A frustrating paradox of ballet is that it requires everything you have to work as one unit, but often actively works against that in practice. Oh, people pay lip service to listening to your body, listening to what you need, but in practice, there’s all kinds of pressure to look, act, be a certain way. Fit the image, no matter what it costs. Take the time you need to recover from injury… except if you’re injured “too much,” you find your parts disappearing and perhaps your contract not renewed.
It’s important to discuss that the ballet world is really changing in this regard. There are a lot of people who are working hard to make the field a healthier place for people, and it’s changing slowly but surely. Part of that has to do with the rise of injury prevention and awareness from medical professionals, some of it with the increasing popularity of practices like somatics and yoga, some of it from dancers and teachers like me who have found said practices in other disciplines (modern especially seems to absorb somatic ideas in classwork very easily) and are working to transfer them into ballet. But still, we’re not there yet.
Recently I taught a modern class in which we spent the first half hour of class doing nothing but listening and noticing. We spent time paying attention to how our breath changed in response to various positions (any position for any length of time was fair game) and then broadened our focus to include our space. What does the floor feel like? What does the wall feel like? What does it feel like when places that don’t normally touch surfaces, like the sides of our ankles or the inside of our elbows, come into contact with the grate on the floor or the corner of the wall? Eventually we turned that noticing into a gentle improvisation collaborating with our space. It was a very interesting exercise from my perspective as a teacher, and the students seemed to agree. I found it fascinating how many things we noticed about our space, a space in which the students spend 10+ hours a week, that we had never even seen before, much less paid attention to.
Modern classes lend themselves very well towards exercises devoted solely to listening and noticing ourselves, our space, and other people–ballet classes perhaps less so. But as teachers, we owe it to our students to help foster this discipline in all their classes, because it’s a really critical skill, not just for dance, but for life. In coming posts, I’m going to start unpacking some of the various threads relating to listening and noticing. It’s a huge topic, so it’ll take a long time to only scratch the surface, but one I’ve been increasingly realizing the importance of in life as well as in dance.
The How-To Dancer 