To put it mildly: Thursday was cold. Though many places had it worse than New York City (where I'm located), waking up to a 4-degree day with a windchill that made it feel like -15 had me looking for the nearest Tauntaun to slice open. (Ah, if only we could make a fire out of the Hoth references evoked by frigid weather, we'd stay warm for days.) But, since I didn't go to ballet on Tuesday, that meant I had to get my weekly fix Thursday, Rura Penthe climate or not. (Yeah, I guess Star Trek cold references don't work as well as Star Wars ones, eh?)
So I put on my two coats, boots, and my most bank robber-y of ski masks, threw my flats in my gym bag, and off I went to a jam-packed class of...seven people. Seven. I've never seen so few people there. This was not good news. Normally, in a class of 20, I could hide behind Baryshnikov II and hope my feet just sort of get lost in the temporal displacement caused by the other dancers' warp-speed movements. But in a group of seven, there was nowhere to run. At first, this was a scary prospect. I'd have to sink or swim by my own abilities. Whatever I contributed, it would be noticed.
And noticed it was. But, honestly, that wasn't so bad. In fact, the adjustments and attention I received were incredibly helpful in allowing me to correct some misalignments that had been plaguing me from the start. Plus, looking around the room, I actually got to see the other students for who they were, too. I've said before that everyone is incredibly kind, and this was no different. However, now, I could see some of their needs, as well as my own. As a group of seven, we all benefitted from our teacher's notes, and her individualized encouragement. Small class size is something we academic teachers argue for a lot, but, to feel that difference as a student really hammered home the impact fewer students in a room can make on the learning process.
Not to mention, I think I moved a part of my body that has literally never moved before. My teacher asked me to open up my back and feel it in a particular spot, just below my shoulder blade, that I had never consciously considered. I did this, and it was as if a new part of myself just said hello. It's, uh - pretty stiff? But it's there. I think my whole body - mental and physical - is trying to adjust to the demands of this class. I can't do fifth position in the way my teacher or my classmates can. Two feet lined up basically parallel, but touching toe to heel. It gets a little closer each week, but this reinforces the fact that there are some things bodies do, and there are other things bodies learn. My body, granted with movable feet, will try to learn to bend this way. Or, if it can't be a rubbery "Bend-'Ems" toy, well, that's okay, too.
Everything was moving along pretty well until the last five minutes, which really gave me something to chew on. As a final dance, our teacher separated us into men and women, and had the men do a dance counterclockwise around the room while women did the same dance clockwise. Men made up an outer ring, women made up the inner one. My teacher put me into the "men" group which, well, makes sense. It's how I present to most, and I've never spoken to her about me being non-binary. (In fact, this was only the second time I've met her at all.) I figured, misgendering or not, dysphoria or not (and there was some dysphoria), I'd just take the opportunity to practice the steps and perform a role.
Once I got past the initial discomfort, I started to think about ballet on a broader scale. Old dances built around wooing often preserve heterosexual, gender-binary wooing. Men woo women. Women woo men. Any period movie about 18th Century socialites will no doubt offer some common examples. But what would the non-binary version of this look like? One might argue it would look a lot like what we were doing before, all dancing in the same, non-segregated group. But I think that loses the performance of wooing. (It's important to note that this is performed wooing, as no one in class was actually trying to woo IRL at all. I would be seriously interested in an asexual/aromantic dancer's experience of these dances, though.) It also creates this idea that "non-binary" means no recognition of gender whatsoever. This is not what I want, and it's not what I think many non-binary folx want. I think many of us - me, certainly - want tons of gender, lots of gender, all gender recognized, validated, loved, and non-toxic. This is what the circle-of-men-circling-a-circle-of-women offers that a large group of everyone can't. So, if we're building on the idea of circles within circles, one might say, okay, just make more circles. Men, women, and non-binary people. But, there, "non-binary people" is a huge catch-all. Do we break this down into folx who are agender, demigirls, demiboys, Two Spirit, burrnesha, etc..., etc..., etc...? That seems like a lot of circles, and circles that may, in some small groups, consist of just one person.
Gender has been described by Ramzi Fawaz as a network with nodes that dip into other nodes at different times for different folx. In this way, gender, to me, is closer to feelings. If instead of men and women, our teacher separated us into "happy people" and "sad people," the task would be nearly impossible. Do you mean happy today or happy in general? There are times when I'm happy and times when I'm sad, and there are times when I'm other things all together. How can I put myself into one group when I'm fluid? I experience gender similarly. I'm non-binary, but some days are more masc, some days are more femme, and some days are other things all together. Luckily, though, Fawaz's network is inherently dance like, with synapses connecting then dissolving only to reconnect later. There is a dance in this, but I feel like it's better left to a choreographer with more than four ballet classes to their name.
That said, though, I think it is a worthwhile project to look at ballet and formal dances of England and France (and the U.S.) and think of ways to queer them. That doesn't mean "just add Queer people," but, in addition to that, think about ways the motions of the dances themselves might better embody the non-binary reality experienced by so many cultures for centuries. Until I can better figure out a way to approach that, I'm happy to learn the binary dances ballet can offer, even if it means I have to perform a male role (and who knows, my teacher might be into my fluidity if I talk to her about it - and I might just do that!). I'm privileged to be able to do what my friend calls "boy drag" without being triggered by such a performance. For many Enbies, taking on that kind of binary role would be a massive emotional hardship, and I respect that immensely. For me, though, if I can use it as a way to think of an alternative, I'm more enthusiastic about engaging in it.
Also, in the case of this specific dance, I was struck by how, even though we were in two separate, gendered groups, we were all doing the same dance. Maybe that's an underlying metaphor in and of itself: that, yes, labels can help us find and talk about our people and ourselves, but, on some level, the actual dance can be a reminder of similarity among us all. It honors the difference and the sameness, an admirable achievement for what basically amounts to a lot of skipping and smiling.
As I donned my layers, the pianist from last week asked me how things were going. I said I thought they were going pretty well, but, hey, could I just ask one question? She said I could. "Okay, so, last week, I was doing that one particular dance, and, like, something kinda snagged my mind, and I thought it was really cool. Um. Were you playing the theme song to Jurassic Park?" "Yeah," she said, "I was." Finally, I thought, a mystery I could solve.
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Thursday, January 24, 2019
Lesson #3
When I got home today after ballet, I had a package waiting for me. Inside the package was a 1999 Mattel "Ballet Lessons Barbie." It was a late night eBay purchase from a few days ago. I thought that, if I got the Barbie, I'd automatically become a better ballet dancer. This was surely Mattel's hope when they made her...for a six-year-old. But, in truth, Barbie, such as she is, would be a really shitty ballet dancer. Her toes can't move out of the pointe position. Her arms bend 180 degrees at the elbow, which, just, ouch. And I mean, she can't move without someone to guide her. Actually, the more I think about that, the more personally appropriate this purchase becomes.
I usually go to ballet on Tuesdays, but, because I couldn't make Tuesday this week, I went on Thursday. The class is essentially the same, only the teacher is different. That, it turns out, is a big difference. A delightful big difference! Tuesday's teacher is extremely talented, and she holds back, moving a notch slower to make sure everyone in the room is as close to her movements as possible. Thursday's instructor, while also being extremely talented, moves slightly quicker, taking the temperature of the room often and generally concluding that she can throw more complex ballet at us. This scared me at first, but the way she made it safe to just have fun put me at ease. At one point, she told us that, today, she was doing motion capture for a video game character she's playing. Apparently, she's, like, a ninth-level boss in a forthcoming first-person adventure. Her character is a vampire ballerina. If I had known ballet had vampire ballerinas, I would have joined a long time ago. The rest of her story was relevant to a movement we were supposed to make with our hips, but I got lost thinking about whether a vampire ballerina really needs the other animal transformations your average Dracula gets, what with the ability to swiftly move as a humanoid and all.
But I snapped back into it, geekery be damned. In our next sequence (is that the right word? "Sequence"?), something new clicked. Before we start moving our bodies, our teacher always moves hers, mapping out the routine we're about to do for demonstrational purposes. I get confused here a lot. I can remember the first few steps of what she does, but the rest piles on so quickly I get overwhelmed. When we start dancing, I usually just pick someone who clearly owns their own tutu and just follow them. Today, though, was different. We have a live accompanist playing the piano (Thursday's has more an old-timey saloon feel, Tuesday's feels straight out of Amadeus). I had been largely ignoring the piano, following along with someone else as usual, until I just sort of...listened. Putting all my attention on the piano, I realized that the music the pianist was playing was designed to tell me the steps. If I just did what the music sounded like - drawing a semi-circle with my foot when the melody swooped, stabbing the ground with my toe when it emphasized a note - the dance would naturally align with what we were supposed to do. It is funny how often your environment is literally designed to guide you, all you have to do is pay attention to all its elements. Once I realized the piano wasn't just there because, hey, where else in New York City are you gonna put this thing?, I understood: you get more from letting go than you do from holding on, more from opening up than from closing off.
For the rest of class, I felt closer to that piano music than ever. That's not to say everything was automatically easy and natural - not even close - but at least my brain was trying to build a new music-body pathway. That only failed me when, for one particular routine, our teacher instructed the pianist to play what I assumed was a classical piece to go with our dance. As the notes were banged out, I couldn't help but think that what was being played was exactly the theme song to Jurassic Park. Nahnahnah-nah-NAH, nahnahnah-nah-NAH... At this point, I was already several dumb questions in, and stopping the action to ask whether this was the thing Sam Neill gazed at a Brontosaurus to felt like a violation of everything that space stood for. I had a little leeway: I told the teacher, and, in-turn, everyone, that this was only my third ballet lesson ever at the top of the class, but I figured any lenience I earned from that was spent on my Avengers: Infinity War sweatpants.
Which: about those Avengers: Infinity War sweatpants: yes, they are from Hot Topic (on clearance, purchased not because I loved Infinity War [I didn't], but because the other clearance sweats were from an anime I knew nothing about, and, well, I can only afford to be a complete idiot about one thing at a time, and ballet was filling that spot). Yes, I bought them because my only other acceptable pants had Millennium Falcons on them and I figured having a change would be good. Yes - this is pretty much in-line with how I dress for anything: learn what's expected and then figure out how I can make that relate to a comic book. But here's the deal: ballet clothing is endlessly cool to me. I love the fact that, regardless of gender, the same, functional, tight clothing pretty much goes for everyone (with the addition of a dance belt in cases where that might apply). That's kind of what I go for in my daily outfits. These sweatpants, for instance, were from Her Universe, a company that markets geeked-out clothing primarily to women. I like mixing clothing like that with my basic, mens-cut black T-shirt. Even if no one can tell I'm blending gendered clothing, I know I am, and that makes me feel really good.
And ballet only scratches this itch even further. For example, there was one dance we did during today's class where our teacher talked to us a little about the history of the routine. She said that it was not a peasant dance, like some of the others we learned. This was a Court dance. It was a dance one might perform while twirling around a royal Court, glass of wine in hand, smiling at suitors, gracefully demonstrating what a well-put-together (most likely) woman they were. I really liked knowing that (despite its problematic historical implications). Don't get me wrong, I still performed this Court dance with the physical fluidity of Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still, but the gender fluidity of performing a dance created to actualize a specific time period's definition of "femme"! That was great. Sure, any actual King or Queen would've had me beheaded, but if Devo were holding Court, I think I could've been the belle of the ball.
The rest of class flew by. At the end, I talked to my teacher about how to "count" music in order to keep my steps in-line with it better. This feels like a really basic skill, but it is one I do not even remotely have. I'm not musical. I can't remember lyrics or tunes. I'd choose a root canal over karaoke most of the time. But my teacher and the pianist gave me some helpful tips which basically amounted to: listen to ballet-specific music and start counting when you hear the first emphasized note, which may not necessarily come at the very beginning of the song. This made a ton of sense to me. My students are always asking me how to find the main idea of a passage. I try to teach them that a main idea can really be found anywhere, even though it has a handful of places it is often stated. You just have to look for the biggest, most important point of the reading, and then follow that through the rest of the text. That feels a lot like the idea of looking for the first appearance of an arrangement's most audible note, its "main idea" note, and then following the rest of the piece on that note's terms. It'll take practice, but I think I can get there.
I've only been on this journey for three weeks, but one of the things that has made me fall in love most severely has been the warmth of others. As stated above, my teacher and the pianist stayed after class to help me with this concept. While having lunch with another friend earlier today, I learned that both she and I were in the beginning stages of our ballet classes, and comparing fumbles, I think, felt like a great relief for us both. Two weeks ago, another friend sewed my ballet flats while we listened to Swan Lake. (And I paid her, because now, more than ever, we need to pay folx for their labor, friend or not. I'm serious about this.) And even more people (you included!) have listened to me blab in one way or another about all the stuff I've fallen over doing each week. That means more to me than anything. The community makes it all possible, and I'm grateful to everyone who helps me.
After all, Barbie has this, too. She's got Midge and Skipper and Chelsea and of course the ever-present Ken. My teacher, today, mentioned something about her hips, how they open one way and not another. I have no idea what my actual hips look like. The bones. No clue. And there she was, knowing the physicality of her body in such an exact way. I imagine this is even easier for Barbie. Plastic is very well understood and, under the plastic is, well, nothing, so that's helpful. Each joint is pretty well pronounced on the doll, so that takes the guesswork out of a lot of movement. All that's left, for Barbie and for my teacher, is the invisible force that drives their mech suits of flesh and muscle and fat and bone (what? Barbie doesn't have her own, independent thoughts? Clearly you've never stepped on one in the middle of the night). The thoughts and feelings give our physiques meaning and motion and emotion. In this way, it doesn't matter what armor surrounds the ether of being; it doesn't matter what shape that suit takes. What matters is that we each learn the ships we fly, down to the hip bones, so that when we issue it commands from our ever-evolving minds, they can best serve our selves. Some, like Barbie, might have that easier than others, but, for everyone, it might be possible so it must be possible. Myself included.
If you follow Barbie's latest developments, you know she, right now, in 2019, is yet again a ballet doll. It's "Ballet Instructor Barbie." It took her 20 years, but she eventually became an instructor! That time table is impressive, considering, in that period, she's also been a doctor, a vet, a presidential candidate, a robotics engineer, a firefighter, and a pilot. I think I need to retract what I said before: given her community and her unwavering work ethic, I think Barbie is in fact an amazing ballet dancer. And actually, the more I think about that, the more personally appropriate I hope this purchase becomes.
I usually go to ballet on Tuesdays, but, because I couldn't make Tuesday this week, I went on Thursday. The class is essentially the same, only the teacher is different. That, it turns out, is a big difference. A delightful big difference! Tuesday's teacher is extremely talented, and she holds back, moving a notch slower to make sure everyone in the room is as close to her movements as possible. Thursday's instructor, while also being extremely talented, moves slightly quicker, taking the temperature of the room often and generally concluding that she can throw more complex ballet at us. This scared me at first, but the way she made it safe to just have fun put me at ease. At one point, she told us that, today, she was doing motion capture for a video game character she's playing. Apparently, she's, like, a ninth-level boss in a forthcoming first-person adventure. Her character is a vampire ballerina. If I had known ballet had vampire ballerinas, I would have joined a long time ago. The rest of her story was relevant to a movement we were supposed to make with our hips, but I got lost thinking about whether a vampire ballerina really needs the other animal transformations your average Dracula gets, what with the ability to swiftly move as a humanoid and all.
But I snapped back into it, geekery be damned. In our next sequence (is that the right word? "Sequence"?), something new clicked. Before we start moving our bodies, our teacher always moves hers, mapping out the routine we're about to do for demonstrational purposes. I get confused here a lot. I can remember the first few steps of what she does, but the rest piles on so quickly I get overwhelmed. When we start dancing, I usually just pick someone who clearly owns their own tutu and just follow them. Today, though, was different. We have a live accompanist playing the piano (Thursday's has more an old-timey saloon feel, Tuesday's feels straight out of Amadeus). I had been largely ignoring the piano, following along with someone else as usual, until I just sort of...listened. Putting all my attention on the piano, I realized that the music the pianist was playing was designed to tell me the steps. If I just did what the music sounded like - drawing a semi-circle with my foot when the melody swooped, stabbing the ground with my toe when it emphasized a note - the dance would naturally align with what we were supposed to do. It is funny how often your environment is literally designed to guide you, all you have to do is pay attention to all its elements. Once I realized the piano wasn't just there because, hey, where else in New York City are you gonna put this thing?, I understood: you get more from letting go than you do from holding on, more from opening up than from closing off.
For the rest of class, I felt closer to that piano music than ever. That's not to say everything was automatically easy and natural - not even close - but at least my brain was trying to build a new music-body pathway. That only failed me when, for one particular routine, our teacher instructed the pianist to play what I assumed was a classical piece to go with our dance. As the notes were banged out, I couldn't help but think that what was being played was exactly the theme song to Jurassic Park. Nahnahnah-nah-NAH, nahnahnah-nah-NAH... At this point, I was already several dumb questions in, and stopping the action to ask whether this was the thing Sam Neill gazed at a Brontosaurus to felt like a violation of everything that space stood for. I had a little leeway: I told the teacher, and, in-turn, everyone, that this was only my third ballet lesson ever at the top of the class, but I figured any lenience I earned from that was spent on my Avengers: Infinity War sweatpants.
Which: about those Avengers: Infinity War sweatpants: yes, they are from Hot Topic (on clearance, purchased not because I loved Infinity War [I didn't], but because the other clearance sweats were from an anime I knew nothing about, and, well, I can only afford to be a complete idiot about one thing at a time, and ballet was filling that spot). Yes, I bought them because my only other acceptable pants had Millennium Falcons on them and I figured having a change would be good. Yes - this is pretty much in-line with how I dress for anything: learn what's expected and then figure out how I can make that relate to a comic book. But here's the deal: ballet clothing is endlessly cool to me. I love the fact that, regardless of gender, the same, functional, tight clothing pretty much goes for everyone (with the addition of a dance belt in cases where that might apply). That's kind of what I go for in my daily outfits. These sweatpants, for instance, were from Her Universe, a company that markets geeked-out clothing primarily to women. I like mixing clothing like that with my basic, mens-cut black T-shirt. Even if no one can tell I'm blending gendered clothing, I know I am, and that makes me feel really good.
And ballet only scratches this itch even further. For example, there was one dance we did during today's class where our teacher talked to us a little about the history of the routine. She said that it was not a peasant dance, like some of the others we learned. This was a Court dance. It was a dance one might perform while twirling around a royal Court, glass of wine in hand, smiling at suitors, gracefully demonstrating what a well-put-together (most likely) woman they were. I really liked knowing that (despite its problematic historical implications). Don't get me wrong, I still performed this Court dance with the physical fluidity of Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still, but the gender fluidity of performing a dance created to actualize a specific time period's definition of "femme"! That was great. Sure, any actual King or Queen would've had me beheaded, but if Devo were holding Court, I think I could've been the belle of the ball.
The rest of class flew by. At the end, I talked to my teacher about how to "count" music in order to keep my steps in-line with it better. This feels like a really basic skill, but it is one I do not even remotely have. I'm not musical. I can't remember lyrics or tunes. I'd choose a root canal over karaoke most of the time. But my teacher and the pianist gave me some helpful tips which basically amounted to: listen to ballet-specific music and start counting when you hear the first emphasized note, which may not necessarily come at the very beginning of the song. This made a ton of sense to me. My students are always asking me how to find the main idea of a passage. I try to teach them that a main idea can really be found anywhere, even though it has a handful of places it is often stated. You just have to look for the biggest, most important point of the reading, and then follow that through the rest of the text. That feels a lot like the idea of looking for the first appearance of an arrangement's most audible note, its "main idea" note, and then following the rest of the piece on that note's terms. It'll take practice, but I think I can get there.
I've only been on this journey for three weeks, but one of the things that has made me fall in love most severely has been the warmth of others. As stated above, my teacher and the pianist stayed after class to help me with this concept. While having lunch with another friend earlier today, I learned that both she and I were in the beginning stages of our ballet classes, and comparing fumbles, I think, felt like a great relief for us both. Two weeks ago, another friend sewed my ballet flats while we listened to Swan Lake. (And I paid her, because now, more than ever, we need to pay folx for their labor, friend or not. I'm serious about this.) And even more people (you included!) have listened to me blab in one way or another about all the stuff I've fallen over doing each week. That means more to me than anything. The community makes it all possible, and I'm grateful to everyone who helps me.
After all, Barbie has this, too. She's got Midge and Skipper and Chelsea and of course the ever-present Ken. My teacher, today, mentioned something about her hips, how they open one way and not another. I have no idea what my actual hips look like. The bones. No clue. And there she was, knowing the physicality of her body in such an exact way. I imagine this is even easier for Barbie. Plastic is very well understood and, under the plastic is, well, nothing, so that's helpful. Each joint is pretty well pronounced on the doll, so that takes the guesswork out of a lot of movement. All that's left, for Barbie and for my teacher, is the invisible force that drives their mech suits of flesh and muscle and fat and bone (what? Barbie doesn't have her own, independent thoughts? Clearly you've never stepped on one in the middle of the night). The thoughts and feelings give our physiques meaning and motion and emotion. In this way, it doesn't matter what armor surrounds the ether of being; it doesn't matter what shape that suit takes. What matters is that we each learn the ships we fly, down to the hip bones, so that when we issue it commands from our ever-evolving minds, they can best serve our selves. Some, like Barbie, might have that easier than others, but, for everyone, it might be possible so it must be possible. Myself included.
If you follow Barbie's latest developments, you know she, right now, in 2019, is yet again a ballet doll. It's "Ballet Instructor Barbie." It took her 20 years, but she eventually became an instructor! That time table is impressive, considering, in that period, she's also been a doctor, a vet, a presidential candidate, a robotics engineer, a firefighter, and a pilot. I think I need to retract what I said before: given her community and her unwavering work ethic, I think Barbie is in fact an amazing ballet dancer. And actually, the more I think about that, the more personally appropriate I hope this purchase becomes.
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Lesson #2
On Monday, I split my pants at the crotch revealing my Spider-Man underwear. If you were wondering just how classy I'm keeping it, well, there you go.
Tuesday (yesterday, as of this writing) was Ballet Class #2. There were a TON of newbies! So many, in fact, that, as I watched them all register with the incredibly kind Ballet School Signer-Upper (official title), I stole a moment or two to feel experienced. "Experienced" is such a relative term, isn't it? Like, a Freshman Congressperson's Deputy Chief of Staff might not be the most experienced politician under normal circumstances, but if the entire government is wiped out and that person is the only one left standing, then congratulations noob: you're the new President! (And of course you have to multiply that person's experience level even more if said person is, in fact, Kiefer Sutherland.) I had been to one class, but all these other people had been to zero classes, so all of a sudden it was as if I'd been doing this for years. "Ah, yes, I remember, distantly, when I was you, writing down my emergency contact on that form." ("Just please don't ask me any specific questions about ballet...")
As class moved along, well, so did I. More or less. At some points (read: exactly two), I actually even felt a little bit graceful. It was as if the notes on the piano moved through me, and my body just acted. Don't get me wrong, it promptly stopped doing that, but, in that moment, I felt what I guess actual ballet dancers must feel all the time: the complete surrender of the physical self to music. Maybe that happens to experienced dancers of all styles. It's such a foreign concept to me. It is not what I'm doing when I'm clunkily bopping to "The Cha-Cha Slide."
But it's actually the less graceful moments that interest me more. In Lesson 2, more so than the sweaty and nervous Lesson 1, I had more time to actually bust out some metacognition on my stumbles. In other words, I had time to think. As someone who teaches students at the developmental level of college reading and writing, the experience of structured stumbling couldn't be more valuable. It is so easy for me to read a handful of pages of a novel and perform some sort of literary analysis on them, whether that's tracking a particular theme, close-reading a character, or linking what I've read to another text. I imagine that's about where my ballet teacher is, too. Whatever moves (is that the right word? "Moves"?) she fires off look incredibly easy because they are incredibly easy. For her. Maybe, someday, they could be that easy for Tom and me, too. (Oh yeah, Tom, my newbie friend from Lesson 1, was back for this class, which, thank God.) But they're difficult for us, just like literary analysis is difficult for my students. For now. When my students express frustration with a text's meaning or struggle to even pronounce certain words on a page, that feeling is no doubt akin to the one I get flopping around in ballet like a trashbag full of live squirrels being electrocuted.
There are environments that can be set up in which each and every one of us would fail. The fact that someone is in that environment when you are not is absolutely no reason to look down upon that person's intelligence. This is the perspective I try to bring into my classroom. The only reason my students struggle with material that I don't struggle with is environment. If they stay in this environment long enough, and fight through the struggle honestly, I am sure they'll wind up better than me. And that's the hope.
When we took our break at Lesson 2's halfway point, our teacher announced that "someone had left their underwear in the lobby." When I went to use the bathroom, I passed said underwear: a small, flowery thing that seemed both functional and TJ Maxx cute. It wasn't mine (though, kick it up a few sizes and give it a little more room, and I don't think I'd object to a new pair), but I knew something about exposed underwear (remember my Spider-Mans?). That seems like what this whole thing takes: the ability to nonchalantly lose your underwear. To share that which you wear closest to your body, under enough layers to hide it from everyone except those who know you most intimately. To strip away coverings. To stand naked.*
When we returned from the break, there was more jumping, more stumbling, more positioning. In that, though, I felt wisps of balance. Hints of grounding. An eagerness to fail more.
(*NOT literally, of course, at least in situations where you don't have the expressed consent of everyone around you. Please don't randomly take your clothes off on the subway.)
Tuesday (yesterday, as of this writing) was Ballet Class #2. There were a TON of newbies! So many, in fact, that, as I watched them all register with the incredibly kind Ballet School Signer-Upper (official title), I stole a moment or two to feel experienced. "Experienced" is such a relative term, isn't it? Like, a Freshman Congressperson's Deputy Chief of Staff might not be the most experienced politician under normal circumstances, but if the entire government is wiped out and that person is the only one left standing, then congratulations noob: you're the new President! (And of course you have to multiply that person's experience level even more if said person is, in fact, Kiefer Sutherland.) I had been to one class, but all these other people had been to zero classes, so all of a sudden it was as if I'd been doing this for years. "Ah, yes, I remember, distantly, when I was you, writing down my emergency contact on that form." ("Just please don't ask me any specific questions about ballet...")
As class moved along, well, so did I. More or less. At some points (read: exactly two), I actually even felt a little bit graceful. It was as if the notes on the piano moved through me, and my body just acted. Don't get me wrong, it promptly stopped doing that, but, in that moment, I felt what I guess actual ballet dancers must feel all the time: the complete surrender of the physical self to music. Maybe that happens to experienced dancers of all styles. It's such a foreign concept to me. It is not what I'm doing when I'm clunkily bopping to "The Cha-Cha Slide."
But it's actually the less graceful moments that interest me more. In Lesson 2, more so than the sweaty and nervous Lesson 1, I had more time to actually bust out some metacognition on my stumbles. In other words, I had time to think. As someone who teaches students at the developmental level of college reading and writing, the experience of structured stumbling couldn't be more valuable. It is so easy for me to read a handful of pages of a novel and perform some sort of literary analysis on them, whether that's tracking a particular theme, close-reading a character, or linking what I've read to another text. I imagine that's about where my ballet teacher is, too. Whatever moves (is that the right word? "Moves"?) she fires off look incredibly easy because they are incredibly easy. For her. Maybe, someday, they could be that easy for Tom and me, too. (Oh yeah, Tom, my newbie friend from Lesson 1, was back for this class, which, thank God.) But they're difficult for us, just like literary analysis is difficult for my students. For now. When my students express frustration with a text's meaning or struggle to even pronounce certain words on a page, that feeling is no doubt akin to the one I get flopping around in ballet like a trashbag full of live squirrels being electrocuted.
There are environments that can be set up in which each and every one of us would fail. The fact that someone is in that environment when you are not is absolutely no reason to look down upon that person's intelligence. This is the perspective I try to bring into my classroom. The only reason my students struggle with material that I don't struggle with is environment. If they stay in this environment long enough, and fight through the struggle honestly, I am sure they'll wind up better than me. And that's the hope.
When we took our break at Lesson 2's halfway point, our teacher announced that "someone had left their underwear in the lobby." When I went to use the bathroom, I passed said underwear: a small, flowery thing that seemed both functional and TJ Maxx cute. It wasn't mine (though, kick it up a few sizes and give it a little more room, and I don't think I'd object to a new pair), but I knew something about exposed underwear (remember my Spider-Mans?). That seems like what this whole thing takes: the ability to nonchalantly lose your underwear. To share that which you wear closest to your body, under enough layers to hide it from everyone except those who know you most intimately. To strip away coverings. To stand naked.*
When we returned from the break, there was more jumping, more stumbling, more positioning. In that, though, I felt wisps of balance. Hints of grounding. An eagerness to fail more.
(*NOT literally, of course, at least in situations where you don't have the expressed consent of everyone around you. Please don't randomly take your clothes off on the subway.)
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Lesson #1
I have no idea who I am. I pick up little hints along the way, though. For example, I played with action figures as a kid (and, like, now), so I based all my academic research on that and grew my toy collection into the thousands. So I guess I'm the type of person who does that. I'm terrified of flying, so I spent years learning about every plane crash ever and deeply entrenching myself in a loving and limitlessly kind group of pilots who podcast about their experiences. I'm less terrified now. So I guess I'm the type of person who does that. I write plays, obsessively. I considered myself cis male until I asked myself why I almost always broke down crying when I heard the vocabulary of being non-binary, daydreaming about whether I could adopt that beautiful language that moved me so much for myself. I can. I did. Put together, that gives me a little guidance about the character of Me, but a lot is still a mystery, and a lot more keeps changing. All the time.
I am deeply uncoordinated. If someone tells me to go left, my dyslexia would tell me to go right if my ADD didn't usually intercept that and tell me to go oh look shiny! Whenever I go somewhere with the caveat, "And there will be DANCING!" my first thought is, "F*ck. Me." I hate moving my body. For the longest time, I hated my body. I was an overweight teenager, but that in and of itself is not reason to hate one's body. I was conditioned to feel bad about being overweight, though, so I did. To the point of an eating disorder, which caused the scale to tell me I was dangerously underweight, but the mirror to tell me, hey you're still fat, and you should still feel bad about that. I did not have positive body role models. I had Star Trek, where every hero fit miraculously into a tight jumpsuit. (When Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis talk about how awful that was, part of me feels seen, but most of me feels horrible for them.) Lately, I've been a little more comfortable in my skin, but largely because I've become better at ignoring the voice in my head that shames me. The voice has not gone away.
By now, I'm sure you're thinking that this provides the ideal conditions for me to sign up for a ballet class! In all honesty, ballet is something I've wanted to try for a long time. Like I said, I am in no way graceful, but ballet just always looked so...cool. I saw Black Swan. Those people could really move! (Was that not the point of that movie?) Even the idea of an elderly French person barking orders at me felt exciting. And now, with my aforementioned gender questioning, ballet took on a new meaning altogether. Part of my own gender exploration has been the embrace of things I've perceived to be "femme." Clothing, make-up, specific female-character costumes. That sort of thing. Ballet falls into this category of entirely socially-constructed "femme" stuff that obviously has no real bearing on anyone's gender. Ballet has no gender, and ballet dancers are of many genders. The ability to perform graceful dances to a delightful piano melody does not "make" one female, male, or anything else. All I mean to say here is that, to me, ballet, and the form that comes with it, excited me for many reasons, one of which being the fact that a lot of women I know have done it, imbuing the art, in my mind, with an air of femininity I very much wanted running through my ever-masc body. My mom was a dancer, in fact. I was hoping some of that would be genetic. Spoiler alert: it is not.
When I showed up for Lesson #1, I asked a group of ballet-looking people if I was in the right place. I was. They all seemed perfectly nice, but a cluster of them clearly knew each other from previous years, so they were engaged in their own conversation. Totally understandable. I'm good at breaking into conversations when it's about stuff I know - comics, toys, sci-fi - but when the topic du jour is a breakdown of the moves that make up a routine I'd have to spend an evening figuring out how to spell, yeah, color me sheepish.
A guy who I'll call Tom (to protect the innocent) soon said, "It's my first time, too." Thank God. We both had that "first time" look down. You know the "first time" look. Making love with your socks on. Holding the golf club with one hand. Ordering a "Large" at a Starbucks. If you do all three of those things at once, you pretty much have our portrait painted, figuratively speaking of course.
I signed a newbie form that included a space for my emergency contact. I guess that's there out of concern for my health, but I'm a little bit convinced it's there for the other students' health. "If this person's ineptitude becomes too distracting, we'll have to call your mother to come get you." I dutifully put down my mom's phone number.
I meant to Google what to do with the straps on my Size 14 Amazon-ordered ballet flats, but I forgot to do that, so I asked the person to whom I gave my newbie form. She laughed, but not at me. It was the "I remember seeing people as confused as you once!" laugh. That actually made me feel better. Like, maybe this isn't so intuitive? She showed me how they went, and that they needed to be sown in place. Yet another area where I'm up the creek without a paddle, but I figured, hey, I'm already trying one new thing, what's one more? She said I could just tuck them in for today, and I was glad she said that. If she gave me a needle and thread, I think she would have had to call my emergency contact.
Once I got in the studio, the whole event became an exercise in silencing my inner Shame Voice. If I can barely look at myself in the mirror without hearing the Shame Voice, well: this whole place is mirrors, so draw your own conclusions. And I want to be clear: the Shame Voice is all me. Everyone I encountered was genuinely nice. The instructor was amazing! I'm still baffled by how quickly she could move her foot. Think, like, Kirby when Kirby wants to rapid-punch attack, except my teacher was not a round, pink blob. In fact, she was the opposite of that, and I don't say that to shame or flatter, simply to indicate that, though she possessed one Kirby-like skill, my teacher is not literally Kirby, for anyone who was confused. In other words, she clearly knew her stuff. Thankfully, though, she was also willing to take pity on me and Tom by slowing down at certain points. I think she made a non-verbal compromise, a compromise I'm very familiar with when I'm teaching my English students. "Okay, if they can just do, like, 60% of the stuff and look earnestly confused through the rest, we'll call that a win." I think I kind of nailed that?
At the end of it all, an hour and 15 later, I signed up for the 10-class card, giving me nine more times to rinse and repeat. I welcome those chances. I did horribly this time around, but if I just tell myself I won't do any worse than I did today, I guess that'll be all right. And I did, at times, between the thoughts of "Just look at how she's doing it and try to do that!" and "Wait she knows I'm just staring to try to figure out how to do that, right?" (yes, consent was established for this purpose - important!) and "Really, self? You know you're the only one here with Millennium Falcons on your pants, right?," feel a taste of what I had hoped for: a sense of fluidity - fluid movements, fluid genders, fluid existence. But I'm not going to pretend I've got some big existential revelation now. As of today, I'm one person who has taken one ballet class. Next week, I'll take another. I have no idea who I am. But I also have no idea how to ballet. So I guess I'm the type of person who thinks about that.
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