Tag: dance class

Lasts

Published on by Laura Nicole Diamond2 Comments

I am running a few minutes late. Never mind that I live two blocks from the dance studio, or that others come from all over the city and are already parked and warming up. We (mostly) know one another only from this space, where we gather every Sunday to move and sweat and leave our weekday identities. Here we are not moms or hair stylists or writers or social workers. Here, for two hours, we are dancers.

Ken ties the laces on his immaculate high-top kicks, turns up the volume, and takes his place in the front of class, facing the mirror. He gives a wicked smile, and we know what we have signed up for: good-natured abuse. Legs wide, we follow as his arms sweep from hips to sky. He models the quality of energy he wants us to give and we count on him to pull it out of us. Our ecstatic priest of boogie.

We reach the last movement. “Genuflect,” he says, just like he said the week before, and the weeks and years before that. “Thank your classmates for a good class. For showing up.” En masse, we step to our right, sweep our left leg behind us, stand tall with our arms extended, one toward the lobby and the other to the scuffed ceiling. We melt our bodies forward, crowns of heads bowing to wood floor, imagining ourselves princess swans. We lift our bodies, face our reflections in the mirror, and complete the movement on our left side. We stretch out the final moment; we make it last.

Walking home under the mellowing influence of my own body’s dopamine, not late for anything, I have no idea that this will be the last class. It is March 8, 2020. The e-mail comes the following week. Class cancelled.

We have all had so many “lasts” this year — last days of school and last ball games. Last words and last breaths.

For me on Sunday mornings now, I open my laptop to stream a dance class. “Shit, what’s wrong with the WiFi?” “Why didn’t I do this earlier?” Then I snap at my would-be helper, “I’m fine! Sorry. Thank you. It’s working.” Unfamiliar music plays in the background, and three dancers warm up on a black stage lit by white lights. They are barefoot, playful, and younger than me by half. In the top left corner of the screen, a number ticks up…750…800…1100…others streaming this right now. I push the square coffee table against the couch to make room. I push down my longing for the wood floor and mirror and camaraderie of real life dancers. I look at the screen, and at the tangerine trees outside my window. I reach left, then right, then close my eyes so I don’t see where I am, but only feel my movement. I imagine other people dancing alone in their living rooms, sobbing for what is missing.

What lasts?

Not the physical. My breath gives out sooner than it used to. Muscles that did not used to cramp do not forgive me for at least a week.  

What lasts? The memories, until they don’t. The photos, until they fade.

What lasts is the love for what — and who — we are missing. What lasts is the hope that they will return, even in some other form. What lasts is our miraculous human ability to adapt to what is, and keep going.

A New Year’s Mash-up: Noticing and The Joy of Dance and Being Among Dancers

Published on by Laura Nicole Diamond2 Comments

I received a beautiful e-mail from my cousin today inspired by the Jewish New Year. My young cousin is brilliant and wise, and if she lets me, I’ll share the whole thing with you later, but for now I was thinking about one thing she wrote about:

Noticing. Noticing new things in the relationships and experiences we have.

I go to dance class most Sundays. Today I noticed something that has been there all along, something that was ignited in the first ballet class my mother signed me up for at three years old, something that at times was lost amidst the despair of not being good enough, but that pumps through my veins and sings in my soul now that I’m old enough not to care about that.

In dance class today, I noticed the keen and pure satisfaction of being in a room of people who feel joy from moving to music in unity, from hitting the correct lines at the right time. I felt the centered-ness of being in a room with pumping music and a room’s-length mirror and that particular kind of wood floor, from feeling I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I felt the camaraderie of being with people who get that the world can be held in counts of 8. 

There is an unspoken understanding among people who share the remembered pride of earning pointe shoes, in which blisters, calluses and bloody toes were badges of honor. Who, with the same grit and drive ascribed to Friday Night Lights footballers, were teenage ballet warriors wrapping their toes in white tape, stuffed lambs’ wool or (if you were in the know) torn brown paper bags, who wedged their feet into pink satin wrapped wooden boxes. Who wound the ribbons that we had sewn on ourselves around our ankles, and became ballerinas for the next hour and a half.

Dancers share a language, not only of words but of physicality. Of “5, 6, 7, 8″ and “from the top.” Of first position through fifth. Of front, side, back, side, first on the right, then on the left. It is order. It is symmetry.

Some of the joy I feel in dance now comes from a beautiful nostalgia, connecting over time with my younger self. My body’s muscle memory connects today with every dance class and rehearsal I’ve ever had, lying on the floor, stretching right leg toward the wall, left leg extended above me trying to reach my nose. There are things that my body will not forget, even as my mind increasingly vexes me by failing to remember to pick up the laundry, or make a dentist appointment, or ask someone about their ailing mother.

There is joy and comfort in striking the same position as when I was 14, striving for the same goal: a better stretch than last time. I feel the same piercing good hurt at the back of my thigh. I feel the same sweat on my arms, pulling that leg closer to my face, closer, closer, never close enough.

Ballet was my love, but it was obvious I was not destined to be a ballerina. I switched to Jazz because the girls and teachers were nicer. There was less looking at how high the other girls’ legs could lift, how many more turns they could do, how extreme their turnout, how gorgeously defined their arched pointed foot.

When I let go the idea of ever being the best, dance became mine, simply for joy.

In a dance class of adults we are all their for joy: music blasting, a teacher inspiring and teasing; and fellow students who are still striving and stretching; still arching and flattening our backs, still lowering our shoulders and elongating our necks, rolling our hips, spotting and turning, and counting and messing up and practicing and living and trying it again, trying to get it just a little better the next time, and – maybe —  nailing it before times up.

Before we leave, “Genuflect,” our teacher says. “Thank your neighbor for a good class.” We all curtsy, like the prima ballerinas we once dreamed we would be, and for that moment we are. We were not perfect today, not close. We made our mistakes and we kept dancing. We laughed them off and helped each other when we forgot the steps. We pushed ourselves harder than we would have if we were dancing alone. We carried each other.

Wishing you these things this year: being with people who understand and appreciate you without explanation or pretense; joy and health and striving; doing a little of what you love.