What Dancing Was Like

I don’t remember seeing my first ballet, but it doesn’t really matter. Show a certain kind of little girl any ballet at all, Giselle or Romeo and Juliet or The Nutcracker, and with sparkly visions of being the best at toe-dancing, this perhaps slightly theatrical girl will become obsessed. I became obsessed when I saw...let’s say it was the Nutcracker, because it’s everyone’s gateway ballet. There’s a girl in the cast, sure, and she gets to throw her not-satin ballet flat at the Mouse King, but really the one that caught me was the Sugar Plum Fairy. She of the beautiful gold-edged sleeves and shining tiara and that fucking tulle skirt! It sticks straight out so that you can see her legs better, and when she turns and turns it’s there, as constant and fancy as any standard-issue handsome prince could ever hope to be. Some adult suggested that I could play the girl when I talked about it later and I scoffed in their face. “I’m gonna play the Sugar Plum Fairy” I said, and then I probably did some pirouetting of my own to prove my point. I was brilliant, I’m sure. 

I had lessons at the Felix Dance Academy, in the basement level behind the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The instructor was a bitty little red-headed woman who would make us get into stretching positions and then sit on us to deepen the stretch. She would single me out whenever we did the butterfly stretch, sitting on my back and telling me to breathe out, but it was worth it to stay and be allowed to the barre and then allowed to the floor for leaps. I loved it so much that once I went when I was feeling very ill and ended up puking right in the center of the studio, too besotted to just stay home. When our first production came- the first I was cast in- I was made the white cat in Sleeping Beauty. There had been talk of me being the Bluebird, which is a solo, and like the diva I intended to be I threw a fit about not getting it. (My mother made me apologize to Anne, by duet partner, and if anyone knows her please let her know that I’m really sorry and not just saying that because my mother made me. That might have been true when I was seven, but now I mean it. You made a gorgeous black cat, Anne.) 

We moved when I was twelve, from Brooklyn to Blairstown, New Jersey. Don’t Ask. As much as that sentence sounded like it sucked, it was eight times worse. My mom found a new dance studio for me which was pretty cool of her considering she was in the throes of rising her first business as an organic berry farmer (my Mom was always about twenty years ahead of the curve.) That studio was different. It was the teacher’s family’s house’s garage converted into a “wood” floor with barres along the walls and no floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Not one. I can appreciate how much a floor-to-ceiling mirror might have cost in the 80’s, and if I work at it I can imagine how Not Available such a mirror might be: I mean, where would you have ordered such a thing? The Sears in Hackettstown, for god’s sake? The instructor was a Goofus and Gallant cartoon version of a ballet instructor, with her being the overweight housewife Goofus to my previous injurious dictator Gallant ballet teacher. She barely remembered all five primary positions, the cow. My traumatized twelve-year old self already knew things were going to go south, and that my career as a Prima Ballerina was in the balance (get it?), but I went to that school and went through those motions because I was so very close to getting my first pair of pointe shoes. 

Really quickly, for those who don’t know because lots of people don’t, ballet dancers (the women, and the Trocadero de Monte Carlo, a drag company of male dancers who dance en pointe for comedic effect) don’t actually dance on just their toes. That beautiful satin hides blocks of wood that have been shaped to look like that, with the ridiculously small flat surface on the bottom and a hollow inside for the toes. They have to pack the toes with unspun wool, then they have to tape their feet up to protect the joints and the skin. Then they have to dance in them until they’re “broken in,” which is a misnomer because the only breaking that happens is in the feet themselves. Then they have to smile and put their arms just so. Dancers, especially ballet dancers, are made of pure grade 10 steel, every perfect line and bird bone as unbendable as that, just underneath the layer of tulle or spandex or sequins or, if you’re the steeliest one in any production, all three. (I knew a dancer once whose hips weren’t open enough, he said, and so he slept with a ten pound weight pinning his knee to the side on his mattress. The next night he’d do the other hip. I’m not making this up.) And I was going to be one of them. So I went to lessons at my new ballet garage until I was given the nod to get the pointes. As soon as I got them on my feet and hoisted myself up I knew this was going to not work out, because, just like childbirth, they don’t tell you how much it’s going to hurt. I went to the lessons and I loved the minutes I spent en pointe, gently waving my arms around like drifting seaweed (that was one of Instructor Goofus’ descriptions, but never mind,) but the second my feet were flat again I huuuurrt. In my feet and my legs and my hips, which were my harbingers. The moment I admitted to myself that I was never to dance the lead in the Firebird (or in the chorus, for that matter) was when I was sitting in my seventh grade English class and the kid in the row next to me said “Jenn!” and pointed at the floor. My little toes had bled through the band-aids I’d wrapped around them and then the new white tennies my mother had just bought for me. I’d double-layered the band-aids, too. My toes wouldn’t stop bleeding. 

So I gave it up and my mother heaved a sigh of relief, I’m sure. I started dancing on my own, just basically throwing myself around a lot in the afternoon to my music. Plus there were school dances, and I would thrash around or move my feet in weird ways that cemented my reputation as a freak. I didn’t care while the music was playing. In college I met modern dance, and belatedly found out that I actually did have some talent. I took a year’s worth- just a year, plus some movement classes- from one of those alchemist teachers who’s able to get you to work at a higher level. She was the same basic dancer-shape as my very first ballet teacher except that she was kind. She had us performing complex choreography to beautiful, weird music and it wasn’t pretty, really, but I loved it and I did it well. I loved leaps the most. I knew how to make my legs work so that I could feel that hang in the air, like I had made time stop at the very height of my jump, you know how like they do, and it was bliss. I probably loved it so much because no part of me was touching the Earth in that moment, and Earth-touching was already becoming problematic. 

My hip problems had started in High School, gifting me extra time between classes because I couldn’t walk after sitting in class. I would fall on the floor sometimes, or lurch my way to my next class by holding on to a wall. I was taken to a chiropractor who gave me standing x-rays and told me that while my hips were a problem, wonky and unbalanced, my neck was worse, leaning straight forward instead of gently curving back. He would crack my spine and my hips and neck, and made it marginally better. I spent a lot of time at physical therapists after schooling was over, and it wasn’t until I moved to Chicago in my twenties that I was told I had Hypermobility. The pain moved from my neck and head and hips to my muscles, my shoulders, my feet (of course my feet.) I limped along, right? This is what we do when we don't have answers. Eventually I got married, got pregnant, and the pregnancy was what pushed my defective physiology past the arbitrary boundary of “come-and-go pain” into “constant pain.” I went into my regular GP and he was the one that suggested I have Fibromyalgia (a condition of constant body pain and fatigue.) I had good insurance, so I was sent to a doctor who specializes to hear that I did have it. I took a lot of pills, and a few of them dulled the pain. The other ones made me sleepy, or possibly it was the undiagnosed Sleep Apnea that kept me in a constant miserable haze of fatigue and stupid. During this whole time I was researching what was going on, trying to find more specific answers, some understanding of how my body could be so fucked up. I found something called Ehler-Danlos Syndrome and...it fit, and it fit for my grandfather who had a certain body type, and for my father who bruised easily and who was impervious to Novocaine, and for my Aunt, my favorite Aunt, who is disabled with body-wide joint pain. I only just saw a Rheumatologist that told me I have Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder. I’ve been searching for a reason for thirty-four years. 

I dance almost every day, now. My days are painful- every moment of them, to one degree or another- and it gets worse as the hours pass, so that the clinging ache starts to become more conscious around five PM. But I am the homemaker for my family, so I’m the one that has to cook. My joints start to burn instead of just ache when I’m cutting food so I turn some music on, something “slapping” as my teenager would say (and saying that has probably just killed that slang. You’re welcome,) and I dance around my kitchen, cooking and washing dishes and whatnot. My feet will start to get stabbing pains and I flex them and then point them, rolling through the mid-foot like a ballerina warming up at 9AM. Another song comes on and I’ll turn, and spot every half-turn because I can’t do it just once per.  Standing at the stove is harder because there’s less moving around the room, so I plant my feet apart and sway, careful of my hip joints, so careful, feeling like a member of the Corps who’s been away from the studio for a month to baby an injury. But I keep swaying- I must do this. Everything that my own personal universe throws at me is just another challenge: how can I move through this? How can I keep dancing, now, with this new or just the same hurting? I put on different music, I turn it up, I do an arabesque on one side and then on the other, just to show my body that it can. My hands throb and I remember to hold my pennies, like that evil redheaded woman  showed me when I was seven. Be graceful I command them. I do not leap any more, because that is too much: I won’t do an amended leap, something half-wonderful and not inspiring, so I just don’t do it. But the rest I do: I have an amended pirouette, and amended kick-turns, and amended plies. No one is watching me. I do not care. I’ll paint my face in war colors and make my pain move instead of have my pain move me, trembling and afraid. Come at me, I think. Give me more, I think. I’m a fucking dancer: I’m made of Grade Ten steel and I can dance through all of this.