My Upcoming Ballet Performance

I am very much looking forward to dancing to an excerpt from Minkus's La Bayadere on January 17.  This will be part of the 92nd St. Y's adult dance performance, where the various classes perform:  there will be ballet, jazz, tap, flamenco, modern and other styles.  I have done this several times before but not since my daughter was born in 2011.  The classes at the Y are quite wonderful and this semester I am taking Dance for the Older Body, a class that is slightly slower and doesn't involve a great deal of jumping.  Like most dance courses at the Y, this class is both rigorously serious and a great deal of fun.  I have been taking classes at the Y for about twenty years now and started taking ballet classes when I realized that I loved going to the ballet but felt that the dancers on stage were having more fun dancing than I was having watching them. 

I first took ballet class at the Columbia University gym, something that took some courage on my part.  My sister had taken ballet briefly but the opportunity was not offered to me when I was young.  So when I first walked into class I had no idea even what to wear, much less how to stand at the barre or what it meant to flex one's feet!  But my teacher was helpful and understanding and I eventually got the hang of it, slowly learning the vocabulary.  I gradually realized that even the simplest ballet steps, such as the tendu, could always be better.  I have seen people come and go in ballet classes and it is easy to get frustrated -- after all part of the idea of a ballet is to make it look somewhat effortless -- but no matter how much difficulty I am having with a particular step or difficult combination I always find that in each class I can do something, even a simple frappe, a little better than in the previous class.   And I have found that ballet classes also involve tremendous concentration, to get the sequences of the steps as well as their execution correct.  This concentration means that for an hour and a half one no longer thinks about the difficulties or problems of a particular day, but rather about being a dancer and dancing well.

The idea of performing was at first scary and somewhat intimidating, but when we started to rehearse it quickly became fun, as one begins to become part of a group and work together with other dancers.  In my current class we have dancers at all different levels and the choreography for our performance is intensely complicated but without particularly advanced or difficult steps, no pirouettes or jetes.   We have been in rehearsal for several weeks now, as we use the steps from our classes in complex combinations.  It gives one a new appreciation of choreography and what dancers go through to learn it, and the feeling that classes can actually lead somewhere, as well as being enjoyable ends in themselves.