Tag Archives: Ballet

Footage Friday: Muscle Memory

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This is the third video in the creative collaboration series that my friend Marsha and I are working on (you can see the first 2 here and here).

When Marsha sent me this piece, I had to smile. It took me back more than a decade.

Long, long ago, when we were teenagers (I think…I’m bad with chronology), Marsha and I were both training intensively in our chosen art forms. She practiced increasingly complex and beautiful pieces of music on the piano, and I practiced increasingly complex and beautiful steps in ballet class.

And when we hung out at her house, we had a ritual of going into the play room where the piano was. She would play through her pieces, and I would stand in the small rectangle of open space behind her and dance. I’ve lost a lot of memories from my childhood, but this one remains a treasured favourite.

Marsha went home over Easter weekend, and she recorded this piece on the very same piano she used to play on when we’d dance and play together. And this video is my response.

I call this piece “Muscle Memory” because I started out with the idea of doing a very “balletic” dance (and you can see how the dance begins and ends that way). I wanted to see if I could still capture the essence and feeling of the dances I used to do in the play room, having not taken a ballet class in 8 years.

I think I managed it…but it wasn’t very comfortable (physically as well as emotionally—the inside of my right knee did NOT enjoy my attempts at turnout). And I couldn’t sustain it for the whole piece. I still like the end result, though. It’s more Meg-now than Meg-then, but it still, I hope, pays homage to the young girls in the play room.

Thank you, Marsha, for a beautiful piece, and for the great memories. <3

 

The problem with pirouettes (a ballet parable)

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Back when I was a bunhead, I developed a huge block when it came to pirouettes. They were the bane of my existence. I could do a single turn with very little trouble, but when it came to double turns, forget it.

I couldn’t get enough momentum for multiple turns while still keeping the correct form, and when I did make it around, I would be so startled that I would fall out of the turn.

(Here is an amazing turner. Which I was not)

My teacher, obviously, wanted me to be able to overcome my block. She was training me to be a professional ballerina, and multiple pirouettes are a basic requirement. She found my block intensely frustrating…

…and she let me know it.

“Single turns are unacceptable!” she would snap, “DO IT AGAIN.” I would try, and fail, and she would sigh in a way that made me feel about 2 inches tall. “No. Do it again,” she would growl, seeming to tower over me.

…It occurs to me in hindsight that she was actually several inches shorter than me by this point, but she seemed very, very tall.

But no matter how much she yelled, how many hundred times we did the exercises, how frustrated we both got, my turns, if anything, got worse.

When I went away to study at Walnut Hill, I was astounded. My teachers sensed my desire to improve, and they empathize with my frustration and self-criticism. They offered suggestions based on their experience, and if their initial suggestions didn’t help, they thought outside the box. For example, one teacher suggested that toning my core muscles and my arms would help my turns, and that made a huge difference.

Their approach slowly helped me realize that, while pirouettes were definitely a problem area for me, that was OK. Dancers have strengths and weaknesses. It didn’t mean I was hopeless, it just meant that I needed to work on that particular area even more. It was OK to fall, so long as I got back up and tried again.

The best teachers know that yelling and threats only make a challenge seem more scary. Instead of losing patience and screaming, they say something closer to “It’s OK. I see that you *insert problem here* Why don’t you try again and this time *insert possible solution*?” I’m not just talking about ballet here either.

I did manage to do consistent doubles (on the right side, at least) by the time I’d spent a year with the teachers at Walnut Hill. Their multiple viewpoints and corrections -coupled with the fact that not one of them ever lost patience or yelled at me- helped me to work through the block and make progress (although I admit that I dreaded pirouettes for the rest of my time in ballet class).

I’m telling this story for a reason, of course.

When you’re trying something new and you can’t quite get it, what approach do you take with yourself? Do you mentally tell yourself off, shaking your head at your own incompetence and your sub-par performance? Or do you dust yourself off, acknowledge your feelings of frustration, try to see the problem from another angle, and try again ?

So often I find I’m stuck in Option 1. The kinder option is always the better one. We just need to remember that it’s there.

Opening the Door To The Past: When things aren’t working, try something new

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about opening the door to the past, and how I finally felt ready to do it. And then…nothing. I couldn’t write a post I felt happy with. It was so frustrating. But now I know why.

We all have memories which stand out, etched in perfect clarity, like video clips that loop in our mind. And every time I tried to write about my mid-teenage years, I would get stuck in this one loop. It goes something like this:

  • Standing in a ballet class in utter misery, feeling nothing but helpless.
  • Dancing through tears, silently begging my mom to come and save me.
  • Slapping myself -HARD- across the face out of sheer self-disgust.
  • Dancing with the flu, with streaming colds, with injuries because I was too scared to say no. Ignoring my body’s screams for rest and care because I was afraid of getting in trouble.
  • Going to auditions for teacher-approved schools that I wasn’t remotely interested in, and being so terrified that I could barely dance at all.
  • Being yelled at. A lot.
  • Pushing everything down. The rage. The pain. The sadness. The self-hatred.

(Just in case you assumed that a person who believes that everyone is a dancer must necessarily have no issues with dance…)

Over and over, around and around these memories went, keeping me from writing, keeping me from moving forward. It’s been this way for years. They’re stories of powerlessness and victimhood and smallness. I didn’t know how to make them into something constructive. And I kept thinking to myself:

I am so very, very tired of this.

So I let it go for a while. And the other day I sat down and did some journalling about these memories, this well of rage and pain and grief that sits in my gut. And I discovered something interesting: in the past month, my reaction to those memories has gone from “Oh, poor, victimized me” to “Yes, it sucked. A lot. But, you know, I could have said no, changed schools, or made my mom understand what was really going on. I know why I didn’t, but technically I could have.”

And I don’t mean it in a self-blaming kind of way. It’s more a realization of the options that were there. Yes, I felt small and helpless and completely victimized by someone who I’d known since I was tiny. Yes, I thought -because I was taught it- that this suffering was Just The Way It Was in Ballet. You Suffered For Your Art.

But I could have escaped from it. Even if ballet had been the right thing for me, this particular path wasn’t the only way.

Look at that list of memories. Those are not things that were done to me (OK, the screaming was, but nothing else was). Those are things I did in reaction to my situation. I mean, did someone else slap me across the face? No. I DID IT TO MYSELF.


All of that pain, all of that rage and frustration and grief and self-loathing and seething resentment? All of those memories? I participated in their formation. And that’s not something I’ve ever thought about before.

I’m realizing that, even though I didn’t use it, and even though I couldn’t see it, I had power in those situations. I had a choice. Something about that knowledge helps. And now I can finally write about it.

Earlier this year, Goddess Leonie posted a video that changed my life. In it, she said “if things aren’t working, try something new.” She was talking about business. But really, that can apply to anything. If things start to suck, you can either 1) keep slogging away at the same old crap and getting more and more frustrated…or 2) you can try something new.

It’s not about giving up when the going gets tough. It’s about knowing the difference between a challenge and a glaring sign that you are not on the right path. Those memories I’ve been cycling through? Those were signs that things weren’t working. And no matter how hard I worked, or how many hours a week I danced, or how many colds I ignored, things still weren’t going to work. I stuck with option #1 for years, and it SUCKED.

But now I can look at those memories and think “You know what? Screw that. From now on, I choose option #2.” Trust me, slapping yourself across the face? It’s about as fun as you think it is. Slamming away at a blog post that’s just not working? Also not fun (though significantly less physically painful).

There are better ways to live.

Is there any part of your life where you’re beating your head against a brick wall instead of walking through the door six feet to the left? Why not try something new instead?