• Embrace risk in both teaching and dancing – try new things, get down on the floor and up in the air, and learn some really challenging choreography

Alright, cue up that basement ballet video, I’m ready to start!

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.