The studio reopens and the dancers file in. Our instructor drops us to the floor twice for crunches. A friend and I shared a resigned smile. Enjoy these crunches. This is as easy as it gets tonight. To say nothing of getting out of bed tomorrow morning.
Why oh why do weeks have to begin on Mondays? Who made that call?
I made it through my first class back with moderate success. This is my hardest class all week so if I can get through it without falling on my ass or tripping up anyone else, I call it success. Huzzah for low expectations.
At this age, I walk into class and spend the first fifteen minutes identifying which parts don’t want to play ball today. You can laugh at me for the “at this age” business if you want, but I take classes with twelve year olds who never get sore and can bend in half three different ways stone cold on a winter morning. You crest twenty or so and this stops being a birth right. And I’m a decade pass twenty.
So you play the cautious test game. It’s been three weeks. Muscles and memory, are we all present? Do we all still remember how this goes? Pleés and tondues speak words that your instructor is too kind to say. People often give me a hard time for speaking to computers as if they’re individual entities. Wait until you see me carrying on conversations with my feet as if we have equal roles in some sort of democracy.
I remember studying sea life in a Biology 1B lab in college. Coral, I think, is what was under the microscope that day. Tiny critters that live in a colony of other identical tiny critters that are interlinked to share nutrients and specialized to the point of some members being in charge of food consumption and others in charge of reproduction, etc. What, then, is the functional difference between that colony of individuals and a human body of cells? I think it’s primarily that the idea of thinking of ourselves as a colony creeps us out.
Let me tell you, though, after three weeks of not dancing and then trying to consciously send the right neurological message along the right pathway to get that leg down there to serve the group and do what it’s supposed to, that whole colony idea gains some strength.
There’s something to it though, when it works. When your whole body pulls together and forgets that it’s really bits and pieces with commitment issues. Every now and then you can let the check list go and transcend the sum of your parts. That’s why you do it. That’s why it’s worth it.
Not so much on Mondays though.
I got through barre with reasonable success and clung to it with desperate dependency when we were called out to center. The turns could be worse. The beats are worse. Penché came off okay. Arabesques and passés are nowhere near as high as they should be. And we’re back at it again, aren’t we?
I think the colony will move to mutiny when I try to move my bones out of bed tomorrow morning. Still, it’s good to be testing the waters again.