Cross-Training

     

In high school, I remember running into a good friend (who was not a dancer) on my way into a cardio class at the gym. 

     "Why do you need to workout?" she asked. "Don't you already dance a jazillion hours a day?"

     

     Exchanging stories with professional and pre-professional dancers, I discovered that questions like these from  non-dancing "normies" are pretty common. Why would we want to drag our already worn-out bodies to extra fitnesses classes or workouts? Don't we burn enough calories in ballet class? Athletes typically understand that, for dancers, it's not (or shouldn't be) about exercising more--it's about exercising differently. 

    Cross-training with moderate weight lifting and classes like Pilates and Yoga complement dancer's training by strengthening muscles that don't get enough attention in daily dance classes. And since most ballet, jazz and modern classes are anaerobic--requiring bursts of high-intensity movement followed by rest periods--cardiovascular exercises are necessary to build the endurance we need to perform full-length shows and long variations. 

    Throughout most of high school, I was a cross-training nut. I ran on the elliptical for at least an hour daily, swam, and took Pilates classes several times a week in addition to my dance classes, rehearsals and performances. Unfortunately, I didn't do it with a healthy attitude--I was more focused on burning extra calories and keeping my weight down than protecting those muscles, ligaments and joints. Instead of improving my endurance levels, I exhausted my body so much that I could barely get through a petite allegro combination.  By the time I got to New York City I was so burnt out on the whole body-image obsession that I let my non-dancing exercise routine fall completely by the wayside, almost in protest. I also noticed that a lot of dancers I met "cross-trained" for similar reasons that I did: to look skinnier, to "get ripped", to get an edge on the competition. 

     On the other end of the spectrum are those who ignore body conditioning for a different kind of over-training. I see this trend among ballet dancers especially. Ballerinas tend to be single-minded by nature and are taught that the more classes they take, the better they will be. This is true to some extent. The only way to get better at ballet is by--surprise!-- taking ballet. 

     But there's a limit.

     By working the same muscles over and over again with no variation, you set yourself up for fatigue, injury and burnout. Everyone's body responds differently to various training methods, but find a balance between the extremes of over training, over exercising, and never exercising was one of the best things I ever did for my body and my dancing. 

    As a younger dancer, I saw my ballet technique improve when I added modern, jazz and occasional tap classes to my regimen, in addition to Pilates. My dancing became less tense, my extensions improved, and my balance became rock-solid. (Okay, "rock-solid" is an exaggeration, but it definitely improved!) Teachers noticed more height in my jumps and better phrasing in my petite allegro (thank you, tap). In the past year or so, I've found that regular cross-training yields similar improvements for my dancing overall, not to mention my mood. Rather than the obsessive exercising of my teen years, I now workout to improve my overall sense of wellness and to keep my body working while giving it a little break from the never ending series of battements and jetés still in my future. Plus the endorphins are awesome.

   I'm incredibly interested in dancer fitness at the moment and I want to know: 

   How do you cross-train? Have you noticed a difference in your dancing? 

A Very Long Walk

"When you’re writing, it’s rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe you up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it’s got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you’ve done all ties up. But it’s a very, very long, slow process."

-Roald Dahl

I am on a very long walk right now. 

      

Striking a Balance: Physicality versus Creativity

It's no secret that dancers strive to keep their bodies in top physical condition. The incredible athleticism demanded of dancers tempts dancers and dance fans alike to insist "dance is a sport!" I submit that art can be just as demanding on the body, mind and soul as sport--in some cases, even more so. The way I see it, dance is an athletic art, demanding the rigorous physical discipline of athletes as well as the creative capacity of painters, writers and actors. Sometimes it's a struggle between mind and body--as we constantly assess ourselves in the mirror it is easy to get stuck there, to forget that dancing is more about our technical execution of the steps or the size of our thighs. Such carelessness results in "robot dancers" and tricksters--dancers who have all the right physical capabilities but lack the imagination necessary to bring art to life on stage. 

 Growing up, I felt no reserve on stage. I loved pretending to be someone else on stage, transmitting stories and ideas through the near-sacred junction of music and movement. I struggled with the technical side of the art. True, I was blessed with natural coordination and musicality, but my body was naturally inflexible, flat-footed and stumpy. Luckily, beginning ballet at such a young age magically molded decent (though by no-means incredible) arches into my feet while focus and discipline helped me gain the technical strength I needed. By my late teens my whole situation had flip-flopped: I was so concentrated on my technique that my performing became more reserved, safer, boring. 

  Since then, I've struggled daily in finding the right balance. Maybe balance isn't the right word--maybe it's about extremes: extreme technique AND extreme artistry. That's what makes dancers memorable. But how can we achieve that? I used to think the answer was to help students develop artistry at a younger age. Most teachers don't begin working with students on the artistic and creative side of their dancing until adolescents, which is also the time students become the most self-conscious. As I teach classes of my own, I wonder how to integrate elements of acting into the ballet curriculum without 1) teaching a full-blown pantomime class or 2) distracting students from the technical foundation that is so important in early training.

What do you think? Should instructors bring artistry into the classroom earlier? If so, how?

Connected to Art: Dance Online

   

   I can’t pretend to remember a world without the internet. Even in kindergarten I went to “computer” class to play KidPics and make my own “world wide web page” complete with glowing hot pink comic sans font. In the days B.G. (Before Google), I used Yahoo! Search to find Harry Potter fan pages and the American Girl website. Still, with all my pre-pubescent millennial generation knowledge of https and hyperlinks, I remember very clearly when dance wasn’t online.

    The “real” dance world, the world of professional dancers and elite ballet companies, seemed impossibly distant to me, an overly-ambitious nine year old practicing pliés and tendus at a small studio in South Texas. I checked out video tapes (remember those?) of Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake from the library, and recorded every version of Nutcracker that aired on PBS in the month of December. Those perfect ballerinas in their glistening tiaras and pristine pointe shoes* were entirely otherworldly, human only in theory. Together the music and movement magically transformed those girls into Dancers. I longed to become one of them, but I wasn’t quite sure how. When in my long years of training would the transformation from dancer to Dancer be complete? At twelve, at fifteen, at the ancient-to-me age of eighteen? How many fatigued muscles, frustrating classes, and fractured ankles would it take for me to transcend my humanness?

    Something shifted in my awareness of “real” Dancers when I received my first issue of Dance magazine. I read interviews with the dancers I watched on video tapes, the choreographers whose names I’d heard whispered reverently by my instructors or fellow dancers. News about dance companies, shows, and schools made me feel connected to this world. I realized that there was no such thing as a Dancer—they were all just dancers, regular people surrendered to an art form larger than themselves. Suddenly, the reality of dancers-as-people became immensely more thrilling than the abstract form of Dancer. I eagerly awaited the arrival of Dance every month and added subscriptions to Dance Spirit and Pointe when it arrived on the scene a couple of years later. I purchased and checked out piles of dancer biographies and read them in one sitting each.The humanness of dancers made the ethereality of their performances all the more alluring. Print publications connected me to that humanness, made me feel a part of it all.

     These days, dance lovers no longer need to wait at the mailbox for the arrival of the latest pile of dance magazines. Dance blogs like The Winger regularly feature behind-the-scenes looks at dancer's lives while others feature company news and gossip. Choreographers upload reels and rehearsal footage to YouTube, and ballerinas have Twitter accounts. Much has been made lately of the new move by certain companies to draw back the curtain of mystery surrounding ballerinas. New York City Ballet recently began the practice of inviting the audience to ask questions of a company dancer before or after performances. Dancers blog and tweet and stay connected with fans and admirers in a more immediate way than ever before. In my opinion, this is a natural extension of the role than print journalism played in past decades. In an age when information can be shared more rapidly than ever, the escalation of audience’s desire for more information is organic.  Reminding audiences and young dancers that their favorite ballerinas are human too can only be a good thing. I think a sense of familiarity towards dancers increases our interest in their careers, and (hopefully) will nudge us as a culture toward spending more time (and yeah, money) at live dance performances.

    I wonder, however, how print dance journalism is affected by the dance world’s leap onto the internet. Will hard copy dance magazines become obsolete in the next decade?  For the sake of preserving the monthly Christmas feeling of finding a new Dance magazine in my mailbox, I hope not. 


*Little did I know they were actually little satin pink torture chambers 

Counting Down With Dance: Darci, Chris, and Black Swan

   Moving on to the dance community at large, it's difficult to pick just a handful of noteworthy headlines this year. Maybe I've just been paying a lot more attention due to the nature of my internship, but I know that no matter how I choose which items to write about someone will say "why not x?" or "you forgot y!" While choosing today's items I focused on the ballet world.

1. Darci Kistler's Retirement

     With Darci's final bow, New York City Ballet became completely Peter Martins-fied (*cue music in minor key*). Prior to her retirement in June of this year, Darci held fast as the last remaining dancer at City Ballet to be hired by George Balanchine himself. Her final performance last June marked the end of an incredibly long (by ballet standards) and illustrious career, but also a kind of end of an era. Although Martins has been at the helm of NYCB since 1983, I felt like some remnant of the Balanchine era still remained with the presence of dancers who had been trained by Mr. B. Although Balanchine's method of training continues at SAB (supposedly. . .) and his ballets continue to delight, intrigue, and confuse audiences around the world,  there's a growing disconnect between the master and the ballet's dancers now. With all the effort put into preserving his ballets and method, I can't help but feel like we're too caught up trying to "do" Balanchine, or cling to bygone era. Darci's farewell also held special significance to me because her book Ballerina inspired me to pursue ballet as a career. I went through a phase where I was obsessed with her and City Ballet and all things Balanchine. Even though I never ended up becoming a Balanchine ballerina like nine-year-old me always dreamed, that book and the Balanchine legacy shaped the trajectory of my training and career.

2. Christopher Wheeldon Leaves His Own Company

     Christopher Wheeldon formed Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company in 2006 only to resign as artistic director in February 2010. His departure caused quite a bit of drama, but as a complete outsider I don't feel I have any authority to comment on the situation other than that it didn't make Wheeldon or Morphoses' executive director Lourdes Lopez look very good. The company has since adapted a curatorial model which, to me, is code for "little artistic stability." Morphoses has kept on keeping on this season, but I'm interested to see how they fare without Wheeldon's name attached--not that they need it. The company has some of the best dancers in the industry and I've so enjoyed their performances in the past, I hope they continue to grow and bring new life to ballet.

3. Black Swan Makes Ballet Scary and a Little Perverse

     If you've mentioned ballet at a party any time in the last few weeks, someone probably brought up Black Swan, the new Darren Aronofsky psychological thriller. So many people asked me to comment on it "from a dancers' perspective" but honestly I don't feel like there's much to say. It was well done and a fairly accurate, albeit exaggerated, portrayal of the "subtle head-trips"  (as Wendy Whelan eloquently commented) dancers must often tackle on a daily basis. I found the relationship between Nina and other company members a little unbelievable--as competitive as the ballet world is, as my friend Ellen commented, your company becomes like your family. Often, only your fellow company members understand what you're going through and in my experience that creates a bond like no other. I also found the movie itself borderline pornographic and came very close to walking out of the theater. Even with its negative portrayal of the ballet world Black Swan seems to have made people take notice of ballet again. Hopefully we'll see an increase in ballet attendance next year and an economic boost for national and regional companies.
       I only wish we didn't need sex and blood to make ballet intriguing again.

Goodbye, NYC

Today I finished the last work of my collegiate career. Tomorrow I leave the city I've called home for nearly four years. I became an adult here. I learned to live outside of a dance studio here, and as a result developed more as an artist than I ever expected (at least I like to think so). At some point over the Christmas break I might do a more thorough reflective post about how NYC changed me as a dancer and a person, but for now this video sums up my feelings pretty well:

Life Happens

   I'm saying "goodbye" to New York City in just a few short weeks. It's crazy how quickly life is changing: I finish college in 15 days, my husband begins college next month, and we'll be starting 2011 in a whole new town! Life in rural southwestern New York state will definitely be different, and exciting, but according to weather forecasts,  it will mostly just be very, very cold.
  One of the things I'll miss most after we move is In-Sight Dance Company. I've been so fortunate to perform and teach with them for the past six months. Keep an eye on this company because they're sure to continue growing, creating, and influencing the arts community in New York City and beyond. I feel like all I do on this blog is gush about how awesome In-Sight's artists and board members are, but it's all true and they deserve much gushing.
  As far as dancing is concerned, I plan to continue training upstate and hopefully teaching as well. Teaching is something I've really come to love in the last couple of years. I imagine I'll make it into the city fairly regularly for auditions, performances, and classes with my favorite teachers. Spring is a busy season in the dance world and I'll soon be busy sending out audition reels and cover letters to companies I admire!

. Of course, I'll keep updating Dancin' Words with news and thoughts about tutus, tights, the dance world and the arts.