“Hi! I think this is the K ____ who was at ADF in 1990? Yes?”
Earlier this year, in April, I reached out on Facebook to a friend I had lost along the way. I’ve never really done this before. I am leery of sliding down the slippery slope of middle-aged nostalgia, have not felt the urge to reconnect with old lovers or misplaced friends, believing the past to be happier when it remains in its place. But it was shortly after I’d started taking ballet again, and my head and my heart had been slammed straight back to the year I found myself as a dancer, just before I turned my back on that self and let her slip away. My casual message belied the heat of my desire to talk to that girl again; K was one of the few people who knew her, who might be able to help. After hovering over her blank slate of a profile I wrote the note and hit send. And waited.
We met at the American Dance Festival in the summer of 1990. Both recent grads of liberal arts college dance programs, we were each at ADF with a small cohort of classmates and as a group we gravitated toward each other, forming a larger island of college modern dancers in a sea of young artists of demonstrably more polished technique. For six weeks we danced, ate, played, and eventually lived together as, near the end of the festival, our new friends were robbed at gunpoint in their shared rental and moved in with us in ours.
It was a heady experience, four classes a day, plus workshops and performance opportunities, our postcollegiate lives suspended mid-leap before the real work of adulting had to begin. I loved it and I didn’t, keenly aware of my own inadequacies in this hothouse of talent. In a letter home to a friend I describe Durham as a “pit” and moan about feeling alienated, lamenting, “I wish I was somewhere where I didn’t have to explain myself to everyone.”* But my memories of it are deep and pleasant, in large part thanks to K and her friends, who helped me feel like I belonged, like I was allowed to call myself a dancer even if I couldn’t whip off a triple pirouette.
When the festival ended, K and I both moved to New York, and she got a job in the box office at the Joyce, where I toiled away as an administrative assistant. It’s all so hazy still, those early months adrift in the city; having her there, upstairs in the ticket office, felt like an anchor. We took classes around town and she got involved with the downtown dance scene, a haven for postcollegiate experimentation. I performed at Dance Theater Workshop and the Kitchen in a group piece originally created at ADF. And then, somehow, we lost track of each other. She went to Europe for a time, and by the time she came back I had quit my job, and I had moved more than once. There was no social media, and no cell phones. No way for two young nomads to find each other outside of the institutional supports that bound us – or at least it seemed that way. I never saw her again.
Until …
In mid-July, just as I was leaving to go to Snake Island, a message: “Oh my god. Yes!!!”
There she was – and three weeks and multiple messages later, there I was too. On my final day in New York last month, I woke up at my friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, packed my bag, hopped on the C train and then the 4, and then took Metro-North up to northern Westchester County. K picked me up in her little white Honda and whisked me to breakfast at the diner near the station, where we grinned at each other in disbelief over our eggs.
We talked for several hours, first at the diner and then perched on the bank of the Hudson, a 30-year span closed in an instant. She knows I’m writing this, but I still want to hold the details close. It was such a remarkable thing.
She had stayed in the dance world where I had not, getting first into Afro-Brazilian dance and then later swing, and we talked at length about the ways our early ballet training both hobbled and lifted us up. There is no denying the disastrous effects ballet can have on young people – the everyday fires of adolescence become bonfires fed by its culture of anxious perfectionism, body dysmorphia, and obedience to ritual. But it also is a conduit to understanding ones own unruly body as something that can be harnessed in the service of beauty. It allows a teenage girl – the most demeaned of all demographics – to realize herself as an artist and set herself up for a life in motion that lasts into her 50s and beyond.
“I think there is a lot more potential for creative movement at our age than we thought when we were young, or that people who aren’t coming from the place we are coming from understand there to be now,” she said – one of the few remarks I thought to write down.
Like me, K had been conditioned as a child to believe modern, jazz, or college dance in general were lame consolation prizes for dancers who couldn’t hack it in ballet. “I closed off SO many potential pathways for myself and it took years to unlearn that message,” she wrote to me later. For her, the process of unlearning was long and hard, but it eventually did happen, “very deeply.” Today she describes herself as an “an equal opportunity lender for anyone moving their body! Or making something and putting it out there. Or being part of a discipline or practice or exploration or performance. At any level. (Not that I don’t have my preferences. But it is delightful to enjoy something young me would have snickered at and judged).”
Me, I still hear that snickering adolescent in my head. As I try to write this, she whispers that my enthusiasms are embarrassing, that my desire to dance – a longing that has me stalking every studio in town for new classes, signing up for improv workshops in spiral movement technique, and following Laban-Bartenieff teachers on Instagram – is unseemly in its fervor. I’m like a convert to a new religion, proselytizing to anyone in my scope and just as annoying. But, as another friend remarked last year, illness and trauma change you: some people get divorced, some people get sober, some people get religion.
Last fall and winter, as I went through chemo, surgery, and radiation, I found myself longing for a belief system through which I might better understand what was happening to my life and to my body. I was deeply debilitated, more than I was able to admit, and at times I felt as though I might truly die from fatigue. At one point I was interviewed by another writer for a book about breast cancer, and she asked if cancer had brought up any thoughts that seemed “unspeakable.” I responded:
What feels unspeakable so far are my questions about, for lack of a better word, faith. At some point in this odyssey I started to feel like what I needed more than anything was to be able to understand the mysteries of life and illness and death in structured community with other people, but I have not figured out how to do that. … I have had plenty of therapy in my life, and don’t feel the need for more of that. What I want is something more mystical, and beautiful.
I still don’t know the meaning of life, but – at the risk of sounding sublimely extra – I have in sideways fashion found that belief system in dance, and in ballet in particular. Ballet is an odd vehicle for healing, but in its ritualized practice, the same in studios around the world and across time, I am rebuilding confidence in my own body. “Take up space!” exhorts the teacher, and I do, ranging across the floor in hungry gulps of movement. Each class takes me back to my younger self and lets me teach her not to be ashamed of her physicality, to revel in the joy of her body – lessons my middle-aged, medicalized self still needs to reinforce on the regular.
Finding my friend and sitting with her at the edge of the still water of the Hudson, as schools of tiny fish flashed below the surface, their own glittering dance, put those two in real conversation at last. I am eager to hear what more of they have to say
*Yes, still more from the “letters to Krista” files