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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in Black Swan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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