i was never a dancer

this video was taken in March 2014

When people ask if I’m a dancer, I’ve grown accustomed to responding with a cordial smile and an abrupt, “I trained as a dancer.” ⠀

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I started taking dance class when I was 13, and got serious about it when I was 16 getting ready to audition for colleges. It was then that I walked into my first ballet school, Logrea Dance Academy. In college, we took dance class 5 days a week, but I felt that wasn’t enough, so I went to Steps or Broadway Dance Center as often as I could in between classes. That was during the time in my life where I looked at the schedule for the students at Juilliard and tried to make sure I was in class as much as they were. My therapist told me it wasn’t really possible to do that; I was holding myself to an impossible standard. I tried anyway. 

I went to the Joffrey Ballet program for a summer, and by the time senior year rolled in I had finished so many of my requirements that I was able to spend 5 hours a day dancing at Gelsey Kirkland Academy. There I immersed myself in the world of classical ballet, the Vaganova method, and studied with straight-up-no-fkin-around-legit Russian ballet masters.

But I was never a “dancer.”

In the world of musical theatre, proficiency in the realm is organized by a few hierarchical categories: movers (a caste I was desperately trying to escape), dancers (as I would sometimes call myself, with an unsure apology, cocking my head to the side and furrowing my brow), and (the most beautiful, untouchable, heavenly creature) dancer-dancers. On an audition card, there’s a number scale: 1-5. 

These distinctions, which I took very seriously for years, drove me mad, whether my assessments were completely real or partially imagined.  I was never a 5. Not even a 4. I sat and sulked in despair for my plight; the plight of the almost-but-never-really-not-even-kind-of dancer.

It was a combination of feeling I had started too late in life (ha!), my inability to pick up combinations as quickly as the others, and most importantly, a lack of drive. In truth, I never cared much about dancing at all. It didn’t feel like an artistic expression coming from deep in my soul as acting or singing did—it was always, from the time I stepped into my first ballet school till the last one I walked out of, a technical skill to master, the thorny means to the end of booking my next job. 

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So it’s almost bizarre that I now find myself so deeply invested in the affairs of the body. I’ve spent countless hours learning about body-mechanics; understanding, spotting, and executing the potential that lies in the human body to be happy and healthy. The body, I’ve learned, is a remarkably adaptive miracle, a well-oiled machine, if only given the attention and care it deserves. I try to spend an hour a day working on improving my own practice. And I spend about 20 hours a week teaching others how to do the same. 

But I often find myself wondering how. How did I get here, so interested and involved in the minutae of movement, the serious study of which I was always somewhat tormented by?

Maybe it’s like any other relationship we have. 

We spend time working on a relationship to something or someone; studying it, obsessing over it, crying over it, feeling defeated by it, emboldened and embodied, enraged yet fascinated and engaged and in love with it. And what we initially thought that time would be used for turns out to slowly melt away. Or we hold it another way, it catches the light just so, and it instantly, shockingly, shatters like a glass vase in our hands. The loss; heartbreaking. 

But eventually, you find that the time spent steeping in that relationship was not for naught—not at all. Because somewhere down the line, you use all those hours spent in a mirror trying to fit into a box that was never really you to help a whole bunch of other people fit into their own beautiful boxes, their own bodies, totally them.

You might look back at a video of that boy who was only ever a 2.5 on the audition cards and see a man so beyond a number on a card that his heart flies with the knowledge, the gratitude, that where he was has everything to do with who he finally is. 

 

as i type, im sitting in the back of a parked car rental, in some college town on the east coast of australia. i left sydney for the day for the sea cliffs. my mind is spinning with everything i have coming up. if you missed the instagram post, the short story is i recently added Certified Personal Trainer to my belt of badges, and stretch therapist is coming next (stretch therapy is this modality of passive range assisted stretching. it's done on the client as they lay on a massage table), and it just feels delicious. it will complement the intense mobility and strength work i do with folks really nicely. 

and,
maybe these questions are implied, but if they aren't, i'd hate for you to miss out on an opportunity for self reflection, so:
what have you lost? how has it shaped you into who you are now? are you still holding on? is there anything wrong with that?