Today Monday I am recovering from a weekend of my young ballet students’ marathon matinee shows that kept us all in the theater till night. This yearly event is a necessary (and grueling!) step to initiate young dancers to the world of performance. While I usually create dances contemporary in nature this year we were asked to choreograph a children’s tale. Because of my experience as a ballet dancer in classic three act extravaganzas such as Giselle, Don Quixote and Swan Lake, I chose to set the Sleeping Beauty on them, a 22 minutes version of it (with the help of my colleague Kim Whittam).

As I was creating this piece, greatly inspired from Nureyev’s version, I questioned what I have been able to bring to my students’ experience of dance. I rediscovered the richness of my training and the pourquoi of all these set of rules, which are so natural to me that I was surprised I had to teach them. The regal carriage needed to carry off the roles of the fairy tale characters, complete with tutus, tiaras, royal entrances and divertissements, is an important lesson in classical dance. You bow to the Queen, never turn your back to the audience, walk elegantly to your assigned spots, respond to the action onstage, stay in line, and create tableaux vivants, all part of a tradition I once rejected as passé. And yet this is very much part of me I realized, with the ease I discovered in creating the short piece, with the wonderful Tchaikovsky music is as a natural lead.

These tales I once dismissed as girlie contain powerful archetypes and this was my inspiration while setting the piece. Sleeping Beauty’s story is rich with three dimensional characters such as the evil Carabosse and her posse of minions, the young innocent princess Aurora, the Queen mother and Prince Charming of course. I enjoyed watching over time the older dancers slowly embodying their spirits and becoming actors on stage, carrying the plot line with aplomb. Our Aurora, a self-proclaimed tomboy, struggled successfully with conveying lightness and delicacy. Our prince, a contemporary dancer in his mind, wore the requisite tights and found he was able to carry off very well the intricate allegro steps and a regal stance. Our other male student partnered the fairies and learned to look poised when there were few steps to hide behind. Carabosse, who had little dancing, was the backbone of the story and rose to the challenge of standing on stage and relying on pure presence to fill it.

You learn to embody these archetypes, and if you do not have the opportunity to dance these roles yourself, just because you have to stand throughout these story lines, you are witness to others rendering their interpretation of these characters. You learn by watching, whether you want it or not. So with this realization I feel at peace about all those long evenings where I paid my dues on stage, standing with aching feet in pointe shoes, feeling like pure decoration, watching the soloists attempting their best at these roles. I was learning.

What we are really interested in are masterpieces of humanity.

-Alonzo King-

I had the pleasure of this quote being sent to me today by one of my dance students. She found it appropriate as I had mentioned his name this morning while teaching my open ballet class, talking of one of the most important things I learned while very briefly studying with him in San Francisco. I was a young burnt-out dancer, on a grant that I had auditioned for in the last ditch effort to see if dance would have me as a member of its constituency. In his class I realized that I love dance, just not always the politics. And so I am here, renewed still when I was once broken, in love with dance.

I was trying to explain to these dancers that, within what seems to be the strict rules of classical dance, creativity is an essential element to being a dance artists. This creativity can be sought in many different ways, in how the music is used, the movement dynamics explored and exploited, in the little details that allow us to put our own stamp on what appears to be just another exercise.

Perhaps the quest to master the body is overwhelming at times that we get stuck in the simple execution of the steps, of figuring out what comes next and just hoping to get through it without falling over or worse still, making a mistake. What I learnt in Alonso’s classes I still carry with me. Perhaps I was ripe for the information. I remember standing behind one of his dancer, Summer Lee Rhatigan, wondering how she would finish that rond de jambe in time with the music. What she was doing was not exactly the straight forward barre exercise I would reproduce to please my teacher. She was putting her own stamp on it, playing with the musicality in an extraordinary and by my well trained standards, creative way. I was amazed to see her finish in time with the last note. Funny how that such a small moment in a dancer’s life can transform one’s practice.

The bodies in that class were of many different shapes, not always the aesthetic ideal of what ballet typically demands. And yet they could dance, really dance. You forgot that they, hum, might not what you prize so much as a budding ballerina, the physical perfection. That too was a aha! moment for me, the realization that my focus on what I did not have (and for a ballet dancer the list can be long!) was detracting me from the real work involved. I was on the road to recovery, making my own beauty, celebrating our God given right to create. That is when I started to lose myself in the art, finding refuge in the daily meditation of dance practice, knowing that I will never be perfect but perfectly beautiful in my own way.

I am sipping coffee in Antwerp, in the living room of Wim Vanlessen, dancer of the Royal Ballet of Flanders and good friend, whom I am visiting while in Europe. It is a pleasure to be here and I watch him go about his routine, reminded of life as a dancer, the rituals, the preparation for class, the taking of various vitamins and homeopathic supplements, nothing else today although there is a Voltaren patch in the fridge for those days of inflammation states.  He might be a principal dancer and his life might seem glamorous to the outside eye (he just flew back from Milan) but I know how physically demanding it is. Not for the faint of heart. He is seen here performing David Dawson’s A Sweet Spell of Oblivion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eHY5dDTXn8. In his early thirties he is already contemplating  with bittersweet emotion how to best spend his last years as a dancer, driven to extract the most out of a career that will not forgive the fading of physical prowess. Paradoxically with the years of experience comes an emergence of wisdom. I am watching him with much interest, curious to see which path he will choose when the time comes to bow out.

I will be watching rehearsal later but right now I am preparing to travel to The Hague later today for the annual International Association of Dance Medicine and Science conference. I have been making my yearly pilgrimage to this event whenever it was possible, enriching my teaching practice and stimulating my brain. This time I will be presenting myself, the results of my study on how to teach dancers to become more powerful learners. I am spending a lot of time refining my words, so that I may reduce the results of months of work into a 10 minute presentation. Not for the faint of heart either.