{"id":26186,"date":"2021-08-14T11:00:39","date_gmt":"2021-08-14T15:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=26186"},"modified":"2023-09-26T20:23:28","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T00:23:28","slug":"once-a-dancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2021\/08\/once-a-dancer\/","title":{"rendered":"Once a Dancer"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Gavin Larsen<\/strong><\/em><\/h4>\n

[This is a guest essay by friend-of-the-blog Gavin Larsen, who lives and teaches dance here in Asheville after an illustrious 18-year career in professional ballet.\u00a0 I invited Gavin to share her “what it’s like to be me” story here at The 100 Billionth Person, and I extend the same invitation to my other subscribers.\u00a0 Hope you enjoy. – CHC]<\/em><\/p>\n

In the ballet world, we say, \u201cOnce a dancer, always a dancer,\u201d and it\u2019s true: no matter how defiantly we may turn our backs and try to walk away from the art and craft of dance, particularly ballet, we cannot rid our bodies of its imprint.\u00a0 Ballet tattoos itself on our physicalities and embeds itself in our souls.<\/p>\n

I was a professional ballet dancer<\/a> for 18 years.\u00a0 Before that, I trained for about ten.\u00a0 And after I retired (\u201cretired\u201d) from my job as a performer, even then I couldn’t quit.\u00a0 I kept taking technique classes and even performed a little bit, on smaller stages and in less technical choreography.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But slowly, I felt my mind and body loosening their grip on my fine-tuned, fiercely perfected technique.\u00a0 I remember vividly the day I stopped wearing pointe shoes.\u00a0 I was at the barre, warming up with a few relev\u00e9s<\/a>, when I found myself struggling to find my balance — I had to hold the barre a little too tightly for support.\u00a0 Though a casual observer might have thought I was very much on top of my game, I felt like an amateur, not a former professional with decades of experience.<\/p>\n

But appearances were not what mattered:\u00a0 I cared about how this felt to ME.\u00a0 And I knew my struggles would only get worse.\u00a0 So, I decided this would be my last day on pointe.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d begun teaching dance long before I stopped performing \u2014 most dancers do \u2014 but being a full-time instructor presented a different challenge.\u00a0 While I was a good teacher and the work was engaging, it didn\u2019t leave me with the same sense of satisfaction at the end of the day. \u00a0 For professionals, a day of dancing always follows the same pattern (class, rehearsal, performance) and leaves you feeling full.\u00a0 Whether or not the day went well, whether you mastered the tricky choreography or not, at the very least you know you have given of yourself, physically and emotionally and intellectually, to something larger — to the dancers around you, to the art form, to yourself.\u00a0 You go home with the satisfaction of having worked hard and well, and the fatigue in your bones is proof.<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t have that fulfillment anymore.\u00a0 No matter how capably I demonstrated the exercises to my students or how exhaustively I worked on them in the studio, I felt I was losing my grip on the life I had led.\u00a0 And I got scared that, with every passing day, my memories would fade and that the dancer<\/em> part of myself — which was, really, all of myself — would be gone forever.\u00a0 I needed it and clung to it.\u00a0 And in a fit of desperation to preserve it, I began to write it down.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\u00a0<\/p>\n

One day in 2011 or 2012, after I had transitioned from performing to teaching, I was passing through the lobby of the building that housed Oregon Ballet Theatre<\/a>\u2019s company and school.\u00a0 One entire wall of the lobby was a window to the main studio space, offering everyone who entered the building a view of whatever dance activity was going on.\u00a0 Company dancers and school students, warming up, taking class, rehearsing ballets or learning new choreography, all were on full display, as if life in the studio was also on stage.<\/p>\n

That particular afternoon, company dancers were in rehearsal with artistic director Christopher Stowell for his ballet, The Rite of Sprin<\/em>g.\u00a0 Standing in the lobby watching them practice, memories of my own experience as a member of the cast a few years earlier came flooding back.\u00a0 It was an unusual production in that the piece was largely en masse: almost the entire company appeared in it, but only a couple of us danced apart from what was literally a mass of bodies.<\/p>\n

I had been a principal dancer<\/a> then, accustomed to using my single voice, so being back in an ensemble was jolting at first.\u00a0 But I soon relished the familiar comfort of being in the corps de ballet<\/a> where I had started my career. The warmth of camaraderie, the different and energizing sense of “power in numbers” and the hilarity we shared to break the tension when the going got tough \u2013 all the familiar feelings of the days in my late teens and twenties when I was learning to be a professional dancer re-emerged.<\/p>\n

My view through the lobby window that day — although just a brief snapshot — stirred up a strong, visceral reaction in me.\u00a0 The dancers were working on a section that we had called, years before, the \u201chuman monolith.\u201d\u00a0 Christopher hadn\u2019t given us any technical steps to execute — he simply told us to \u201cooze\u201d our way into a tower of people.\u00a0 One dancer would become the capstone at the top, supported by a few of the strongest men in the group.\u00a0 The rest of us cascaded downwards from there in gradually smaller, flatter, muddier positions. The only directions we were given were that everyone, at all times, had to touch at least one other person\u2014 a hand or a foot or a neck or a torso — and that no one except the supporter-men could be upright.\u00a0 And no ballet positions were allowed.\u00a0 We were to embody humanity emerging from primordial slime.<\/p>\n

Through the window, I watched those dancers work on \u201coozing\u201d into the monolith and I immediately felt myself in there with them — as if I were outside my own body, watching myself in the past, yet physically present.\u00a0 I felt I was reliving a dream.\u00a0 Every physical and emotional feeling from my own days in The Rite of Spring<\/em> came flooding back with such force that I almost thought I was late for rehearsal and needed to run into the studio to join them.<\/p>\n

Seconds later, another emotion overcame the first one: the relief that I didn\u2019t have to.<\/p>\n

I was retired \u2013 I had no need to pull my body into shape and into a leotard, no need to be ready to do whatever moves a choreographer dreamt up.\u00a0 But what I suddenly longed to do was relive those experiences, capture the essence of them, and find within them a thread of truth about what on earth this dancing life of mine had meant, how and why it had happened, and why had it happened to me?<\/p>\n

I went home, opened my laptop, and began to write.\u00a0 What came spilling out, in one sitting, would become Chapter 46 of the book<\/a> that many more years of memory-capture ultimately delivered.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\u00a0<\/p>\n

After that afternoon in the lobby, a flood of other snapshot memories cascaded down, so many and so varied that I feared losing them if I didn\u2019t work fast enough.\u00a0 I furiously wrote them down.\u00a0 Some were a couple of pages, others a few paragraphs, or even less.\u00a0 There were episodes, fragments of episodes, slivers of thoughts, reflections, images, conversations.\u00a0 Eventually, feeling I needed some instruction in how to do what I was doing (always a dancer at heart, I wanted direction and correction), I signed up for a memoir-writing workshop, led by the marvelous Merridawn Duckler<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Each week, Merridawn gave us a title prompt and an assignment to write two pages about it.\u00a0 (Five of her title prompts became chapters in my book.)\u00a0 I distinctly remember how excited I felt to run to my computer to write about “The Fork in the Road” and “The Time I Taught Someone Something” and “My Scar.”<\/p>\n

The workshop members shared their writings each week.\u00a0 As nervous as I was to read my essays aloud to the group, it finally proved to me that my conviction was right: people — not just other dancers but real people — could be as fascinated by ballet as I was, if they were shown something a little below its surface.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, at last, I have found gratification again: my book, Being a Ballerina: The Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life<\/em><\/a>, was published in April by the University of Florida Press and reviewed in May<\/a> by the New York Times.<\/p>\n

How does a dancer become a writer?\u00a0 One would think these art forms could not be more different: the one is intensely physical, interconnected with and dependent upon other bodies and minds, and effervescent, disappearing forever the very next moment; while the other is completely stationary, solitary, and permanent.<\/p>\n

But for me, the similarities that make expressing myself in words on a page as natural as using my body are strong.\u00a0 I still don\u2019t have to speak out loud, which emboldens me to be forthright, daring and fully revealing.\u00a0 On stage, costume, characterization, choreography and the buffer of a proscenium stage<\/a> gave me that fearlessness.\u00a0 On stage, no one can stop you.\u00a0 On the page, no one can, either.<\/p>\n

Once a dancer, always a dancer.<\/p>\n

[Gavin Larsen retired as a principal dancer in 2010.\u00a0 Her final principal performance was in Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant,” music by Stravinsky.\u00a0 For several more minutes of pleasure, I recommend you watch this video<\/a> of Gavin’s movements and reflections.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Gavin Larsen [This is a guest essay by friend-of-the-blog Gavin Larsen, who lives and teaches dance here in Asheville after an illustrious 18-year career in professional ballet.\u00a0 I invited Gavin to share her “what it’s like to be me” … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-notes","category-interests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26186"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26293,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26186\/revisions\/26293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}