(no subject)
Amazing, simply amazing. One night I'm throwing music across the practice room, and the next I'm tearing it up (not literally of course! I mean that I was playing well).
I am being incredibly nostalgic at the moment. Listening to any ballet music--especially music as luscious as Prokofiev's Ballet Suite for Romeo and Juliet--I cannot help but allow my mind to wander back to my serious dancing days. I never really got closure with ballet, which is particularly aggrivating because looking back, even now, I know that ballet was the "love of my life." (I'm tolerating that phrase at the moment.) And I was good at it. Darn good at it. I mean, when I was told I could never dance again, I was about to audition at the School of American Ballet in Manhatten. I guess I can say that I was good at it, now that I am not dancing any longer...it is not boasting. I miss it so much. I ache for it. That feeling that is unparalleled anywhere else but on a stage. Think of this: You spend an hour warming up in class, and then another hour and a half in a dressing room. Thirty minutes for stage makeup and hair, an hour working on new toe shoes. And then you get your call. You go up the stairs, walk into the back stage area, and there in the wings you watch as the dancers on the stage are in another world, and you cannot wait to join them in that world. They run off stage, and you know that this moment is it, the moment you've been waiting for all night. Your partner grabs your hand and walks you on stage. The maestro looks at you, nods to his orchestra, and you begin dancing. Suddenly you are not on earth any more. You ARE music. That feeling of being so one with divine sound, excrutiatingly beautiful to the ear, you hold back tears. And as your partner picks you up, pushes you, touches you...all that matters is the music and your partner, the story you are telling. Somehow the story, the dancers, you all become the music. When you walk off stage to end the night, you cry because the body is not capable of holding in such beauty as music. When you and your partner walk back onstage for final curtain call bows, you step back and kneel completely to your male counterpart. How can you not care for someone,respect someone who has taken that journey with you, someone who has held you in your most vulnerable moment? Then you look out in the audience, no longer judgemental faces, but faces of people who have watched you do the thing you THINK you were born to do.
But I couldn't have been born to dance, I know this now. And this makes my wonderful day end with anger and sadness and questionning in my heart. I am beginning to wonder about the ridiculous misproportion of blows that have been dealt in my family's life...and now I am trying hard not to succumb to self-pity. I will resist the urge to allow my mind to name them...list them would be more appropriate. When will the winters pass and allow the sun to dry the snow? This snow never melts, ice only packs thicker and thicker. But I will overcome. OVERCOME!