Blood, Sweat, and Tears: A Panegyric

This post is dedicated to some of the hardest-working people I know and some of my dearest friends: my fellow dancers.  Yes, we are amateurs, but we are also passionate about ballet, and particularly during rehearsal season it often feels as if we live at the studio.  From the days when you feel light as a feather, to the evenings you can hardly move, to the nights when you've danced so long that your brain starts bouncing around like a drunken circus clown...you spend it all with the same people, and in the end they come to know you in a way few other people can.  There is a bond which grows when you've sweated and laughed and cried and bled side by side with someone.  For me, I always feel that with those people I hold no secrets.  I mean, there may be details about events in my life they don't know about, but of myself, my intrinsic me-ness, there is nothing hidden.  They've seen me at my worst and at my best.  My friend Jocelyn and I used to say that you had to be yourself in class because it is impossible to hide anything under those clothes.  I believe that statement began in a physical sense, in reference to some people's use of padding on certain parts of the anatomy, but it works in the psychological sense as well. :-)


Martha Graham said that "movement never lies" and I've found that to be true.  You can lie to yourself and others, but it is your body that gives you away.  Everybody can feel this, in a blush, in goosebumps, in hands that shake when the mind is gripped by fear.  In a dancer this is magnified.  You cannot sit on your hands to hide the shaking.  You must use your hands, your arms, your legs, every part of you, and in doing so you bare your soul to the audience. If you try to hide it, half your energy will be spent in the hiding and much of the beauty will be lost.


After a time you just love it.  Sometimes you can't remember why, but you don't want to be anywhere else.  And there is always that moment.  The dance is finished, your heart is racing, you've completed the last step, and there is a moment of silence before the audience begins to applaud.  All the best parts of living are contained in that moment.  You've fought, you've sacrificed, and now you've won.


So I would like to raise a glass to some amazing fellow dancers, past and present, and to our incredible (and incredibly demanding) teacher, Ann Marie Benedict.  Here's to another year of striving for an unachievable perfection; another year of blood, sweat, and tears; another year of camaraderie and laughter.  Here's to life, and dance.

That Crazy Time of Year

So this is it, the beginning of the mad, fun, grueling, wonderful rehearsal season, when we pretend to be real ballerinas and not just small-time slaves of Terpsichore.  Actually, we've been rehearsing one piece through February for a fundraiser at the end of the month, but the real excitement starts in March, when we begin to learn all the choreography and start working to bring the show together. 


Here I really must say something about my teacher, Ann Marie Benedict, because just the fact that Chewelah possesses such a gem is amazing.  In her youth she danced with a company in Los Angeles under the direction of Eugene Loring.  She never talks much about herself, but the stories she does tell from that time are fascinating.  She's been teaching ballet in Chewelah for over twenty-five years now.  I've been her student for twenty of them.  She is by far the greatest slave-driver I have ever encountered, and we love her for it.  It is easy, in a small town without much competition for quality, to become content with "good enough".  She has never allowed us to relax into a false sense of self-satisfaction, but always urges us to improve on what we did before -- to jump higher, balance longer, turn the double into a triple, express ourselves more.  Most important, she has passed on to us her passion for art in all its forms.


Our show this year will be on May 22nd, in Colville, Colville being the nearest town that actually has an auditorium.  One of the many challenges Ann has faced over the years is a severe lack of facilities.  Our classes and rehearsals are held in a dirty old gymnasium, and even though we have the space reserved months in advance, we are ousted whenever they need somewhere to have a blood drive, or rehearse a play.  However, plans have lately gone into motion for an actual dance studio, which would be the biggest step forward in years.  There is also the ongoing challenge of making ballet accessible to the inhabitants of a small town whose exposure to it often consists solely of multiple viewings of "Barbie in Swan Lake" with their very young daughters.  Chewelah does have a surprisingly strong core community of artists.  But there are certainly plenty of the other.


I like to think that these various obstacles have made us all stronger, more interesting dancers than we would have been otherwise.  In all events, they have certainly made us stubborn, determined, and maybe just a wee bit pugnacious.