Levitate Out of Your Body
I try to understand why dance matters more than anything
We’re taking class in the studio that looks like a barn. Me and my teens and 20-somethings and about 1 million termites the mistress keeps sweeping up. Also one of the girls’ moms who looks young enough to be my kid, can you beat that? The mom-who-could-be-my-kid is altering costumes. The termites are migrating. The mistress has given up sweeping; she’s giving the rest of us class.
Outside, someone’s shorn the grass with the farm tractor, even the grass on the steep bank that holds back the lake. If we were looking out the tall windows we could see the shorn bank, the sky with not even one cloud.
But we are not looking out the windows. We are looking over our right shoulders, head up and at an angle, tipped to the right, “Expose your neck,” the mistress says.
Expose your neck.
“Drill your feet down,” she says. “Lift your sternum forward and up. Like you’re being pulled by a fishhook.” She mimes it. “Let your spirit levitate out of your body.”
Let your spirit levitate out of your body.
“If you feel like you’re falling, don’t fall.” She grins. A wicked grin, a grin with a secret. “It’s that easy. Don’t fall. Force yourself to find another option.”
Another teacher has said, “Lift up your heart.”
At Artists Simply Human in 2016 or so, Desmond Richardson walked through the thirsty teenagers and 20-somethings in their sleek leotards, sleek makeup, sleek hair, as if they were so many gnats. He walked right up to the short teen in the big tee shirt and had her do that contraction again, grabbing her tee shirt this time to see her torso outlined through the fabric.
“That’s what I want to see,” he said. “Take it deeper. Eyes there. See — ” We were in a hotel conference room with marley on the carpet, I think, and soundproof walls, but he gestured into imagined space. “There, eyes to the top balcony.”
And Master Apollo, fingers on my back: “Yes. A little broader there. Those wings.” Or I forget. Maybe it was another girl, one of those teenagers, her back.
Make them broader, those wings.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to tell you. I know what I’m trying to tell you. It’s wrestling it into words, like Jacob grappling the angel, that’s the hard part. How do I tell you the thing that does not exist in words, the dance, in words?
How do I tell you how you have to learn to — all at once — think about reaching with your toes, curving the arch of your foot, extending your knees, rotating from your hip sockets, lifting your hipbones forward, dropping your belly toward your spine, knitting your ribcage down and together, the lifting your sternum as if pulled by a fishhook, pressing your shoulders down, spreading your back broad, spread your wings, lifting your head, cascading your arms shoulder-elbow-wrist, while your spirit is levitating out of your body?
And that’s before you think about your position relative to space and to yourself, a compass rose of positions. Before you think about the tilt of your head and direction of your eyes for each position — there must be a lot of vampires who love ballet — exposing your neck.
(They like your feet, too, present your instep, the mistress says.)
And that’s before you think about movement. Let’s make it something as simple as a développé en écarté devant, leg unfolding up toward and maybe past the raised arm as you stand, no, as you lift onto demi-pointe on a diagonal line, presenting your instep, eyes past your forearm, exposing your neck, and that moment when your spirit lifts out of your body before you fall into a pas de bourrée turning toward the working leg, opening opening like petals on a rose?
What in the world am I trying to say? All those words have failed to describe half a second of moment, yet for that movement to happen, I have to be aware, all at the same time, of all those things.
And at the same time as my mind is aware — it probably should be unconsciously but I’m not there yet to be honest — of all those things, my spirit has to levitate out of my body.
The metaphors get you closer. Your body responds to the tang of metaphor quicker than it understands physics-based instructions (though learning how my psoas muscles worked was a revelation).
Rose. Wings. Fishhook. Spirit. Heart. Expose, well, it’s a metaphor word if you think about those vampires after your neck and feet. Levitate.
I think, after all these words, I’m trying to tell you how art flowers out of technical precision. I think I’m also saying exactly the opposite: that technical precision enables us to — feebly, partially — express the reality of the spirit.
That this world is a shadow, and that world is real, but the only way we get from here to there is to grind hard into this reality. To sweat. To sweep up termites. To repeat and repeat and repeat.
That’s what those masters see, through that student’s loose tee shirt or my loose skin or anyone’s tired flesh. Choose not to fall. Spread your wings. Lift up your heart.
They see spirit.