Beautiful dancers, when I started this blog post, I was searching Google for a picture of a person surviving a bear attack by making themselves big. Let me tell you, that was not a good phrase to search. I was rewarded with lots of photos of bears being very mean and scary and lots of photos of people who had survived the attacks but had been bloodied and disfigured in the process.
So this will have to do:
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| Courtesy YouTube |
FYI this image is TOTALLY WRONG! If you encounter a brown or Grizzly bear, you are supposed to lie down and play dead; if you encounter a black bear, you are supposed to make yourself big. Here's more about bear safety. (#1: talk to it??? Really???)
Thank you for coming to my TED talk about bears.
Now back to ballet...
Imagine if you will, ballet is your bear. It looks cuddly and you think it must be soft and cozy to curl up with, especially from a distance where you can see the sun catch its sleek coat and admire its graceful lope along the park path.
"Ah," you think. "I would like to walk alongside this bear and get into bear adventures with it."
But you get closer and you see it's got teeth - really big ones - and its paws are the size of your head and if they get too close, they will swipe your face clean off your skull. Uh-oh! Run away!
For some people, this is how they approach ballet: as if it's a terribly mean bear and they are encroaching on its territory. Some bears, I mean ballet dancers and instructors, want you to feel this way about ballet. They want you to think you don't belong so run away or play dead but you can't join us on our bear, I mean ballet, adventures.
That's just B.S. (bear s***). You do belong. You just haven't learned the bear language yet.
Another FYI...it takes years to learn to speak the bear language. But that's okay. You're not in a rush, are you? You start slowly, studying the basics, then once you've got a handle on those, you progress and study further, maybe try a higher level or learn to perform. But how do you manage in the meantime? What do you do when the bear sneaks up on you and threatens you? You don't speak bear yet, so how do you handle this encounter?
In ballet terms, I mean you're taking class and you're faced with a step or correction you don't understand. What do you do, especially if you worry that the bear/ballet doesn't want you there?
1. Talk to the bear...ask the teacher for a more specific breakdown of the step (preferably at a time when it is convenient to do so or when questions are allowed to be asked). You might need a private lesson or two to feel comfortable attempting it in class.
2. Get to higher ground and be bigger than the bear...when we feel anxious about something, we naturally make ourselves physically smaller. We retreat (play dead, run away) instead of attacking it back. When you feel anxious in class, deliberately make your arms bigger and your upper body the focus of the movement. It helps regulate your breath and it keeps you lifted instead of collapsing. Use your demi-plie to help you get off the floor or travel farther and faster. Don't run away, take a breath, extend yourself beyond your immediate physical boundary.
While I hate the admonition to "fake it til you make it," it comes in handy here. Sometimes you need to act like you know what you're doing before you actually do.
3. Be bigger than the bear mentally...you came to the park to see bears. You're prepared. You want to go on bear adventures even if they are scary and you don't know how long you'll be hiking. But that's the joy of ballet: the adventure it takes you on. It's a lifelong adventure. It has its ups and downs. Some days you will nail a double pirouette with ease; some days you can hardly manage a wobbly balance. The bear doesn't show you how hard it is to be a bear - you discover that yourself. But you have every right to be there so give yourself permission to not get things correctly the first time - and be all right with it. If you have to grin and bear it (ha! see what I did there?), so be it.
Happy dancing, everyone!