The Normal, Everyday Courage of the Hobbyist Dancer

This is not a post in the Movement Practice essay series, but maybe it should be. Probably, it will be. For now, its just for me. Because I did something I have a lot of thoughts about…

I danced.

On Monday I did a ballet class for the first time in about three years. And it was… What it was.

And then, because I wasn’t quite sure what happened on Monday, I went to another class on Thursday, just to check my hypothesis that this was an OK thing to have done with my life.

So how was it? I won’t blow it up and say, “OMG going to two dance classes this week totally changed my life,  best decision ever, I’m gonna go out and crush some auditions now ’cause I’M BACK”.  (who is this “I“, and what does “back” mean?)

Not even close. It was sobering. Everything about it was hard. It was thought provoking. I wanted to leave halfway through barre, when I realized, “Oh God, I have to let people see me attempt a pirouette”.

At one point on Thursday’s class I found myself unable to hold back tears dripping down my cheeks, not because I was frustrated or upset, but because watching the woman in front of me dancing with all her soul and all her imperfection was the most beautiful thing I’ve witnessed in a while.

I am feeling real, challenging emotions about this whole experience that I’m still processing. Lucky you, dear reader, you get to read all about it.

If you weren’t afraid to… what would you do?

It took me three years work up the courage to get myself back in the dance studio. It started when I asked myself the question, “What would I do if I wasn’t too afraid to do it?”. On that list of answers (besides figure out how to do my own dang taxes) was that I’d dance again.

The last time I danced was in a ballet class in 2015, or was it 2016? Doesn’t matter. At that time, I wasn’t taking dance classes as a professional means to an end, but I still had this idea that I needed to be good at it, and that if I wasn’t able to go back to being as good technically as I was before it wasn’t worth doing at all.

I was still so very attached to the Old Monika who called herself a dancer. I didn’t realize that there is no going back, only forward.

Identity theft

I could say that my dance career was stolen from me, but really, it’s loss was a gift.

The gift was an injury and the injury turned out to be sieve. A sieve is a utensil used for separating coarser things from finer things, and that’s exactly what my injuries did for me. I was left with no option but to sift through all the shit that got shaken up as I stepped away from dance. At the end of the great sifting, moving through all the dirt, and grime, and darkness, all that was left in the sieve were the things that truly mattered.

The sifting was the letting go.

Let’s say you’ve danced since you were a little kid, like I did. When you hit high school you decided that dance was your career path. Then, you stop dancing suddenly because to continue is unsustainable, physically and mentally. And you never once though about a plan B because up until then you felt indestructible. That was me.

For Old Monika, every choice was framed by the question, “Will this get me closer to being a successful dancer?”. What questions define life now without dance at the center? If you’ve been in this place,  you realize that you don’t know who you are anymore without the one thing you were known for.

Worse, you realize that if you don’t even know who you are, neither does anyone else, and this realization feels agonizingly lonely.

This loss of identity is both relieving and terrifying.

Relieving because now there is this opportunity to reinvent and become the person you are, not the person you felt like everyone needed you to be. Terrifying because you have no idea how to be who you are because you’ve never stood still long enough to feel who that person is. You’ve never had a reason to sift.

Too, there is no praise for the process of figuring out who you are. It’s not like in the dance studio where, if you just did exactly what you were told, you could stand on a pedestal and be adored. No one gives you a high five for making the mess as you sift, only for the cleaning it up when its over (and its never over, so you never get that high five).

Seven years ago on my dance career path the intention was “be the best”. The competition was stiff, and yet there was great comfort in knowing exactly how I was expected to look, act, and be. There were rules to follow, and I was good at following rules. I loved rules and I loved control. There was always a technical skill to learn and master to build my confidence around, and I was a good learner.

Then, when it was all gone, all I was left with was this unrecognizable thing called… Me.

A death.

Upon my departure from professional dance training I was left with a lingering pain that I think I now understand to be grief. For seven years I grieved the death of a part of me. But she wouldn’t die all at once. Old Monika took seven years to die, with varying rates of decay.

Each little spurt of death hurt and confused me. Rather than let myself feel the pain of death, I fought back. I refused to let Old Monika die without a fight. It was like there was a whole forest burning and I was trying to fight the flames with a garden hose. It was a losing battle, I knew it, but I just could not let go.

An honest kind of beautiful

You know the cliché phoenix mythology: As Old Monika died, someone new rose from the ashes. I began to feel a sense of peace run through me like a rare cool breeze on a hot, sticky, Toronto summer day. The peace of this re-birthing, still in process, feels so beautiful to me.

On the outside, however, this is not the graceful revival you read about in fairy-tales. Its an honest to God messy, thrashing, struggling just to stand on one leg kind of beauty. Its the honesty that makes it beautiful.

For the past seven years, when people have asked me about my education, they inevitably say something to me like, “Oh, you’re a dancer?”, and I have no idea what to say back. There’s always an awkward silence.

Is the answer “yes”, or “no”, or “I was”, or “I will be”? The current answer is “I don’t know”, and this feels so unacceptable to me. It is the confused answer of someone deep in grief with the unwillingness to let go and move on. I feel like I don’t have enough energy to explain all of the confused things I am feeling.

They just won’t get it. How can they? I don’t even get it.

And then there is the shame of letting Old Monika die. “How could you have let this happen to her? What will people think? What right do you have to go back to dance now? You are unworthy of being seen dancing unless you can be her again”.

But she died. I never even knew who she was, yet I’m still holding on.

The hobbyist’s bravery

As I un-become Old Monika, and reinvent my identity and relationship with my dancer-self, hobbyist is the word that comes to mind.

The word hobbyist fills me with conflict. That word would have sickened me to associate with a few years ago. Certainly 7 years ago. Old Monika would rather never dance again than consider her caliber of dancing a mere hobby. Outrageous. Unacceptable. Shameful.

But that’s the identity I now find myself embracing. Even openly welcoming.

There are so many lovely things about dancing as a hobby that I had no idea existed. There’s no judgement. There’s no pressure to get anything out of this. My livelihood doesn’t depend on me being the best at this. I don’t need to have the pointiest toes, the straightest knees, or the highest arabesque. My leg can stay below 90 degrees and it doesn’t make me a bad person.

The energy in the studio is different, too. The air in here isn’t thick with fear and judgement and rejection. There’s actually this sense that we’re all in this together, a shared experience in which we’re not competing with each other- to get a job, to get approval, to be the best- we’re witnessing each other. We have this shared understanding that we are doing the hardest thing we are likely to do in our lives: We showed up.

We have the courage to just be, and that courage is the work of our lives, not the dancing.

Initially I had this belief that to dance as just a hobby was the easy way out, but I was wrong, because getting here, being ok with being here, was the hardest work I’ve done.

Yes, I found the professional dance world hard in a  harsh, critical, and superficial way, but these were the obvious challenges that I knew would come with the profession.

When you make the choice to commit to the professional path you know full well what you’re signing up for: A quest to be the best, to make pretty lines and tell stories. You take pride in pain and you sacrifice a bit of your soul and your sanity and your body for it. That’s what they told me, anyway. They also told me that maybe three people in my class will make viable careers out of this. If you’re lucky you are one of these three people, and you love the quest so much that these sacrifices feel right and you are even able to make meaningful art.

But in the world of hobbyist dancing we are all fierce warriors, not because of the sacrifices and long hours and hard physical work and pain. We’re doing something I found much harder than any of those sacrifices: We’ve chosen to practice letting go of the need to be perfect. We’re practicing self-respect. We’re practicing honesty.

And failure. The hobbyist dancer is engaged in an active practice of failure. We have all stepped into the studio with the shared understanding of the inevitability that,  at some point in the next 90 minutes, we will all fail. And what’s even more appalling, we are actually letting other people see our failures. And we’re paying our own money for this experience. We’ll fall out of single pirouettes, forget the steps to the exercises, and probably one of us will wipe out completely going across the floor.

We’re practicing bravery by showing up despite having being told in the past that how we look isn’t good enough, that we needed to feel self-conscious about our bellies, our butts, and our thighs. We show up to be seen in tight clothing having done the hard work involved in not giving a fuck about some dance teacher’s idea of what a “ballet body” is.

All the inadequacies we thought made us unworthy to be dancers are welcomed here, and we honour them, but we first needed to have the courage to show up.

The uncertainty of imperfection

The notion that failure is welcome and expected is both foreign to me and a breath of fresh air.

The uncertainty of imperfection is just as scary as the expectation to be perfect, but in a way that feels constructive. Perfection is a clear and distinct goal that comforts me, yet causes inordinate amounts of stress. I was taught that perfection is beautiful. I fell in love with the path to perfection when I fell in love with ballet. Imperfection, as I am learning, is beautiful in a way that perfection could never be.

Now perfection isn’t being asked of me and I have no idea what the point of ballet is. Its weird. The idea of moving with the sole intent of “to enjoy” feels like I’ve strayed from an important path and maybe I’m wasting my time.

But maybe I don’t need to know where this new path goes, and its the idea of not needing to know, the stepping into the unknown, that freaks me out.

As an aspiring professional dancer I knew exactly what to do and be to be “successful”: Book gigs, be the best, be thin, do what you’re told. I still have this attachment to that old version of success. Old Monika who learned through ballet to be a perfectionist wants to succeed at everything, but what does it look like to succeed as a hobbyist?

Do hobbyist and success even belong in the same sentence?

And then I met an angel

I’ll call her Alex (not real name of angel). She was in her mid-thirties, and after Monday’s class she came over to talk to me.

She recognized me as Old Monika, “Hey! I think I know you… Didn’t you write that ballet blog?”.

For a moment, there was fear. Who is she expecting me to be?  “Yeah, that’s me, danceproject.ca, right? That’s cool you read my blog, I really appreciate that”. I say through a smile that feels too strained, with what I hope sounds like cool confidence. I realize I have no idea what else to say to her because I don’t know who I am right now. She’s caught me standing barefoot in a puddle of vulnerability. And its raining uncertainty. Fortunately, she seemed to be an extrovert. So I let her talk. I am so grateful for the people who love talking and let me listen in silence.

Alex introduced herself as a hobbyist dancer. She actually used those words. I knew right then that I was to be her student. I wanted her to teach me how to be as brave as she was. She didn’t say “just” a hobbyist, she made the statement boldly, unashamedly, smiling and sweaty, with a courage I didn’t have.

Where before I wanted to be perfect like Sylvie Guillem, Evelyn Hart, and Svetlana Zakharova, now Alex is my role model. She is not perfect.  She does not have that idealized “ballet body”. She is a regular-ass human being doing her best. She is in love with dance and how it makes her feel. Alex doesn’t seem to give a fuck what people think of her. She is showing up to class for herself, because it makes her feel good, not for anyone else. This is the kind of person I want to be now.

“Done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure.”

There are so many hard things about making the identity switch to hobbyist. For instance, why am I feeling so much shame just speaking the word “hobbyist”? When did having a hobby become something to judge someone for or feel about?

Do you know what the definition of hobby is? I looked it up. Its, “an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure”.

Why am I ashamed of dancing in my leisure time for pleasure? This is what dance was for me once, before I turned it into this great snarling beast that slowly sucked my soul out through my pointy, bleeding feet.

Alex, my angel-of-dance, I have so many questions about how this is supposed to work.

How often do I need to go to class to call myself a dancer? Do I need to use the prefix “hobbyist”, or can I just call myself a dancer, flat out? Am I allowed to call myself a dancer if I have no desire to be flexible, or have no interest in doing the splits ever again? Wait, why do I even care about labeling myself? Can I just… not? Can I just be a human who dances sometimes?

I miss having rules… Can you tell me,  where is this going? What’s the point of trying if I’m not going to be the best at this? What if I run into someone from my past who knew Old Monika and they see how I’ve changed, and they judge me for not being as good as I was before I died? What if they say, “wow, what happened to her? She used to be a good dancer and now she can barely point her toes…”. 

How do I step into the unknown of who I am becoming with the bravery you have, Alex? How many times will I have to remind myself that “just to enjoy feeling my body move” is enough? That “for pleasure in my leisure time” is the best reason there is right now for doing this.

I intend to find out.

But to start, I am going to make myself some soft rules. The three irrefutable “U’s” I must surrender to: Unbecoming, Uncertainty, and the Unknown.

This idea of surrender feels like the most important thing in the world right now.