Adventure in Tutuland

The eighth-grade history fair happens tomorrow. The way this works is that each student dresses up in character as a prominent American (in Utah, eighth graders study US history), and makes a poster with several facts about their subject, but without the individual's name. Parents and other students then tour around and talk to the kids and fill out a form with their best guesses as to whom each of the historical personages is. The person who gets the most right wins some kind of prize.


The Daughter decided she wants to be Maria Tallchief. Well, first, she said she wanted to be Misty Copeland, but I suggested she choose someone a little more... historical. Lest you think that Grownup Bunhead's influence leads the child only to think of ballet-related figures, let me just tell you that last time (in fifth grade), she chose to be Jane Addams.

Also, this has been the spring of her ballet awakening. She is finally on pointe, and taking lessons every day with hopes of getting into the junior company in the fall.

So, what does a reasonable mother do when her child decides to be Maria Tallchief for history fair?

I don't know. I am not that person.

A quick search of Google Images led to the decision to make MT's Odette costume. How hard could that be?

Lots and lots of tulle

A quick search of Google "How to Make a Tutu" returned 108,000,000 hits (approximately), none of which began with the phrase, "this quick and easy project."

So it was off to the sewing store for about 18 yards (a conservative amount, in tutuland) of stiff tulle (unfortunately, real tutu netting is not available at JoAnn), some satin, and white feathers. As I was paying for our purchases, I quickly looked up how much a white practice tutu would cost on Discount Dance Supply's website. The answer was gratifying: about $55-$65, and that's before any additional frou frou that you want to add. Our cost came to about $30, with tulle 50% off at 75 cents a yard.

Following instructions from the fantastic "tutu-torial" at the blog Never a Dull Moment (http://sharpsewingny.blogspot.com/p/tutu-torial.html), and also inspecting many, many other tutu-construction blogs, pinterests, and discussion threads, we began by drafting a paper pattern for a pair of, well, satin underpants. In the classical language of tutu construction, these drawers are called caleçons de precaution. Underpants of precaution. Hahaha!

caleçons de precaution with butt ruffles!

This is not my pattern, but it basically looks like it (except that we went with only 8 layers of tulle, since I am not completely insane). Also, as Daughter said she did not want "butt ruffles" we dispensed with what are labeled ruffles 1, 2, and 3 on the above pattern.

Precautionary unders cut out and fitted to the meager hams of Daughter, we marked the sewing lines. And then, dear reader, the work really began.

We cut  EIGHT strips six yards long in graduated widths (12", 11", 10", 9", 8", 7", 5", 3") out of the tulle. Sadly, our upper two layers we chose to make out of a softer tule, which as you will see merely looks sort of limp and wrinkly. Use stiff tulle, my friends.

dagged edge

Next we "dagged" the layers. Making one inch accordion folds and swearing under our breath (well, I was swearing while she was singing "I wanna be like Kanye"), we cut each set of folds on a 90 degree angle to the edge in order to get a nice zig-zaggy hem. Since this is meant to be a "feathery" tutu we did our dagging a little more irregularly than the petal-like perfection of the pink tutu shown on the right. No, actually, we did it more irregularly because dagging turns out to be really, really difficult. Daughter's father said, "Thus the expression "Dagnabit!" as we struggled with the wayward netting.

Pants with first two layers of tulle

So, the next step was to make twenty million or so 1" pleats in the tulle strips, machine basting those down, and then doubling over the pleats to achieve fullness. There is nothing terrible difficult about making pleats or basting them down, but it is very boring. We moved on from "I wanna be like Kanye" to an in-depth plot analysis of the Dr. Who episode, "The End of Time," (or rather, Daughter moved on while I grunted, "mmhmm" with my lips clamped tightly over pins). We sewed and sewed and the layers of tulle ruffles took form.

Five layers and counting

We attached the tulle to the pants, beginning with the second row down from the top, which you sew with the raw edge facing the waist. Then you sew the first row on over that, also with the raw edge facing the waist. The other layers, made of the stiffer tulle, we sewed with the raw edge facing the... well, facing down. This gives the tutu its lift, so to speak.

As the layers went on, something really cool started to happen. The underside of the tutu started to look almost exactly like it was supposed to look, like all those pix on the internet, serried layers of fluffy loveliness, like a freshly-opened rose. It was seriously, seriously poofy.

Once we had all the layers attached (and we did not make it to the 3" layer, because we simply ran out of pants to sew it onto), we checked the fit and attached the basque. What is a basque, you ask?

Basques in basques

Well, according to Wikipedia, a basque is (among many other things), "a long corset, characterized by a close, contoured fit and extending past the waistline over the hips. It is so called because the fashion was adopted from Basque traditional dress, initially by the French and then throughout Western fashion." Both Daughter and I recently read a book called Dance and Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele, and in its introductory essay on the tutu, one of the things we learned was that the construction of tutus closely mirrored the construction of fashionable women's dress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so it's unsurprising that a tutu would have what amounts to a built in girdle. This is what allows the skirt to emerge not at the dancer's waist, which would be a disaster for partnering (a handful of scratchy slippery tulle could easily prompt the partner to drop the ballerina mid-lift, or precipitate a sudden loss of grip resulting in an awkward and probably painful slide of the hands upwards...), but just at the point of the hips, lengthening the torso (graceful) and making it seem as if the legs emerge not out of the angular architecture of hip and pelvis but instead out of a cloud of delicately sidestepped anatomical vagueness.

Basque attached to skirt

 With the basque in place, we then adjusted the fit at the waist with a little elastic and some hooks and eyes. This was actually one of the more difficult steps, for some reason. All that tulle was bristling about, and getting a smooth fit over the hips was a challenge. Also, somehow I managed to sew the bra-extender hook-and-eye unit that we purchased on in such a manner that it would not hook or eye, so that had to be carefully removed and reattached (more colorful language on my part while Daughter talked on the phone with her bestie about when they were going to get together to watch (rewatch) "The End of Time").

The underpinnings

You would think we were almost done. But there were still the rear seam and leg-holes of the pants to be stitched up (always fun when you're trying to deal with a wayward cloud of tulle. We didn't elasticize the legholes, since by some unbelievable miracle they fit just right, but I certainly wouldn't want to dance in a tutu without a little more of a guarantee that nothing would be uncomfortably exposed as I rode around on my cavalier's shoulder in a rather ass-upwards position!

At this stage Daughter also tacked the layers of tulle together so that her tutu didn't look like a giant powder puff and had more of a flat-pancake shape. We're still working on this -- most "real" tutus that have that classic Russian shape have a hoop discreetly hidden in about layer 4, and also have lots and lots more layers, plus butt and ahem, shall we say "front"? ruffles. Ours is a little droopier, due to lack of layers and somewhat overenthusiastic tacking.

The final stage was fun. We decided not to make a bodice at this point, but instead to have her wear a white leotard that has been adorned with fluffy boa loops over the shoulders and a fake-bodice front in the shape of a V. This is not because we are lazy. Or, yes, it is. Or because we ran out of time.

Ta da!

As you can see in the photograph, we adorned the "plate" of the tutu with two wings (we had just been down to see Ballet West, and in the lobby of the Capitol theater, they have the actual tutu that Taylor Swift wore in her video, "Shake it Off" and I think that was the inspiration), covered with white feathers and gold frou-frou. The skirt still needs a bit of taming -- the back has a bit of a duck, or, er, swan tail where it needs to be joined, but I must say, it was impressively like the real deal. She rushed to put on her pointe shoes and to strike a pose (many poses) and I took this picture. I would show you her head-piece too, but I respect our privacy at least enough to keep her face off the blog. It's really good, is all I can say, and she made it from pipe-cleaners, feather boa, feathers, and glitter glue.

Taylor Swift with actual ballerinas from Ballet West

Now that we've done this, would we do it again? YES! It was a fun project, took about six hours total, and included lots of great mom-and-daughter time, during which I learned more about Dr. Who than I ever needed to know, and she learned more about my dirty mouth than I ever wanted her to know. For our next project, though, it would be fun to create a costume for a real production, complete with the pieced bodice and real tutu tulle instead of the iffy stuff from JoAnn. I think we still have a lot to learn before we can start selling our wares for $400 a pop and up on Etsy, like some people do, but at least we can dream. And speaking of dreaming, if you're a tutu-enthusiast, this video from Australian National Ballet is so worth the four and half minutes of your life it will consume!

The ironic thing about our tutu adventure is that when we went to the ballet on Saturday, the program was Balanchine's Square Dance, Fonte's Almost Tango, and Forsythe's In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated. Not. One. Single. Tutu.

And that was kind of nice, too.

Mirror, mirror

I try to avoid looking in the mirror all the time in class. Not only is it bad form, but it seems somehow morally reprehensible to me. I'm sure that this is some kind of manifestation of the hypocritical anxiety about narcissism that haunts our solipsistic society (after all, I'm no different than any other blogger/social media user in that part of the pleasure of engaging with these things is knowing that one is out there, visible). But it is also about how hard it is to concentrate on what your body is doing when your watching your body doing it in a mirror (the reversal of the image, etc.). On the other hand, the mirror provides the primary tool for self-correction. It may be I do not look in it often enough.

So, it was weird, this morning, to find in my e-mail inbox some photographs that were taken during one of the adult classes I took in New York. The photographer, Arthur Coopchik, has been compiling images of his wife's students in class, just their faces and upper torso usually, presumably in the interest of studying the moods or expressions of people absorbed in a deeply bodily discipline. Here is his website: http://www.acoopchik.com/. I won't post any of his photos, since you can see them there under "Kat Wildish Class," -- he was kind enough to send me my own pictures, though I very much doubt he will post any of them, since they're not really very lyrical.

Some of the photographs he has taken of other dancers seem to me deeply moving; my own photos, however, just made me feel a bit elderly and unbeautiful. I look so awkward!

Naturally, like most dancers, I am probably my own cruelest critic. But all I can see is my stiff neck, my high shoulders, my bent elbow, the way I stick out my thumbs like a hitchhiker, and the crepey skin on my triceps. Oh, and also how dumpy I look in my favorite leotard and knit shorts. Why are photographs so unkind?

However, as the fashionista Tory Burch says, "negativity is noise," I am going to try to mine these pictures for a positive outcome. There is this -- if I can see the error of my ways, I can work on improving. So, tonight, I will focus on my shoulders. I will look in the mirror and I will ask myself, "are you really standing up straight, or are you still at the keyboard?" I will dance to liberate myself from the mouse pad! And next week, I will move on to extending my arms. In the meantime, perhaps I should start doing some pushups.

Quality and Quantity!

This has been an exceptionally ballet-rich week in my life.

Last weekend, I took the offspring to see BalletWest do their Swan Lake, with the ordinarily gamine BeckAnne Sisk as Odette/Odile displaying a new depth and maturity to her dramatic interpretation of both roles, some great stage effects, a dose of arched-eyebrow comedy in the third-act court scene, and Christopher Ruud more tolerable to me than he has been in the past – he had toned down his melodramatic airs (though not eradicated his hammy quality entirely, thank goodness, as it is in small doses somewhat endearing) and was actually landing his jumps in clean positions.

Tuesday, since I am in New York for the College Art Association Annual Meeting, I went to the Intermediate Ballet class at Peridance with the wonderful Graciela Kozak, from whom I took a class two years ago. Her choreography is so fun and danceable, and so challenging! I jotted down some notes about the adage, because I absolutely want to bring it back to Logan.

Tuesday evening, I had my birthday present to open. My birthday was in December, and my dear, dear mother bought me a front-orchestra ticket to NYCB’s last performance of a triple bill of Peck/Wheeldon/Ratmansky. Oh, it was soooo tasty. I know I’m kvelling a little here, but honestly, every time I go see that company it just takes my breath away. The combination of speed, technical precision, and élan is just so, so, so ineffable! Here's a link to the video content about this season's ballets: http://www.nycballet.com/Explore/Multimedia.aspx

The Peck piece was particularly memorable, since it seemed very personal; that is, here’s a young guy who is a corps member, and he choreographs a ballet (set to the iconic Copeland Rodeo suite, so often dressed up in chaps and ten-gallon hats for Agnes DeMille’s setting) for men, mostly dancing in ensemble. And how they dance! The piece has this quintessentially Balanchine-esque ludic quality, but it does not stray into the silly or the merely humorous (in this it reminds me of Mark Morris at his best). Peck digs into the music’s own range of expression, from jazzy insouciance to tender, lullaby melodies, to that wonderful last movement with its brassy fanfare shifting into a polka, and then the strings and horns coming back in all bright and topsy-turvy. I love that he does away with the need for a narrative and yet still captures a sense of character – one of the male leads, danced on Tuesday by Daniel Ubricht, has this great swagger that quotes DeMille’s puffer-pigeon cowboys, but then his braggadocio gets transformed into a kind of collaborative athletic endeavor with his “team” (the costuming suggests three vaguely athletic affiliations). 

Team sports

There is a ballerina, too: Tiler Peck and Amar Ramasar featured in a beautiful pas-de-deux in the third movement which has that lyrical feeling. But the very atypical treatment of male/female ratios and the way in which all the men, to some extent were Tiler Peck’s partners throughout all four “dance episodes” made the pas fit into the whole seamlessly. Oh, and can I mention that Amar Ramasar is really fantastically beautiful and has divine legs?

She is standing on his chest.
And he walks off stage with her like that.

The other pieces, Ratmansky's recent Pictures at an Exhbition (juicy) and Wheeldon's Mercurial Maneuvers (juicy and moody) were also great, and I got to see one of my favorite dancers, Sara Mearns in the former. What I liked best about the Ratmansky was the way color figured into the choreography -- not just the beautifully luminous projections or the delicate, floating, costumes, but also in terms of an almost synaesthetic channeling of color-sense into the "characters" enacted in the various passages; yellow, for instance, strains upward, like a shoot, moves at angles, like a ray of light, melts, like butter. Also, "yellow" gets the best lift in the whole ballet, maybe the best lift ever. I cannot even describe it. Here it is.

 

This afternoon, the main business of conferencing having wound up, I went and took a second class at Peridance, this time from the highly energetic and dynamic Kat Wildish, who specializes in teaching adult beginners. The class was more “real” grownups than “aspiring professionals” (the usual Peridance crowd), and she led a long and inventive barre that included, among other things, a barre stretch that involved at one point doing a handstand in pike position with one’s feet on the barre. Yes. That. She also gave me a fantastic correction – she said, “You’re rising to relevé on someone else’s time. Go on your own time.” I didn’t get it right away, but then it clicked. I was popping up to three-quarter pointe fast, on the beat, and wobbling as a result. So she got me to slow down in the transition, and presto – I was solid, and somehow, miraculously, still right with the music. I love those aha moments. 

Okay, and now I am going to brag a little. For once in my life, I actually not only got but also enjoyed the petite allegro on the first try – two changements, echappé, jump to coupé back, chassé back, chassé side, reverse and chassé back on the angle, chassé en tournant, tombé, pas-de-bourrée, echappé, jump to fifth). Afterwards she singled me out to say I had done well and asked where I had been trained. I told her that I went to an RAD school, and she said that she thought that might be the case. That was really nice; all those days, weeks, months, years of sweat! It made me as happy as the time Patricia Godfrey told the class I had nice dance quality. Sometimes I just get so wrapped up in worrying about whether I’m turned out enough or closing my fifths or whatever, that I forget how much just enjoying the dance, becoming the music, or whatever, really grounds the whole thing.

You can watch the trailer online.

After dance class I went down to the Sunshine Cinema in the East Village and saw the recently released documentary “Ballet 422” about the work that Justin Peck choreographed in 2013 to Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s Sinfonietta "La Jolla.” Shot in a verité style with no voiceover and very little in the way of contextual titles, it opens a series of windows onto the creative process, both the individual work that Peck does as he begins to frame his ideas, and the collaborative work with the dancers, the ballet master Albert Evans, the costume designers Reid Barteleme and Hannah Jung, the conductor and musicians, and the lighting designer and techs. I suppose it might be a bit dull for those not familiar with the dancers or the style of ballet associated with NYCB, but still, the way in which this very young man produces this very layered work exercises a seduction of the imagination.

 

Do I have deep and connective thoughts to share about these activities, embedded as they were in the matrix of my professional life? No. Not really. I just feel grateful to have been able to do these things, and to get energized by New York.

And I will work on relevés on my own timing.

Ballet Noir?

I know it is Nutcracker season, and all that, but I just re-watched The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, director, 1946), and my head is filled with visions not of sugarplums but of the magnetism between the young Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Two scenes in particular, seem to have lodged themselves in my visual cortex. In the first, which happens about two thirds of the way through the film when Philip Marlowe goes to the villain Eddie Mars’ private club, Marlowe hears music coming from one of the rooms and goes to check it out. He stands in the doorway and absorbs his initial shock when he realizes that the singer is Vivian Rutledge, the woman with whom he is falling in love while at the same time suspecting her (rightly) of collusion with Mars.

And what is she singing in that voice like a shot of Laphroiag? “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine,” a 1944 tune with lyrics by Joe Greene that includes the lines, “She's a real sad tomato / She's a busted valentine,” which ought to be funny but, in the context of this scene, are somehow effortlessly erotic.

And Oh MY! That dress! Here is Vivian at her least angelic (throughout the film Marlowe calls her, not without a salty crust of irony, “Angel”), in the midst of her biggest con, singing smokily and boozily about a man who abuses his wife, in what amounts to a bridal gown. Her costumes in this movie (by Leah Rhodes) are so expressive; the first time we see her, she is literally and figuratively wearing the pants (and what pants they are, and how she wears them!), and in another scene, she wears a shimmery, metallic suit jacket that serves as armor while she engages in an extended joust of sexual innuendo with Marlowe, unhorsing him (the metaphors are all based on horse racing) in the end with a casual thrust.

Hello, I am a woman wearing pants, and don't you forget it!

But the wedding-dress in the Cypress Club lounge scene, oy vey! It has a kind of heightening effect, so that the exchange of glances and gestures can be played softly, shading from initial surprise (real on his part, feigned as we already suspect and soon know for certain, on hers), to dismay (his), to amusement (hers), to acknowledgement of the voltage of mutual attraction that seems to leap between them (lifted eyebrow, two finger wave). This is the scene in which Marlowe and Routledge make their wedding vows of a kind, and it is all accomplished through gesture and body language, the way she first pretends not to see him, and then turns partly away before facing him. 

That Bacall was a graceful, even feline, and physical actor is not headline news, obviously, but in this scene she just nails it so perfectly, and one has to feel that the pas-de-deux between her and Bogart is at least in part inspired by the styling of her dress. The white-on-white striped bodice is half zoot-suit (hello, shoulder pads) and half tutu, with the points over the hips giving emphasis to her long, long, very long legs. And Bogart is not so bad himself; he is “not very tall” as Vivian’s little sister Carmen remarks in the opening scene of the film, but he has that slim-hipped, muscular build of a dancer, and when Carmen more or less throws herself into his arms in that same scene, he catches her ably as Fred Astair would catch Ginger. In the Cypress Club scene, all he has to do is stand there, but look at him! He even stands lithe.

Prelude to a kiss: "Will you take this thing out of my mouth?"

Okay, so now the second scene, which is essentially the polar opposite to this one, and also its logical partner, the (figurative) consummation of their (even more metaphorical) marriage. I should note that at this point they have already kissed, and she has grudgingly said, “I guess I’m falling in love with you,” and he has only a little less grudgingly said the same. But then she has played him another dirty trick, so they are not exactly on the same page. Marlowe has pursued Mars’ hitman, the wonderfully named Lash Canino, to a house in the coastal hills where Mars’ wife Mona is hiding out, and where Vivian has also now gone to ground. Canino and the owner of the rural service station attached to the house have knocked Marlowe out and tied him up. He comes to on the floor of the living room, propped up against the sofa. Though still bleary, he cannily gets rid of Mona by pissing her off, so he can be alone with Vivian.

Sexually this scene just sizzles. There’s Marlowe, tied up, beaten up, hopelessly rumpled, physically at her mercy, but still dancing the verbal tango with her. And there’s Vivian Routledge, now dressed in the most fantastic wool-jersey sheath; I cannot decide if it is more “dragon lady” or “female priest”, but either way, it signals her dominance and her inapproachability and is in every way the opposite of that wedding gown she wore at the Cypress Club. It functions as a counterpoint to her transformation, her seduction both of and by Marlowe, as she moves through the scene. She begins standing off from him, towering over him where he is stuck on the floor, but by the end, she is right there with him, jammed into the intimate space between the coffee table and the sofa. The entire arc of lovemaking is sublimated into word-play and choreography. In the end, just before she frees him, they share a cigarette and a moment of post-coital melancholy.

I haven’t seen the whole ballet yet, except for this short clip on the NYCB website : (http://www.nycballet.com/Ballets/F/Funerailles-New-Liszt-Scarlett.aspx) , but the new Liam Scarlett pas-de-deux set to César Franck’s Funérailles that the choreographer set on Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild could potentially be the ballet cousin of The Big Sleep, though I don’t know if it has the film’s sense of fun. It certainly uses costuming to similar effect; Sarah Burton, who is the lead designer at Alexander McQueen, put Peck in a dress that is both totally Goth and yet at the same time wants to be a Vienna-waltz white gown. The bodice has the same slightly sinister, Orientalizing motifs as Bacall’s wool jersey sheath (and in fact of the whole design concept of The Big Sleep, where faux-Chinese aesthetics signal the drug-addled world into which little Carmen has slipped), gold on black, with very sexy flesh-toned cut outs, but underneath this, the full skirt cascades in layers of what looks like silk charmeuse in shades that gradually fade through grey to almost-white. In the clip, the choreography makes maximum use of the gown’s dark-to-light fade.

That said, the concept in Funérailles is more eighteenth-century vampire-chic than film noir. Check out that velvet cutaway coat that Fairchild, a nice, fresh-faced boy from Salt Lake City, sports over his bare torso and his black satin tights. It turns him from the boy next door into a beau tenebre, Vampire Lestat rather than Philip Marlowe. Still and all, this new trend in contemporary ballet of using high-concept costume design not just to complement or augment the choreo, but as integral to the Gesamtkunstwerk, reminds me of classic Hollywood film. And this is a good development, because, one hopes, it leads us away from the cheese-whiz aesthetic that has the tendency to pop up in the form of sequin-spangled hotpants and silly-goose tutus in far too many ballet environments. I still haven’t recovered from the Star Trek costumes and disco choreography at  Ballet West's “Innovations,” a year or two ago, I guess.

My left foot... a footwear memoir

The let-down: Grishko Elites that
never quite worked for me

When I was a very little girl, I had an LP album (to play on my Fisher Price turntable) that someone had no doubt picked up for me at a yard sale. It was dated, already, in 1974. The only songs I can clearly remember from the album, which was a mix devoted to "dance music," are "Windy" by The Association and "Don't Go Out into the Rain" by Herman's Hermits. What has stayed with me far more clearly are the shoes worn by the girls on the cover of the album, a bunch of stylish teenagers of circa 1968. The baby-blue pearlized-leather Mary Janes with block heels filled me with a kind of Proustian longing totally out of place in a six-year-old, while the spiffy white patent booties with bows (bows!) on the back of the ankle made me tremble with desire. Above all, the girl in the pink and red plaid mini shift dress, green tights, and bright red patent low-heel pumps seemed to embody all that was chic.

So, footwear has captured my imagination for a long time. Even when I haven't had money to spend on shoes, I have carefully curated my shoe rack; in high school I had two pairs of the same pointy-toed Mia flats, one grey, one black, that I polished weekly, and took to the shoe repair shop the minute it looked as if I had worn through a heel tap. I also had a beloved pair of black lace up boots with a round toe that were just dainty enough that they weren't combat boots, just butch enough that they weren't prairie-girl. I must have had those resoled four or five times. I still think of them with a pang of sadness at their inevitable demise (a snowy day in Williamstown sealed their fate).

Any ballet dancer knows the central and vexing role that shoes can play in life; the right pair and you soar, the wrong ones, and you feel as if you have blocks of wood on your feet. The foot-shoe relationship in ballet is so intimate that the materials of the shoe, leather, canvas, satin, elastic, almost become an extension of the skin. I think that's why so many dancers prefer to go barefoot inside their shoes, peeling back their tights for class and rehearsal, and modifying them to bare the toes for performance. The shoe embraces the foot, and the foot gives the shoe life.

In Alexander McCall Smith's fantastic and quirky "Number One Ladies' Detective Agency" series, the assistant detective and typing-school valedictorian Mma Grace Makutsi has a relationship with shoes that I really get: her shoes talk to her, sometimes in a friendly way, and sometimes in a bullying way ("You're such a liar, Boss," her shoes said, disparagingly). I have never had an actual conversation with a pair of shoes, but I certainly know the personality of certain shoes; some are easygoing, some more exigent, a few pairs real prima donnas.

Every shoe has a story, and a few of mine have really good stories, so I thought that I would take a page from Grace Makutsi and let some of my favorites speak.

Do not let my dainty appearance fool you. I am tough as nails. The grownup bunhead came to me after a series of soft-shoe misfortunes. First there was that perfect pair of (very expensive) Bloch Neo Pros, beautiful leather shoes with a neoprene heel, that fit like a gift from the gods. She took them to Kalamazoo, of all the places on earth! She was doing her "hotel room ballet" routine (you don't want to know), and then she had to rush off to give a talk about who knows what? dead animal skins? and when she came back to the room one of those damn shoes was just gone. Vanished. Never to be found. After that, there was a manky pair of "stretch canvas" slippers that had to be constantly sewn up where they split out at the seams. And after that, a pair of leather slippers that just never stretched and made her toes cramp up. Then, believe it or not, she managed to buy another pair that were too small, my half-size-smaller sisters. After about six months of bruised big toe nails she finally figured it out and brought me onto the job. I can't give her banana feet, but I sure look a lot better than most shoes, and I stand up to all the abuse (sweat) she can dish out.

 Yes, that is a Jane Austen band-aid she is wearing, and it figures, doesn't it, since she seems to have a predilection for rather Jane-ey shoes. Though me, I am not an Englishwoman. Rather, I am French, more Emma Bovary than Emma Woodhouse. Pricey too -- she used to walk by the chi-chi little boutique on Solano Avenue in Berkeley and peer in the window at me. Then at some point, maybe around 1996, she overcame her scruples and shelled out an unthinkable sum to Monsieur Robert Clergerie. She was an unemployed graduate student, so what was she thinking? Perhaps she was thinking, "Her heart was like the soles of those shoes. Wealth and luxury had rubbed against it and left upon it something that would never wear away."

Pounding the streets of London on an unusually hot summer day, she stepped into the cool fastness of Liberty, thinking she would buy a handkerchief as a souvenir. Somehow she found me, instead. She claims she had no idea that Liberty even sold shoes. So it happened that she was wearing me the next day, when the Underground stopped at Embankment and everyone had to leave the train and the station. Nobody knew why, but everybody knew that the reason could not be good. Soon enough, the facts were established: July 7, 2005 -- 4 bombers, 52 dead, 700 maimed and mutilated.  From where we stood, on Great Russell Street, at about 10 am., it was only a few blocks to Tavistock Square. I felt the ground leap under my soles when the bomb detonated.

Winter in Paris is not so romantic. The streets are crowded and damp. The metro smells of wet wool and sweat and stale grease. Behind the plate glass of shop windows, however, glows the promise of a different world, where everyone walks on swathes of midnight-blue velvet and soft jazz music purrs in the background while a blue-black Rhone wine slides silkily down one's throat. Purple shoes (she admonished herself) are not practical; neither is living in the Marais with two young children; neither is thinking you will write a book about a book perhaps twenty people have read since 1550. All the more reason to do it!

I really have no idea what that French pussy-cat means when she says purple shoes are not practical. Let's say you are going to New York City in the summer and you need a pair of shoes you can wear to Lincoln Center but also all over the Village, and that go with your plum maxi-dress for the theater, but also your jeans, and you need to be able to wear them for an entire week, much of it on your feet, at a technical art history seminar. Purple patent leather ballet flats that pack flat are just the thing. Also, I am not at all out of place in the dressing room at the Joffrey School when you go there to get your butt kicked in an "intermediate" level class.

My left Sorrel pack boot asked me why I hadn't included her in this essay, when she and her mate are indeed my oldest footwear friends; my dad bought them for me at the Army-Navy Surplus store across the street from the Federal Building in Seattle, where he worked. He thought I would need some serious winter boots since I was going away to college in the snowy Berkshires. As it happened, Sorrels were a bit de trop -- the standard winter boot (and Williams was a very conformist place) was the L.L.Bean 9-eyelet duck boot -- but I never had the heart to tell him so, and I stomped around in winter days in my ridiculous mountain-woman clodhoppers. They grew on me, though, and I hadn't the heart to tell them that they are simply not that photogenic anymore.

The only pair of shoes older than those snow boots that I still own are my last pair of teenaged pointe shoes. And that should tell you something.

Turning Turnout Inside Out

Turnout is to ballet what grapes are to wine, butter is to paté brisée, and melisma is to Celine Dion. Fundamental. But what is it really? When I was a kid, one of my teachers, a nice man, really, used to come around and tap our skinny fannies with his stick (he was not pervy at all, thus the stick, rather than his hand, I guess), and tell us to “pull up tight, squeeze!” I have actually had a ballet teacher or two tell the class to imagine holding a quarter between their cheeks (those cheeks, yes). It seemed to me for many years that therefore, good ballet form must be all about the butt muscles being contracted… hard.

But you know, that never quite made sense. In ballet, when you want to get a really high extension on your arabesque, you cannot grip your glutes. Au contraire, the popo must get the heck out of the way, so that the back muscles can hoist that hefty mass of bone and muscle that is the leg, up toward the sky. And if you squeeze your derrière while doing, say, a grande ronde de jambe, it just is not going to be pretty. That big, heavy boulder (as one of my dance teachers likes to call the hardened muscles of the glutes or the quads) will squash all the life out of your extension. You can bet that the girl in the picture above is not gripping in her hips. Such as they are.

So imagine my gratification when I began to hear, in recent years, of a new way of thinking about turnout as coming not from the firm contraction of the caboose, but instead from the abdomen. The abdomen? you might ask… What has the abdomen got to do with the rotation of the femur in the hip socket? Well, as anyone who has ever taken a yoga class, or even sucked in their gut in order to impress a likely lad or lass knows, the contraction of the abdominal muscles, especially the deep muscles in the lower abdomen and pelvis (what my grandmother called, with great blushing, “the lower regions”) has a profound effect on the alignment of hips, spine, and legs. The core of the body, as it is called in contemporary physio-speak, is activated by this contraction of many small, subtle muscles, while the big brutes, the gluteals, the quads, and the hamstrings can ease off a little, and in their relaxed state, become more supple and responsive. 

Still, it is a little hard to wrap one’s body around this idea, that turnout is generated in what the yogic tradition calls the Mula Bandha, the “root lock,” described by Iyengar as “a posture where the body from the anus to the navel is contracted and lifted up and towards the spine.” Really? Ballet is so NOT about words like… anus. I would say it took me a week of standing there in first position, practicing just that – standing in first position with my root lock on – before it felt at all plausible. And probably, most of the time when I am actually in class, I forget all about it and go back to the old ways, my tush not at all cush, cranking that turnout from my lower back. 

Not optimal (see blog posts on FAI, or femoralacetabular impingement), but it is very, very hard to think about one’s abdomen while also executing complex or even not-so-complex choreography. It is simply not second nature to me, despite years of yoga. Translating that inner-body awareness to ballet is an ongoing process.

Gratuitous Alessandra Ferri photo

Last week, I took a class with a woman who has taken a couple of workshops from a guy called Philip Beamish, who has coached such luminaries as Alessandra Ferri and Polina Seminova; from him she has learned an approach to training the body for turnout and for pointework that is very much based in this whole idea of working from the core outwards and keeping those big muscle groups pliable and relaxed.

It was a fun class, quite unconventional. We exercised our feet on some spring-loaded devices called “archecizers” and we did tons of very simple tendu combinations at the barre.  Bizarrely enough, these seemingly mild routines had me sweating like a pig (I mean, I sweat easily, but this was ridiculous), and I was completely flattened by the end of 90 minutes. Needless to say I rushed right out and bought myself an archecizer. Though it would seem to have little to do with the core, the principle is the same for the foot as for the hips. Contracting the bottom of the foot, that is to say the muscles that attach heel to ball of foot, provides a similarly well-aligned and responsive center for balance and movement.

The language of this method (and others like it, as trawling the Internetosphere of ballet instruction videos has revealed), has strong resonance with the language of yoga and other forms of bodywork and it really gets at the issue of turnout from the inside out. Simply by naming different muscle groups and providing the mind with a different set of visual images for what’s going on deep in the pelvis, this approach feels to me a lot like that of certain yoga or pilates teachers who are really good at helping students find the heart of an asana, rather than just its outward appearance. And it makes sense that this would work just as well for ballet as for any other somatic discipline. 

An example. One of the videos I found on YouTube features the former Balanchine dancer Stephanie Saland coaching a dance student through a routine where she rises on demipointe on a pair of what are in effect lazy Susans, meaning that she cannot use the torque of her foot on the floor to “crank” her turnout from the bottom up. Instead, Saland cues the student in to the very fine, and very crucial, activation of the small muscles (piriformis, internal obturator) that rotate the thigh, suggesting that she “bring the back of the thigh forward, so that the inner thigh becomes the front,” meanwhile relating all this not to the tightening of the gluteal muscles, but instead to the contraction of the abdomen to draw the pelvis into position. 

Now, I did not have a set of heavyweight lazy Susans at home, but a pair of slippery socks and the hardwood floor make a good substitute, and I walked myself through Saland’s exercise a couple of times yesterday. It is ridiculously simple: relevé in a small second position, turned parallel, then slowly rotate first the left, then the right leg into a turned out position, without contracting the glutes. Plié while on demipointe, then tilt the pelvis, first back (that is, sticking out the behind), then forward into a neutral position, all without contracting the glutes and still maintaining turnout. Extend the legs into full relevé. Repeat ad infinitum. The advanced version seems to involve doing this on one foot, the other in coupé, but I am definitely not there yet, and this morning I have discovered a whole new way to be sore. 

Baryshnikov and Makarova making it look easy as breathing.

So, to answer the question with which I began, “What is turnout?” I would begin by saying that mechanically speaking, it is the activation of the muscles of the body core complemented by the spiraling forward of the inner thighs, aided by the activation of the sole of the foot. On a more conceptual plane, I am visualizing it as something like the opening of a bud into bloom, or the release of a fist into a spread hand, the front body spreading, the back growing soft and supple.

Like most beautiful things, turnout is effort that seems effortless, intention that seems incidental, labor that seems like ease, but in the business of seeming, I think that in some ways it actually becomes. That is what gives a truly great ballet dancer fluidity and weightlessness, and the ability to fully inhabit a character or concept even in the swirl of immensely technically difficult choreography.