Dancing in the Light (12 page)

When she was displeased at a student’s progress, she never hesitated to denounce them as “ridiculous” and told me once that I would never be able to dance the role of Cinderella because I was too “big” and she just couldn’t have Cinderella “clod-hopping” across the stage when the prince was supposed to feel sorry for her. When I told Mother what Miss Day had said, Mother called her up and said, “Fine, Shirley would rather be an actress anyway.” That was news to me, but I had to stay away from class for a few weeks until Miss Day apologized for her breach of sensitivity and said I would be really wonderful in the role of the Fairy Godmother because she needed to have size and command. Mother relented and I returned to class. Mother might have been reticent where she herself was concerned, but nobody was going to push her daughter around in an impolite manner. Mother wanted me to be a success and neither Miss Day nor anybody else was going to intimidate me if she had anything to say about it.

Miss Day, on the other hand, admired Mother’s spunk and gained new respect for me, too, as a result, so much so that later on when the school was in financial disorganization, she called Mother to solicit Dad’s help in “straightening out the mess.” Dad complied and the three of them have been friends ever since.

With Miss Day I always knew where I stood. If I could extract a pleased nod or a compliment from her, I knew I was progressing. The summer I returned from an intensive ballet course in New York City, she took one look at my legs and said, “Well, finally you are beginning to develop dancer’s muscles. Things are looking good for you.” That compliment satisfied me for six months.

So Miss Gardiner and Miss Day were my childhood professional mentors. They were the ones I longed to please and they were my yardstick for accomplishment. I spent more time with them at the school than I did with anyone else. And along with Mother, it was they who planted the seeds of acting in my mind. Miss Gardiner’s way of nourishing those seeds was to say, “You are a fine actress when you move. I always know what you’re attempting to convey.” Miss Day would say, “You know, Shirley, your face moves too much for classical ballet. Why don’t you think about going into acting?”

Either way, I got the message. But first I felt I needed to become accomplished at the expression of dance.

I remember the choreography contest. We were allowed complete freedom to choreograph what we wanted. I wasn’t interested in “steps” or matching movements. I wanted to express what I was feeling. As I was discussing it with Mother, she revealingly said, “Why don’t you choreograph movement that expresses a person willing to die for her art?” At first, that sounded melodramatic to me, but her
feeling
was so intense, I realized it was “acceptable” because that was just where she lived.

I chose some Russian symphonic music. I designed my body movements to express the anguish of the Russian soul in its suffering. I dragged myself across the floor as though being held down by an invisible force and finally convulsed into an outburst of triumph in the last movement.

When I performed my choreography, Mary Day
had me do it twice. The second time, I spontaneously altered the final position. She gave me second prize because she felt I had been more involved with performing than with choreographing. I felt spontaneity was essential to choreography.

Thus began my personal conflict with the classical forms of dancing and consequently the dilemma Of whether I wanted to be a dancer or a star. When I graduated from high school I went straight to New York and into the chorus of a Broadway show. I was finally a professional dancer.

Dancers, or gypsies, as we refer to each other, are soldiers with talent, artists who are not allowed freedom, exponents of the living body who are in constant pain.

No one who hasn’t done it can possibly understand what the inherent contradictions mean. It is an art that imprints on the soul. It is with you every moment, even after you give it up. It is with you every moment of your day and night. It is an art that expresses itself in how you walk, now you eat, how you make love, and how you do nothing. It is the art of the body, and as long as a dancer possesses
a
body, he or she feels the call of expression in dancer’s terms. Dancers are always aware of how they look physically. Such is the name of the game. I, as a dancer, may move awkwardly, but I am always aware of it. I may profess to be relaxing, but my body speaks to me when the time is up. I may revel in what strength I have, but I always know I could use more. And I always know when I look beautiful, when the line of a crossed leg is exquisitely angled, when my posture denotes certitude, and when a proud bearing commands respect. I, as a dancer, also know that when depression sets in, I cave in in the middle, become slovenly in my movements, and find it very difficult to look in the mirror.

I, as a dancer, may run with graceful strides to catch a cab, but I am intrinsically involved with every crevice of the street because I don’t want to
become injured. I may adore a certain dress, but I will never wear it if it doesn’t enhance the body line. I choose clothes not for style or color or fashion, but for line … a dancer’s obsession.

When you have observed the progress of your body year after year in the dancing-class mirror, you are aware of each centimeter and bulge. You are aware of how beads of sweat look when they fall glistening from the end of a strand of your hair because you have worked hard.

You know that each slice of chocolate cake you indulge in the night before will have to be lifted in an arabesque the following day.

You learn how to apply your dancer’s knowledge to small everyday tasks, how to warm a pot of milk and set a table at the same time. How to talk on the phone and stretch your hamstrings on a tabletop in order to save time. You can deftly change your entire wardrobe in an airplane seat without being noticed because your body is your domain of manipulation and you know you can do anything with it.

Your relationship to pain becomes complex. There is good pain and bad pain. Good pain becomes a sensation you miss. Bad pain becomes a sensation of danger. With age you learn to pace yourself. You learn that breathing is as important to the movement as the physical technique itself. You learn to never breathe
in.
You understand that nature involuntarily takes care of that, as it does when you sleep. You learn to only breathe
out.
By doing that, you release the toxins in the body. Whenever you engage in a high kick, you breathe out toward, the kick. With that, you know you can go on kicking indefinitely.

And the personality of a gypsy is volatile. With a solo artist, eruptions of temperament are expected; with gypsies they are misunderstood.

Gypsies and soloists have put in the same amount of time in class, have slogged through their own self-doubt, and have endeavored to touch the soul of their being in similarly confrontational terms. To dance
at all is to confront oneself. It is the art of honesty. You are completely exposed when you dance. Your physical health is exposed. Your self-image is exposed. Your psychological health is exposed, and your senses of humor and balance are exposed, to say nothing of how you relate to time, space, and the observer. It is impossible to dance out of the side of your mouth. You tell the truth when you dance. If you lie, you hurt yourself. If you “mark” it and don’t go full out, if you don’t commit your body totally, you hurt yourself. And if you don’t show up for work, it is relatively impossible to live with the guilt. That is why dancers give the impression of being masochistic. Masochism is not a dancer’s gimmick. Dancers fear being hurt. They do, however, enjoy the challenge of overcoming. That is, after all, what the art of dancing is all about. Overcoming the limitations of the body.

Dancers know that the mind, body, and spirit are inextricably intertwined.

You know it the first time you face an audience. There is “the big black giant” (as Oscar Hammerstein put it) out there and your task is to make them feel something through your body. You know you have to mean it. You know you have to have faith in your balance, your flexibility, and your strength. You know also that they will readily identify with your physical feats because they all have bodies too. You know that if you trip and fall, you humiliate
them
because that is what they are afraid of in themselves. You know that the easier you make it seem, the more hope you give them for themselves. You know they are rooting for you, otherwise their attendance would be called into question. You represent what they would like to be able to do themselves, because each and every one of them have their own problems with their bodies.

And so you continue day after day to keep yourself in shape, driving each muscle one last mile in
order to become a role model for what can be done with the body.

And I have done this for nearly fifty years.

I don’t know why I loved dancing so much from the very beginning. As I said, I believe it had something to do with having danced in a prior incarnation. It came “naturally” to me, as they say.

I adored the graceful, lyrical, romantic reward that came after the discipline and perspiration of hard work.

Perhaps the camaraderie of physical pain, accepted and tolerated in the name of dance, binds each of us gypsies together. But when I meet Olympic athletes and the like, I find we all have the same issues and contradictions in common. We love junk food, cigarettes, sugar, and rising to the occasion. We love to complain and set about helping each other with secret techniques to achieve more. Were we overachievers because of deep self-doubt? That’s part of it. Yet no one is more seemingly proud than a human being who knows he can do most anything with the body.

Perhaps buried in the art of dance and in the performance of athletes is the human understanding that the body is the temple of our soul’s existence, the house in which we live, the instrument of our soul’s expression as we determine whether we are part of God or not.

There are always periods when your body is off, out of sync, not responding to your will. It is at those times that we are forced to confront the invisible reasons why. I have gone through many such periods over the years. Certainly food, rest, and mood entered into the picture, but soon I realized that there was a very real correlation between harmonious periods physically and harmonious periods spiritually.

I remembered my mother explaining the law of reversed effect to me. It happened to her once during a swimming contest. It was a contest for the
backstroke. She had usually “raced” against the clock in order to win. On this particular day, she glided on her back, somehow feeling in total harmony with the sun above her and the water beneath. She said she exerted herself to the utmost, but she didn’t have the sensation of competing. It was more a sensation of harmonizing with the elements involved. She said she just didn’t care whether she won or not. She simply wanted to go as fast as possible. She
relaxed
and became “one” with all that surrounded her. The discipline of a trained body took over and, to her astonisnment, she won easily.

I began to operate with the same principle, and found that my body hurt less and was capable of doing much more.

Later I studied Oriental approaches to karate, judo, and aikido. Meditation was the mainstay, the discipline of becoming one with mind, body, and spirit. The more I learned to ignore negative emotions, the more positive my body felt. I avoided the intellectualization of movement and allowed my body to respond to itself. I realized my
muscles had memory
if I kept my mind from interfering. If I trusted the muscle memory, I could remember choreography from numbers and combinations I had done when I was twelve years old. The body always
knows
if it is allowed to prevail. The body is a spiritual temple with checks and balances. When the spiritual harmony is not nourished, the body starves too. When the spirit radiates happiness, the body performs miraculously.

Often I look back on the years and years of physical discipline. I can remember nearly every classroom where the beads of sweat fell, where the water fountain was located, the smell of each rancid dressing room during the summer months, the smooth feel of the wooden bar during each warm-up. I remember the dank wetness of woolen tights when the cold night air hit my legs in the winter, seizing my elongated muscles into tight knots until I could
reach a warm bath. I remember the tingling of my scalp just prior to breaking a sweat and how the food I had eaten would determine when that would occur.

I remember the bleeding calluses on my long toes as I mercilessly stuffed my feet into toe shoes padded with lamb’s wool, how I would measure my height from month to month, shredded with anxiety that I might be growing too tall.

I remember the inflamed lower back pain whenever I had to dance on cement floors in television studios, the incessant mental notes to land with my heels down whenever I performed a jump, in order to prevent ugly calf-bulging, and stinging shin splints.

I remember the nausea doing pirouettes, the stretched splendor of a slow adagio, the joy of defying gravity in a grand jeté, the awkwardness of turns to the left, the strained quivering of the pointed foot at the end of an extension, the burning thighs in a slow grand plié, the certainty that my back must be made of concrete during a backbend.

The mirror is your conscience. You’ve rehearsed with its definitive image in front of you for weeks. Then the choreographer turns you around, away from the mirror. You are on your own. You’re not sure where you are. Your image is no longer there to ratify your existence. Your orientation to space is altered. You become aware of the meaning of movement and your need to communicate to the audience because you can no longer communicate with your own image. The music sounds different. Your spacing is off. You are unable to check out your line, not only in relation to yourself, but also in relation to whomever else you may be dancing with.

Then you begin to soar, you begin to become what you mean. You find a hidden subtext in your movement. You bend and flow and jump to the music when you allow it to carry you aloft. You begin to fill every space with body language; no move is gratuitous. You learn to think ahead, knowing
which combination of moves requires the most anticipation. You learn which movements are the most fulfilling and which are defiantly dangerous. You employ shortcuts and pain-saving devices. You know how much breath you’ll need to pace yourself.