What I Learned From Dance

Today I was sitting in our home on a rainy, rainy, cold, grey Sunday feeding our daughter a bottle of breast milk procured from a FT working, single mom who is in our Mommy & Me class. This lovely woman, whom I barely know, was kind enough to drive over a shopping bag filled with 5 oz. frozen bags of milk in the pouring rain because Frances is sick and she wanted to help. And this from a woman who has a very stressful, high-powered job.

Talk about kindness.

Last night the baby had us up all night with her 101.5 fever, completely stopped up nose, wet, sputtering, cough and howling, pitiful cries. At one point she projectile vomited all over my husband. Anyone who is a parent knows what that moment feels like – time stands still and all of your needs go out the window.

You are reduced to being at the mercy of the helpless babe in front of you.

I happen to have a nasty cold myself (thought it was allergies, but nope it's a cold) and my husband had barely 4 hrs of sleep the night before because he was up and down with Frances (which must have been a precursor to this new virus – she catches everything this little one).

But all of that took a backseat to our sweet, 11 month-old, blue-eyed beauty who could do nothing in that moment to comfort herself and relieve her distress.

She needed us and there we were by here side to do whatever we could, which wasn’t much.

She slept in fits and starts and thankfully the fever broke around 5 a.m.

Long night.

She is still sick today, but it’s uphill from here – now that I have mommy antibiotic milk to give her.

Back in our living room on this dreary Sunday, holding her chubby, little, nascent body and listening to the gorgeous Adagietto from Mahler’s 5^th Symphony No. 5 in C Sharp Minor I was transported back to my dancing days when I was a teenager and a modern dance major at the North Carolina School of the Arts (an arts school that trains both high school and college students) I performed in a faculty piece (quite an honor) to the Adagietto. It was perhaps the hardest dance I ever performed and taught me more about myself as a dancer than any experience outside of a workshop with the Lar Lubovitch Company the summer of that same year. The piece was achingly slow, tremendously lyrical, and required intense strength and total ensemble focus.

I am not someone who generally looks back. I rarely sit and relive my life experiences. But listening to this particular piece of music brought this memory flooding back to me in great detail.

The piece started with a group of dancers on an almost pitch black stage lying flat on our backs. Were there 10 of us? 8? The details on that part are fuzzy. We began with the floating up of a single arm. Deliberately. Slowly. With an intense, yet delicate precision. None of us could see one another – we had to sense our timing. Each other. This requires stilling all thoughts in your brain until you are nothing but living, breathing in that moment. Hearing the breath of others. Sensing with every pore of your body all that is happening around you. It was excruciating. Interminable. Our movements progressed at a snail’s pace until we were all standing on one leg in an arabesque (for non-dancers this means one leg stretched behind you completely straight in what should be a beautiful line ending in an equally beautiful pointed foot). Our backs were completely flat, parallel facing the floor, which means our heads were facing the floor too, which means our eyes were focused not on one another but on the floor! To execute this as an ensemble in the dark without the benefit of even peripheral vision is nothing short of impossible.

To do it as a teenager is a life changing experience.

From the moment we stood up, it never got easier, because we spent a good chunk of the piece dancing on that same one leg on that same darkened stage. For anyone who has ever done danced adagio movement on one leg, then you know the balance required… intense focus… the zen of being nowhere else but in the moment. One slight shift and you wobble or worse…

…you fall.

The dread I felt about performing this piece was paralyzing. I had to dig inside myself to find the strength to get through rehearsals let alone contemplate performing it on stage. Because when you are dancing in an ensemble piece the greatest fear you have is that you will let the others in the group down. You’re creating something together. Each individual’s contribution is as important as the next. You cannot, not, not fail the group. The audience.

Yourself.

On opening night I can remember warming up in my dorm room. As I was stretching and going through the piece in my head, terror struck and I completely lost it. 

The magnitude of finally being at the point where I would actually be performing this piece live before a paying audience hit me – hard. We had only done technical lighting rehearsals up to this point and not even a complete dress rehearsal – run-through – for an invited audience of our peers. Adding to my stress was that the choreographer, our beloved teacher and mentor, the God we all worshipped, had stormed out in a rage after a lighting run-through a few days earlier, telling us he was through. That we all basically sucked and we were now on our OWN with this piece. This means we had to finish rehearsing an 11 some odd minute piece for this asshole for his faculty concert with no help from anyone but ourselves. Remember, we were in high school. To top it off we were to be reviewed by the local press. As an adult looking back on this event, the reality of what this teacher did to us seems truly Machiavellian and yet he had a master plan. He knew that by abandoning us we would come together.


And we did. We finished our scheduled rehearsals – prepared ourselves for the upcoming performance. Bonding together in a completely democratic way that I have rarely experienced since. No egos. Just working for the good of the whole. Trying to get that Goddamn piece off the ground, despite the brewng hatred we had for man we all considered an asshole.


Back in my dorm room, I broke down and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed until my diaphragm was in spasms – until there were no more tears left in me. It was all too much. I couldn't handle the pressure.

I was completely convinced I couldn’t do it. 


How I got myself to the theater that night I’ll never know. But somehow I pulled it together – never telling any of the other dancers what I'd just been through and how petrified I was. I'm sure I was not the only one.

In the dressing room, I quietly put on my kabuki make-up. We called it that because the stage was so dark we had to devise a way to lighten our faces in order for our features to be seen.

As I prepared myself, I was shaky, exhausted from my breakdown and unsure whether I even had the strength to get through the piece. Yet, when I put on my costume something hit me.

So what? 

If I fell off my leg, I fell. If I made a fool of myself, so be it. What was the worst that could happen? I'd already experienced such gut wrenching emotions... At some point all that fear burned into fuel and I faced my demons head on, realizing that I could only be as good a dancer as I was in that moment and that would just have to do.

Talk about life lessons.

When I got out on stage and took my place and the music started, I was so focused (worn out and fatigued I had no other choice but to let go and be in the moment), I simply listened to the music and allowed it to take me through the piece and in doing so trusted myself in a way I hadn't fully done before. I trusted that I knew the piece well enough that my body, mind and spirit would not, could not fail me, or the other dancers.

And it didn’t.

I gave the best performance I had ever done of the piece. WE the ensemble gave the best performance we had ever done. We had bonded during the process (ordeal) to the point that we were one living, breathing entity.

I know (and knew then) I wasn’t the best dancer in the piece. I was really, very good, don’t get me wrong, but I was not the best. And yet, somehow I triumphed over what only hours before had seemed like an insurmountable odd.

Today, as I held our daughter, staring into her wonder filled face – her sickly glazed eyes and runny nose, I was filled with such intense emotion for the teenage girl I once was. How could I know then the woman I would become? All the obstacles that still lay ahead? Heartaches and triumphs.

I still don’t know what life has in store for me. But that performance was my first real life hurdle and despite the ensemble nature of dancer's life, I felt utterly alone.  (Btw, I don’t believe I’ve ever shared this story with anyone in my family – not even my friends.)

Daubing milk from tiny, pink cheeks all I could think was, what trials will Frances face? What roads will her life take her down? How will she handle herself? And will she share her fears and failings with me or will she keep them buried all to herself, just as I did these many years?

More important than any of that, is how can I help her be self-sufficient and strong? This goes for Henry too. How do I teach my children to face difficulties and have the wherewithal to persevere?

Yesterday, in Mommy & Me class http://www.pumpstation.com/pumpstation/dept.asp?s_id=0&dept_id=3497 we discussed the Po Bronson New York Magazine article: How Not To Talk To Your Kids – The inverse power of praise. http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/  It’s interesting and speaks directly to this subject. It created quite a stimulating discussion that obviously has me still thinking about it.

As hard as that performance experience was, I did manage to get myself through it. 


My parents did something right.

Somehow they raised me to persist... 

I know I can’t protect my children from everything, but I can help them develop coping skills.

Right now, I am trying to help an 11 month-old cope with constipation and feeling really crappy.

And for today that’s enough.