Learning to stand on one leg

Software is my second career.  My first was modern dance.

Dance is a consuming life experience.  Being a dancer is like being an opera singer; you are your instrument.  The craft of dancing demands tremendous training.  The art demands that you transcend that training.

I started dancing toward the end of my basketball career.  I was attending UC Berkeley on a basketball scholarship and struggling to transition from center to forward.  I needed to improve my mobility and speed.  I thought dance classes might help.  I never made the transition in my basketball game and my career fizzled, but dance stuck.

The learning challenges for a young dancer are immense.  Consider the pirouette, in which the dancer spins on one leg.  Here’s an example from the ballet world, Mikhail Baryshnikov performing in Giselle. 

He does all kinds of hard stuff.  The first pirouette comes about 30 seconds into the clip.  Go ahead, try one.  Spin around on one leg.  You pick the leg.  Try for 3 spins.  See what I mean?

Just accomplishing the movement, hard as that is, isn’t enough though.  Art demands transcendence.  When you spin, make it so that the audience doesn’t see the effort, make it so they experience something profound.  Maybe, the feeling of flying, or forgetting that they’ve just been laid off and leaving them with a sense of hope and beauty. 

There is a way to learn to do the spinning, and there are ways to learn to approach the art.  Those learning paths are what grabbed me and made me a modern dancer for 10 years.

The beginning of learning to spin is to learn to stand on one leg.  First you stand with your whole foot on the ground.  Then you do it on tip toe, or releve.   It took me about 3 years of daily classes to be able to stand on one leg in releve and not tip over.  There wasn’t anything mechanical or procedural about learning how.  It wasn’t like weight lifting, where if you just show up in the gym your physique changes.  Learning to stand on one leg was mystical.  Feeling what was going on when I fell over, listening to my teachers try to get through to me, feeling what it was like when it worked, experiencing the connections between skeletal alignment and the foot. 

And then the art of it.  A sudden pause in the midst of the dance, the dancer suddenly still, as if in mid air, standing on one leg. 

At first, moments like that were terrifying.  What if I fell?  Eventually I arrived at the real learning.  The dance itself would hold me there.  If I didn’t hold back in any way, but gave myself over completely to the performance, it would happen.

It took me about eight years to arrive there–learning to give myself over to the dance.  The breakthrough happened on stage, in a performance of a piece that was just beyond my comfort zone.  That night I realized that the dance was much bigger than me, it was like a series of waves and currents.  I had to let them take me over.  That was 25 years ago.  I remember it like it was yesterday.