R.M.

~ Essays. Poems. Written Meditations.

R.M.

Tag Archives: dance

2 Visions

15 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by racheltejas in art, Dance, Meditations and Poetry, photography, Seasons, Travel

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dance, essay-poem, meditation on memory, memory, music, Paris, photography, travel, winter

2 Visions

1

It was many years ago now. Late winter. The only sign of spring the intensity of the light: the sky had an endless quality of blue layered upon blue, with a light between the layers – a vibrating blue.

But cold. It was the cold of the North, the cold that holds your bones and burns your eyes. A clean cold.

We sat outside, in the sun, and the sun mixed with the cold like stratified surf. Later that day we were due to get on a plane that would take me away from the complicated city, with its art and its avenues, its courtyards in shadow and limestone-light.

A flash of black caught my eye. A cat. A sinew-limbed, tall, long-legged short haired black cat. Around the cat’s neck was a perfectly fitted collar, attached to the collar a long thin leash. Attached to the leash was a hand, the hand of a beautiful man. He was sinewy, tall, long-legged and had beautiful thick short black hair.

The cat pranced, clearly comfortable with some morning ritual of promenade and then, I imagined, a lovely fish breakfast. The man strolled behind the cat, a newspaper under one arm. He had headphones wrapped around his ears, and I wondered what he heard as he watched the cat’s proud mast of a tail.

Memory is a trickster. Was the cat white, the man old? Was the cat a small dog? No. The cat was a cat and his companion his twin. I remember. It’s true. Blue. Cold. Tall man, tall cat, cobblestone.

Often when a guest leaves after a lovely visit a gracious host will offer a small gift to remember him by. A sketch, a book, a scarf. Or a man and a cat strolling down a quiet street on a cold Sunday morning.
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2

Rain. A heavy, burdensome rain. A rain that one couldn’t believe was not snow, because it was so thick, so raw and cold. The broad sidewalk was dark, the street alive with the blurred yellow headlights of scooters, delivery trucks, commuters. The pavement was so wet it created a mirror to every light, as if one could live both above and below the Earth.

Such weather does not create a mood for lingering; reality itself seemed to pick up speed as the rain and the darkness deepened. I knew I had something of a walk ahead of me, and even with an umbrella I felt I would never be dry or warm again.

I reached the Eglise de Saint Germain des Pres. This was my landmark. Soon, home. But on this night, this most impossible of nights, in front of the church, was a man. He was extremely well dressed in that Parisian bobo style: he looked like an attorney on holiday.

The man had no umbrella. But he did have enormous, DJ-quality headphones, which apparently were waterproof.

He was dancing. In the rain, under the eaves of the Eglise. When I say dancing, I do not mean to indicate that he was conspicuously bobbing his head. He was… moving. Head down, legs engaged in an intricate pas de bourree, his torso undulating, gorgeously, to the silent sound. Whatever he was listening to, he really heard it, and, as someone who knows a bit about the subject, I tell you the man could really groove.

No one paid any attention. Big city, big rain, cold night. And he was not performing. His was a private joy, and those who caught a glimpse were just lucky. Someone, I am sure, caught sight of Isadora Duncan’s first white-robed solo on top of the Acropolis. I saw a nameless man moving like a feline snake on the Boulevard St. Germain.

These visions. Apparently, they are everywhere.
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Flash

04 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by racheltejas in Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Yoga

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anger, asana, autobiographical essay, Buddhism, cocaine, dance, death, drugs, falling out with spiritual teachers, family, grief, history of spiritual practice, meditations, schism, sisters, spiritual practice, travel, yoga

Flash

“untie your knots
soften your glare”
— Lao Tzu

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”
— Yeats

Occasionally in one’s life something sudden occurs, and though it may have been building for months, or for years, or for lifetimes, if one thinks along those lines, the event nonetheless appears to the eye and mind like some hallucinatory flash from the ether. Such events are perhaps like witnessing the Northern Lights, though I’ve never seen them, but I imagine them to be ephemeral, constantly shifting, an eternal surprise to the eye and a visual trick to the mind.

The Northern Lights, however, are beautiful, and one yearns to witness them. The event I just experienced was not; it was the sort of thing one dreads, and as quickly as it arrives, the residue, one knows even as it occurs, will stick around like unwanted sap from a poisoned branch, for years. It is a flash that penetrates the body, and as it exits leaves the very skin forever altered.

Human beings, and for all we know some animal species, have engaged in spiritual life for tens of thousands of years. Two years ago my father explored the great cave paintings of Chauvet in Southwestern France, and in his description of them, of their eeriness, their depth, their beauty and their otherworldly wonder, it was easy to feel a communion with these long dead beings that bore the interwoven threads of survival, creative impulse, and spiritual searching.
Paintings_from_the_Chauvet_cave_(museum_replica)

When exploring art created thousands of years ago by communal bands of peoples, or reading the stunningly prescient texts of the pre-Socratics, or connecting the historical puzzle of Egyptian gods and those of Mycenae, one is always tempted to envision a uniformity of spiritual cohesion and intellectual thought: the images gorgeously morph and shift, but the seeking is the same.

And perhaps in some fundamental, wordless way this is true. Human consciousness has left in its wake a riddle, the riddle of its own awareness, and it is one we ceaselessly attempt to answer and to solve. The mutable then becomes fixed, water becomes walkable land, and the horror of one’s own mortal body becomes linked, in the mind’s surety, to an immovable Divine. Spiritual life, even one that consists primarily of questions and tracing links in an endless chain of inquiry, has then a sort of comfort. There is faith. There is shraddha, as a yogi might say. There is hupostasis, roughly meaning a contract or promise (literally a “standing under,” as a support), to the scholar of Greek and the New Testament.

When surveying practice, whether Christian, Sufi, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, one sees so much connection, so many mirrors and layers upon layers of analogous impulse, it makes one joyously hopeful that unity does indeed exist, that humans in their suffering, in their fears, in their mental patterns, are indeed…. alike.

Sadly, we are also alike in our rage, our judgment, our estrangement from love; in our loneliness, our ache, our sorrows existential, our sorrows of loss, our violence and fear. We are alike, too, in the manner in which societies, governments, communities large, communities small, right down to the individual, tend to use spiritual practice as a cudgel and a cave, as a mask for judgment and easy decision.

One week ago I had a falling out with the founder of the Ashtanga shala where I practice, or, used to practice. She and I have known each other a long, long time, and have always had enormous differences in our practices and personalities. I am a perfectionist, deeply insecure, never settled in a belief system, constantly questioning, wondering, asking. I am, I have always been, an unsettled person. And I am aware, constantly aware, that the spiritual practices toward which I am drawn – yoga and Buddhism – will forever be in some sense alien to me, to my birth as a Westerner whose family is much closer to the Mayflower than to Mysore. My grandfather was an Episcopal priest, brought up on an estate in New York and in a townhouse on the Upper East Side. Why, then, and how, did I come to be drawn toward a practice so many thousands of cultural miles away from my own antecedents?

I remember vividly the day my sister and I jointly decided we were no longer going to church, and no longer Episcopalians. It was a Sunday. We were upstairs in her bedroom. We were lolling around on her bed, lazy, giggling, half arguing, half knowing what the other would say before it was uttered. As if in tandem, we looked at each other. No more. No more church. No more pretending. We called my mother, who was at work. That’s it, we told her. We are not going.

When she died a few years later my sister was rather absurdly given a full formal Episcopal funeral. But in my mind, my mind eternally connected to her mind, I knew that wasn’t the practice for us. We will always be lying around on her bed, worshiping at the feet of David Bowie and (the good) David Byrne, arguing about our parents, envious and adoring of one another and in sisterly communion saying “No. That isn’t our practice. We’ll find our own.”

But I didn’t find my own. Or rather, I jumped from practice to practice, for a long time. First and always, with an attachment bordering on the erotic, ballet and music became, and remains, though in a different way, my practice. And then academics. Particularly poetry. And then travel. Wandering. That’s it, I would think to myself. Being a nomad in a settled world will keep me dropped in. Then for awhile cocaine was my practice. Cocaine and Stevie Wonder and Al Green, and, oddly, an obsession with Bach’s sixth Brandenburg that would deafen and bore my high, jittery friends. Stilettos and long tresses and late night long forgotten conversation with my-still best friend. That was a really fun practice. But it only got me to nose bleeds and crushing depression later on.

Somehow, through the drugs and vodka and pills and anti-depressants I found myself bleary in a yoga class. I thought it was beautiful, and I thought the instructor even more so: I developed a wicked crush on a slender woman with waist length mermaid blond hair who spoke to me about Tarot and Virabhadrasana II, and how everything in existence was essentially a metaphorical stand-in for something else. She told me that cocaine was the perfect drug for the Gemini-Pisces mix that I am, but that I had to move through it. She told me psychiatrists are essentially sexually frustrated idiots. I loved her. Now I think a lot of what she said was beautiful bullshit, but my gratitude to her wisdom about my self-destructive patterns will always remain true.

Finally I landed in the lap of Krishnamacharya. Or, to be more precise, his most famous students: BKS Iyengar, and Pattabhi Jois. And there I have remained, slowly, slowly establishing an asana practice, a meditation practice, and, even more slowly, altering the egoic vision I’ve always had of the world around me. So beautiful, the practice, when the “me” fades away altogether, and there is nothing that remains except the smoke of whatever burned. Then it takes hard shape again, the ego, the desires of the heart, the hunger of the mind, the judgment of one’s body, and practice begins again from the beginning, wherever that is.

We carry our histories like mules. And our habits intertwine themselves to our flesh like mineral veins in hard granite. Our minds are stupid and stubborn, hard to train and easy to indulge. The hungers of the body, for food, for drugs (and drugs come in many forms), for fucking, for control, for losing control – they are endless, and, I believe, unlike what is taught in much spiritual practice, that they are not bad. Indeed, that hunger can be grand, and lead to creative, aesthetic, and spiritual revelations that would without craving be impossible.
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And so I practice. And I struggle with practice. I struggle with my ego. I struggle with my age, with my fading beauty, my sharp and lonely mind. Practice has made me far more lonely and far more loving. I actually do love, now; I couldn’t before. A few days ago I led my precious students in pranayama. They dropped in. They trusted me. They trusted their own sacred bodies, their own breath. I looked at them, and wondrously I saw not bodies, not personalities, but beings. Just beings. And the only thing I felt, the only identifiable thing on the horizon, was love. Just love. God what a gift.

Which makes it all the more painful, all the more strange, to have recognized, after a long, long time of denying it, that I have been engaged with and working with a teacher who thinks poorly of me. She thinks poorly of my practice, of my habits, of, I suppose, my general personality. A week ago, when I finally allowed the truth of this division to settle on me like some sort of invisible sticky dust, I was shocked. And furious. Affronted. How… how on earth… how could a teacher say such things to a student… I spluttered on and on in my mind.

In my pain I reached out to another practitioner who knows her. I placed people in the middle, trying to create my own little war. I did this unconsciously, hoping to find connection, hoping to find love and support and a prop for my delicate, fragile ego. No go. It is a real falling out, with a real person, who has totally different values, totally different opinions. A real falling out with a real person who doesn’t like me.

Impossible, the pain. However, even now, just a week later: what a gift, the pain. Because not every damn person is going to feel love, or even affection, for another practitioner, even though they stand together in a similar practice day after day, year after year. And accepting this shadow, this simple fact, is an amazing and wonderful challenge to the power of the ego. Stunned, I was: she doesn’t like me. Stunned, I was: the person I confided in just doesn’t want to “go there” with me.

This evening, I hear a voice, like a distant call of birdsong: practice. Practice through it. Practice with it. The pain itself is the practice. The rejection is the practice. The cultivation of practice in the face of such loneliness… is the practice.

Why bother? Why not have a drink, seduce my husband, and call a friend to bitch for an hour? Because practice is where the poetry is, where the flash of love’s absence and love’s presence abides, where the dance is, and I want to dance the dance, even when it hurts.

 

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Adventures in Ignorance

11 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by racheltejas in Dance, Denver, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood, photography, Yoga

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dance, depression, finding balance, home life, homeschooling, Manouso Manos, meditation, motherhood, nervous breakdown, photography, professional dancing, teaching yoga, writing, yoga

My children and I are finishing our first week of making small steps toward homeschooling. This week my seven year old son began a study of Martin Luther King Jr., wrote his ¨version¨ of the ¨I Have a Dream¨ speech, learned long addition to the hundred thousand place, and read two novels. Oh, and his handwriting remains at a kindergarten level, and our work together on this subject reveals every shortcoming we both have (coordination on his part, sustained patience on mine).

My five year old daughter is studying sight words, handwriting, and playing, something she received in grossly small measure in ¨regular¨ school. She is also presenting a potentially real capacity for art and color, a gift certainly not inherited from her mother, whose ability to draw consists of creating a circle and a line and calling it a flower.
2015-04-05 21.29.33All of this has proved rather challenging with a 16 month old girl running around in varying degrees of fussiness; the cleanliness of her diaper seems to run parallel to the intensity of our academic focus.
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As it happens, the week the children left school falls within the same span of days I had my last meeting with my therapist, realized I have no reliable childcare, finally admitted to myself how desperately I want to dance professionally with a modern company here in Denver, and returned to teaching yoga. The result of all this has left me feeling as though I am doing trivial amounts of everything in a sea of nothingness. I am everywhere and nowhere, but not in some lovely divine sense. I feel more like stagnant water: eventually change and evaporation will occur, but for now… muddle.

How will I not lose myself in this project? Will I be able to dance, to practice, to teach, to write and travel, to read, perhaps see this man I call my husband occasionally, and still be the primary educator for my children? Or will I do just a bit of everything and succeed at nothing? These are the worries that roil my mind as I find myself sadly and blindly flipping through the Zara website at 11PM. (Oh, to be wearing those heels and that backless dress and taking the subway at dawn, watching the sun come up over the East River after breaking hearts and dancing all night.. such are the late night musings of someone who feels, despite her full closet and schedule, more like a Mother than a Woman.)

At the height of my nervous breakdown, which lasted for many months, I imagined my future, when I had the strength to do so, as a comatose drugged river of time, a side-lined waiting for my demise. Death, the savior. Death, the release. Never did it occur to me that the slow stumbling climb out of despair’s depths could lead not only to a return to life, but the creation of a new, brighter existence. My nervous breakdown occurred during and after my pregnancy with my youngest child; I see it now as its own kind of birthing, but one in which the labor almost killed me and I was carrier, deliverer and mid-wife.
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And now, I am alive. Alive and lucky: my children are healthy and smart and beautiful and well cared for. They never go hungry for anything: love, food, stability, and their mother’s adoration are the ground upon which they deservedly and unconsciously stand. I am also alive to my own internal ambition and potential: dancing, writing, the earnest practice of yoga and meditation, and the sharing of that practice through teaching. This adds up to nothing short of sheer abundance.

However it is an abundance I experience, oddly, in solitude. The breakdown I lived through, the eccentricities of my obsessive mind, have washed me up to a beautiful but lonely shore. I remember a particularly poignant moment in a teaching the great Iyengar teacher Manouso Manos gave, in which he recounted speaking to his Guru, BKS Iyengar. Manouso said, ¨Sir, I am lonely, and I think it is the Practice that is making me so. The Practice makes me more alive, but it is lonely too.¨

Mr. Iyengar responded, ¨Manouso, wait until lonely becomes Alone. And then you will abide in practice as a happy and meditative, but solitary soul.¨
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Terrifying it is, to embark on an awakened life, or at least one in which one is attempting to awaken to some sort of clarity of vision and spirit. Homeschooling, dancing, yoga, writing and teaching: in all these endeavors I feel like a child wandering down a silent lane. Everything new, unknown. But underneath, from some mystery that must remain contained within itself, emerges a new, sustained curiosity. And the curiosity itself is a teacher; one can only hope its character is not mercurial in nature, and that eventually the lonely endeavor of fully living becomes a simplified, satisfied Aloneness.

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Expansion

23 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by racheltejas in Dance, Denver, Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia

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aging, ballet, ballet photographs, ballet technique, ballet training, ballet world, creativity, dance, depression, family, Hannah Kahn, modern dance, personal history, relationship, renewal, Robert Sher-Machherndl

When I was a child I fell in love with ballet. As is true for most dancers, the love affair was almost violent in its grip on me: from the age of about eight through fourteen I thought of nothing but turn-out, tendues, grand-jetes, famous ballerinas, music and, of course, increasing my ever growing flexibility. I also dieted and compared bodies and lived through the shadow side of ballet, but the relationship to the art was for me primarily an obsessive joy.
Alexandra_Ansanelli_in_Ondine_Royal_Ballet

The ballet world provides safety for young girls, particularly girls with a lot of insecurity in their lives. My family life had almost no structure: my mother and father had become parents at too young an age and had inevitably divorced. My mother had just come out as a lesbian, and my father had broken off a relationship with a woman who was a second mother to me, only to marry a woman who wanted nothing to do with either me or my sister. My mother’s partner, too, considered children to be a burden, something to “deal” with, and so we retreated, my sister to her friends and me, shy and lacking almost entirely in companionship, to the highly regimented, almost monastic world of ballet.
yuan

That world became my savior: the music was my mother, the form of the technique my father, the other students my family, and my teacher was a combination of all three. I also, by sheer luck, had talent: a naturally flexible body, good feet, a good ear for music, and a fine coordination. With the right guidance, I had the ingredients in place to become a professional dancer: an obsessive mind combined with the correct physical attributes.

Sadly, there was a great absence of one of the pieces a young developing dancer requires: I had no teacher of any merit. My teacher was a sweet old woman, devoted to her students but absurdly possessive of them, especially the students of talent. A good teacher, whether in ballet, or academics, or any art or spiritual instruction, sees  his or her own limitations in the context of any given student’s development, and when that limitation is reached, also sees (no matter how painfully) the necessity of sending that student on her way toward further and more superior training. My teacher, after watching my growth, clung to me with an ever increasing clutch of jealous possession. And so my ballet family became a bit like my family at home: disorganized, and utterly lacking in awareness of my own creative needs.

I tried to strike out on my own, joining a small apprentice company, and then studying with various Vaganova teachers. But the lack of support and my own growing fear, what I now recognize as profound depression, proved too much of a barrier. By fourteen I was experimenting sexually, in a manner that was indescribably damaging to my girlish vulnerability, and the ballet world began to fade. I still attended class, but essentially I gave up on myself.
PUSH.SWT.21-3-2007

It is one of the mysterious blessings of my life that I never truly gave up dancing. I went through trauma after trauma, relationship after relationship, fell in love with academics and travel, and still the presence of ballet stayed with me, like an ethereal talisman. The longest I ever really “stopped” dancing was during my pregnancies or during long periods of travel. Ballet is home, though the home is deeply scarred with regret (oh, what might have been…) and ambivalence (should I really be here, given that my technique isn’t what it should be, would have been, etc).

As I begin the long, long emergence from the greatest period of depression I have ever known, one that did indeed come close to killing me, I find that my wild joy for and fanatic love of dance is rekindling. The love, now, is a mature one, and filled with the sort of appreciation I never could have known as a younger woman. Sometimes, when Bach is played for a petite allegro jump or Satie for a plie combination, I find myself in a state of no less than mystical wonder at the union between limbs, torso, feet and music. It is ecstasy, far beyond joy.

And now, so strangely and wondrously, that ethereal talisman of the moving arts who has been my constant, though sometimes invisible companion, is leading me to new explorations, new teachers, new physical development, despite the fact of my (for a dancer) ancient age and the myriad injuries and surgeries my body has lived through.

I have begun training with a brilliant woman named Hannah Kahn. She is a visionary modern choreographer, used to dance with the great Mark Morris, and has a beautiful company here in Denver. The dancers have been incredibly welcoming to me, as if they sense I’ve been on a long and difficult journey, and they are offering provisions along the way.
hannah

I’ve also taken the brave step of seeking out perhaps the greatest teacher in this region, an astonishing man named Robert Sher-Machherndl, who has choreographed for almost every major company in Europe, set dances on dancers from American Ballet Theatre, worked with Nureyev, and has turned out to be as patient and kind and humble as any person I’ve ever met.

Even though I have created a beautiful home with my eternally supportive husband and three lovely, healthy children, somehow ballet, and the creative impulse, continues to be another primary residence for me. It turns out I need both, and my gratitude at discovering, even at this late stage of the game, that I might have both is limitless. As limitless as the unfolding line of a ballerina’s arabesque, extending toward infinity and away from itself.
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Sarah

29 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by racheltejas in Dance, Grief, Melancholia, Motherhood, photography, Yoga

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anxiety, ballet, children, dance, Denver, depression, Failure, motherhood, nervous breakdown, photography, pregnancy, recovery from depression, Thanksgiving, therapists, West Pines Hospital, yoga

2014-11-28 15.30.23

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, a holiday I’ve never much cared for, no matter how I attempt to translate its meaning into pure spiritual gratitude instead of the grotesque consumerism it’s become in our culture. For many of us, holidays invite bizarre standards to live up to, memories strangely morphed by time, loss and expectation, and too often a sense of almost existential isolation: everyone else is doing (or feeling)  that, why can’t I?

Failure. That is what Thanksgiving has forever meant to me. Failure to be fully present, failure to enjoy the presence of others and myself with others, failure to be a truly good daughter, granddaughter, wife, mother; failure to cook or enjoy cooking. Failure to let go of my cynicism about the historical origins of Thanksgiving. Failure to really appreciate the astonishing luck of my lot.

I have an almost obscene amount for which to be thankful: I’m dancing, despite all the injuries and my age.

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I have an active yoga asana and meditation practice, despite taking care of three wild children.

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And, of course, my husband, my family: I have given birth to three healthy, intelligent children, who love each other, love their father, love me, even with all my neuroses.

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Yesterday, in the late afternoon, as my sweet family and I were taking a walk in the lovely light of dusk, I found myself unable to concentrate on the riches surrounding me. The abundance of food, of love, of company and security for reasons mysterious sent my mind back to a particular period, and a particular person with whom I had a short, intense relationship, in the summer of 2013.

It was the middle of July, and my mind had devolved to a husk of terror and suicidal yearning for oblivion. Pregnant, my world unrecognizable, I delivered myself to the care of West Pines Hospital, where I was promptly enrolled in that institution’s “partial hospitalization” program. This program essentially assumes that one isn’t crazy enough to pull the trigger during the evening hours, but also isn’t functional enough to exist in the world of regular, non-suicidal folk. If there had been a safe, real hospital for me that would have been ever so much better, but this was what was on offer, and we took it. For the next two weeks, I spent every day under the watchful eyes of the therapists and doctors at West Pines, and I spent every evening hunched and dodging nameless ghosts.

I got lucky. My “case-worker” was a thoughtful, deeply caring, and utterly non-judgmental woman named Sarah. She had curly dark hair, colorful glasses, a short plump body, bright warm eyes and a smile that soothed as much as it invited openness from those around her. Her voice, too, was perfect for someone in my condition: straightforward, low, friendly, unsentimental. Immediately I adored her. Immediately and irrationally she became, as I’m sure she had become for so many others, my life raft and savior.

Each morning, after “check-in,” Sarah and I would retreat to a tiny, windowless private office equipped with exactly two chairs and several boxes of tissue. Sarah would cross one ankle over her knee and face me as I emptied and laid before her every darkened crevice of my anguished history. She never blinked, she never flinched, and she always listened.

The rest of the day was usually taken up with embarrassingly absurd activities like “art therapy,” or making lists about ways in which to be mindful or assertive. Useless and silly for the suicidal, but it passed the time. Sarah made the time meaningful, and she reminded me over and over and over again that the “hormones would pass,” that I “would find the right therapist on the outside,” that “there really were the right meds,” and I would discover them, in time and after pregnancy.

I wish I could now write that indeed, Sarah was absolutely correct, and that all these things came to pass. After I left her care, however, I continued to disintegrate, and on many days, all these months later, I am still dragging myself away from the abyss’s edge. But there are lots and lots of days when the edge is kept at a safe distance, and I have found the right therapist, and the hormones of pregnancy have passed, never to enter my body again.

Sarah was wonderful, a gift of steadiness and sanity during a time of madness. It is, then, sadly appropriate that on Thanksgiving I find myself thinking of her, remembering her and the haven she provided, and wondering if in the future I will find myself in this unsettled place of gratitude and remembrance once more.

2014-11-28 15.27.18

 

 

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Profile #1

10 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by racheltejas in Dance, Denver, photography

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Tags

ballet, dance, dancer, Denver, Giselle, nature of art, photography

2014-11-08 16.32.31In my small ballet community there exists a wonderful variety of people, mostly women, from every imaginable background and age group. There are professional ballet dancers, professional modern dancers, young dancers-in-training, athletes, older women, and many retired dancers who just can’t imagine life without the quasi-religious ceremony of barre exercises and Chopin.

I have known for several years in this lovely little closed world a beautiful young woman named Briana Bosch.

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Briana dances professionally for a local company called Ballet Ariel. She also teaches dance and does guest performances with other companies.

At the moment she is rehearsing for one of the greatest ballet roles ever created, Giselle.

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Although the performance is many months from now, and Briana still has Nutcracker season to weather, her training and study are already well underway.

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On the evening Briana performs this magnificent and exquisitely challenging role, it will be her intention to appear to effortlessly inhabit the very essence of the character. To the audience, she will be Giselle, and ideally it will seem as though she always has been: the space between Briana the dancer and Giselle the haunted Wili will disappear, and only the creation will remain.

Most people are unaware that dancers must train like athletes and live and think as monastic artists; it is one of the oddities and ironies of ballet, along with many other forms of art, that this concealment of preparation is intentional. If one sees the “work,” it’s not working.

Briana, like all of us, must take on the modern mantle of many differing, sometimes conflicting roles: wife, teacher, friend, family member, artist. She also, I think rather amazingly, has a master’s degree, and it’s not in the performing arts.

This is one of the countless reasons I love the discipline of ballet: on the face of it, one sees pure unity, symmetry, openness; the concord between body, music, and movement seem both satisfyingly inevitable and divinely realized. Beneath it all, where the mechanisms lie, is sinew, ache, ligaments stretched, feet fatigued and deformed. The most interesting part.

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It matters not at all if one has never danced: we are each familiar with the mask and what is hidden beneath it. All too often, it’s pain of one sort or another. The artifice of art is what celebrates, refines, and gestures toward the tension between authenticity and the futility of it ever really being true, or permanent. As the sublime filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino tells us in the final moment of his film “The Great Beauty,” referring to the unfolding of existence and time:

“It’s all a trick.” (“e tutto un trucco”.)

And so, too, is the grand, glorious, and impossible art of ballet. Though no one will be thinking of that the night Briana becomes Giselle.

2014-11-08 16.22.47

2014-11-08 16.42.05

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It’s time

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by racheltejas in Dance

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Tags

alastair macaulay, Balanchine, ballet, dance, irritations

I love dance.  I love to take class, I love to feel music in my body; I also love to think about dancing, to read about it, and to study the artists who are at the forefront of the art.

People who write about dance, particularly ballet, should have a passionate appreciation for what the art looks like in its current form.  As much of a genius as Balanchine was, he’s dead, and there are other choreographers doing brilliant, groundbreaking work.

This is why I cannot stand Alastair Macaulay.  He writes for the New York Times.  He is a powerful voice in the world of dance.  He is also clearly someone who spends his days pining for the good old days of the 60’s, when Balanchine and Jerome Robbins ruled the Earth, or at least New York.

Against these giants every dancer and choreographer is compared.  And they always fall short, because nostalgia always wins, no matter what the game.  The sepia tones of the past will forever look more alluring than the difficult glaring light of the present, especially when the past includes a great, irreplaceable genius like Balanchine.

When I read Macaulay I usually have an image like this in my head:

alastair

And it is that image that’s critiquing artists who look like this:

dfeet

And this:

mfeet

And there is something wrong with that picture.  Mr. Macaulay needs to retire.  And let ballet take its new, inevitably different, form.

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