On Tuesday night, I took an adult's "Beginning/Intermediate" ballet class at Los Angeles Ballet Academy.
I am trying to remember the last time I took a dance class. Meaning a ballet class (or, I suppose, a modern class; but I almost know that ballet is more recent: modern was never my core thing). It was in college, I think. I think not even senior year of college--before that. Let's say senior year, to be sure we're avoiding hyperbole. At some point in college: I remember taking a couple ballet classes (literally: two) at The Dance Complex in Central Square. I remember shaking my head and laughing at myself, at all the things I could not do; I was part performing my disdain and part really feeling it. And if we say senior year, to definitely avoid hyperbole, we're talking 17-18 years ago.
Before that, growing up and till college, dance--again, ballet specifically--was my thing. I started when I was eight; the lore (the lore may not be true. I think, in this case, it's approximately true) is that I was visibly bored, doing steps in my seat, as I waited and watched the weekly little-girls' ballet class to which I accompanied my sister. And then my parents saw an open call for auditions for the School of American Ballet (SAB); they took me to audition (I vaguely remember this: a hallway, kids; numbers?).
I got in.
There's more to this story than the lore might suggest; not that my parents primed either me (or my sister) for dancerly pursuits, but I know for example that we took some kind of little-kids' movement classes before that, running around in circles waving scarves and what have you. But I think the "well gosh we just saw this ad and he got in" version of the story has essential truth to it, also.
So before I go on, here, an important proviso. I'm writing it here, saying it once so I don't have to repeat it. I'll say other things first--I'll be extremely clear what the proviso is, do not worry.
SAB, as you know if you know ballet, is one of the ballet schools in the world. Some would say best; I have no idea, I haven't trained at the others and I'm just someone who happened to get to go there as a kid. But it's certainly on the shortest of short lists.
It feeds into the New York City Ballet, which is ditto amongst ballet companies.
As a kid and a young adult, I got to do a lot of world-class $h1t with this school and this company, and with other opportunities they led me to. And I want you to understand from the outset, because it's important, that this is not because I was amazing at dancing. I'm not trying to be humble, or fake humble, or any of that stuff. This is important to the story:
I was okay at dancing! I had good training, clearly. I'm tall and pretty athletic and blond (I am not kidding. That helped me, I'm...96% sure). I worked pretty hard; not as hard as I now know I could have, but probably harder than some kids would've. But I certainly--this is not 'real talk'; this is some 'the ocean is salty'-type trewth--did not have the natural gifts that many young dancers around me had. The feet; the extension; whatever precision of twitch muscles pumps your jumps a little higher or centers your gravity for six pirouettes. I mean I guess in my life I have done six pirouettes, but not like...do you see what I'm saying? I was okay! I was a good performer. I was a fine dancer, meaning "fine" for the sandbox I got to play in, which was an amazing gift of a sandbox.
And it's just as important to note that, from pretty early on, I knew this. It would be a bad misconstruction of my relationship to dance, which is what this post is gonna now be about for like six-zillion words, to anchor on the idea that I was or thought I was "something special", "really talented", or any of that stuff. I had, if anything, a strong sense of myself as not that way: as kind of moderately okay with a good disposition and hey, he's tall, that's good.
But, because of context and geography and luck, I got to do crazy cool shit from pretty much age 8 till age 18, when I went to college. I trained at SAB from age 8 to age 12, and during that time I danced with New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, Paris Opera Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet (my dad liked joking about "great Danes"), the Royal Ballet (I think), plus...I mean, literally I do not remember it was like "cool! another one of the world's great artistic institutions! neato." I was in the world premiere of Peter Martins's first full-length choreographic work as Artistic Director of NYCB, Songs of the Auvergne. I ran onstage at the wrong time once in that one. There was some ballet at the MET where I got to wrangle a dog and do a little solo: that was cool. These were all childrens' roles -- we're talking 8-12 years old, remember.
I knew that wasn't 'normal', but it's hard to parse your level of privilege as a kid; I knew it wasn't normal but internalized it as a normal part of my own collage, and the smells and rhythms and geometries of ballet rooms and hallways and dressing rooms and shoe leather and resin and marley are native to me and always will be.
When I was twelve I took a break for middle school to be a f*ck-up. The precipitating facts were that (a) continuing at SAB would've meant stopping going to 'regular' school, a sacrifice made doubly unpalatable by (b) some combination of personal chemistry and physical gifts (or lack thereof) knocked me off the hot track at SAB, in terms of which class I got put in. FWIW, my big thing above about not being so great aside, I think in this particular instance the 'personal chemistry'/politics was influential; NOT because my talent was unjustly thwarted, I hope I've made that clear. Just: that's how I think it went down.
I was a f*ck-up for a couple years, and it didn't make me that happy, being a f*ck-up, so in 9th grade I switched high schools and started dancing seriously again. Kind of all of a sudden, whatever the opposite of cold turkey is; I started at this challenging high school with lots of homework and I started dancing Mon-Sat, Sundays off (I think?). And I was happy, again.
This second round with dance was different from the first. The first I was a kid; I was shuttled to and from classes by my own or other parents; I had the world in my lap with these frequent amazing performance opportunities. This second period was less about those dizzying heights of the dance world, but I'm much prouder of it; I again got to be at wonderful and respected schools/companies and to the extent that I did achieve something in these years it feels like it was partly a result of my own motivation, combined with the generous investment and expertise of those around me.
Freshman year of high school, I trained at and performed with Ballet...Hispanico. I'd danced with them a little during my f*ck-up years; in 9th grade I danced with them a lot, and performed some with the youth company. I got to do Flamenco, which is amazing. Then, in 10th grade, I had the extraordinary good fortune to fall in with Francis Patrelle--a beautiful man and a beautiful teacher. Through Mr. Patrelle I got to perform with his company, Dances...Patrelle. I got what was and probably always will be my best notice in a major newspaper (last 'graph: HWHAM; I just opened my eyes really wide the whole time that's all I did); I got to perform with amazing young dancers from (natch) SAB and the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet (CPYB) and got THIS review, which is actually the one of which I am proudest--if you click don't look for my name you won't find it, just mention of a "strong men's contingent" which...y'have to understand, these dudes were in this program, and well on their way to those careers, so just, y'know, credibly presenting felt (and feels) like a thing.
By the end of high school, thanks mostly to Mr. Patrelle's investment and mentorship, I got to spend the summer training at CPYB and was offered to stay on full-time: training and then perhaps shipping off to a good company (CPYB is amazing) and then...who knows! Or, come end of summer, I could head off to freshman fall at Harvard.
I headed off to freshman fall at Harvard.
And honestly that's kind of the end of the story. I resisted making dance my thing at college. I found that I couldn't have a 'healthy' relationship to it. Remember me shaking my head and 'laughing' at myself in those last couple classes, 18 years ago? Like many dancers--I've since learned this is a common experience, a clichè--I couldn't sorta dance. Like: in a reasonable way, the way one does a hobby: 3 times a week, sometimes 4 sometimes 2. I couldn't deal with what my body couldn't do when I was not training 8-10 times a week; it was like trying to operate a broken machine that you knew could do better. It became an all-or-none thing and I, like many before and after me, went with none.
In grad school, I met a woman who did ballroom. We'd meet up sometimes and do ballroom. That was fun. That, like...literally. That was it, for me and dance.
Till last Tuesday night: 8pm, Los Angeles Ballet Academy. Adult Beginning/Intermediate.
I can't really tell you why I decided to do this. I don't think I have anything to resolve. I wonder about not deferring college to do CPYB. Even just for a year. But not in a, "oh I would've been a dancer!" way. In a, "a wiser Slimbuttons would have seen that as a cool life experience!" way. But I decided to do this; I wanted to do this. I may even go back.
I was tired. I had a cold; I'd just done a solid workout at Hot 8 a couple hours before.
Reader, it may not surprise you to learn that the class was a head f#&k.
The studio was ideal. Just what I'd been looking for. I chatted with the lady at the desk as I signed in; I asked about the kids in the big windowed front studio, training late on a weekday night; she happy-bragged about a boy with the good extension who's "going to be a star". The whole tone was correct, and familiar; not some CardioBarre fitness thing. This is a place like the places I knew: a feeder for the SABs of the world rather than one itself, but no question they do serious dancing with integrity, seriousness, intent.
I walked into class and the teacher asked if I'd danced before and I told her, like 17 years, and she said, "It's like riding a bike." She was surprisingly correct: it's all deep in your body. The rhythm and steps were quick to come back; the things I was bad at (turning) I was bad at in similar ways, the things I was good at (jumps, aspects of adagio) I was good at in similar ways. All scaled for time and age and all this, of course, but I was familiar to myself as a dancer. I knew this guy.
But here was and is the thing. I was a very different guy. Everything was different. A total head-trip. A sad and strange and bittersweet head-trip. Because here is the thing:
Ballet is cruel. You probably know that even if you've never danced; you saw Black Swan or whatever. Ballet is beautiful, and ballet is cruel, and in its cruelty it guts and it burns down your dreams. As just a...like a routine, ordinary thing! That's what it does! There is no hidden angst or baggage to my own journey through dance--it was comparatively untroubled in all ways besides an eating thing freshman year of high school (which Mr. Patrelle was instrumental in my moving past). But even in my relatively untroubled, relatively unconflicted journey through dance that culminated in turning down a great academy to go to Harvard, for fuck's sake...even in that my gosh, sure: I had my dreams gutted and burned down lots of times! Constantly! Not getting to be Prince in The Nutcracker. Getting taken off the hot track at SAB. A period where Mr. Patrelle was doing a ballet with all the "good" young dancers and hadn't asked me to be in it (he subsequently did, and gave me a wonderful role, and I still to this day will bet you money that it was the compassion of the man's soul, seeing how I was for those 10 days where I thought he'd not cast me, that made the man do that. It was the ballet with the "strong men's contingent").
Ballet lives in that nexus of actual undeniable power and beauty, layered over with constructions of scripted prestige and status, and it holds these glittering unattainable gems on high and you over and over build your shitty scaffolds to get higher and higher and reach for the gems and you're almost there and then psssshh: burn it down, try again. Psssshh: burn it down. Psssshh.
And it's okay because you see the gems the whole times, and you're building yourself as a dancer and your dreams all up towards them. Building working building.
And the sad strange head-fuck of dancing now, at 37, is not how my body looks: I'll be str8, reader--it looks better than ever. It's not what I can or cannot do. It is that I have no dreamscaffolding left to burn down. Those gems are not for me; I don't even know where they are. They're not in my landscape. My dreams and my aspirations and hopes are all...they're wrapped up completely in other things. This thing, ballet, which for so many of my formative years held the very concepts of beauty, hope, dreaming inside it...it doesn't hold those things anymore. Even in Muay Thai, which I was NEVER nuts enough to think I was 'good' at, there's some funny idea of, ha ha -- maybe I'll win a belt someday. It won't happen. I don't think it will happen. But the concept exists as a bright burning light.
All those lights are snuffed in dance. Those ships have inexorably sailed. There is no such thing as a...or it wouldn't be me who...it's all done. It's an over, done, past-tense thing. It is a thing that lives in the wells of memory and hope pressed into my heart as a child, but which are now dried and done with. I have other things. And it is so strange and so sad and so weird and so...head-f#*k to come face-to-face (I mean, literally: you're looking in the mirror the whole time in most ballet classes) with yourself in the activity that held those aspirations and finding the activity, the you that is doing it, just...empty of those things.
It is so weird, and I have no idea if it will ever or can ever be a present-tense for me. It's an interesting and elegant and rewarding physical activity; I have some background in it. But what it is is this inherently conflicted palimpsest of the past on top of the present. It's a fascinating thing to have revisited for a night. I think I will revisit it again -- perhaps not as a regular thing, but occasionally. I bought those slippers you see on my feet in the pic, #ffs. But...yeah. I dunno. I dunno.
It was an interesting night.
I've been trying to write this out for a few sessions; I'm just going to hit publish now and be done with it. Sorry if there are some missing words or whatever. Thanks for reading (hi, mom).
I am trying to remember the last time I took a dance class. Meaning a ballet class (or, I suppose, a modern class; but I almost know that ballet is more recent: modern was never my core thing). It was in college, I think. I think not even senior year of college--before that. Let's say senior year, to be sure we're avoiding hyperbole. At some point in college: I remember taking a couple ballet classes (literally: two) at The Dance Complex in Central Square. I remember shaking my head and laughing at myself, at all the things I could not do; I was part performing my disdain and part really feeling it. And if we say senior year, to definitely avoid hyperbole, we're talking 17-18 years ago.
Before that, growing up and till college, dance--again, ballet specifically--was my thing. I started when I was eight; the lore (the lore may not be true. I think, in this case, it's approximately true) is that I was visibly bored, doing steps in my seat, as I waited and watched the weekly little-girls' ballet class to which I accompanied my sister. And then my parents saw an open call for auditions for the School of American Ballet (SAB); they took me to audition (I vaguely remember this: a hallway, kids; numbers?).
I got in.
There's more to this story than the lore might suggest; not that my parents primed either me (or my sister) for dancerly pursuits, but I know for example that we took some kind of little-kids' movement classes before that, running around in circles waving scarves and what have you. But I think the "well gosh we just saw this ad and he got in" version of the story has essential truth to it, also.
So before I go on, here, an important proviso. I'm writing it here, saying it once so I don't have to repeat it. I'll say other things first--I'll be extremely clear what the proviso is, do not worry.
SAB, as you know if you know ballet, is one of the ballet schools in the world. Some would say best; I have no idea, I haven't trained at the others and I'm just someone who happened to get to go there as a kid. But it's certainly on the shortest of short lists.
It feeds into the New York City Ballet, which is ditto amongst ballet companies.
As a kid and a young adult, I got to do a lot of world-class $h1t with this school and this company, and with other opportunities they led me to. And I want you to understand from the outset, because it's important, that this is not because I was amazing at dancing. I'm not trying to be humble, or fake humble, or any of that stuff. This is important to the story:
I was okay at dancing! I had good training, clearly. I'm tall and pretty athletic and blond (I am not kidding. That helped me, I'm...96% sure). I worked pretty hard; not as hard as I now know I could have, but probably harder than some kids would've. But I certainly--this is not 'real talk'; this is some 'the ocean is salty'-type trewth--did not have the natural gifts that many young dancers around me had. The feet; the extension; whatever precision of twitch muscles pumps your jumps a little higher or centers your gravity for six pirouettes. I mean I guess in my life I have done six pirouettes, but not like...do you see what I'm saying? I was okay! I was a good performer. I was a fine dancer, meaning "fine" for the sandbox I got to play in, which was an amazing gift of a sandbox.
And it's just as important to note that, from pretty early on, I knew this. It would be a bad misconstruction of my relationship to dance, which is what this post is gonna now be about for like six-zillion words, to anchor on the idea that I was or thought I was "something special", "really talented", or any of that stuff. I had, if anything, a strong sense of myself as not that way: as kind of moderately okay with a good disposition and hey, he's tall, that's good.
But, because of context and geography and luck, I got to do crazy cool shit from pretty much age 8 till age 18, when I went to college. I trained at SAB from age 8 to age 12, and during that time I danced with New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, Paris Opera Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet (my dad liked joking about "great Danes"), the Royal Ballet (I think), plus...I mean, literally I do not remember it was like "cool! another one of the world's great artistic institutions! neato." I was in the world premiere of Peter Martins's first full-length choreographic work as Artistic Director of NYCB, Songs of the Auvergne. I ran onstage at the wrong time once in that one. There was some ballet at the MET where I got to wrangle a dog and do a little solo: that was cool. These were all childrens' roles -- we're talking 8-12 years old, remember.
I knew that wasn't 'normal', but it's hard to parse your level of privilege as a kid; I knew it wasn't normal but internalized it as a normal part of my own collage, and the smells and rhythms and geometries of ballet rooms and hallways and dressing rooms and shoe leather and resin and marley are native to me and always will be.
When I was twelve I took a break for middle school to be a f*ck-up. The precipitating facts were that (a) continuing at SAB would've meant stopping going to 'regular' school, a sacrifice made doubly unpalatable by (b) some combination of personal chemistry and physical gifts (or lack thereof) knocked me off the hot track at SAB, in terms of which class I got put in. FWIW, my big thing above about not being so great aside, I think in this particular instance the 'personal chemistry'/politics was influential; NOT because my talent was unjustly thwarted, I hope I've made that clear. Just: that's how I think it went down.
I was a f*ck-up for a couple years, and it didn't make me that happy, being a f*ck-up, so in 9th grade I switched high schools and started dancing seriously again. Kind of all of a sudden, whatever the opposite of cold turkey is; I started at this challenging high school with lots of homework and I started dancing Mon-Sat, Sundays off (I think?). And I was happy, again.
This second round with dance was different from the first. The first I was a kid; I was shuttled to and from classes by my own or other parents; I had the world in my lap with these frequent amazing performance opportunities. This second period was less about those dizzying heights of the dance world, but I'm much prouder of it; I again got to be at wonderful and respected schools/companies and to the extent that I did achieve something in these years it feels like it was partly a result of my own motivation, combined with the generous investment and expertise of those around me.
Freshman year of high school, I trained at and performed with Ballet...Hispanico. I'd danced with them a little during my f*ck-up years; in 9th grade I danced with them a lot, and performed some with the youth company. I got to do Flamenco, which is amazing. Then, in 10th grade, I had the extraordinary good fortune to fall in with Francis Patrelle--a beautiful man and a beautiful teacher. Through Mr. Patrelle I got to perform with his company, Dances...Patrelle. I got what was and probably always will be my best notice in a major newspaper (last 'graph: HWHAM; I just opened my eyes really wide the whole time that's all I did); I got to perform with amazing young dancers from (natch) SAB and the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet (CPYB) and got THIS review, which is actually the one of which I am proudest--if you click don't look for my name you won't find it, just mention of a "strong men's contingent" which...y'have to understand, these dudes were in this program, and well on their way to those careers, so just, y'know, credibly presenting felt (and feels) like a thing.
By the end of high school, thanks mostly to Mr. Patrelle's investment and mentorship, I got to spend the summer training at CPYB and was offered to stay on full-time: training and then perhaps shipping off to a good company (CPYB is amazing) and then...who knows! Or, come end of summer, I could head off to freshman fall at Harvard.
I headed off to freshman fall at Harvard.
And honestly that's kind of the end of the story. I resisted making dance my thing at college. I found that I couldn't have a 'healthy' relationship to it. Remember me shaking my head and 'laughing' at myself in those last couple classes, 18 years ago? Like many dancers--I've since learned this is a common experience, a clichè--I couldn't sorta dance. Like: in a reasonable way, the way one does a hobby: 3 times a week, sometimes 4 sometimes 2. I couldn't deal with what my body couldn't do when I was not training 8-10 times a week; it was like trying to operate a broken machine that you knew could do better. It became an all-or-none thing and I, like many before and after me, went with none.
In grad school, I met a woman who did ballroom. We'd meet up sometimes and do ballroom. That was fun. That, like...literally. That was it, for me and dance.
Till last Tuesday night: 8pm, Los Angeles Ballet Academy. Adult Beginning/Intermediate.
I can't really tell you why I decided to do this. I don't think I have anything to resolve. I wonder about not deferring college to do CPYB. Even just for a year. But not in a, "oh I would've been a dancer!" way. In a, "a wiser Slimbuttons would have seen that as a cool life experience!" way. But I decided to do this; I wanted to do this. I may even go back.
I was tired. I had a cold; I'd just done a solid workout at Hot 8 a couple hours before.
 |
| Those are my shins and feet. The feet have ballet slippers on them. They come with elastics sewn on now, which was a big relief. My dad always did that for me. |
The studio was ideal. Just what I'd been looking for. I chatted with the lady at the desk as I signed in; I asked about the kids in the big windowed front studio, training late on a weekday night; she happy-bragged about a boy with the good extension who's "going to be a star". The whole tone was correct, and familiar; not some CardioBarre fitness thing. This is a place like the places I knew: a feeder for the SABs of the world rather than one itself, but no question they do serious dancing with integrity, seriousness, intent.
I walked into class and the teacher asked if I'd danced before and I told her, like 17 years, and she said, "It's like riding a bike." She was surprisingly correct: it's all deep in your body. The rhythm and steps were quick to come back; the things I was bad at (turning) I was bad at in similar ways, the things I was good at (jumps, aspects of adagio) I was good at in similar ways. All scaled for time and age and all this, of course, but I was familiar to myself as a dancer. I knew this guy.
But here was and is the thing. I was a very different guy. Everything was different. A total head-trip. A sad and strange and bittersweet head-trip. Because here is the thing:
Ballet is cruel. You probably know that even if you've never danced; you saw Black Swan or whatever. Ballet is beautiful, and ballet is cruel, and in its cruelty it guts and it burns down your dreams. As just a...like a routine, ordinary thing! That's what it does! There is no hidden angst or baggage to my own journey through dance--it was comparatively untroubled in all ways besides an eating thing freshman year of high school (which Mr. Patrelle was instrumental in my moving past). But even in my relatively untroubled, relatively unconflicted journey through dance that culminated in turning down a great academy to go to Harvard, for fuck's sake...even in that my gosh, sure: I had my dreams gutted and burned down lots of times! Constantly! Not getting to be Prince in The Nutcracker. Getting taken off the hot track at SAB. A period where Mr. Patrelle was doing a ballet with all the "good" young dancers and hadn't asked me to be in it (he subsequently did, and gave me a wonderful role, and I still to this day will bet you money that it was the compassion of the man's soul, seeing how I was for those 10 days where I thought he'd not cast me, that made the man do that. It was the ballet with the "strong men's contingent").
Ballet lives in that nexus of actual undeniable power and beauty, layered over with constructions of scripted prestige and status, and it holds these glittering unattainable gems on high and you over and over build your shitty scaffolds to get higher and higher and reach for the gems and you're almost there and then psssshh: burn it down, try again. Psssshh: burn it down. Psssshh.
And it's okay because you see the gems the whole times, and you're building yourself as a dancer and your dreams all up towards them. Building working building.
And the sad strange head-fuck of dancing now, at 37, is not how my body looks: I'll be str8, reader--it looks better than ever. It's not what I can or cannot do. It is that I have no dreamscaffolding left to burn down. Those gems are not for me; I don't even know where they are. They're not in my landscape. My dreams and my aspirations and hopes are all...they're wrapped up completely in other things. This thing, ballet, which for so many of my formative years held the very concepts of beauty, hope, dreaming inside it...it doesn't hold those things anymore. Even in Muay Thai, which I was NEVER nuts enough to think I was 'good' at, there's some funny idea of, ha ha -- maybe I'll win a belt someday. It won't happen. I don't think it will happen. But the concept exists as a bright burning light.
All those lights are snuffed in dance. Those ships have inexorably sailed. There is no such thing as a...or it wouldn't be me who...it's all done. It's an over, done, past-tense thing. It is a thing that lives in the wells of memory and hope pressed into my heart as a child, but which are now dried and done with. I have other things. And it is so strange and so sad and so weird and so...head-f#*k to come face-to-face (I mean, literally: you're looking in the mirror the whole time in most ballet classes) with yourself in the activity that held those aspirations and finding the activity, the you that is doing it, just...empty of those things.
It is so weird, and I have no idea if it will ever or can ever be a present-tense for me. It's an interesting and elegant and rewarding physical activity; I have some background in it. But what it is is this inherently conflicted palimpsest of the past on top of the present. It's a fascinating thing to have revisited for a night. I think I will revisit it again -- perhaps not as a regular thing, but occasionally. I bought those slippers you see on my feet in the pic, #ffs. But...yeah. I dunno. I dunno.
It was an interesting night.
I've been trying to write this out for a few sessions; I'm just going to hit publish now and be done with it. Sorry if there are some missing words or whatever. Thanks for reading (hi, mom).
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