Penché, Promenade, Lecture
For Anna Baker-VanCura
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul
Lookout Valley, 2019. “Mrs. Anna, what kind of cross training do you recommend?”
The building might be an old Works Progress-era school. The studio’s big; could have been a cafeteria. Potted plants stand in the corners. Frosty sunlight gleams through the wavy glass of the tall old windows. On the walls hang ballet posters, including one of Mrs. Anna as Juliet 50 years ago. A fair-haired girl with an eager face, ready to risk anything.
We’re lined up around the walls — a few teens from homeschool families, but mostly grown folk, college age through our sixties, all serious enough to take time from work and family and come to class, morning after morning. Some of us take classes in the mornings and the evenings, too. Mrs. Anna entertains more questions than she would from her all-teen classes. This is because older folks learn head-first, not body first, and possibly also because she enjoys the dialogue.
With the young people in the evening I learn routine, method, get-it-right-quickly, watch-and-learn, don’t-talk-too-much. With the grown folk I learn anatomy and dance theory and a broader theory I’ve discovered that many elder dancers and dance teachers embrace without making explicit — theory of life as dance.
Contrary to any school of thought since 1980 or so, Mrs. Anna says: “You shouldn’t need to cross train at all. Dance should be easy.”
No one’s going to contradict her but you can feel us thinking it: This is hard. We come to class and dance badly, day after day, month after month. After class, we hurt. That fifth position, even if we aren’t wrenching our knees, leaves our hip sockets with a deep ache. Two and a half minutes of petit allegro — small, quick, glides and jumps — leaves us winded.
And while Mrs. Anna is kind, she is demanding. “Ladies,” she’ll say at the end of a petit allegro that feels crazy fast, “you should be able to do this smiling. Two and a half minutes is a woman’s variation.”
She meets us where we are, but also teaches us as if there’s no limit.
“Well, Jenn,” she says to me one day when I need to rotate my back leg more fully in its socket, bringing my back heel snug to the outside of my front foot, “if you only ever want to be a community dancer, I guess that fifth position is okay.”
Learning is ecdysis, shedding old skins. If your teacher doesn’t peel your skin right off, how are you going to grow?
We listen respectfully, but we do cross train. Some run, some lift weights, most practice yoga. Result: we’re pretty bendy for a batch of older biddies. When it’s time to do a penché — an arabesque with the working leg held high up behind and the body bending toward to the floor — a lot of us can pretty much put face to knee. Technically it’s better — certainly it’s lovelier — if you have that full split but your sternum and face are lifting up, though. Open your heart! I think to myself, also thinking about keeping my standing leg turned out, my working knee straight (imagine the back of your knee yawning wide) and my working foot pointing high.
Then Mrs. Anna says, “Let go of the barre. Promenade — ”
That’s a slow, flat-footed turn, just barely scooting the heel around, WITHOUT MOVING THAT WORKING LEG.
Yikes. We try, but believe you me, as my old mother says, it doesn’t look good.
“Wait, wait — ladies — ”
Mrs. Anna cuts off the music and gets our attention. We’re laughing, of course, and also thinking about trying again and doing better.
“You want your chest up,” Mrs. Anna says. Then she says again: “It shouldn’t be hard. Dance isn’t effort. Dance is focus. Keep your eyes up. Lift up your heart. Lift up your thoughts. Just — watch — where you want to go.”
Saying this, Mrs. Anna — who is past 70 and has a hip replacement scheduled — leans forward into a penché which may not be quite vertical but which is definitely beautiful, leg arcing straight up, body dipping gracefully to complete the line — a line like a long, long curve, a hawk’s wingspan, the earth’s horizon — and then lifts her chest and promenades. She continues her lecture as she slowly moves a full 180 degrees, effortlessly filling that big, drafty space with her voice, and — I swear to all the gods, I’ll have lived well if I never see another miraculous thing — her working leg traces a circle as perfect as a compass’s, practically visible in the air above her.
She’s wearing ballet slippers and soft street clothes, she’s as amply built as any other 70-year-old grandma, and — there is no and. She’s just a person. One grown women talking to other grown people, showing them something simple and essential as breath.
“You see,” she says, standing, “it’s not hard. Keep your focus up. Try again.”