Tales From a Past Life

On My Relationship to Dance

Photo of the NYC Ballet by Henry Leutwyler

The earliest form of any dance class for young kids isn’t exactly dance class - it’s movement class. At age three, you don’t yet have the mental facility to hone the finger placement in your arabesque line or the understanding of nuanced, internal bodily sensations, necessary to engage your deep core muscles for balances and pirouettes. Instead, you start developing a relationship with movement; you become aware of your physicality in relation to your environment and other people. You learn that the faster you run, the harder it is to slow down. The more you bend your knees, the higher you can jump.

Slowly, a deeper understanding of yourself begins to settle over time. You know, intellectually, what muscles you need to engage to achieve the right outcome, you watch other dancers perform and recognize what they’re doing “right.” By the time you’re eighteen, you more or less know what you need to do to be physically successful because you’ve been told it for the past fifteen years. You could write it on paper, and sketch a picture of it.

And then somehow, there is some kind of signal error when the neurons fire. Be it a lack of strength, mental fatigue, or a lack of confidence, you’re unable to manifest what you know into your body itself. You have this understanding of what’s right, of what it’s supposed to look like. But someone looking at your body and the way it's moving in relation to the surrounding environment and people might not know that you know that. Your body is stuck in its patterns. The knowledge rattles around in your mind and spews out in a clumsy translation. At times, your attempts are more adroit. But they’re never perfect.

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I took my first movement class around age five and didn’t like it a whole lot, mainly because little kids don’t like being told what to do. I disliked the poking and prodding at my body, both when my mom fixed my ballet bun and when my teacher corrected my form. It wasn’t until fourth grade that I remember something clicking into place - I watched myself and the rest of the students balancé in the mirror, all moving in harmony to music. We were all able to create something beautiful by simply doing it together. Moving in tandem with others filled me with an elated sense of satisfaction. Each time we hit the correct accent in the music it was like scratching a pesky itch; a feeling of relief, like everything in the world would somehow be okay. I enjoyed watching myself in the mirror, seeing how I could move my arms softly and then rigidly in an instant, carrying emotion with just one step. I thought I was becoming quite good, maybe the poking and prodding was worth it. Two years later, I quit basketball and soccer - I wanted to dance.

Eager to diversify my dance skills - to be more than just a bunhead - I added a contemporary class to my weekly load and took an instant liking to it. Contemporary was like ballet but with fewer rules and more emotion. Dancing it felt like rolling around in mud, like screaming and crying. Raw, unhinged, and beautiful - it felt good on me. After getting rejected the first year, I eventually joined my studio’s performing arts team and later its competition team. In middle school, I got my first pair of pointe shoes and it felt as significant of a step into womanhood as getting my driver’s license or my first period.

My high school and college years were punctuated by all I did as a dancer. I performed at every arts and cultural community event in my hometown. I competed at regional dance competitions, running through can after can of hairspray and package after package of Capezio tights to win plastic metals. I attended dance master classes and conventions run by So You Think You Can Dance? alumni, walking into mid-sized city convention halls caffeinated and excited and walking out of them in tears, having received little validation from the instructors. I performed in fourteen annual productions of The Nutcracker, many of which left me with blisters on my heels, costume rashes on my underarms, and blood under my toenails. I began student teaching and eventually teaching and choreographing on my own. I got a job as a pointe shoe fitter and later meshed my love of writing and dancing by contributing to the blog of a local dancewear store. I took college dance courses, performed with a local company, and attended any dance show in town I could. 

A photo of the Australian Ballet’s production of Giselle, my favorite ballet. Photo by Jeff Busby.

Amid these busy years, I thought, for some reason, that I probably wasn’t going to “make it” as a dancer, or maybe that I just didn’t think I could. Or that I didn’t want to, in the professional sense - or maybe all of the above. It’s hard to pinpoint when that happened exactly. Perhaps it was when I attended a rigorous ballet academy for a year, where the teachers stepped on my thighs in the splits and paid me little mind when I asked technical questions. Indifference can be a bigger deterrence than outward expressions of frustration. Maybe it was the physical limitations that my body was struggling to overcome - my lack of hip rotation, my raised shoulders, my weak développés. It’s difficult to tell whether my shortcomings in dance were a result of a genetic predisposition or poor commitment to strength training, conditioning, and relationship building. When I was six, my hips rotated inward so naturally that I tripped over my feet with every step. Ballet requires hips that rotate outward. I would often use my pigeon-toed inclination as an excuse when my teachers pointed it out, but took care to practice rotation exercises before bed, rotating my legs in and out of their sockets repeatedly, like twisting a Barbie’s appendages.

A unique aspect of dance as a sport and an art form is that there is always quite quantifiable room for improvement. You can always get one more rotation out of your pirouette, jump a little higher, and hold your leg in your extension a little longer. After years of training, my hips managed to gain just millimeters of additional rotational range. It felt like I was receiving mere crumbs in return for my hard work. It’s difficult to know if I truly hit my physical ceiling or if I simply stopped trying. Could I have been more if I had the mental stamina to put in more reps? If I had focused less on my studies and more on my dance career? What could I have let go of to make more time for my growth? I suppose the fact that I chose to not let go of anything answers the questions for me.

It’s strange to have so much passion and knowledge about something that I don’t put to use as much as I used to. I studied something intensely for seventeen years and developed a deep sense of love, irritation, and above all, curiosity with it. And now, that knowledge - that wonders, that fascination - it sits in me. It’s never dead but it’s often dormant, waiting patiently to be reactivated. Living in a country like the United States, where free time is so scarce for so many, we’re often encouraged to find ways to monetize what we love. If you need to spend the majority of your life working, you should understandably spend time doing something that brings you joy. And yet, so many artists claim that monetizing their art makes the delight in it wane. Others aren’t able to find work as an artist that sustains them and their families. Many of us sit with this sleeping passion, this vast knowledge from a life we lived pre-work and pre-adulthood. It sits and, in some, it waits to be stirred.

I miss the studio rat I was as a teenager, doing homework in between dance classes, falling asleep sewing my pointe shoes. Yet, I know that the zeal I had for movement as a child hasn’t faded. My relationship with dance feels surprisingly more comfortable than I ever expected it would feel as an adult. I think it’s because I often wake that sleeping giant in me - on my own terms and with great enthusiasm, even though it’s not roused as frequently as it used to be. I feel gratified knowing that I’ve been able to love something for so long, not for its ability to bestow me with financial or social capital, but for it giving me the chance to play, be mindful, and practice artistry. I have all this passion and knowledge and it’s just for me - it’s for no use other than to enrich myself. Nobody can take it away.

Today, I take weekly open ballet classes and master classes around my city. I watch performances and hope to eventually perform again myself. I have developed lifelong relationships with my instructors and cohorts, and continue to develop new ones. Years of dance training have instilled a self-discipline in me that allows me to push my body in class. And age allows me to develop a sense of self-compassion that I lacked at sixteen. I’m able to move without fear of how far my hips will be able to rotate. Being able to laugh with myself when I make a mistake feels powerful. I know that there will be periods of inactivity and I know that there will always be opportunities to move my body because I control my body. My love for dance devastates me and invigorates me in the same breath, but as long as I love it, I will continue to do it. My hand will always feel at home on a ballet barre. I’m free to enjoy my relationship with movement, taking pleasure in how high I can jump when I bend my legs.

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