At the age of 29 I decided to become a dancer, about fifteen years past the time I should have started. I didn't make an entirely serendipitous decision. I had had some premonitions as far back as fifth grade, from the neatest teacher in the universe: Miss Ziegler. She looked a little like Sally Field, but wore her blond hair bobbed, almost F. Scott Fitzgeraldian in shortness. At the end of the day she would often drag out a scratched Yamaha nylon stringed guitar and drag us out of our itchy self-consciousness long enough to sing songs.
One day, rainy, in the interregnum between Thanksgiving and Christmas, she wheeled in a movie projector. We hadn't had a movie in a while, and she hadn't mentioned this all week, so we grudgingly transformed a bit of our early winter torpor into interest. She turned the lights off.
A few frames with numbers (of course we counted down out loud), then a brief bit of leader, then a title, with a blast of symphonic music behind it: "The Magic of Dance." A bunch of us groaned. She, for her part, kept cool and let the movie run.
I have only the sketchiest memory now about what the narrator, Edward Villella, first said; which came first -- the pictures of the New York City Ballet in class or in performance; whether he began or ended with a rendition of Giselle. But I do remember that what Villella said spoke powerfully to a part of me that thrilled to this fusion of idea and body, to the possibility that something as nebulous and irritating as an idea (which I'd only just begun to create with any certainty) could shape space and time into something as solid as an afternoon snack.
I can recall even now Villella arcing through the air in a ballistic grand jeté that seemed to take forever to complete; his Apollo, the soft lines of his white costume clinging to his robust body, his pirouettes sharp, unerring, his hand gestures languid, fluent, tight. And he said something which I have never forgotten (and I'm still amazed that my eleven-year old brain retained it at all): "In dance, total freedom comes from total control." I watched the movie again after school while Miss Ziegler sat and did papers.
But where I grew up boys didn't dance, and it wasn't until college that dance and I met again, in a series of musicals (the usual suspects: Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Applause). I liked the discipline and clannishness of dance and the dancers. Our choreographer would always have us come early for a short class, and I got my first exposure to the French of the classroom and the length tendons will (and will not) stretch in a développé or a forward port de bras in fourth position. I felt privileged in doing this, imbued with seriousness, slightly bohemian or gypsy and therefore special, selected. We dressed for rehearsal in the rattiest clothes we could find, our commitment measured in inverse ratio to how torn our torn leg warmers were or how loosely our sweatshirts hung on us. (This is a trait I've noticed among dancers, who seem to lug around an endless wardrobe of dishabille to offset the formality of their training.) I pursued dancing for a little bit in graduate school, even thought about going to New York. But, as with many things, it just never happened for a variety of perfectly good, and perfectly lame, excuses.
So why at twenty nine? Because twenty-nine bordered thirty. At the time thirty years old loomed as an ominous fulcrum. Balancing the seven years I'd spent since graduate school crafting a professional self was the not quite tamed desire to move in a world wider than just salary and retirement planning. Which side would teeter up to the light, which side drop to darkness? I had no doubt about the answer. So I started taking ballet classes every day, sometimes with adults at night, sometimes with the after-school crowd in the afternoon. (Picture a stocky youngish balding man in black tights among flocks of girls with pink shoes and tendons as pliable as warm licorice.) Soon I started taking two classes a day, and then branched into jazz and modern, sometimes even going to classes on Saturday mornings (often well before my body awoke).
I was teaching at a private school at the time, and I convinced the administration to let me teach dance as my coaching requirement. So I taught ballet and modern and jazz, and I choreographed pieces for the students' spring dance concert. I also started doing some performances with local dance companies as well as choreographing -- and before I knew it I was a dancer. True, fifteen years late and destined not to go much beyond where I spun and stretched. But I danced; I had become a dancer. I followed this regimen for two years before a number of things convinced me to move on.
In looking for a way to describe the flow and filigree of dance, the best metaphor is quantum physics, with its elements of space, time, uncertainty, and motion, and informing all these, energy. Einstein showed that despite our common-sense notions, space is not empty emptiness but instead is a substance shaped by the bodies occupying it, and shaping those bodies in return. Dancers whittle this space with their bodies, carving out the universe moment by moment, movement by movement, mimicking the jig of quarks and the orbital reel of the planets.
A vocabulary of rules reins in each of Einstein's choreographies: electromagnetism, the weak and strong forces -- and for dancers, gravity, the master choreographer that they must always obey. But far from restricting the dancer's creativity, gravity gives it latitude and resilience because only through that obedience -- Villella's "freedom through control" -- can dancers transform gravity's clinch into a beauty that makes luminous the grace and mystery that attends each moment and each breath of our lives. The dancer's translation of gravity confirms what we already know: all life moves as a choreography of intricate attractions as intimate as skin and as glorious as the fractal beauty of the cosmos.
I did dance again, in a summer production of Guys and Dolls and an extravagant Evita. It was good to get back on stage, refreshing to see how much my body remembered as the choreographer rapped out the counts. Part of me wondered if it might be good to start taking classes again, but I decided not to. Whether or not I'm on stage, a part of me always dances, and a part of me always stays attuned to the partnerings and solos eddying around me. The choreography is everywhere, and there are always good seats.
(January 1996)