Walking with jewels

At the small local dance studio where I started ballet lessons when I was five, I remember the owner of the studio telling us to imagine that we were wearing long diamond earrings and we couldn't let them touch our shoulders.  It was her way of getting us to relax our shoulders and not hunch them.  I also remember being told to imagine we had jewels on our chest that we wanted to show off.  I remember when we learned the step "fondue," we had a fondue party with strawberries, marshmallows, and a gigantic pot of hot chocolate fondue -- the reasoning, besides just having fun, being that we would make our dancing as gooey as the chocolate.  I remember holding giant beach balls in front of us to learn the correct curvature of our arms in 1st position.  I remember selling pizza to raise money for the studio; I remember bringing our moms to take class with us; I remember decorating colored folders with glitter and stars and pictures of ballet dancers on the first day of class.  I remember doing some basic tumbling in our first classes.  I remember dancing in our Halloween costumes and the way the studio was decorated for the holidays.  I remember all the inspirational pictures around the studio.  I remember being on a float with my studio in the fall parade in my small town and in the summer going to a pool party organized by the studio's owner.  I left that studio when I was 10 or 11 because I needed more rigorous training at a serious ballet academy, but I've been thinking of it often lately, now that I work myself at a rigorous ballet academy.  Though some of the activities at my local studio at the time might have seemed a little silly, they also left me free to find my love of dance without ever feeling like it was a chore or obligation or yet a few more hours of school.  Instead, my early ballet lessons, and the activities surrounding them, were pure fun and joy.  When I decided to go to a ballet academy where the instructors were much stricter and harder on us and the classes were more time-consuming with obligatory attendance, I knew it was my decision, not teachers' or a school's, and by that time, I had developed a deep love of dance.  And the imagery the teachers at that first studio used to communicate their physical adjustments has stuck with me all these years.  In fact, at an acting audition a few years ago, the casting assistant asked me if I was a dancer.  When I responded yes, she said she knew because "you carry yourself like you have jewels on your chest."

In my current job as an assistant with young children taking their first ballet classes at a ballet academy in New York City that prepares students very successfully for careers as professional ballet dancers, I've been forced to be very creative in how I give corrections.  Every day I'm in class with them, as I see what adjustments they need, I want to tell them about the earrings and the jewels and the beach ball, but I can't.  I can't even mention chocolate fondue, let alone have the kids see and eat actual fondue.  In fact, I'm not allowed to speak to the children at all (only the teacher is), so I can only adjust them physically.  But without words, a physical adjustment doesn't always have the intended effect, because the children misunderstand how I'm trying to adjust them, and I of course can't force their body parts into the alignment I want.  One day last week, I wanted a girl to tuck her tailbone in and engage her stomach muscles.  Tapping her belly wasn't working the way it works with many girls, because she sucked in all her air, making her shoulders go up and her rib cage expand.  If I were speaking, I'd simply tell her to tuck her tailbone in and imagine she had to make her belly button go back towards her spine without letting her shoulders slump, but I had no words to use.  Flummoxed, I stared in the mirror at myself, mimicking her incorrect alignment, and started pushing and tapping things to figure out how to gently make my body get back into position without knocking something else out of alignment.  Once I figured it out on me, I did it on her, and it worked.  Similarly, I've been struggling for a couple weeks to figure out how to get a girl with lovely lines but slouchy upper body posture to pull up when I can't simply tell her, "Pull up," and last week, to my delight, I finally figured out a combination of physical adjustments that clicked for her and had the desired effect.  However, at her very next class, she was back to slouching.  Though all children process directions differently, I couldn't help but feel that if I could just tell her to imagine that she had to show off the most beautiful necklace ever, it would help her internalize the correction and what it meant, and it might actually stick with her.   As it is, since she never internalized the correction before the first round of cuts (children getting cut from the program), she most likely won't be invited to continue with the program.  And I never once saw a smile from her or anything to indicate she was actually having fun in class, so I doubt she'll ask her parents if she can continue to dance elsewhere.  In fact, one of my proudest moments assisting with these kids was when, in the middle of a class in which a girl's hair had come out of her bun three times, I looked at her with her messy hair and shook my head and laughed and saw that girl (who had always had a perpetual "I don't want to be here" expression on her face) smile and giggle for the very first time.

Though neither method of teaching early ballet is necessarily "better," with some children responding better to rigorous training from the beginning and some responding better to being eased into it (and the academy's output vouches for the fact that they train and mold students into exceptional dancers), I have no doubt that, for me, the best beginning I could have been given to ballet and dance was at that small studio where I was free to learn at my own pace with individual attention while eating pizza and chocolate and imagining I was a princess covered in jewelry.  I'm so glad that my first studio was one that focused at least as much on making dance fun as they did on making me a good dancer.  And I'll always carry those long diamond earrings and jewels with me wherever I go.