Rite(s) of Spring

Last weekend a friend and I took our children to see Ballet West's reboot of Rite of Spring. It was a little different from any other production I have seen and it might have been a lot less full of hokum than the more literalistic, narrative treatments had the costumers not decided to put all of the dancers into vaguely Star-Trekish spandex. The post-industrial set felt a little "cutting edge opera production of the early 90s" to me as well, but the dancing was stellar, including the young boy who played what might have been "the Chosen One," but might also have been a young deity, an acolyte, or any number of other ritual actors.

At the very end, much to the delight of my offspring, the large copper disk hanging at the back of the stage that I thought was meant to be some kind of prehistoric sun deity turned into a basin, and rain from on high filled it up. Then, as the score crashed to the close of the Sacrificial Dance, the boy and his female shadow or double were both deluged by this water as the basin tipped back to the vertical. Cool effect. Wet stage, wet spandex.

Though the staging was a little too Cirque-de-Soleil-esque and not quite reflective enough for my taste, I did like the choreography, for the most part (Nicolo Fonte), and the company just keeps getting better, especially the male dancers, the newer generation of whom are far more technically adept than their forerunners. I think that if Adam Sklute can just trust his company's skills to carry them a little bit more and resist the urge to play to the middlebrow, BW could change the whole culture of dance performance in the region and maybe open up the possibility of more experimental dance finding an audience.

The non-narrative, non-literal treatment of the Rite was refreshing, and it helped focus attention on the music, which is still sharp and astringent after more than a century. The rites of spring -- graduation, end-of-year ballet recital, final parent-teacher conferences, and of course, the impending pilgrimage to Kalamazoo for the International Congress on Medieval Studies -- are on my mind, of course, and the music, with its counterpoint of tenderness, abandon, and foreboding, seemed particularly in tune with my mood.

When I began writing this entry I thought I would have something more profound to say about the ballet, or about spring, or about these annual rituals. But perhaps because it is also the week in which the end-of-semester rituals are a bit attenuated for me (I am not giving any exams, and I have already finished grading), I am inclined only to observe, and not to pontificate. It's just as well.

Passed Over

A more somber than usual blog tonight, in memory of the three human beings who lost their lives in the shootings in Kansas City on the eve of Pesach. It would be disrespectful to their memory to call it mere irony that none of them were Jews, when the gunman was a vitriolic anti-Semite whose choice of venues was clearly motivated by his hatred of Jews, but it does remind me of the famous lament of the German Protestant minister Martin Niemöller, “First they came for…” Every time one of these crimes occurs, in which the cocktail of readily-available arms, tolerance of sociopathy cloaked as political opinion, and a twist perverted vigilantism, explodes into yet another utterly shocking and yet predictable bloodbath, I think of how he concludes his condemnation of his own and other’s indifference to Nazi genocide: “and then, they came for me.” 

What, if anything, this has to do with ballet, I do not rightly know, though on Saturday I am going to see Ballet West perform Jiří Kylián’s Forgotten Land, along with a couple of other things (like, for instance, Rite of Spring). Last fall I saw his earlier Return to a Strange Land, a tribute to his own mentor, suddenly dead, set to Janacek’s haunting cycle of piano pieces composed as a lament for his daughter, and Forgotten Land (according tonotes on the Joffrey Ballet website) “explores memories, events, and people that over time are lost or forgotten.” The echo of the title of the earlier work cannot be a coincidence. Also, it is set to Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, which, while not as heartbreaking as the Janacek, is nevertheless not a cheery piece of music, taking as the implicit text of its three movements the Lacrymosa, the Dies Irae, and the Requiem aeternam of Office of the Dead.

Dance and mourning are old partners; you can see them going down the road together at any New Orleans-style funeral, or along the walls of some old churches in Scandinavia, or following along behind the mummy in Egyptian tomb paintings. The dancers may be sending the departed off in style, celebrating the life lived, or using their living bodies in motion as a talisman against the stillness of the grave. 

There is no talisman, no Tau painted in the blood of a lamb, that can spare any of us from the fate of all living beings – that is, to die – but one can certainly imagine things we might do to lessen the risk that a fourteen-year-old boy aspiring to compete in a teen talent contest and his grandfather, a physician and a family man, would be shot by a former KKK official armed with legally-obtained guns and an excess of perverted self-righteousness (the guy was still shouting “Heil Hitler” when they arrested him). One can certainly imagine laws and safeguards that would have helped prevent the senseless death of Terri LeManno, who was visiting her elderly mother at a Jewish-run retirement home (LeManno was Catholic). It may be true in a limited and highly disingenuous way when NRA boosters say, that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” but last week when a deranged teenager went on a rampage at Franklin Regional High School with a pair of knives, nobody died. A physician who treated some of the patients observed that if the boy had been shooting instead of stabbing, the situation would have been far worse. So people with guns do kill people much more effectively than people with sharp objects. It is one of the things guns are for and one of the reasons people no longer go to war armed "only" with spears. 

So what to do, not to fall victim to quietism or despair? This week, looking for some more socially and politically relevant way to celebrate Passover with my kids, I came across an opinion piece by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a Jewish activist and Occupy Wall Streeter from New York City, that ran in the Huffington Post in 2012. He proposes ways that people of different faith traditions can enrich their celebration of the season’s holy days (Pesach and Palm Sunday), by linking the ancient rituals to present day issues. It is pretty standard stuff in terms of connecting the sufferings of the poor and oppressed today to the fundamental messages of social justice that both Judaism and Christianity can be understood to contain, but I really like way he concludes. He says that the world is undergoing an “earthquake” at all levels, from the disruption of basic biological systems to the technological redefinition of the self and sociability, and that we have three choices; ignore the quake and get crushed in the rubble, cling to the past as something immovable and become hopelessly reactionary, or learn to dance in the earthquake. He urges us to “attempt to dance in the midst of our earthquake.”

It is a metaphor, I know. But it is a metaphor with a groove, and maybe we can dance our way out of this sad mess to it.

The Hip Speaks

See page 550

I am forty-five years old, so it never comes as a complete surprise to me when my body just will not go along with the plans I have laid for it. I had early training in not being surprised, anyhow: at fifteen the state of my knees meant that I had to stop ballet for long enough that I lost my desire to pursue it as a career. At twenty, I damaged a disk in my back putting a rowing shell in the water and learned that even a young, fit, body has to be treated kindly in order to keep it in working order. At thirty-two, my doula-scripted birth plan for my first child had to be thrown out when I developed HELPP Syndrome, one of those really nasty diseases of pregnancy that you read about in the back of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and think “thank goodness that’s not me!” I would not say that my experiences in this regard are significantly out of the norm, either. Our bodies may be ourselves, but they are also oddly opaque to the conscious mind. 

Eloquent profanity (preferable to tears)

Our bodies speak to that mind, of course, primarily in the form of sensation. Pleasure, pain, hunger, satiety, exhaustion, exhilaration, the fight or flight response… The last may be impossible to ignore, but it is remarkable how often one can be a bit out of touch with the others. Pain, in particular, is an odd thing. Some kinds are just so insistent that they cannot be ignored, but from early childhood one gets the message that a certain amount of denial of pain is called for in the practice of life. That is to say, the repression of the pain response is a mark of maturity, so when I stub my toe badly, instead of crying and howling like a baby quite sensibly would, I instead utter some unprintable string of filth, and then hobble on my way to the next thing I must do (the laundry, generally speaking).

Ignoring a certain degree of inconsequential pain, or at least suppressing one’s response to it is probably not a terrible habit in itself. It gets you through life without being too much of a whiner. Plus, it allows you to put things in perspective. Stubbed toe? Painful, but hardly as painful as that liposuction procedure you watched on TLC last week. However, I do think it shapes a pattern of ignoring the body’s voice that may not be so helpful.

See Chapter 5

Case in point. Last fall, I began to notice, maybe not for the first time, but in a really consistent way, that my right hip has a tendency to sort of hang up, or get kind of jammed, so that it feels as if a bit of connective tissue right down the front of my groin has frozen in place. This could occur after I got up from working at my desk, or while I was washing dishes, or more often than not, in ballet class, usually right in the beginning of class on the initial grand plié in first position. Once it happened, then it would not go away for some time, even if I continued trying to articulate my hip and warm up the joint. This was annoying and uncomfortable, but not what I would call painful, so I figured it was just one of those things that happens when one is forty five and not twenty. One gets what the great Zen master, I mean children’s book author and illustrator Arnold Lobel, called “the creaks.”

Pretty soon I started noticing, but not really wanting to acknowledge that my hips kind of ached, especially on the right side. I thought this was just because I was really working out the muscles and the soreness was of the “good” sort that results from exercise. As a lifelong athlete, I am pretty used to that feeling, and it did not strike me as an omen. It was.

As I discovered yesterday, when I finally dragged my aching, really more than aching now, but actively hurting hip to the orthopedist, I have what is called, in the biz, “femoacetabular impingement” which has resulted in the ominous-sounding phenomenon of a “labral tear.” 

This is how it is all supposed to hang together.

A tear, as it happens, can be mended, either by rest and time and strengthening of the supporting tissue, or by surgical means. The other thing, which for the sake of brevity is called FAI, is structural. I could see it so clearly in the x-rays he took and it looked so wrong. Remember elementary-school anatomy, in which one learns that the head of the femur is the ball in a ball-and-socket joint? Well, what if that ball is not round, but instead has a sharp ridge that runs around its outer edge? Imagine the sharp ridge nudging up against the nice, squishy cartilage gasket (labrum) that seals the joint, keeping the precious synovial fluid inside so that bone never rubs directly against bone (instant recipe for arthritis). Imagine that happening over and over again, say, during grands battements, or grands anythings, for that matter. Got the picture? 

So, with my frayed labrum and my deformed femoral head, what is to be done? For now, physical therapy, anti-inflammatories, and only baby ballet. Having made the mistake of googling the terms “labral cam tear” and “FAI,” I am quite concerned that most of the people who comment on their own experiences with these things seem to have ended up having surgery to debride the frayed cartilage and to reshape the femoral head. All I can say to that is yuck.

You gotta love this one. Or, rather, I gotta love it. Twenty times a day.

I would give up every pretty leotard I have ever bought not to have this problem, but since that was not one of the medical options presented to me, I will dutifully do my exercises and hope for the best. Notably, all the exercises and stretches I have been assigned are my least favorites, probably because they stretch the quads and hip-flexors (that thing that seems to hang up is evidently the hip flexor) and strengthen the hamstrings, the imbalance of which, the good Dr. C tells me, lies at the root of the problem. I distinctly recall the orthopedist I saw thirty years ago for my ballet-battered knees telling me essentially the same thing, that like most ballet dancers I had powerful quads, tight iliotibial bands, and relatively puny hamstrings. 

And if you don't listen to your body, at least listen to Shaq!

So, gentle reader, listen to your body, especially to its rich and varied vocabulary of discomfort and pain. Anything persistent is serious, even if it seems little more than a whisper. Take care of it now, not later, when it is worse. And while you are at it, stretch your quads and strengthen your hamstrings. Then you may not have to waste four or five hours a week when you might have been dancing hanging around the PT office having your butt massaged with some stinky icy-hot gel that make you smell like a cough drop or Shaquille O'Neal for the rest of the day. There it is, my wisdom for the ages.