Dance is an art for the young, when we mean by dance that classically disciplined art that is not bars and not ballroom but more ballet and Broadway jazz and Martha Graham. Yet I don't mind a completely ridiculous challenge at times, to spice up my life. So at the less than supple age of 29 (I'm now closer to 32), an age when most male dancers are hitting their prime, I took up dancing. I had done some dancing in college, in musicals and such, but never took formal class until I was 23 and in graduate school. But I got hurt from bad training. Being a male, I was used (and abused) because males were in such short supply. My body learned everything wrong and told me so in an inventory of aches and pains that convinced me to seek less hazardous enjoyment.
But, as things went, having been bitten by the art once, I was ready to be bitten again, a sort of aesthetic version of malarial fever. Under the gentle tutelage of a loving wife plus my own curiosity at how much adulthood had adulterated by body, I plunked down $50 for materials, and walked bravely into the (admittedly minor) storm.
Certain things do not come easily to a 29-year old body trained in football and basketball, with heavy thighs and an upper chest like a weightlifter's. I was invariably the only male in class and was always chagrined by the seemingly tendonless stretch of young, pink-glowing bodies. When they slid gracefully into full splits like a pair of shears in a tailor's hand, I made a shallow V. Where they rippled their arms like the breathy sweep of a second hand on an expensive watch, my arms ratcheted around like the arthritic second hand on those clunky old school clocks. Where they pulled like taffy, I was hard candy; where they skimmed and flitted, I waded.
Naturally there came a time, after several months of this disciplined exposure of my body's dirty laundry, when I had to seriously get in touch with why I had decided to punish myself this way. I'm sure this time comes to all dancers, and all artists, but I think it comes with a special poignancy to an older dancer who wishes he were a younger dancer. My failure to be even an unreasonable facsimile of Nureyev was rusting the joints of any self-worth that might have been loitering around for an encouraging pat on the head. It was not a very nice rack I had stretched myself on.
As I look back now from those intense two years of class and performance (I no longer take class), I realize what a crucial moment that was, in both senses of the word. I had tasted failure, or so it seemed. Not all the good will in the world was going to give me a 180-degree turnout. I'd believed, naively, that my noble acceptance of the challenge would have somehow automatically transformed me; but the only automatic thing was Terpsichore's indifference to my good intentions. I was angry, and the anger threatened to make any progress or enjoyment of dance impossible. It was a kind of wood alcohol, and I was being blinded by drinking it.
As I said before, I think anyone who wants to be an artist goes through this coronation of failure; it's not particularly novel or interesting. What is interesting is how I had to change to accommodate these new images of myself as a naked failure. I had reacted to my insufficiencies in typical male fashion: I was going to give myself no loving quarter, no time off for good behavior. Which told me much about how men do, and don't, endure. Men endure best, will go through forests of pain and privation, when they're reasonably assured that they'll gain some profits from their efforts. The body, then, is an instrument that should tolerate no weakness nor exhibit any hesitation. Men are not good long-haul people for the most part because their intimacy with their bodies is often purely contractual, like stabling a thoroughbred to earn money at the races.
Dancing had broken that contract of denial and forced me to see "me" in a very startling new light. If I was going to dance I couldn't use my body like a racehorse until it dropped dead in its tracks. I had to nurture this hunk of flesh, pamper it with patient regard and tender congratulations. If I continued to use is as a machine, I could only expect that anger at it one feels when a machine gives in to entropy.
But that was not all. Mind and body became more integrated. The defense/prosecutor coalition I'd been using to judge myself gave way to a gossipy quilting bee. And suddenly (though it took a while for that "suddenly" to bloom), I understood more clearly what women had understood for a long time, what Steinbeck has Ma Joad say in The Grapes of Wrath: "Man, he lives in jerks....Woman, it's all one flow, a stream...[that] goes right on." I had wanted to jerk my body over the threshold of ignorance into the honeymoon of accomplishment, forgetting all the tiny marriages and truces along the way that would knot mind and body, idea and expression, into a strong, durable, accomplished state of being.
I'm not speaking here as if this is the way men and women really are; this is dance, after all, not real life. All I mean is that in the process of becoming an artist I had to recognize and make use of certain traits that have been, rightly or wrongly, designated feminine, such as softness and delicacy of movement and expression, as well as treat my body much more "femininely," as an integrated partnership between muscle and mind, not as an anxious truce with each distrusting each. I am still male, still masculine, but when I dance those words say little or nothing worthwhile about who or what I am as a person. The more I dance, the more I describe and think of myself as a dancer, the less I am able to think of myself as a male, a man, a masculine creature. I am a better dancer for the balance; I am a dancer because of the balance.
I'm not going to New York, of course. I choreograph for local groups, take a class a day if I can find one, perform when I can get, or can make, the chance. But a person doesn't need to go to New York to be certified a dancer, only to his heart, and it's a good bet that a person can't find his heart if he has to go to New York to do it. I'm glad I took the challenge, even though I'll never be noticed by Arlene Croce or courted by Peter Martins, because it showed me that becoming a person is much more interesting and curious -- "curiouser and curiouser" as time goes on -- than being neatly enwrapped by the cartouche of "man" and thus made to play a game of limits.