The End of Art

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the role art plays in our lives.
For most of my life, I viewed my art--dance--as an end in itself. Like many dancers, I would sacrifice anything for the sake of my art. It was the nexus around which everything else in my life revolved. To me, it was a god.
In NYC, my tendency toward art-worship was encouraged by the city's professional dance scene. But something about the world I loved started rubbing me the wrong way. I started to see what idolatry of art was doing to artists. It became increasingly more painful to see so many gifted, driven artists who derived their self-worth only from their ability to create the art that they loved. If they couldn't serve their "god" the way the art said they should, they felt worthless. A few (too many) used the art as what I see as a kind of self-worship. They loved themselves in the art and with the right job, the right people, the right status, they felt like failures. Often these people (myself included) completely run themselves into the ground or worse--run others into the ground in the competitive show business marketplace.
Against all odds, my time in NYC brought me closer to the one true God. Even immersed in a dance world that encouraged the idolatry of the arts, God brought me back to Him. He became the center of my life. Well, most of it. During my week at Ad Deum Dance's spring intensive last month, I realized that I'd given every part of my life to the Lord, except one--dance. Since that week, I've started seeing dance and writing as means of communication with God, glorifying Him, showing Him to others. For so long my dancing was focused on my goals for my life. It was all about me. Now I'm learning to give it back to Him, to see art as a tool, not as a god.
I really admire artists of all faiths and personal convictions who use their art for a purpose greater than themselves. Be one of them. Make a difference.

A New Way to Learn

It's been a whirlwind month of writing, traveling, dancing, auditioning, nursing sore muscles and reading like crazy.
This is a strange time in my life--a time I never thought I'd experience. In many ways, my life is restricted by my remote, isolated, constantly snowy location on old Native American burial grounds (The Shining, anyone?) but in other ways, I'm freer than I've ever been. For the first time, I am not a formal student. For the first time, I have moderately consistent work that is mobile. For the first time I have no concrete plans and virtually endless potential pathways stretched out before me.
All talk of dance jobs and my frustration in that arena aside, I think I've grown more in these first months of 2011 than I did in my entire four years of college. Stepping outside of the world of academics, the cut-throat NYC dance scene, the by-the-skin-of-your-teeth city lifestyle helped me learn how to learn again, if that makes any sense.
 Instead of focusing on perfection in each dance class, I aim to discover something new about movement, about the way my own body cuts through space.
Instead of struggling through assigned essays and novels, I spend voluntary hours poring over books in the exhaustive religious studies section of the Houghton library. Also I read silly historical fiction and crime novels, because I can.
Graham's sheer enthusiasm for the subjects he's studying (philosophy and theology) make me excited about them too. However, unlike Graham who can't fall asleep until he's read passages from his "Metaphysics, Morality and Mind" textbook, I have my limits. :-) Last weekend my father-in-law and I actually had to place a moratorium on any further discussions of the Euthyphro dilemma. At the end of that car ride I turned to Graham and quoted one of my favorite John Green books, An Abundance of Katherines: "You are such a geek. And that's coming from an overweight 'Star Trek' fan who scored a five on the AP Calculus test. So you know your condition is grave."

So basically, I'm happy. As much as I miss New York City, I'm glad we moved. There are a hundred things I would change about my life, but none of them are important and none of them would bring me any greater joy.

Facing Our Fears

Is failure your biggest fear?

It's mine. 

Both dancers and writers we possess an all-encompassing kind of artistic perfectionism,  the kind that plants seeds of devilish obsession, doubt and fear in our self-critical minds. The gothic heart of Black Swan pumps the blood of overblown ballet stereotypes along with unfortunate truths about the dance world  to sustain film's chilling plot. But beyond sprouting wings and attempting to murder fellow company members, dancers have to struggle daily against their own worst fears- that they aren't enough, that they won't make it, that they will fail.

    My own crippling fear of failure nearly destroyed me--as a person and a dancer--several times. I can't pretend I've found the perfect method of dealing with incessant perfectionism or self-doubt, but a quote from this interview with the incredible Jenifer Ringer made me take pause. Ms. Ringer, a principal with the New York City Ballet, made headlines last December when New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay noted that Ringer "looked as thought she'd eaten one sugar plum too many" in his review of City Ballet's "Nutcracker." Macaulay's remark caused an uproar in media and on dance blogs everywhere. Ringer remains open about her past struggles with eating disorders and responded to the critic gracefully both on the Today Show and Oprah: 

     

 "My first thought was, 'It's happened. My worst nightmare. Somebody has called me heavy in the press and lots of people are going to read about it.' But then my next thought was, 'It's happened and I'm okay and I'm fine the way I am and I have survived it.' I think it's just because I had gone through my eating disorders, I had gone through depression, I had lost dance for a while because of my eating disorders."

-Jenifer Ringer (From Oprah.com, emphasis mine)

    Jeni faced her "worst nightmare." And she's okay. What if spending our lives suppressing our fears, we were able to face them, acknowledge them, and move on? If our worst nightmares came true, could we even use them as a launching pad? In J.K. Rowling's 2008 Harvard commencement speech (Do I quote this too much? Maybe.) she discusses the fringe benefits of failure, how rock bottom was a place of new beginnings for her. Both Rowling and Ringer (when she first left NYCB and after Macaulay's comments) found themselves in nightmarish situations. Others might have wallowed in self-pity, used failure as an excuse to quit trying, to forget about their dreams. Instead, these women found power in failure. They faced their fear, acknowledged their nightmares, and kept making art. 

Will you do the same? 

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