Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet (34 page)

Then, just before a moment when the music stops and then changes to a faster rhythm, there is a simple jump, a
pas de chat
, that takes the Sugar Plum to center stage front. I thought, I’m going to jump
really
high!

I didn’t. Something happened on the takeoff, and I landed on my bottom, with a thud and a bounce, front and center.

It was shocking. And embarrassing. And, well, funny. I stood up to resume dancing and got applause for my recovery. I finished out the solo with no further mishaps. When I got offstage someone joked to me, “Well, after that, you can do no wrong! The audience is going to love you no matter what!”

And I think maybe God was helping me to remember that I don’t need to be perfect. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. I can just dance—yes, I have to, and want to, put the work into it and do my best, but at the end of the day, once I’m onstage, the performance is about just dancing.

—

A
s I turn forty, I’ve returned to a place in my dancing where I’m simply appreciating the experiences I’ve had both onstage and off, and my thoughts turn again to
Dances at a Gathering.
Jerry gave his dancers a
wonderful gift with the last movement of his ballet.
Dances
does not end with a robustly uplifting finale in the traditional sense. The music is soft and contemplative, and all the dancers from the ballet, together onstage for the only time, wander in from the wings slowly, walking and pausing as if to look at and remember the space that they are inhabiting. At one point, the Brown Boy crouches down and softly presses the floor with his hand as if he is touching something extremely precious; all the dancers stop to watch him and consider what he has done.

Then there is a moment in the music when it seems that something momentous has suddenly taken place offstage. All the dancers stop where they are and look to the front left corner of the stage. They then stand still and follow an unseen
something
with their eyes and faces as it travels up the left side, across the top of the theater, and then down the right side of the stage. Next, something else, also invisible, high in the center of the space in front of them captures their attention. They all gaze at it, and some take a few steps forward to get closer to whatever it is. Then the dancers slowly let their gaze drop down until their chins have lowered toward their chests.

The music then resolves itself into a melody that sounds like dawn and hard-won knowledge and growth after a loss. The dancers all do a very simple port de bras together, lifting their arm across their bodies in an arc and gently opening their palms to the sky to catch something hopeful in their hands. They move to the back of the stage and separate into two groups, one of men and one of women. The groups gaze at each other across the stage, then exchange bows of greeting. They reach to their partners, in some cases dancers with whom they have not yet danced in the ballet, and then form a circle to bow to each other again. Finally, arm in arm, the couples begin walking, off to another experience, as the curtain lowers.

Everybody seems to have their own explanation for what exactly it is that we’re supposed to be seeing when we all stop and turn to gaze upward in the finale. Even Jerry himself changed his description from time to time. I was told we were following a flock of birds as they
winged across the sky at twilight. Another time we were told we saw a zeppelin in the distance. The explanation for the finale that resonates most with me is that this is the last time we will be in this particular space, and we’re remembering the experiences we had there. After being a part of
Dances
for so many years, I treasure each performance and am often moved to tears during the finale because I never know when it could be the last time I perform it. Injuries could happen, or it could go out of the repertory for a few years and not return before I’ve retired.

I’ve used the finale of
Dances
to say good-bye to certain theaters on tour, knowing that I probably will not be coming back to them again, and to individual dancers with whom I might not perform again. And every performance of
Dances
is in fact a last of sorts, because each combination of cast, pianist, and audience is unique and can never be repeated. For an hour, we live a small life together, and when it is over, we all move on to experience other things. It is bittersweet because we have shared such a rich time together, yet we know that it will never happen in exactly that way again.
Dances at a Gathering
is a complete journey, but one whose ending is actually the beginning of another path. It lifts up both the dancer and the viewer, urging them to relish life with all of its passions, losses, and light and then to have the courage to face a future filled with even more of the same, yet different, experiences.

I feel the same way about my dance career as I begin contemplating the end of it. In the Bible, it says that David danced before the Lord with all his might (2 Samuel 6:14). It does not say that he danced before the Lord with perfect execution; it just says that he danced with all his might. And I’ve been given the gift and the chance to do the same. I feel so grateful that I’ve been allowed to dance for a living, and grateful for the lessons I’ve learned and am still learning as I travel through this ballet world. I would change nothing that I went through, because it has made me who I am. I would not have the blessings I have now without the trials I experienced before. I’m grateful that I get to share this gift with the people around me, and that I get to reflect the gift back to God. When I look in the mirror now, I see God’s grace and mercy
accepting and eradicating my failures and imperfections. For it is my Savior, inside me, who is beautiful, and what I see shining back at me from the mirror now, covering all of my brokenness, is Him.

And how I want to burst when my five-year-old daughter hears some favorite piece of music in our apartment and rushes toward me in her Supergirl costume, hair and bare feet flying, arms outstretched and crying, “Dance with me, Mommy!” I pick her up and twirl her around, the two of us doing some inspired mother-daughter moves, and then we turn to include my one-year-old son, who shrieks and chortles as he watches us and does the “toddler bounce” on his short, chubby legs.

What a gift.

D
ancers are surrounded by mirrors. They fill our dressing rooms and line entire walls of our studios. We’re constantly checking ourselves: What looks right? But much more often, what looks wrong? What needs to be fixed or changed or hidden or eradicated? Even if we’re alone in a studio, working on something just for ourselves, we cannot get away from the mirror. It is there, projecting a truth that can be easily distorted by the dancer’s mind’s eye.

Somewhere along the line, I gave the mirror way too much power. It became a malevolent presence in my life, always lurking around corners to suddenly appear on a wall or a door and taunt me with evil images of myself. There was a certain seduction it wove over me that drew my eyes ever toward it, even while the rest of me was constantly trying to run away. I hated the mirror, but I was still ever trying to please it, hoping that one day it would gaze back at me with approval.

When I was a child, the mirror was my friendly companion as I discovered myself and became aware of my appearance. The mirror brought me nothing but entertainment as I watched how my limbs moved or saw how my body bent when I was sitting down. It helped me experiment with my facial expressions as I sat in front of it and tried to act out the exotic feelings I would read about in my beloved books: dismay, shock, horror, euphoria.

In my pretend stories, I was always a princess of some sort who had to escape from being captured by some villain. Princesses were always beautiful and perfectly behaved. I clearly remember being devastated
one day when I looked in the mirror after dressing up in my red velvet princess dress and tiara. I had the chicken pox, and my face was covered in spots. Princesses were not supposed to have spots.

When I started to take ballet, the mirror became my compass. Was I going in the right direction with my positions? Did I need to make adjustments to where I put my arms or how I held my shoulders? Were my legs going as high as I wanted them to? In the mirror I saw my actual self overlaid by my vision of myself as a perfect ballerina, and I constantly strove to reconcile my reality with my ideal. The mirror was a source of hope and a promise of what I felt I could achieve.

Slowly, subtly, without my noticing, a darkness crept over the mirror like an oily film. As my body began to change into its womanly form, the mirror showed me shapes I didn’t recognize or want. I was not matching up to the ideal I’d always assumed I would eventually reach. I still felt the same—why was the mirror showing me something different? The mirror became something for me to distrust; it was no longer showing me a princess or a perfect ballerina, and no matter what I did, all I could see staring back at me was an ugly stranger.

The mirror had betrayed me. It was now something hateful to be denied and avoided, but I still had to use it and was confronted by the necessity of it every day. Gazing into any mirror was a torture, but I could never tear my gaze away. I would stare at myself, lingering on the distasteful parts of my body that the hateful device would flaunt defiantly, displaying my failure with awful clarity.

Finally there was a break. I stopped dancing. I stopped looking at anything but my face in the mirror. I struggled for a new identity, a new worth divorced from my appearance. I withdrew inside myself and there found God, in whose image I am made. It is the reflection of His glory that brings me joy, and it is the striving for His image that brings me identity and humility.

As I mended, I warily struck up a new relationship with the mirror. It was one of fragile acceptance and even, finally, approval for just the
normal, imperfect person that I was. I was not a princess, and I had good, beautiful parts along with weird, ugly parts, all making up a whole being who was just fine. I’d taken away the mirror’s power.

And now I can use the mirror as the tool it is meant to be. I often forget to look into a mirror all day long and then catch my reflection and find my hair sticking out in a funny direction or baby food stains on my shirt. After a wild morning with a grumpy toddler and too much to do, I force myself to use the mirror to make sure I don’t leave the apartment in a state that would embarrass my family. Grace is starting school, and I want her to be proud of her mother.

I also now have the precious privilege of teaching my daughter how to use the mirror, and I hope to infuse her with physical self-confidence as well as the knowledge that her appearance does not define her worth or her identity. Grace already has a tender, kind heart and a generous spirit, and I hope to teach her to always look to the heart of a person when she is making decisions about the people she meets.

Often as she is getting dressed, she will pause and stare at herself naked in the mirror, her face a neutral expression of curious interest.

“Oh, Grace,” I’ll say. “Look at the beautiful body you have. It is so strong and healthy and can do so many interesting things. God gave you exactly the right body for
you
because He knew what you needed. And inside that body is your beautiful, precious soul.”

And I’ll see her expression change to one of pride and pleasure as she gazes at herself and wriggles around, shaking her arms and legs and twisting to see her tummy and back.

“Yes,” she will say with the confidence of a child. “God gave me a beautiful body. Watch me, Mommy!” And she will dance before the mirror, beaming with joy, her beautiful spirit shining out through her eyes.