A Little Tea or Something

Following delightful conversation among friends over a lovely high tea earlier today (thanks, Elizabeth!), I could not resist posting an excerpt of the hilarious all-male ballet ensemble, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, dancing Pas de Quatre, or as the Trocks call it, Le Grand Pas de Quatre 1/2.  This is my favorite of their works, satirizing everything about Romantic-era ballet that it so deserves.  Have a fun few minutes.  And do click on the link to their website.

Filed under: Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, ballet, humor, tea by deb
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Big Apple Anxiety I by A Little Tea or Something on Polyvore.com

Dear Diary,

Well, it would appear that I will actually be boarding a plane for the Big Apple in just thirty-nine days.  Me—the Big Fraidy Cat, all by myself.  Alone in the city.  Navigating La Guardia, hailing cabs, finding my leased apartment, grocery shopping (do they have grocery stores in New York?), cooking, and going to classes at American Ballet Theatre.

Anxiety is a mere euphemism for what I’m feeling, gathering intensity every single day, with a healthy dose of irrationality thrown in for good measure.  Let me give you an example.  This terrifying thought jolted me out of my sleep one recent night:  What if I run out of clean underpants???  What then??? I mean, God knows there is no place in New York to buy underpants, right?  Or wash them, either, I am sure.

I decided the best plan for dealing with this crisis was to go to my neighborhood Target and buy up as many pairs of underpants as I could reasonably cram into my luggage, and so I did just that.  Which in turn got me thinking, how can I pack for ten days?  I am an expert at the long weekend, but ten days-worth of clothing?   Hmmmm—that’s a lot of threads, especially considering I will need both work clothes and leisure clothes.  And what of pajamas?  I need nice pajamas, in case, you know, the apartment building catches fire in the middle of the night and I am forced to run out into the street to escape the flames.

So today I addressed the pajama issue, along with the clothing issue, at least in part.  I figured, shorts don’t take up much space and I could use some new ones.  That mission was easily accomplished.  But as I headed across the parking lot from the department store back to my car, the Bed, Bath, and Beyond caught my eye and I remembered a friend had advised me that they carry TSA-approved bottles and zippered bags there.  I had totally forgotten.  I’ve got to put some shampoo in my carry-on, in case, you know, the airline loses my luggage that has the big bottle of shampoo in it.  (Because I am pretty sure you can’t buy shampoo in New York.)

I am feeling a teeny bit better now that I have underpants, pajamas (nice ones), shorts, and TSA-approved tiny plastic bottles in a zippered bag.

Until the next crisis occurs to me, I remain yours truly,

Deb

Filed under: American Ballet Theatre, ballet school, fashion, humor, travel by deb
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Okey-doke.  So I had my annual allergy check-up last week and complained almost as an aside that the air quality this spring has been horrid—more horrider than usual, even.  I told my doctor that for the first time in about a decade of running I’ve had to stop on occasion and prop myself against whatever tree trunk is handy so that I can cough up a lung.  Pollen, right?  Nope.  How about, exercise-induced asthma.  He prescribed an Albuterol inhaler that I am to use five to ten minutes before vigorous exercise (including ballet, of course).  I must say that the first time I used the thing, I could actually breathe.  In the intervening days my mileage has increased, as has the quality of my running.

So—when you run, lots of air is supposed to come into and go out of your lungs.  Who knew?

Filed under: ballet, running by deb
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I do.  Her name is Jane Shelton, and she teaches ballet in Memphis, Tennessee.  I have known her since I was four, when she was a young psychology student at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) and I was a rising kindergartner at Church of the Good Shepherd.  She danced at Memphis Ballet back in the day when mom was new to the company, which is how my family came to know her.  Jane had hypermobile knees and wacky-gorgeous feet, but tragically ruined them for pointe early in her erstwhile career as a ballerina after she took multiple cortisone injections to allow her to continue dancing on injuries.  (Jane would not recommend this practice.)            Photo:  Mark Weber for The Commercial Appeal

To me, Jane always had an aura of coolness about her.  First, she was a dancer.  Second, she was several years my mom’s junior and therefore a bit more accessible to me.  And third, as if that were not enough, she was a free spirit—you could rightly have called her liberated, or at times maybe even a flower child.  How exotic.  At least it seemed that way from my middle-class, Donny Osmond-loving, white-bread-American-suburban-girl point of view.

In the 1970s Jane had impossibly long, wavy hair and glasses whose lenses made her eyes twinkle in a pleasing way, but also broadcast this message:  I am smart and have little tolerance for bull.  You can even see that in this picture of her, taken just before a Ballet Workshop demonstration in about 1975 at St. Dominic School in Memphis.  When I was in junior high she was still driving a Volkswagen Beetle and had a wonderful, muscular dog named Al, a boxer who seemed to go everywhere with her.  In the winter months Al wore a turtleneck for warmth and sat bolt-upright in the driver’s seat of the VW waiting on Jane, as if he were her chauffeur dog; people would walk by the parked bug and give him a double-take.

Through the years Jane lived in various groovy midtown Memphis digs, always with at least one badly behaved cat lurking about, and lots of appealing artwork, books, and plants.  On some Saturdays she did her laundry at our house; my younger brother and I variously insinuated ourselves into Jane and mom’s kitchen table conversations, trying to steal her attention.  On one of these occasions my brother actually played an original “happy birthday” composition for her on his tiny, Suzuki violin while singing to her.  It was really very sweet, but we could not help exploding in laughter at his six-year-old’s rendition of a classic, complete with exactly eight notes and a minimalist libretto:  HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU.  Jane held her ribs, tears rolling down her cheeks.  Laundry took on a higher meaning on those Saturdays.

Jane’s appeal was also in part derivative of her mom, Dorothy, a Boston transplant who possessed the most fascinating blending of deep-South and Boston Brahman accents.  In my view, Dorothy was simply exquisite.  She lived in a stately, old pink stucco home in one of Memphis’ most genteel neighborhoods.  My family spent lazy holiday evenings at Dorothy’s, gathered around her elegant dining table for Thanksgiving dinner, or sitting in her living room in front of a Christmas tree set before a large window, festooned with glamorous decorations the likes of which I had never seen before.  I lingered in front of Dorothy’s built-in bookcases when the adult conversation grew tiresome, fingering her crystal and glass chotchkees and looking at Jane’s school yearbooks and ballet books—especially one about Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova, with shocking pictures of little Soviet children auditioning for the Kirov Academy in their underpants.  I loved watching Dorothy gingerly remove the tea bag from her china cup, carefully wrapping the string around it to squeeze out a few more drops of brew.  And I loved listening to her tell me which Erno Laszlo product—a line she proudly represented—would best suit me, though I never actually had any of my own.  A trip to her bathroom was like visiting an exclusive department store, with all manner of creams, facials, and various other beauty liquids in signature Laszlo jars all over the place.  It was magical.  Dorothy had impeccable taste, and I loved her for it.  She still lives in her pink stucco house.

When I was about twelve (in the picture, there, warming up before a year-end demonstration), Jane started teaching ballet at my mom’s newly-acquired school, Ballet Workshop.  Formerly Memphis Ballet School East, Memphis Ballet had been eager to dispose of the failing suburban branch of its school, which came into my family’s possession with its enrollment at a low ebb.  Leaving the school’s central city branch, I joined the classes at Ballet Workshop, but dreaded instruction from my own mom, credentials notwithstanding.  So the opportunity to take class from somebody else on Saturday mornings—my “Auntie Jane,” no less—was a welcome one.  In short order my classmates and I discovered that Jane would not hesitate to unleash all kinds of torturous strength-building work on us.  We started class sitting in a huge circle on the floor; Jane would put a record of orchestrated ballet music on the school’s old phonograph and let it play all the way through one side, while taking us through an impossible regimen of abdominal work, among other things.  Working right along with us, she made it look so easy.  But she was unmoved by our groaning and wincing against the strains of Tchaikovsky, and simply quipped, “Smile!”  Jane had a habit of sneaking up behind you during barre, digging her fingernails into your backbone, working her way outward, forcing scapulae to open and flatten.  And you would occasionally feel her poke a bony finger just under the occipital at the base of the skull to make you pull up correctly through the spine, without lifting your chin.

Strangely, I have not actually seen Jane in maybe as long as twenty years.  Life’s pace has not allowed me to travel to Memphis, nor Jane here.  We have instead kept up with each other through epic phone conversations that sometimes stretch as long as two hours and beyond.  Jane has watched my child grow up through sporadic Christmas photos and detailed ramblings from me, though she has not yet met him in person.  She has kept up with the founding of my young ballet school and offered many words of advice over the last few years.  She has willingly shared trade secrets, resources, and ideas for all kinds of classroom exercises and combinations with me; my own students are now the beneficiaries of her wisdom.  Jane has been relentlessly supportive of my aspirations.  For all that and more, Auntie Jane, I am truly grateful.  Photo:  Mark Weber for The Commercial Appeal; that’s Jane in the center doing a cambre to the back with some of her adult students.

Oh, yes:  One of these days, I will show up in your ballet class, Jane.  One of these days.

Filed under: Jane Shelton, Knoxville Ballet School, ballet, ballet school, dogs, family, parenting, teaching ballet by deb
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American Ballet Theatre superstar Angel Corella announced last year his plans to found a new ballet company in his native Spain, Corella Ballet.  It was his hope that—given the absence of a professional classical ballet company in Spain—his new company would afford professional opportunities for Spanish nationals, who until now have had to seek work outside of Spain.  (There is also a new school whose purpose is to train dancers for the company.)  Filmmakers documented the company’s journey through its inaugural season, and the trailer for the documentary is breathtaking; go here and enjoy yourself for the next four minutes and twenty-one seconds; Corella Ballet company class, photo by Gran Angular.

Filed under: American Ballet Theatre, Corella Ballet, ballet, ballet school, dancers by deb
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WARNING:  THIS POST CONTAINS SELF-INDULGENT BALLET DRIVEL.

Dancers are obsessed with bodies, especially their own.  And even though I have not been a dancer dancer for some time now, I still dance in front of my young students in their ballet classes (and wall-to-wall mirrors) five and sometimes six days a week; I am keenly aware of my own physical shortcomings.

About six years ago the director at the local ice rink approached me with the idea that I might give some of his skaters a short ballet class on Saturday mornings.  At the time he suggested this I had not so much as taken a maintenance technique class myself for roughly a decade.  After briefly questioning my sanity, I relented and began teaching a forty-five-minute barre in a smelly back room with a rubber floor, intended as a suiting-up room for the hockey team.  (A few years later this Just-Add-Water approach to ballet would become the inspiration for my fledgling ballet school.)  I begged some Marley scraps from a ballet pal and asked the rink director to build me a portable barre from plans I snatched off the Internet.  It was not the best of circumstances, but the kids actually learned a few things that perhaps ultimately helped them on the ice.

I prepared myself at home, using the rim of the kitchen sink as my own barre, slowly warming up, and then going on to plan classes.  Trying to coax my old ballerina frame (by now past forty) into dancing again was tricky.  It was not so much that I was out of shape—I had spent the intervening decade variously running cross country, swimming, cycling, and attending aerobics and Pilates classes, to say nothing of parenting a very active little boy—but that I was no longer a dancer; that meter had long expired.  Standing in fifth position (at least fifth position that looked like fifth position) now required that I stick out my butt.  I never had to do THAT before to get into a decent fifth.  And because of my running habit, my hamstrings were painfully shortened so that I was lucky to get an extension of ninety degrees in any direction.  And I had regrettably lost some of that characteristically stick-straight spine that makes a dancer stand out in a crowd.  Oh, yes:  one of my feet would no longer actually stretch.  Hmmmmm.  I felt betrayed.

I soldiered on, though, and managed to demonstrate pretty much “full out” all the exercises I wanted my skaters to do.  Their ability to parrot my movements with gathering competence was evidence enough for me that I was dancing sufficiently to get the point across to them.

That spring I went to Chicago with my family to catch American Ballet Theatre on tour, and decided I might try to observe ballet classes while I was in town.  First, I asked ABT if I could sit in on the audition class they were giving while they were there (an inquiry couldn’t hurt, could it?).  They suggested that I grand jete into Lake Michigan.

But the Ruth Page Center for the Arts was a scant two- or three-block walk from our hotel.  I called and asked the very polite young man who answered whether any of the instructors would allow me to observe classes.  No, he said, but you can take class while you’re here. Take class?  Me? I thanked him and hung up.  But then I wondered, Why not?  I trained to be a ballerina for years and years, after all, even if my fifth position leaves something to be desired now.  I called him back and asked about an open class on Saturday morning; what did I need to do to enroll?  He said, Show up at 10:00 and bring eleven dollars.

So on a snowy, windy springtime Saturday in Chicago, my palms sweating, I walked a few blocks to Ruth Page Center and took an open class taught by a nice older man (Rodney Irwin, now sadly deceased) who seemed genuinely pleased for me to join the group; the other dancers in the class were friendly and welcoming, and I felt somehow at home almost right away.  I was euphoric all day long and well into the evening, as I sat in the Civic Opera House and watched Amanda McKerrow give what was to be one of her final performances as Giselle.

Funny thing about that class, though.  Even though I discovered—in a very public way—that there were some movements I should no longer attempt in centre floor (read:  grand allegro), the classroom dynamic had not changed one jot.  I came into the studio early, with a few others, and started warming up slowly and stretching some.  Then I staked out a place at the barre, taking care not to grab someone else’s cherished spot.  That done, I sized up the other dancers in the class and settled on one in particular who seemed like she was more or less of my ilk—and then the two of us proceeded to compete off each other fiercely for the next hour and a half!  Some things, it seems, never change.

Six years later I still struggle with the former ballerina trapped inside a body that occasionally feels like a fossil.  What has come to pass during those intervening years, though, is a glimpse here and there—if only a glimpse—of the hidden ballerina.  I can once again get into a decent fifth position.  My spine is straighter than it was six years ago, though still not what it was when I was nineteen.  My bum foot stretches better than it did.  To be fair, I also have new problems that are associated with ballet in particular:  the first and second metatarsals on my right foot are very painful in releve—an old problem that had vanished when I stopped dancing; my hips hurt like the dickens when I sit for more than a little while; my crazy, hypermobile knees give me fits, as they once did, in rond de jambe en l’air, with a loud and painful popping sensation.

I still run, and so I still have tight hamstrings and poor extension, even after a slow, careful warm-up followed by deep stretching.  (Note:  I will NEVER give up running.  NEVER.)  But, after all, Who cares? This old dog is plenty happy to be learning old tricks again.  I can even demonstrate pointe work wearing (drum roll please) Pointe Shoes!  Ta-dah! My advice to anybody who is experiencing aches and pains that come with moving a slightly older self?  Use your body—that’s what it’s for!

Filed under: American Ballet Theatre, Knoxville Ballet School, Ruth Page Center for the Arts, ballet, ballet school, dancers, humor, parenting, running, swimming, teaching ballet by deb
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As the founding director of a small ballet school, I think about this ridiculous dichotomy just about every single day:  the overwhelming majority of children in most small ballet schools (and that’s most of the ballet students on the planet) do not resemble children in the world’s premiere ballet schools, where young hopefuls are scrutinized and carefully selected by the staff from scores of ballerina wanna-bes.  Having been raised by an Actual Ballerina who happens to have graduated from one of the world’s premiere ballet schools, and who is also a ballet teacher, I get an earful on a regular basis about the prodigy of the moment and what amazing thing she pulled off in class last week, how she’s got the goods, how she’ll “make it,” as we like to say in the ballet world.  (Alternately the child is spoken of with chagrin if she is performing less than optimally.)  Mom, if you’re reading this: sorry.  But you know I’m right.

“Producing” a dancer—one who succeeds as a professional somewhere—is a badge of honor for a teacher, and for a school.  The trade magazines are full of school advertisements boasting the number of professionals turned out over the years, and often listing companies they joined.  These are jewels in a school’s crown.  And these schools deserve bragging rights, to be sure, especially when they demonstrate consistency in producing beautiful professional dancers through time; we see these ads and think, They must be doing something right.

But I wonder about some of those programs and how they approach teaching classical ballet to the rest of the world—the bodies whose legs refuse to rotate open at the hip joints;  whose knees refuse to fully straighten; whose feet do not have a beautiful arch; whose tummies perpetually seem to spill out; whose ears seem not to hear the music.  Some schools are large enough to separate enrollees into “pre-professional” and “recreational” divisions.  (There is an entire generation of teachers out there who cringe at the notion of “recreational” ballet, but I wonder what else they would call it.)  Other schools, like my own, make no such distinction and say yes to just about anybody who crosses the threshold.

At the risk of sounding like a fossil, I will say that my own early training was at the hands of a couple of “old-school” teachers whose method of segregating the talented from the rest was to shove the undesirables into the back of the room and forget about them.  In a class with fifteen students, five of us—the “favorites”—would be placed on the front row for centre floor work,  with the best and brightest front and center, and the remaining ten would be relegated to the back two rows; I wonder how the parents of those unlucky kids found it in themselves to keep writing tuition checks.  This overt prejudice instigated all manner of hateful dressing room chatter, but that is fodder for another post.

Classical ballet—what I teach almost every day of the week—is classical ballet.  I don’t know how to kind of teach ballet; I only know how to deliver what I learned over the course of many, many years (with much still to learn about the method of delivery).  It isn’t Classical Ballet for Dummies, or Disney ballet (horrors!), or ballet writ small.  It’s classical ballet, and it starts with the basic elements of plie, battement tendu, and releve; it includes learning a whole lot of French and some Italian vocabulary; it engages the senses and requires us to become very aware of our bodies and how we stand and move through space; at some point in the process we learn how to go beyond technique and become artists.  I would like to think this is the product being delivered to every child in my school.

I am still feeling my way through the business of teaching ballet, making plenty of mistakes as I go.  I have been at this now for a paltry six years—three of them under my own roof, and three for another institution.  As I have mentioned to my mom during countless “shop talk” chats, teaching gifted children feels gratifying and enjoyable.  But what kind of teacher am I if I can’t reach everybody else?  Lately I’ve had my kids under a microscope, scrutinizing everything, but mainly the basics.  It is spring evaluation time, and in a couple of weeks, I will give every family an essay, or at least a couple of well considered paragraphs, about their child’s or children’s progress since last September.  This is a good exercise for me, as it requires that I consider each child’s strengths and weaknesses—not as held up against the most advanced or talented kid in the class—but held up against where each of them was last September.  And then I must face the reality of whether I did my job well.

At the end of the summer I will attend a ten-day teacher’s training intensive at American Ballet Theatre in New York.  This is a new program, started about a year ago, and offered through the prestigious Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at ABT (yes, the JKO school is a world premiere school).  The program’s directors say they want to reach teachers like myself, who teach in small schools across the country; I am thrilled about this amazing opportunity, of course.  But I especially can’t wait to hear what the instructors at ABT have to say about The Rest Of Us.

Filed under: American Ballet Theatre, Knoxville Ballet School, ballet, ballet school by deb
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Go here for the Spring 2009 issue.

Filed under: Knoxville Ballet School, Louisville Ballet, Louisville Ballet School, ballet, ballet school by deb
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A couple of seasons back Louisville Ballet gave its audiences a taste of choreographer Mark Godden in the guise of his version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (which he first created for Canada’s Royal Winnepeg Ballet), where Tamino—here a TV junkie in a smoking jacket—enters not from stage right or left, but is dropped from the flies above the stage.  This coup-de-theatre evokes the opening sequence in Rowan Atkinson’s hilarious “Mr. Bean” series, where he is unceremoniously plunked down onto the street cobbles by aliens following what we gather was an abduction.  Mr. Godden—and by extension Louisville Ballet’s Artistic Director Bruce Simpson—delivered a rare and unexpected gift to audiences at those performances:  the chance to guffaw during a ballet. (Photo by David Cooper; dancers of the Royal Winnipeg in The Magic Flute)

Earlier this season Louisville Ballet also gave its audiences a heart-stopping, adrenaline-inducing work that included virtually naked men joyously smacking each other around in fraternal bliss to a montage of Scots-Irish music performed by The Chieftains, Bill Whelan, and William J. Ruyle.  The ballet was Lila York’s Celts, to be danced once again in Louisville’s season next year.  Andrew Adler, dance critic for Louisville’s Courier-Journal, described Celts as “a flat-out, mouth agape pleasure, the ballet equivalent of riding a motorcylce 100 miles an hour on an open, twisting road.”

This past weekend left me wondering what Mr. Simpson is slipping into the dancers’ water bottles.  Although I was eager for another chance to see NYCB principal (and Louisville native) Wendy Whelan dance with the company, I did not expect to be swept off my feet again so easily, especially after Celts.  Let me just say I had the wind knocked out of me, not once, but three times within the space of a couple of hours.

Louisville gave us Val Caniparoli’s Vivace (Louisville Ballet School Director Elena Fillmore was right on when she said even the adagio was fast, but I was unprepared for the ambitious lifts, which left me with white knuckles); Bruce Marks’ poignant and beautiful Lark Ascending (and those adjectives go only a little ways towards doing the ballet justice), the lead danced with mercurial quality by Natalia Ashikhmina to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ sumptuous score; and resident choreographer Adam Hougland’s world premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which he set on Wendy Whelan and the company.  (Photo by Ryan Galbraith; dancers of Ballet West in Lark Ascending)

In an unlikely turn of events, husband was in Louisville the weekend before my trip there, and brought me the copy of Louisville magazine from his hotel room for its article about Wendy Whelan and her Louisville homecoming.  I must say the article was rife with misinformation and errors, not least of which the misspelling of Adam Hougland’s name throughout.  But the most striking omission was any explanation at all—not even a glancing blow—for the proliferation of Le Sacre du Printemps (or, Rite of Spring, if you prefer) world premieres being rolled out by ballet companies far and wide just now.  This year marks the centennial of Russian impressario Serge Diaghilev’s iconic company, Ballets Russes; dancer Vaslav Nijinsky made Le Sacre du Printemps, set to Stravinsky’s atonal score, for Ballets Russes between 1912 and 1913.  Its premiere in Paris purportedly incited rioting among ballet patrons, who began throwing punches before the show was even half over.  It is an excellent choice to mark both the Ballets Russes centennial and the arrival of spring.

If you are unfamiliar with Stravinsky’s score, you should know that it is unequivocally NOT tea-sipping music.  I caught some murmuring along those lines in Whitney Hall’s lobby Saturday afternoon, about the seamy, industrial sets and costumes for Mr. Hougland’s ballet, and the music; I for one enjoyed being knocked around a bit.  If your definition of classical ballet fits into a tidy box that is all tiaras and tulle, you might in fact be tempted to throw some punches during this ballet.  Adam Hougland revealed an exceptional understanding of Stravinsky’s complex score, and a remarkalbe ability to translate that into movement through the dancers.  To me, that is so much more what good ballet is about.  In the Louisville magazine interview, Houghland admitted being drawn to create this ballet precisely because so many other choreographers have attempted it:  “I don’t regard it as off-limits in any sense and I am not approaching it differently from any other piece.  I listen and react to the music.” (Photo by David Michalek; Adam Hougland and Wendy Whelan in rehearsal for Rite of Spring)

The company and Ms. Whelan also listened and reacted very, very well to the music in the performance I saw.  I have long internalized movement on stage when I go to the ballet, often feeling the effects of that for hours beyond.  The first time this happened I was about seven or eight; the National Ballet of Canada had brought their Swan Lake to Memphis.  As my mom tucked me into bed late that night, I complained that my legs ached miserably.  My mom quipped, Of course they do—you were dancing right along with the company from your seat!  For years I doubted this, but after watching Louisville’s dancers roll musically through inhuman abdominal contractions throughout the entire ballet yesterday, it is no surprise that I now find myself with sore back and stomach.

I encourage you to go here for video excerpts of Adam Hougland’s works, including footage of Wendy Whelan performing in Christopher Wheeldon’s company, Morphoses, as well as excerpts of Louisville Ballet dancing Mr. Hougland’s ballets.  For my local readers, I hope you agree with me that it is time to invite Louisville to Knoxville, and I encourage you to jump on that wagon with me.  And to Louisville Ballet, Adam Hougland, and the amazing and incomparable Wendy Whelan, I say, Bring it!

Filed under: Adam Hougland, Knoxville, Louisville Ballet, Louisville Ballet School, New York City Ballet, Wendy Whelan, ballet, choreographers, dancers, music by deb
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Mile two with Teddy Blue:

Not bad for a cell phone camera (and a new, sexy, purple one at that).

Filed under: dogs, running by deb
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