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.
No comments:
Post a Comment