From The Archives: 11.8.2021

An entry salvaged from the archives of my previous blog, originally posted on November 8, 2021.

A third dance instructor has now had a serious chat with me about No Really, You Should Be In My Class. Just to be clear, none of these people are getting any money out of me. I work for the studio, and they're required to allow a certain minimum number of us to attend for free, as part of their rental contract. There's no clause that says they have to actively solicit the comps, though, and most of them are perfectly happy to just wait until someone asks. If anything, I'd be taking up a spot that could be sold to a paying client if the class gets full.

Also to be clear, it's not like the entire studio is beating a path to my door. There are lots of teachers that rent space there, and since I fill in at the desk at odd hours I've talked to almost all of them at one time or another. They're generally friendly as people, but indifferent to me as artists, as they work well outside of my specialty. Circus arts is kind of not really a thing to most dancers; it's historically been seen as lowbrow, lowest-common-denominator commercial entertainment, and I'm sorry to say, most people who see themselves as serious dancers are not above that viewpoint. 

Every so often, though, someone apparently thinks I have potential. Or maybe just finds me amusing, I have no idea. There is an administrative procedure for signing up as a comp student, that involves requesting a spot and emailing people for confirmation and CC:ing our front office and collecting paper receipts; I am not too cool for rules, and I do actually follow it. People who start out giving me the NR, YSBIMC speech inevitably get impatient, and end up telling me point-blank, "Just come to class." As this one has.

You know what they say. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action probably also a coincidence, but frankly just as weird and unexpected the third time as it was the first. Why on earth would anyone be that invested in passing on their thing specifically to me? I don't expect to be unwelcome if I ask to sign up for a class, nor do expect to displease anyone with my progress once I get there, but the proactiveness is a little unnerving. 

This one is an instructor of both jazz and a sort of mishmash fusion contemporary style, the latter of which is probably closest to what I do when left to my own devices. He is very, very tall, and though not especially bony, does give the impression of being a bit gangly if you only see him standing still. He smoulders well in his modeling photos, but most of them involve a hoodie, because otherwise his ears have a tendency to flap free and do as they please. You would not pass him on the street and say to your friend, "You know what, Gladys? I bet that man has a degree in ballet."

[No, you would probably say, "Golly gee willikers! I didn't even know you could get a lilac tracksuit in a men's extra tall." Many of his outfits are very definitely choices. I've tried his jazz class once, and he turned up wearing a chartreuse sweatshirt and matching sneakers. I don't even know where you'd get chartreuse sneakers in, I don't know, probably a size 13? I was impressed.] 

Which he does. The degree is in ballet pedagogy, specifically, which is interesting because he is -- and I quote -- "not really a ballet girl." This apparently came about because his choices for college were 'full ride to classical ballet conservatory' or 'nothing'. (I do actually talk to these people before I sign up for anything. And rummage through their websites, which contain a lot of interesting information that I do not feel bad for knowing, because they put that on the interwebs completely on purpose.) I looked up his school, and in fact the undergraduate degree he has listed in his public bio, and yeah, that's an actual BA, separate from the performance BFA, with various education and psych requirements, and even a mandatory research component. 

Evidently he is rebelling by using all of that ballet theory and technique to do a lot of things that are pretty much not ballet at all. His website is full of extraordinarily dramatic street jazz. His Instagram suggests a penchant for having a lot of big, visible feelings to singles by Adele. 

This did present a bit of a problem when I tried his jazz class, because I do not have a ballet background, and by the midpoint of class did not know what any of the relevant words in his instructions meant. Technically most ballet terms are French, but they're French jargon, and just knowing the literal meaning of the words doesn't give you any of the relevant context. 

I caught him afterwards and explained all that, and basically went 'BRB gonna go teach myself ballet on YouTube'. He nodded like this was some sort of reasonable plan (Note to non-dance readers: This is not any sort of reasonable plan. This is not something any reasonable person would come up with, or do, or anticipate any success at. Everyone else I told this story to politely opined that that wasn't going to work, and I should just take a couple months of beginner ballet and come back) and suggested I track down a book by some lady I'd never heard of. Given his pedagogy background, I expected it to be some sort of standard Ballet 101 text. But no. It was an actual technical dictionary, with a whole bunch of relevant terms in alphabetical order. 

I told him I was going to read the damn thing straight through, and I did. He did not seem to think there was anything strange about that idea. I suspect he may have also been that kid who read the encyclopedia for fun. At one point I also mentioned that I do better starting at low-intermediate levels than strictly beginner, because I'm better at guessing things from context than I am at retaining a bunch of unconnected basic skills. He lit right the fuck up and was nodding with great enthusiasm before I even finished my sentence.

It would be lovely if I could finally get a load of ballet theory without having to actually do any ballet. Classical ballet and I do not get along at all. I will happily watch other people's ballet for hours on end, but it's not a good fit for my body. I put my foot down circa age ten and refused to go to any more classes, and the intervening thirty years have not changed my mind. I don't enjoy attempting it, and I don't like the way it looks on me even when I'm told I'm doing it right. On the other hand, I also find it very tedious to deal with people who think that ballet is the mother of all things and that 'does not have a ballet background' is incompatible with 'serious dancer who does generally know what they're doing', and it would be great to not have to explain that anymore.