how to changement...

more relaxation and less right

I am in Croatia right now, with my partner on a half retreat, half working residency for this project. And I know, it sounds incredible! And it is, in so many ways. But, as typically happens when I take myself off the grid and go into retreat mode, I’m meeting parts of myself that I am really frustrated with… I think I’ve cried every day since we got here. I’m also incredibly challenged by working in total collaboration with another person, as I have been pulling my own cart, artistically, for so, so long, and I don’t really know how not to. I want to change, but I don’t know how.

I haven’t been teaching ballet class since we were in Zagreb on June 30. And yet, I’m still having ballet teaching dreams…

The other night, I dreamt about teaching changements (literally- changes), which are small jumps in a turned out third or fifth position, in which you change which foot is in the front by springing straight up into the air, and then landing with the back foot in front. These jumps are a standard/de rigeur part of ballet classes across all sorts of techniques… they’re essential.

In my dream, a student was protesting that in other ballet classes, with other ballet teachers, the instructions I had been giving for changements in my class were seen as highly suspect… wrong, even. Because, I was telling everyone, as Janet Panetta told me, not to worry about straightening their knees in their changements. As Janet used to say, “I don’t care if your knees straighten in the air, I care that they land bent.”

While I have always loved to jump, and always loved petite allegro (which is the sort of overarching category to which these jumps belong) I had shin splints throughout high school because of the approach I was using to do these jumps, and all jumps, really. Even after leaving formal ballet training, I couldn’t maintain a consistent fast jumping practice that didn’t aggravate my shins, achilles or plantar fasciatis, until I started taking Janet Panetta’s class, and learned to do these jumps in a really different way than I had been taught.

Back to the dream… When I responded to my student in my dream, I told them not to even tell other ballet teachers what I had told them, but just to keep trying to do what I was asking, so that, eventually, the change to their changements would be invisible. No one would know that they were relaxing their knees in the air, because, if they used the correct force to leave the ground, and the correct softness to land, then, eventually, those forces would combine to actually make their knees straight in the air, and to make their jump super springy, fast, light and even high. But the thing is, you can’t skip the step of letting go, of relaxing, and of not trying to straighten your knees, or you will always land with painful force somewhere on your foot or achilles.

We all, myself most definitely included, want change to happen faster. And we have an idea of what that change might look like. Instead of feeling our way through the change, we force it to happen… but it’s not a real change, it’s an illusion of change, an approximation of what the fantasy of change would be.

In order to actually learn to changement without hurting yourself, you have to relax. You have to feel the floor, you have to push from your toes, and not the arches of your feet. You have to let your heels drop fully when you land, so that there is no tension in your feet or ankles. You have to let go of the images in your head of your feet looking pretty or your legs becoming straight, or your back being upright, and learn to use your whole body in its most efficient patterns. And it is a bit ugly for awhile. Change is hard. It can totally suck. And it’s especially hard to shift your patterns when you’re always looking in a mirror.

When I am teaching, I have dancers play, look at one another, and pretend to be bouncing around in the club before they take off into their changements. That usually changes the alignment pattern, gets people to relax, connect, and often, remember to breathe. It also reminds people that dancing is supposed to be fun, and isn’t jumping something we are supposed to do for joy? Looking at each other also helps calm the critical voices, and it helps us not get stuck in comparing the image in the mirror to the image in our heads, but, instead, respond to the nice people bouncing around in front of us.

Right now, I’m trying to change, but I’m away from my community. So I’m doing my physical practice alone, with a mirror. And my emotional processing with my journal, and the help of looking at the sea. There are so many things about myself that I want to change, that I am unsatisfied with. And it’s hard. I wish I could just instantly become the person I imagine I could be.

I am grateful for this dream, to remind me to feel, to play, to be my own teacher and student- reminding myself that change, and changements, don’t happen right away, but once I can let go, and let myself feel what actually feels good, I might even want to spring around, just for the joy of it.