Artist's Date #12: Absolute Beginner Ballet
My New Year's resolution for three weeks and counting
Last year I took a dance class at ODC I had no business taking. It was called counter technique and I was so bad at it that I cried every time I went out of humiliation. The music was amazing but I had to sit down during half the class to watch because I got lost in the choreography and became a hazard to the other students who were going fast on the floor. Still I loved to go back because the teacher moved like an alien jaguar and the students were so serious and so good it gave me the chills just to be in the room with them. This year I decided enough with putting myself in situations that are way over my head. I scanned the schedule. On January 6th a new series began: ABSOLUTE Beginner Ballet. Now this sounded like a class right for me.
The ballet room is upstairs and on the first morning of class we sat in a circle and introduced ourselves and said what we ate for breakfast. Me, nothing or actually tea. Many people had just coffee. But more than a handful had egg sandwiches or oatmeal or actual food. One woman had made her own smoothie. We spent the next hour on the floor feeling the engagement of our upper thighs all the way down to our toes.
Unlike other performance arts, the teacher Christopher Lam reminded us, dance is practiced in a group all together. Upstairs we made rainbow shaped pizza slices cut out of paper that we were to be kept under our feet when we practiced at home. This bit of cardboard was the size of our turn out, which we found by placing our heels together and moving our toes out to the side. Downstairs a room full of men and women wore ankle length skirts and danced to three young drummers while a small woman led them all from the front of the room.
The whole building is full of real dancers and I mean full of them. You can smell the commitment right when you walk in the door, if you don’t also see the bodies warming up on the floor before class. There are people in leg warmers, stretching down to their toes that make just the right shape as if they have a purpose and know it well. To lengthen the leg. To look clear and definitive. Their torso move down toward the floor like they trust it to support them; to be firm underneath.
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Enter horrible memories of my third-grade dance teacher grabbing my foot and twisting it in her expert hands until the toes did not sickle inward. There, she would say, there. Do you feel the difference? she’d ask, with her hands tight on my arch. In the front of the room my neighbor and friend would be turning perfect twirls across the floor in front of the mirror while I crouched in shame in the back by the bar. Yes, I did feel a difference but as soon as she’d let go my foot would turn back into the much hated shape of one who lacks discipline. There was no way I could turn my toes in the direction they needed to go without her pushing them there. So soon I just quit. I kept my scuffed point shoes in the closet for while. I can still remember the soft silk of the ties and the cotton we stuffed into the tips. There were rituals. There was practice. But there was never any love.
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For a while our class of beginners stood in a circle with Christopher at the center, going on about Australian ballet vs. Russia ballet vs. The San Francisco Ballet and how each has their own view of what makes first position right. Then he walked around and looked at each of us standing and said to one person, THERE. Just look how she stands on her feet. Like her feet are in a prayer with the floor. This, in Australian Ballet terms, is the highest compliment.
We practice a slight relevé with our hands at the bar. Don’t go up so far that your ankles swing out to the side, he said. Nice, he said, passing by me at my bar and I reacted by flaring out my toes in their place.
Dancers, he said, all out once, shouting out in the room and taking a bit step to the center. Beware when you come down you don’t work out your toes. They need to relax. They need a Mai Tai.
I think we might have tried out plié.
He told us how people sometimes come to the first class in leotards and pink tights and the whole ballet get-up and think they are going to be twirling and whirling AND YOU WILL, he says, in three years. And I thought to myself: Oh. That’s not too long at all! From absolute beginner to spinning around on the floor in a tutu in a handful of years? That’s as fast as overnight. This is the kind of thought that shows up around middle age. You know that those three years are almost already gone, so you might as well point your feet through a few of them. So what if you’re bad.
It turns out I’m in good company with the New Year and the restarting dance, or trying out signing, or just doing something that you once wanted to do but forgot about doing. Other people seem to be revisiting childhood loves, where I am retraining my right side. If the only thing I get is a new alignment from the hip to the foot then I will be happy.
Now, said Christopher, with one minute left. His eyes shined and widened like a playful toddler. Shall we have music? Imagine every time you heard the sound of a piano your whole heart opened wide. Imagine what a good life that would be.