Exhaustion

I've been an active person my whole life. Weeks of soccer camp, long runs, lifting--I hit most of the high points. I thought I knew what it meant to be completely, irrevocably beat. But there's just nothing in the world says exhausted like the fifth consecutive week of 10+ hr. days of dance school, weekends featuring rehearsal.

I'm not trying to throw the misery poker tougher-than-thou trump card here, because I'm sure there are people who engage with their sports or other training experience in a way that completely uses them up. Just that I've never felt so genuinely at my limit. It's weird because I'm awake, brain's still goin. I just can't get up to go get my book from the shelf, or to wash the dishes, or to move to my bed.

Addendum

So Greg, friend and fellow dancer extraodinaire, had the subject of turnout come up in recent e-mail correspondence with a friend starting into some ballet. I hope you find his insight as illuminating as I have.

ballet. ballet. it took me nearly a year to figure out that ballet is a form of dance. i was like "oh". but you have to fight for it, they don't make it easy to figure out.

and turn out. i mean, turn out is really a philisophical question. it answers itself with further interrogation. it interlocutes. it is the absent present, the square root of negative 1, necessary but undefinable. you can't search for it to find it. i wish you a relationship wiht your turn out which is a journey which is its own end.

Exactly.

Turnout Happens

Dance training is a gift that keeps on giving. There are the immediate visceral joys of a body engaged, what with the pumping blood and extended muscles and sweating and all, and then there's the surprises, like today.

As per the usual, I went to ballet class and stood at the bar in first position. You know, some plies, tendue, port de bras. Keeping it nice and easy to warm up. I've spent the last couple weeks in ballet trying to focus on turnout. Turnout is what you do in your hip joint, knee, and ankle to create that goofy ballet image, what with the knees pointing to side, the toes pulling backwards and the heel forwards. My latest tactic in this maddeningly futile struggle has just been to spend like five minutes before class pumping myself up: "Oh man your turnout is so awesome!" "Yeah, I know, it just comes naturally" and so on and so forth. We finish the warm-up and there I am facing the bar, looking into the mirror, in first position (which means legs like in the picture). Then I had a moment, my head and body in unison saying something along the lines of "let it happen," and all the tension, all the effort I'd been exerting to turn my damn legs out disappeared. They just went. In all my worry, all the times I've been told "turn out turn out turn out," I was working with superficial muscles in your ass that wrap around your waist and are actually for extension of the leg. I just let it go and suddenly the most basic movements, your plie, your tendue, were aligned in ways that made sense. Awesome. So the feeling is "let it go," but when I finished class my real turnout muscles, the internal ones, were spasming from the exhaustion of actually doing the entirety (more or less) of the work they're supposed to for the very first time.

A good ballet teacher notices stuff like that too, when a student gets a position in a way they didn't before, and they're there to line you back up, firm up the newness of the thing. Next for me to tackle is the connection between shoulder blade and the crest of the pelvis, which is good for keeping the length in the side of your torso which is money for balances.

I've been dancing for long enough to know that this surprise is just the start. Tomorrow I will have to fight and focus once again to find my turnout, and I'll have to rework old habits in movement I'm familiar with, and then maybe three vigilant months from now I'll have it firmly in my both my mental and physical repertory. Because really it's never just one moment, it's part of the process of stretching, every day, of standing at a bar sensitive to what's going on in your body, almost every day, then dreaming about it.

Ballet class reminded me of another movementy thing today--a movement generally doesn't start where it LOOKS like it starts. That's why it's so funny to watch people who haven't been trained in ballet (read, me just a few months ago) actually start to learn. You watch and see, oh sure you kick the leg up high and keep your torso straight, oh sure you balance on one leg and bring the other toe up to the standing knee. But it's just not how it works. The organization, especially in ballet which is so concerned with looking effortless, comes first. To balance with one leg on demi-pointe (that means standing on the ball of your foot) and the other in passe, first you have to arrange the ankle joint, adductors of the leg (inner thigh muscles), oblique and straight abdominals and pretty much everything else into a powerful line of support extending all the way from the floor to the top of your spine. THEN the other leg can come off the floor without disturbing the body.

Aight gonna go try and figure some stuff out about my lower legs and feet.

Falling off your game/supporting limb or body surface

Dance School has had me down and out the past couple of weeks. A couple of minor injuries, an unnaturally warm spring with attendant distractions, too much partying. In dance training, there's just no room for an irregularity of cycles.

You reach a point in any discipline where you really understand what it means to take the next step. After unending hours of training, thinking, watching, you just get it. You're on the cusp; the tension and excitement of this position gives you the impetus to overcome whatever limits you've placed on yourself.

But you can slide backwards as easily forwards. Before the holidays, I was really getting a handle on how to perform some body-hurling, dangerous-looking leaps to the ground safely. Working on it meant I went home bruised and cut up, but that's where you gotta start. The pain forces you to learn how to sequence through joints, which surfaces can cushion impact to the floor, when to push and when to release. You only really make things dangerous for yourself when you're not connected, focus to body, and find yourself unable to get to the real maximum potential of all the supporting musculature, or the real maximum of mental surety. Which is where you have to be, all the way all the time. A little bit of negligence and you may, for example, coming crashing down on a hip and hobble for a day and half, damn those exposed joints. All the way all the time, especially in the discipline of dance, is not just mentally exhausting.

And it's funny how much easier things get when you're prepared to take advantage of all your physical support. You get a greater range of motion, better dynamics, more exciting stage presence AND you're so much more efficient. Your body thanks you for it and doesn't groan at the mere thought of grand plie or rolling over your knees. I've been having trouble getting there. Sleep more, eat better, worry less. Whatevah.

Kinesthesis

To start off with a correction: I talk pretty often about things "kinaesthetic," which I group under the term "kinaesthesia." Apparently these terms are nonsense and I actually mean "kinesthetic" and "kinesthesis." Sorry if I offended anyone's academic sensibilities. Nerds.

So four years ago at Swarthmore college, a dance teacher stopped her class and told her students to sit down and go through the dance phrase we'd been learning. In our heads, without moving. I did my best, taking advantage mostly of visual memory and my memory of the rhythm. As I recall, I couldn't get to the end of the phrase. I got distracted or hung up on exactly how a particular movement was functioning.

In dance school a couple weeks ago, a similar task was assigned. We could move small, but had to remain on our spots. And as I stepped through the phrase in my head, which was full of imagined swathes of force and weight, accompanied by predictable sound effects and dabs of color from the kinesthetic palette, the memory of this class at Swat came back to me. The way I went after the problem was entirely different. No longer was I using visual memory by literally trying to picture the image of my body in space, and rhythm memory had taken a back seat to kinesthetic memory. Also, I realized this abstract imaging was a part of my daily routine at dance school. You do it while watching others dance a phrase, waiting your turn. You use it while you're dancing. It pops into your head as you walk home, or when you trip and catch yourself--really at any time, because there are so many movement dynamics in your environment that are abstractly tied to dynamics dancing has made you familiar with. An entirely normal phenomenon as far as I'm concerned; like with any activity that you perform daily and place under some kind of focusing lens, it gets into your head and gets worked around.

To take a couple of steps back and talk about exactly what kinesthesis is, I went through the trouble of googling for its definitions: "The ability to feel movements of the limbs and body." And kinesthetic: "resulting from the sensation of bodily position, presence, or movement." This also turned up: "the kinesthetic system interprets the excursion and direction of joint movement." So the general idea is experiencing and filtering the physical sensations of movement. To me it sounds an awful lot like perception. Like kinesthesis is another of our senses, but for our internal environment instead of the world around us. It's an idea that appeals to me, at least on an aesthetic level, because it feels like it completes the five senses model--instead of an absent, passive interloper with instruments to perceive and mentally construct an external environment, separate from us, we're IN it, an embodied, integrated part of our environment.

I do not find kinesthesis to be at all encompassed by the sense of touch. There's just too much other information involved in the "movement" element, in being aware of weight, of force exerted by muscles, of speed, direction, and orientation in space for it to be merely about touch.

So I'm not at all done with this topic, I still want to talk about why I want to understand kinesthesis better, how we perceive and communicate through kinesthesis (kinesthetic empathy), how some dance arts are more visual than kinesthetic... but since we're working blog style we'll go in installments. Oh, I know you're on the edge of your computer chair.

Commitment

The first scene is in a Swarthmore dance studio. I'm nervous; it's one of my first dance classes. I am the only guy there. Clearly not quite sure what sort of comfortable clothes are appropriate for dance class. During the warm up, we're asked to kneel, to sit on our heels. I do my best, but the pain in my ankles is unbearable after a few moments. The skin over the joints of my metatarsals is pinched and stinging. I try again, then adjust onto my ass. Try again, get off my feet and back onto my flank. I fidget in discomfort watching everyone else still as yogis. After just this one class I have tiny, oozing scrapes on the top of my feet. It would take two years to develop the appropriate calluses to protect the skin on my feet. Another two for the position to be comfortable, with weight evenly distributed and joints aligned without strain. No pinched skin. Every time I settle into it, it feels like a miracle.

I decided to become a dancer after seeing a performance. I'd been in a couple musicals before, nursed a secret desire to be in the limelight, but never anything serious. What captivated me in this particular show was not an over-arching artistic statement, not even the choreography, per say, but the execution. The mastery of the dancers in their bodies, the sheer athleticism, something pure about what was happening that made my body feel charged, tensed and forward in my seat before even realizing what was going on. And something in my head said "You can do that." Not just a voice, but something I knew. Just like that, without understanding anything that was involved. I wanted that command, or felt like it was some potential I had within me, or something. Presence of mind and body, over myself, over the lyricism of the thing, over the space around me. Luckily enough, I was at the same time sufficiently prescient and sufficiently ignorant to go for it.

Another scene, this time in the hallway of my freshman dorm. At this point in my life I am all about the social dancing. Life has been too kind in introducing me to alcohol and rib cage isolations all at the same time. It should also be noted that I am a member of the varsity soccer team, and consider myself the pinnacle of youthful fitness. The girl across the hall is telling me about yoga class and how great it is. She shows me her favorite position which is downward dog. Psh, I can do that. So I try. She looks at me kinda funny and says, well, ok, but you have to make this small adjustment, and move your hips this way, and press your heels towards the ground... at which point I lose all conception of the outside world because my mind is utterly consumed by the hellfire rising from my calves and hamstrings. Perhaps "pinnacle" was too strong a word, I think to myself.

Dance training meant I had to learn about release. Release the tensions induced by environment, because suddenly straight white guy means curious minority. Release pride, because however fast or strong I was didn't matter when I couldn't touch my toes or coordinate myself to learn fifteen seconds of dance phrase. Release myself to the conclusion that I didn't have to perform for everyone else, or outperform anyone else. Rediscovery of a genuine personal process. And whether a product of perversity in my mind or in my circumstance, I was thrilled to be starting off with the absolute basics, ill-suited feet and tense musculature and all. Oh, there would be wonderful, daunting obstacles!

And there still are. But the moral of the story is, at least my feet aren't leaking pus.

Big Strike

So, there is a movement in ballet called grande battement, in which one leg kicks as high as possible to the front, to the side, or backwards. Turned out and straight with the foot pointed, of course. The rest of the body, to the audience, looks entirely undisturbed. For the dancer this means a shitload of work in organizing the weight and supporting musculature over the standing leg. I am a big fan of grande battement.

Basically what is happening (when performed to the front or the side) is there are a lot muscles in and around the hip joint going into intense flexion. Dancers of the classical/modern tradition invariably have a lot of tension in this area (hip flexors and their compatriots). Abdominals, both straight and oblique, are somewhat tensed to maintain the length of the torso on both sides and to cushion the impact to the hip joint of the standing leg.

Now, the body is structured for efficiency. It knows that when one joint goes into flexion, probably there are more joints that need to go into flexion. Think squatting, or cowering, or shielding yourself from the rain, crouching, crawling, sitting, etc. So when you start learning grande battement, your body suggests to your shoulders, your hands, your other leg, elbow joints dot dot dot that they contract. This is contrary to the dancer's goals. This is also where I talk again about the surprising utility of imagery.

Whenever a teacher talks about movement related to grand battement, they focus on the muscles paired opposite the hip flexors, which necessarily become relaxed so the leg can stretch high. You talk about energy being sent downwards, instead of focusing on the upwards movement of the leg. You imagine length of the lower spine, weightlessness of the leg, and the shoulders falling downwards. It's like trying to forget that the iliapsoas is working like hell to pick the leg up, that the quadraceps are flexed to extend the knee joint, the calves to extend the ankle joint. All these things, your mind molds into the sensation of an airy arc extending out from your strongly grounded center so you can keep your port de bras (carriage of the arms) and neck relaxed, extended, and effortless-looking.

Dance training sometimes feels like one of those metal puzzles with lots of pieces linked together. You adjust one part and it prevents three other parts from moving, but then you adjust this other way and two parts are free and rotatable but still stuck to the whole. You learn to isolate and organize, when to be gentle and careful with a muscle group, when you need to throw force abruptly. And things are tangled up to an absolutely unbelievable extent, and everybody's different. Flexing my toes upwards, for example, tends to make me perform the analogous movement with my right hand, while my Polish friend can't swing his arms in backwards circles without pulling the muscles on the side of his nose up.

So, whether you're aware of it or not, every waking moment you are orchestrating a massively complicated operation with alarming connections and potentials. Yee-haw.