Broche Banter #37 -- Michelle
Today, I chat with Mic, a long-time piano teacher and professional musician who recently started ballet.
2020 was a really hard year for musicians, but Mic is so happy that it gave her the opportunity to pursue her love of ballet.
We connect on so many topics including why art matters, the learning process of a technical artform like ballet and piano, and why we love ballet. Her kind and warm heart will surely leave you smiling.
Enjoy!
Being a professional musician in 2020
Julie: Welcome to the show, Mic. I'm so excited to get to chat with you today.
Michelle: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much for asking.
Julie: It's going to be a great show. We met really during quarantine, like many of us did online when the whole world exploded. And we suddenly had all this time on our hands. You are musician, which is a difficult place to be during the pandemic. How has your life changed this year?
Mic: Well, it's really weird because as I've told you, I sang professionally in a chorus for 22 years. And early in February, I decided this was going to be the year I was going to quit my chorus job. And I was going to get back into my own music do more of my own piano and my own bass playing. I play for the Pops Orchestra here too. And I literally had a meeting with our conductor a week before March 13. So the week of the Friday before. The Tuesday of the week of March 13 I announced it at our at our rehearsal. And then Friday, March 13 happen. And everything got canceled. And I never got to have my season closer with all the goodbyes, the last concert, all that and it was really quite stressful. And then my Pops Orchestra schedule also got completely canceled. In fact, now I will not have another rehearsal with the orchestra till probably next October.
Julie: October 2021. Oh my gosh,
Mic: Yeah. Because our seasons run from October through May. So this year is done. It's done.
Julie: Wow. Oh my gosh.
Mic: That was pretty stressful. And I was really grateful that I do have a private piano studio. Immediately, well we were on spring break the week after March 13. And I spent that week trying to get it together and figure out how in the world am I going to do this? And after we got back from Spring Break I've been teaching online the whole time. Some students have come back in person. But we have a big serious protocol in the studio. We have several pianos downstairs so we can stay far apart. But yeah, it's been a stressful year.
Julie: Absolutely. I mean, it's so hard to be in an environment and in a field that requires close proximity to create something.
Mic: Yeah, especially singing like, that is literally the worst thing you could be doing right now.
Julie: You're right. Yeah.
Mic: And audiences, you know. But ballet came out of it, though. So that was my silver lining for 2020.
Julie: How did you bridge that gap between that darkness and finding the silver lining? I mean, now looking back, obviously, it's nice to see the silver lining, but in that process that can be pretty intense.
Mic: Yeah, I didn't handle it the best!
Julie: I didn't either. I didn't either for the record, so we're there.
Mic: I wasn’t like “woohoo” all this time, you know, I never had that moment at all. It wasn't till recently where I started going, “Okay, what did come out of 2020 that I can be thankful for.” And it was getting to do ballet all the time. But it's just so weird because I spent the first two months of this year going, “I wish I had all this extra time to work on my music.” And it's like, I swear it wasn't my fault. But then when I had all that time, I was just so depressed for a while that you know everything. Kind of just fell out, so it’s taken a while to find my “Joie de vivre” again. So yeah.
Julie: And I think that was part of the depressing irony of all of it was that everyone wanted their life to change a little bit, and then their life changed a lot. And they were like, “Whoa, like, that's not what I meant, oh my gosh, that's not at all what I meant. I didn't want that kind of time.” And then it was stressful, because you sort of got what you wished for in some ways, but then you couldn't take advantage of it. I think that that had another meta layer of mental weight, that you're sort of like, almost beating yourself up for not taking advantage of that time, but unable to take advantage of that time, at the same time.
Mic: Yeah, we were just doing well, just to get through each week, not freaking out that one of us was gonna get sick, or you know, I mean, it's just, everybody, we all wanted the same thing. I mean, globally, we all went to the same emotions, I'm sure.
Julie: Yeah. Very intense. Very intense. We've all grown up a few years.
Mic: A few grey hairs later.
Julie: 2020’s been real.
Starting Ballet
Julie:So ballet came out of it. So you started ballet this year? Or did you start before and this was when you really got to dive in? How did this ballet thing come about in your life?
Mic: Yeah, I started before. So just a brief background. I had loved to dance my whole life. Nothing like ballet or anything structured, just dancing in general for the love of it. And in, gosh, what year would that have been… 1989 I actually worked as a dance instructor for Arthur Murray ballroom dancing. I loved dancing so much. I only did that for a little while while I was going back to school.
But then I didn't do any kind of dancing for a really long time. And then our chorus did these great collaborations with Sarasota ballet, where the chorus, if you can imagine I have to send you a picture. The chorus is in the back of the stage. And then the ballet is all happening in front.
Julie: Fun!
We did some great work some beautiful pieces by Lauridsen. And there was this one piece we did, and it was all about light, eternal light. And so there were a couple choreographers that we worked with from the Sarasota ballet, and they've just choreographed these beautiful pieces. And we sang the backdrop. We were part of that tableau. And it was just amazing.
So in 2016, I started dabbling into the idea, you know, I wonder if adults even do ballet, and I just started doing research. And I found some of the DVDs by Finis Jhung from New York.
Julie: Yeah, he’s awesome!
Mic: Got a barre, got some shoes had no idea what I was doing. And I just followed his DVDs, but his DVDs are excellent. They're so thorough. And then a couple months after that, I fell in our driveway and really hurt my right ankle. Really bad. So I could even walk normally for six months to eight months, and ballet, just kind of, you know… then a couple years, I got into it again. And then I got really busy. My schedule up until March 13, my schedule was crazy. I even entertained the idea of finding adult ballet classes. But my schedules never mixed. All the beginner adult was when I either had rehearsals at night, or I was teaching late.
And so then once 2020 happened, I thought “This is it. Okay, I'm gonna finally do this.” And so that's when I really now I'm like full-in. It's done. I'm not ever going to not do it again.
Julie: No turning back at this point. What is it about ballet?
Mic: I don't know, what is it about chocolate? It's just like, there's just this thing. It's just the way it makes you feel and being a musician and already loving dance. It's putting all those things together. Just feeling it just how it feels to move. I've always been pretty athletic and liked working out love lifting weights, everything like that. So I love being in my body and moving my body. And just, I don't know, it's beautiful to look at. Until you see yourself doing it, and then it's not so beautiful. But that's another topic. It just feels good and I love the discipline actually. I like the discipline of it and just the meditative practice of doing barre. It’s like meditation.
“What is it about ballet?”
Mic: “I don’t know, what is it about chocolate? It’s just the way it makes you feel and being a musician and already loving dance. It’s putting all those things together. Just how it feels to move.”
Julie: Is playing the piano like meditation in that way, or is it different?
Mic: Definitely. Definitely, yeah, it depends on what kind of music you're playing, of course. So if you're playing something really fast and loud, that requires a lot of focus on octaves going everywhere or whatever, you can't zone out or you know, go to that place, you have to just be right on it. But if you're playing some new-age pieces or some beautiful light easy stuff, then definitely, it's definitely a meditation, and I love that.
Julie: Yeah. Do you think that same principle applies to fast ballet? Like with being able to play fast music? How do you go from playing slow music to fast music? I wonder if any of those are similar to how you would go from fast, slow frappés to fast frappés?
Mic: I don't know, you would know. But I've done nothing fast enough. At this point. So
Julie: When does a beginner piano students start going fast?
Mic: That's a good question. Okay. So that I can answer.
Julie: There you go.
Mic: So it's a couple of years before we start really working on speed. But if you ever teach little kids, all they want to do is go fast.
Julie: Yeah.
Mic: So I don't think that it's something you ever have to bring out of most students. So most of my students, I have to get them to slow down.
Julie: I see, because you teach a lot of kids.
Mic: A lot of kids, I have a few adults, actually too, and one of my adults actually I have to slow down as well. But little kids have a tendency to want to play fast because it sounds cool, it's fun. But as far as training them to go fast, that's not until a couple of years of some solid technique before we actually work on fast scales, fast arpeggios. It takes a while. It takes a bit of technique to sink in before you're ready for speed. I always say never sacrifice accuracy or technique for speed, because it will never help you in the long run. Slow and steady is the way that I was taught and slow practice is… Even professional concert pianists will tell you that some of their best practices they do before a concert is very slow, just very slow practice.
Julie: A lot of times beginners equate slow with easy, or slow with baby stuff. Or, you know, “Why are we going so slow in the tendu, why are we going so slow?” But like you said it, and it’s the same thing with ballet, when you get to the advanced level, you should be sweating by the end of holding a combination that would consist of holding fifth position for 32 counts and 32 tendus on each leg, you should be sweating by the end of that. But a beginner will see that as like a baby exercise, or why are we doing this? It takes a long time to teach someone that that is how you actually get better because it seems so unrelated to the fast stuff.
Mic: Yeah, and that's really I think what's good about taking ballet even as a beginner, which I still consider myself way a beginner. As an adult and especially as an adult teacher, because I already come into it knowing that it's going to take time. And I appreciate the slow because I think of the music and trying to get my students to go slow and and learn properly instead of learning sloppy, if you know what I mean.
Julie: Definitely, learning slow is really the only way because otherwise you miss the details, you miss the transitions, you miss the nuances, you miss the muscle engagement. I assume there's muscle engagement in piano as well. I mean, you have incredible posture. So there's at least a postural situation happening. But I assume there's also some sort of muscular technique in the wrists and the fingers and all of that stuff as well.
Mic: Yeah, there's definitely but we don't think about the muscles as much. It's more about joint movement, actually. Because if you're playing, you're thinking about not having the wrist, I can’t even do it anymore, not having the wrist bent like this, but having a level wrist or down, or keeping the shoulders down. This is huge thing, keeping the shoulders down, because students have a tendency to raise their shoulders. Also not slouching. But, I've been playing the piano my whole life, so I've been trained to sit up. But then we use things like rotation. So say you're doing a movement that requires in piano going a fifth or an octave, you don't do that with just your fingers. You actually do that with your wrist and your arm. So all the movement is from the elbow, and you're rotating, because we're always wanting to use our bigger muscles. It sounds weird, but the bigger muscles are actually the ones that that ease up the smaller muscles to go fast. I know it sounds like it shouldn't be that way. But yeah.
Julie: Yeah, it's definitely that way in ballet for sure. When you talk about having a graceful porta bra, which probably is similar to having a nice sound in piano, a graceful port de bra comes from the tricep and from the back, it doesn't come from the fingers. The fingers are moving because the upper arm moved, and not the fingers move, and therefore the upper arm moves, then it looks like a claw kind of a situation. It has to be the upper body moves, all movement comes from your center and your core. And as much of your movement comes from the middle of your body as possible. Maybe the piano doesn't quite extend that far. But certainly it sounds like you're kind of going up the chain of command to create the motion.
Mic: Yeah, yeah, another there is definitely a lot of body technique that we talked about. And a lot of people just have that naturally. Like in ballet you're always looking for things just to make sure there's not small tweaks and corrections. But overall, if a student comes in who has really a very natural approach, as long as they're not doing anything that's going to harm their own wrists or something. I just basically try to stay out of the way and let their bodies do what they want to do. As long as there's nothing that's going to cause them problems down the road.
Julie: Fascinating. Yeah,
Mic: It's fun. I love teaching.
Julie: So you've been teaching piano for a long time as well.
Mic: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've been, I guess it's 22 years now.
Julie: Wow. Yeah. You've touched a lot of lives.
Mic: Yeah, it's really wonderful. I consider it an honor. I have students who now are in their 30s, that still text me to say hello. I mean, it's really neat. When you see them every week, and you see them grow, especially if you've had them for 10 or plus years, you've literally seen them grow up and you go to their high school graduations, and you become part of their family, and they become part of yours.
Julie: With ballet, I spend a lot of time working with people on their confidence, on their anxieties, on their fears, on what they want to become, who they want to be. I mean, it's just sometimes a little mind-blowing that all of this goes into a good tendu but you really have to fight a lot of inner demons when it comes to thoughts like “I'm not good enough” “I'll never get this” “that person is so much better than me” “this is going to take forever” “can I do it?” I mean, all these thoughts come out in your quest for a tendu. Is this the same in your world? How do you handle this as a teacher? As a student? As a person? What are your thoughts?
Mic: Yes and yes, all of the above, it all applies. I think that it's just a human condition, quite honestly. Because anything that means a lot to us, we're going to want to do our best. And especially if you really love your teacher, and you admire your teacher and you want to be like your teacher, you want to do well so they're proud of you. But you want to be proud of you too. So you work hard and you want to sound good. You want to look beautiful while you're dancing. Some of us who have the perfectionist tendencies, we're hard on ourselves. I think we've all gone through imposter syndrome, thinking what am I even doing here? They're gonna find me out in a minute. No, musicians go through exactly the same thing. Yeah, I've known just a few musicians that are super ultra-confident and stuff, but they're not usually people that you want to be around because they're so cocky. They just have a little too overconfident personalities. But most of the people that I know, we all feel like we're not good enough, or we'll never get to where we want to be. I think it’s universal, Julie.
“Anything that means a lot to us, we’re going to want to do our best. And especially if you really love your teacher, and you admire your teacher and you want to be like your teacher, you want to do well so they’re proud of you.
But you want to be proud of you too. You want to look beautiful while you’re dancing.
Some of us who have the perfectionist tendencies, we’re hard on ourselves. I think we’ve all gone through imposter syndrome, thinking what am I even doing here? They’re gonna find me out in a minute.
But most of the people that I know, we all feel like we’re not good enough, or we’ll never get to where we want to be. I think it’s universal.”
Julie: I think it is. It's just a funny tension between accepting where you are now while wanting to be better than what you are now. It's just a funny tension. It keeps us excited. It keeps us engaged. It keeps us slightly upset all the time. It keeps us slightly happy all the time. It just keeps us in this agitated state where we're just always kind of jostling with ourselves in our future and our present and all of this.
Mic: Yeah, maybe they would get bored. I don't know. Maybe we would just maybe we wouldn't strive to be better if we didn't have that inner turmoil going on that pushes us to straighten that foot a little bit more or listen to what you're playing on the piano to make sure that it's the sound that you want to have come out. There's so much to it.
Julie: There's so much to it. It's fascinating. The meta-layer on top of it is fascinating. The whole thing is fascinating.
Mic: It's funny even after doing even after teaching and playing piano my entire life, literally. I never get tired of doing it. And I always love the times I just go down into the studio. Even if I've been teaching a lot that day, maybe after dinner I'll go down, especially this time of year and just go play Christmas carols or something. It still makes me as happy as it did 30 years ago. I think that's how you know, that you're supposed to do it. I'm starting to feel that way about ballet. I look forward to doing it. And it makes me happy and it's just something I think I would have loved to have done as a child. But I was so ingrained in music that my route just kind of went that way, you know?
Julie: Yeah. And now, I guess you can put it all together, right? Having come into it with the expression already there. Watching you dance in the exam that you had just done, you have such an expression already in you that is just dying to come out. You have an expression that's in you that's in your fingers that's in your face, that's in your details that's in all of these things that's just been building your whole life and is now going to blossom in a new way.
Mic: Yeah, hopefully, it'll blossom sooner rather than later.
Julie: Well, there's something incredible about watching a new dancer that I really love. I swear I have nearly cried watching dancers do their first circular port de bra. Because it is a time … that particular move, the circular port de bra is a time where you're feeling it, you're exhausted from the rond de jambe. So you're so ready to breathe and move and you're forced to use your breath because you're actually exhausted. And so the dancer breathes and stretches and it feels amazing. Sometimes a dancer will come in the first time and I'm just like, can you replay that? You just capture this incredible beauty in that moment. And it just kills me how expressive adults are on their first day. Sometimes. It's amazing.
Mic: That's beautiful. That's really beautiful.
Julie: It's really incredible. I'm one thing I admire a lot about musicians. And I've always loved to go to concerts, classical concerts, not pop concerts, I've gone to way more classical concerts than I have pop concerts. But New York Philharmonic was my favorite place to go, when I lived in New York City, I would go all the time, and their theater is such that you can actually feel the music touching your body. I can't explain it other than that. It's like you can actually feel it around your body. It reminds me when I played the euphonium in high school where you're holding the instrument and you can feel the music in your body at the same time as you're playing it. Very connected. And you watch the musicians and they're all older, and you watch the ballet dancers and they're all younger, and you watch the expression of someone who's been doing it for 40 years. And it's just a level of confidence and finesse and of something that we lose out a little bit on and dance when we retire at the age of 30. Not that they haven't been doing it already for 20 years, but it's actually just incredible to watch a dancer take that level that they reached up 30 and take it to the age of 60 or 70 or beyond. Because there's something there that develops with life and with tragedy and with joy. And I don't know what it is. Maybe you have some ideas on what that is.
Mic: Yeah, but I never really thought about that until you just said that about the age thing as far as comparing ballet to music. Because the one thing that I do love about being a musician… I don't know if you like jazz or anything but I grew up listening to Dave Brubeck's piano. My dad was a jazz pianist, and so I grew up with loving jazz and Dave Brubeck.. that man, I saw him not in person, unfortunately, but I saw him on a concert that was taped, and he could barely walk to the piano. He was really in his advanced age at that time, but once he sat down at that piano, he was on fire. And it just looked like he was still 20 playing the piano.
He hobbled to get there, once he sat down, and that's one thing I do love about music is that you can do it almost your whole life unless something terrible happens.
Going back just for a second on what you said about the vibration though. It's absolutely true that it's almost a tangible feeling. Because if you think about radio waves or sound waves and vibration, they are there in the presence of you even though you can't see them. I explain to my students if you think about radios and how radios work. The music is going through the air in a wave all the time. I'm talking about old radios, analog. We can't see the music going in front of us. But if you turn on your transceiver and you have the equipment to receive that radio wave, and all of a sudden you're hearing music in your living room.
So wouldn't sound waves be exactly the same in a hall? Oh, you can actually see it back there [pointing behind her], my double bass, when you are playing the double bass, which is I basically had to pick the two largest instruments on the planet, right? The next would be the harp, which will be the only logical step, the piano you can’t take with you. But the bass, that is about the biggest instrument, you can literally carry around which is heavy.
But when you're around it, and you feel it against your body, you do actually feel it. And if you take a video of the string, it actually is going like this [making wave motion with her hand] while it's being played. It's really cool if you do it in slow motion. And I've done that before, because I love doing videos as a hobby. It's kind of one of my little hobbies, photography and videos. And I've videotaped the string on the bass, and you don't see it when you're looking at it. But when it's in slow motion, it's doing this and it just that you think about, okay, that movement and vibration, it's all we're receiving it, just can't see it. But we can feel it. Because I can guarantee you that if I plopped you down in our concert hall, and put a CD on of our orchestra, and you didn't know and you didn't hear anything else, and then I brought our entire orchestra and played, you would definitely know the difference.
Julie: Yeah, amazing. That's actually a really amazing thought to think of sound as a physical thing. Because it's invisible. I mean, you're right, it's a physical thing, it's actually causing the air to hit you in a different way. Right? It's actually causing a disruption. And it's actually a thing coming at you. But that's really fascinating to think of it like that explains a lot.
Mic: So it's no wonder that we love ballet and ballet, music and dancing, is it all? It becomes part of us.
Julie: It really is a very deep, perhaps that's why it brings up so many of the deep feelings that we talked about, because it really is in coming from deep inside of us physically, as well as mentally, and it really is actually quite a deep thing to do, to create, to make from inside your body.
Mic: I was you know, singing for 22 years. And when you're actually making the music with your body, it's very personal. Just like ballet, sometimes you have an off day. And sometimes your off day is when your performance is happening.
If you get a big solo, I've been really lucky to have some really nice solos. And you pray that the morning that you wake up for your concert that you're in “good voice.” It would be just like not wanting to get out of bed and being stiff. But you push through even if you don't. Because if you've done your craft well enough, the audience most of the time won't tell if you're at your best. But you know that you are. When you're on or you know, you're in your flow or whatever, you know, but the audience just wants to be taken on a journey. They don't, they don't need to know. So you have to make it look easy. They don't need to know that you have a sore throat and you are really pushing through this performance and you're always subject to whatever your body is going to do that day.
Julie: I feel like that's how it would be with a reed instrument as well. The way they talk about the clarinet reads is that it's like a you pray to the gods that you have a nicely moist reed that day. Yes, that is very intense. I always wonder how people don't when they travel, and then do these things. Like my voice is always a disaster after I travel, my body is a disaster, then these people going traveling tours doing dance and singing and all of this stuff. And they have to somehow overcome jetlag. And I don't know.
Mic: I think it's the training and I've watched a lot of our like big hitter soloists that come in and do.. we just did Haydn's creation, and we had the most amazing vocal soloists that got flown in for this concert. And you see them just step off the plane maybe the night before, and then they come to the rehearsal the next day, and they might be a little groggy or whatever. But because they've trained so very well, and they warm up a little bit in the next thing you know, they're just singing this amazing thing. And I'm sure that well, you can tell me you know, as as a dancer with so much experience, have you ever had a time where you had to perform or dance on a day that you didn't feel your best, but you still pulled it off?
Julie: Oh, definitely. I mean, there's always a time. I think all of us have many, many times where it's just like, you can't find your turnout muscles or as we say, in ballet, you're “off your leg.” You can't get your turns to work, you feel heavy, your body feels heavy, your jumps are low. And you know you have all these different things.
But I think I'm definitely when it comes to this stage for me, the adrenaline always puts your body back into tip-top shape. It's actually I prefer almost to be a little bit slow on a day of a show so that the adrenaline puts me at normal. But if I'm not normal than the adrenaline puts me on like insane mode. It's almost like uncontrollable, that is fun to be a part of, fun to experience that uncontrollable feeling. But it's like you need to hold it together to complete the show.
Mic: I just have an image of someone doing a ton of pirouettes after drinking Red Bull or something.
Julie: Yeah, that's like actually a very accurate description. Yeah, that's right. The adrenaline is fun. It's a fun I love I mean, the adrenaline of performing. It's fun and exciting, and I think it allows you to do superhuman things that you're kind of experiencing it in and out of body kind of way, where you can kind of you.. it's odd to kind of step out of your body sometimes in a performance and watch it happening. Because your training takes over, basically your training takes over, your muscle memory takes over and you're not actually supervising the process, it's happening, and you're watching it. And it's a very odd meta feeling. Maybe similar to drugs, I actually don't know, but maybe similar to what people describe when it comes to hallucinations or something where you kind of out of your body, watching your body do a thing that you're kind of a part of, but not really, it's like kind of a very interesting sensation.
But because you're moving, the movement makes you start to feel in your body again, whereas a musical performance, I always found more difficult to perform on the flute or something because you're kind of you're not doing much with your body. So it's easy to just be off in space.
Mic: Yeah, being nervous the day of her performance when you have.. it's not so much like when you're singing in the full chorus, because you could basically be moving your mouth and no one in the audience would really know you were singing. But if you are singing a solo, or a small ensemble, which is like my favorite work to do, being nervous, the day of the show is not a good thing, because your breathing gets really messed up. And if you're anxious or nervous, you're not breathing fully into your diaphragm, right. And that just makes your voice not sound that great. And so you know, it definitely there's a, there's something to be said for years of experience. And you learn how to calm yourself down. And one trick that I learned from somebody a long time ago, and I can't even now remember, like, who taught me this. But starting to one time, this is like 20 years ago, I had to sing a big solo. And we do this Handel Messiah thing, where there's a bunch of different solos in the saya, and then the audience sings the choruses. It's really cool. It's the Messiah sing along. And I remember one of the first times that I had to do that, because I also had a church job at the same time. And I just went out there. And I remember somebody told me one time to just think about the music and not think about yourself. And that kind of lets you off the hook. Because if you just think to yourself, and this is what I teach my students, when they go to do their performances, which we do every several times a year, think about how beautiful this music is. And when you go on stage, think to yourself, first of all, think the audience in your own heart, you know, and then think to yourself, this music is so beautiful. I can't wait to share it with you.
“On performing .....
I remember somebody told me one time to just think about the music and not think about yourself, and that kind of lets you off the hook.
This is what I teach my students, when they go to do their performances, which we do several times a year: think about how beautiful this music is. And when you go on stage, think to yourself, first of all, thank the audience in your own heart, and then think to yourself, this music is so beautiful. I can’t wait to share it with you.”
If you come to it with that idea, then it's not about you. And I think that's when we get into trouble is when our ego takes over. And not necessarily in a bad way. Because we all want to do well. But we don't want to look stupid, or we don't want to look bad. And there there is something to that. And that's not a terrible thing, either. But it doesn't help us when we're nervous. So if we go on stage, and we just think, okay, I love this piece so much, and I can't wait till you hear it, and I hope I can do it justice. And once I started thinking that way, then my solos became a lot easier, even though I was still nervous and sometimes terrified to see the audience, “Oh, God, here we go.” But it helped a lot. And I'm sure dance is probably like that, too. You've got this beautiful choreography that you or somebody else has created. And you're like, I just want to do this justice. Let's have fun. Let’s go do this.
Julie: I love that. It's so it's so wonderful. And I think even as a teacher is where I think I resonate with it the most where when I'm sharing ballet with people it can be a little stressful because there's so much you have to share. And there's so much that people need to learn and there's so much that you may not teach right or that you could teach better or whatever. But I think what tends to help me through that and really helped me love teaching so much is that I feel like I love ballet so much and I just can't wait to share it with people and I can't wait for them to see how fun it is and I can't wait for them to feel a pirouette and I can't wait for them to be en pointe and I can't wait for them to do all this stuff. And that makes it really fun and enjoyable and no pressure on me. Because I mean, there is pressure, obviously, I want to do it justice, as you said, but I'm just so excited for them to get to be in this world. And I'm so excited for them to dance. Maybe that's kind of cheesy, but that's why that's how I feel as a teacher.
Mic: It's not cheesy at all. And Julie, I have to tell you, you absolutely you come across that way. And it translates 100%, I can tell when I'm either taking the live class from you, or doing the on-demand classes, I can tell that you love it so much, that you are so excited for any student at any level to find the beauty in it no matter what level and something I really admire about you, because you really do love it. And I can tell that and I can tell that you never lose your patience with people as far as teaching and that you're such a kind teacher, and I just really appreciate that about you.
Julie: Thank you. That's very sweet. That's all how I hope to be as a teacher and what I hope to give to the world if there's anything I can give it that one more person than would have before gets a pair of pointe shoes or gets to be on stage or whatever it is because it's magical, I think.
Mic: Well, it comes across.
Julie: Usually, I finished with a piece of advice, but I think you have a very interesting perspective in your life. And I want to just ask you to finish Why does art matter?
Mic: I think it matters very much. And I think we're seeing that this year more than any other year. Because there's not many things that we can do in our lives other than things that are artistic that touch our souls in a way that will change us. If you hear a great piece of music, or you watch an amazing ballet performance, it changes a little part of your soul. And you're more richer for it, you know, because you just it brings us such joy. And we need that so much. And not just this year, any year. But that's why we go to concerts, we go to performances because it fills that part of us that can only be filled with art.
“I think [art] matters very much. And I think we’re seeing that this year more than any other year. Because there’s not many things that we can do in our lives other than things that are artistic that touch our souls in a way that will change us. If you hear a great piece of music, or you watch an amazing ballet performance, it changes a little part of your soul. And you’re more richer for it, you know, because you just it brings us such joy. And we need that so much. And not just this year, any year. But that’s why we go to concerts, we go to performances because it fills that part of us that can only be filled with art.”
Julie: Beautiful, it's beautiful.
Mic: We need it.
Julie: Sometimes it's hard to believe that joy is justified when there's so much work to do. But I think we've all learned a huge lesson about that this year. And I hope we all take it to the future.
Mic: Me too
Julie: Well, thank you so much for being on the show what an enjoyable conversation. I feel like I learned a ton about music and ballet and just you have incredible wisdom to impart. So I appreciate this whole conversation and really getting to know you this year. What a pleasure.
Mic: Well, it's been a pleasure to be here talking with you. And I really enjoyed talking with you. And I'm sure we could talk for hours about this.
Julie: Yes, and I'm sure we'll continue talking for hours offline about all of this.
Mic: I hope so.
Julie: Well, thank you again.
Mic: Thank you, Julie.