glamour

This is what I look like, generally speaking, after a day of rehearsals. I spend most of my working days in either shapeless cotton that could double as pajamas or in stretchy, thin things that could double as swimsuits, if they weren't so ratty and utilitarian. I look like a bedraggled character from a Dr. Seuss illustration. My clothes are mostly sweaty, my hair has gone mad, and I am usually stiff, bruised, or otherwise aching.

POSSIBLY STARTLING TRUTHS:
1. Ballet class remains hard, incredibly and painfully hard, about two decades after my first one.
2. Last week, I was very lazy. I had a light rehearsal schedule, so I skipped class on four days out of the possible seven. Still, I danced for twelve hours. And this is me being as slothful as I probably can without going on vacation. Usually, it's 30 hours or more.
3. All of this practice--class, rehearsal, being on stage--all of these hours and hours, thousands and thousands of them, add up to a certain level of skill that still leaves me working on such difficult things as Standing Up Properly.

Dance, for me, has lost its glamour. It's still beloved and beautiful, still capable of offering intellectual sparring, rapturous pleasure, and that particular satisfaction of time spent on something so worthwhile and good that you can't wish it had been allotted to anything else. But it has lost its slickness and soft unreality. I've lost the illusion that disconnects the magical, floating, impossible creatures onstage from the damp and unromantic confines of the studio.

It's a side effect of familiarity. Something like the sharpening of focus that takes place when you've known someone for years. It's intimacy in action and the exhaustion of mistruths. It's commitment and honesty and all that is good and solid and thrilling-yet-not. It's infinite possibility, and I am glad to have it. Even at the expense of glamour.

"I know now that I have not yet been in love."

Last Friday, I went with my sister and some friends to see Nederlands Dance Theater, one of the most famous and well-respected contemporary dance companies in the world. We went with high expectations. We wished to be thrilled, impressed, inspired, agog. We desired insensibility dealt by beauty. We wanted theater with capital letters.We wanted the only thing that you should want when you sit yourself down in the dark, velvet cradle, which is to be completely and generously not bored.

The shock of getting a wish granted is infrequent. How does it feel?

It feels affecting enough that you say things you might otherwise be embarrassed to air in ordinary life. Things like, "I know now that I have not yet been in love," which is exactly what one of my friends said while we stood in the lobby afterward, engaged in post-performance dissection. She said it with humor, of course, but not irony.

Art is a tool for understanding the world. It holds it still long enough so we can see it. And if a dance performance can make you understand a little more about something as vast and strange as love, even if you can't explain it, exactly, in words, then that makes the minutes spent (from such a finite store!) on a night at the theater worth it.

I want to change the world.

This hasn't been a lifelong ambition. I was never the kind of kid who wanted to be an astronaut or the President of the United States. I never wanted to be a doctor in an impoverished country, or an activist on a crusade. I never wanted to dream up technology. I never wanted to teach young children. I never wanted to be a knight in shining armor. I had no delusions about my chances of being heroic.

I was a self-possessed child, and I took it as a matter of course that I would throw my life, the whole kit and caboodle of it, after some sort of vocation, but only because I loved it. The world could go off to another room and close the door, for all I cared.

And now I find myself rather older and still committed to the things I fell in love with while young and impressionable, but haunted and obsessed by the need for it all to matter.

I can argue for why dance should matter and why stories so often do. It's easy to list the reasons for why you should go to the theater, why you should read a book. Pleasure, obviously. And beauty. The exercise of compassion, the shock of empathy, the way you are given transportation outside of your own experience and into the lives of others. An education in being a human being.

I can tell you, emphatically and with no equivocation, that the pursuit of dance and the pursuit of writing have made me a better person. They shaped my character, enforced ideals, and trained me to think with rigor and imagination. I would not change that education for any other... And, yet...

The last time I went to the theater, I saw an extravagant production featuring one of the most famous dancers in the world. I arrived early, so I went up to the cafe and had a cup of tea and leaned over the railing of the second floor promenade to watch people wander in across the lobby. They were all, almost without exception, older, obviously well-off, and spectacularly, breathtakingly bored. They seemed prepared to see something pretty, to have a cocktail, and to go home; there was so little expectation for anything more that I found myself uncomfortably depressed.

And now I find myself worrying, more than usual, about a person's responsibility to change the world. Is it right, is it good, is it a meaningful use of the privileges that I've been given if my life pursuits have such a narrow range of effect? I sometimes think about how much easier it would be, in certain ways, to go back to school, even this late in the game, and become something more clearly beneficial. Would I feel less conflicted about the minutes that I keep inexorably spending if I were a doctor, or lobbyist, or an investigative reporter?

It might be incredibly obnoxious to say that I want to change the world, but I do. Not necessarily in any grand or great or indelible way, but relevance seems like something we owe when we are so lucky as to do the things we love.

I so very badly want for this to be true.

on why dancing is like being a time lord

If you had asked me, perhaps when I was eight, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would probably have said:

"A zookeeper."

Or, maybe: "The person who swims with Shamu."

Or: "A paleontologist."

When I was about ten, I might have said, "veterinarian" or, "jockey."

When I was thirteen, it was a foregone conclusion, and the only thing I wanted to be was a dancer. I didn't want it desperately; I wanted it with steadfastness. It was the only thing I wanted to be, the only thing I could be, and the only thing I imagined I knew how to be. Everything else was either a pleasure, an irritation, or irrelevant.

I said no to lots of things. Horses, nice guys, invitations. A four-year scholarship to the University of California. Skis, hobbies, summer vacations. Dancing was so huge and complicated and wonderful that it took up all available space.

I sometimes wonder how I could possibly have been so sure, such an absolute and fervent believer.

***

I'm reading a book right now about memory. It makes the point that time seems to speed up as we get older because things are less new. We have done so many things for so long that our minds have less novelty to savor. The edges wear off and the seconds and minutes and days slide past us.

When dancing is going well, time does funny things. Sometimes it feels like the most perfect special effect. The suspended water drops. The muffled pause inside an explosion, with every piece of debris hanging still in midair. The only other time I've felt the same endless expansion was one evening when I drove down the freeway and a car in front of me lost control, spectacularly and ridiculously. It spun the way cars do in movies, actual elliptical twirls that carried it across the entire spread of lanes, first one way and then the other. It struck the central divider and pinwheeled off again, and everything looked so gentle and so inevitable that when it swung towards me, it seemed to drift along an obvious curve and I had all the time in the world to twitch my own car the smallest degree to the side and watch it slide past. Time suddenly opened up, every edge of it unfolding, like some sort of weird, reversed version of origami.

And that, I think, is one of the reasons why I still dance.

observations from the dance floor

So, last week I went dancing with some magnificent friends at this funny place that might be the illegitimate offspring of a rec center for retired hunters and a dive bar (skee ball, pool, taxidermy... loads and loads of taxidermy, arcade games, beer... loads and loads of beer, and a little kitchen making Southern food). The DJ was rubbish, but the dancing was a glory. I don't go dancing very often, but when I do, I mean it. One hundred percent, balls-to-the-walls, let's be ridiculous, three hours (but, oh my god, didn't that feel like 30 minutes?), sweat and jump and kick and shake, mean it. It's just so much fun. I feel like a kid running around outside and hollering just for the hell of it. Maybe I'm an airplane, maybe I'm a monster, but who cares?

And then I see people who are trying to be cool, or trying to be sexy, or sort of dancing, but not really, just kind of swaying so that they can still go hah, well aren't I silly? and I want to beg them to throw their dignity on the floor and just get on with it. Have some fun, it's good for you. Be silly, look me in the eye, don't worry about making a good impression, just move and listen and don't think.

***
Tuesday was the brilliant Chris's birthday, so I went along to birthday drinks. There was another birthday gathering there, a bunch of young people at the table next to ours. There was also this man, dancing. I don't know his name, but he comes into the bookstore sometimes and he has a disability. He is very large and middle-aged, but he acts like a child. He's gleeful, he stands too close, and he can talk for ages without filtering out repetitions or inappropriate things. He is deprived of the charm of a child though because of his size and his clumsiness and his obvious age.

He was dancing and singing and the people at the table next to ours were laughing and urging him on. They were videoing him on their phones and he kept saying, oh, you like my dancing, I'm so glad, and they kept saying nasty things to each other and then turning to him and saying, of course we like your dancing. Keep going. Ha ha ha! Look at him go, isn't that funny, isn't that the silliest piece of shit you've ever seen?

It broke my heart.

How are you supposed to feel in this situation? He's happy. They're amused. Neither party would appreciate my pity or anger. Why does it matter that they're laughing about different things? It's not like mean-spirited humor doesn't tickle me. I snark incessantly. This video puts me in stitches:



And still... It really upset me. Here was this guy dancing, going all out, saying here I am and this is me, and they were ridiculing him, yes, but that happens all the time... The thing is, they were pretending not to, so there he goes pinning more of his heart to his sleeve, and they just think it's the funniest thing, the stupidest thing, the most hilarious thing they've ever seen.

call me: exhibitionist

There are a whole bunch of reasons for why Hans Christian Andersen got it both uncomfortably right and incredibly wrong when he wrote up a story about red shoes. Right now, I want to consider this:

Have you ever said to someone, please, undress me? Turn me inside out. Look me in the eye for longer than is polite, or comfortable, or safe. Let's unfold those honest linens, the ones in the dusty chests piled under manners, niceties, the sheen of everyday. Diminish the distance to none. Let's have you be me and me be you, and we'll watch each other while we reach into this bag of shadows and pull out: a toad, a pebble, a long afternoon.

Put another way...

It's really difficult to lie and dance well. You're trying to say something without words, which are somehow easier because meaning doesn't have as much space to rattle around in when it's confined by words. It can't drift off, can't evoke quite as many unintended echoes. You can limit how much people see with words. Dancing well (at least, my current definition of well) is much more like inviting someone to see a clumsily edited montage of your entire life. You've done the best you can, but rogue fragments keep finding their way into the stream. They tell more than what you meant, though you're not sure how much. Your only defense is that the audience, the person with whom you're having this conversation, is (with any luck) being struck by astonishments of his own. Recognition and memory and all those things that make us feel anything when we experience some art, when we look at the (metaphorical) inside of another human being.

I can't get enough of this, on either end. It's a pleasure and a thrill. It's as much fun as running around in the rain, singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" at full blown, ridiculous volume. Trust me, I know.

thoughts on dancing together

Tonight, in the company of the lovely Emily, I went to see Smuin Ballet's 2009 Choreography Showcase. The performance was interesting for various reasons (more on that later), but Em and I started talking about dancing in the car, and now my brain is stuck on the thoughts we batted around.

When you're dancing with someone, and the dance is going well, it's at once the most pared down and the most textured, layered, and vulnerable kind of conversation that you can have. It's a physical thrill to crack yourself open and communicate everything inside to another person without having to confine any of it to the solid hallways of letters and words. You don't have to love them, or even like them, but for the space of a dance, you're stepping in each other, and it's a weird, vast kind of intimacy.

***
And, for some silhouetted, steamy goodness: The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello is pretty much wonderful.

conversations

Have recently been arguing with myself about art, about dancing in particular, and about what it is that I want most at this very moment. Self-indulgent, circular thoughts. But I ran across a quote, in Gourmet magazine of all places, that translates a Turkish saying as, "What the heart wants most is intimate conversation, the rest is an excuse."

And now that idea has exploded across my head, and I can't stop thinking about it. Sometimes, I think dance doesn't have that capacity, and sometimes I watch things like this and am all wrung out and confused.

I'm obsessed, and thinking round in a circle, and prone to pacing. Maybe I'll wear a hole through my floor and fall on my head, and then, like magic, everything will be clear when I wake up.

exactly not quite what i mean

Today I had the opportunity to answer some questions in a rather interview-ish format. One of the questions went along the lines of: "What do you want to achieve in dance? What about dance is important to you?" And I said something along the lines of how I want fluency of expression. Communication with people. Connecting with the audience and saying something honest. Rising above technical amazements. All these rather worn out turns of phrase and sentiment kept falling into my mouth. It's something I've said often, parroted back ever since one of my teachers (the extraordinarily beautiful Ms. Dunn) told me that dance is an art that only becomes meaningful when based on generosity.

Not that I don't believe this. I do, but I've spent the rest of the day thinking about this--injuries have a way of making you evaluate, constantly, the worth of dancing. Over and over again, weighing the drudgery of rehabilitation against the reward of dancing again. Is it worth it? starts off a train of arguments in my head at least ten times in a day-- and I realise that yes, I want to communicate ideas to other people, but the meat of it is what I feel when I'm dancing. That's what intoxicates me. I get satisfaction from other kinds of work. Writing, for instance, has moments of complete absorption. It can be thrilling and exciting and strange, but it's still a pleasure of workmanship for me. Dance is the only thing I know so far that gives me that visceral kick. It makes me feel different, extraordinary. I feel, inside me, the same species of gut and heart and mind vividness that I can sense in poetry and music.






In one of Jasper Fforde's books, a character describes poetry as the "crack-cocaine of the literary world." That's what I feel like when I'm dancing well. I bypass the process of consuming and understanding the art and go straight to wherever it is-- solar plexus, soul, whatever--where you experience those aches of feeling so commonly described in drama, but so rarely felt to that sheer degree in real life.


Chasing that is what means the most to me in dancing. Of course, I want to make other people feel too. If they can have at least a morsel of that same shock of sensation, then I'll feel I'm doing a useful thing. I'm selfish though and the thing that keeps me dancing at all is that greed for feeling.

That's what I really meant. It makes me sound like an addictive personality, doesn't it? Lucky I haven't latched onto any dangerous and illicit substances.

And now, to calm my hyper-ventilating dance indignation organ, I'm going to watch Doctor Who. My first Tom Baker episode. It's called GENESIS OF THE DALEKS, which seems promising.