Broche Banter #1 -- Noabeth
Today on Broche Banter, we have Noabeth, a consultant, former powerlifter and rugby player turned ballet dancer. She started ballet for the first time ever just a few months ago.
We talk about the physicality of ballet, powering through setbacks, and the Japanese language.
Enjoy!
Why did you want to start ballet?
Julie (studio owner): So I know a lot about you from class, like that you did powerlifting and all kinds of things. Why did you want to start ballet? What got you into it?
Noabeth: I wanted to do something that was disciplined, difficult, didn’t need prior experience, not a team sport, and physically and mentally demanding, but not where I was going to be getting tackled like football and rugby.
J: So there’s like, 3 things that fit that description: Karate? Ballet? What else?
N: Skiing?
J: Yeah, there you go. You do go skiing a lot.
N: Yeah, I’m a skier, I did martial arts for years, powerlifting, rugby, football, and now my “retiring” sport is ballet.
J: Retiring young!
N: I’m probably older than you think.
J: I think you’re young.
N: I know I look like a bat-mitzvah boy, but I’m probably older than you think.
J: Age is a mindset!
N: Yeah, knees and backs are not a mindset. Shoulders are real. They’re like, I know you think you’re 32 but we’re 80!
J: Yeah, the struggle is real there. The second-day recovery gets harder and harder.
What keeps you coming back?
Julie: So all of this stuff gets harder as you get better. What keeps you coming back and why doesn’t that push you away?
Noabeth: I like that. I don’t want something to be easy. If it were easy, it would be softball and then anyone could do it.
J: Softball seems hard.
N: I mean, yeah, 70mph fast-ball is hard, but if you’re just playing rec-league softball, it’s like dodgeball. It’s the gateway sport for female jocks like myself.
J: Well ballet is a great gateway sport. It’s a gateway to itself. It’s a gateway to harder things.
N: To more ballet. Your turnout gets better and your spine gets longer.
J: Yes, you get taller. It’s great.
N: I felt myself get 3 inches taller in Crissy’s class this morning.
J: Oh good!
N: She was like, okay we’re going to do a sous-sou, and I just pulled my shoulders down, pulled my neck up, pulled my ribs and stomach in, and I felt like my eyes were 3 inches higher. It was great.
J: That’s amazing. That’s ideal, that’s the fun part. When all of it is harder and harder, you get these moments where you feel kind of weightless. The feeling is kind of cool.
N: Right. Which being weightless for me is quite the accomplishment. On earth, I weigh quite a lot but the moon would be a different story.
J: And gravity never gets tired. It’s relentless.
N: Relentless, like the sun.
J: Always pulling, always heavy. I’m like just give me a break!
N: Yeah.
What are your goals? (And also, how Japanese, Powerlifting and Ballet relate…)
Julie: So aside with almost dying in every class, what are your goals in ballet?
Noabeth: I want to have good form and execution, of course. I want to increase my flexibility, but most important are jumps and turns. That’s going to be jam.
J: You want to fly across the floor?
N: I want to suspend in the air and float for an endless amount of time and then I’m like, oh that was easy!
J: Like gravity didn’t apply.
N: Right, like I just turned it off for a second.
J: We have a term for that in ballet, it’s called balon, which is balloon in French. So you basically become a balloon for a moment in time. So if you want to compliment dancers, just say their balon is fabulous.
N: Plus, I’m a linguist. I speak Japanese, Swedish, and Spanish. I’ve never taken French, but I’m getting tons of French vocabulary.
J: Fascinating. How did you get into those languages?
N: I started taking Spanish in 7th or 8th grade, and then when I was in high school, I moved to Connecticut and there was going to be this magnet school in Norwalk, which was about a half an hour away. It was going to be an immersion program to learn Japanese. This was in the early 90’s when Japan was on fire. They were buying up everything. Now it’s like South Korea and China but in the 90’s it was all about Japan. I was like get me out of this high school in the woods and into one that was more like the high school I'd come from that was down in Norwalk in a city, it was more diverse, all different kinds of people. Going to “Martha Stewart High School” was not my jam. I studied Japanese and Spanish and continued Spanish all through high school. I studied Japanese for two years and I had an opportunity to study abroad my sophomore and junior years of high school in Japan where I lived with a family. And then my brother married a Swedish lady, and so I bought Rosetta Stone and learned some conversational Swedish. So it was kind of random.
J: That is very random. Do you still speak and remember Japanese?
N: My last client is a subsidiary of Toyota so I was super pumped about it because I got to use Japanese because they have a lot of Japanese implants at the company so I’d come and say the niceties. I’ve got that down because that was my life for about 2 years.
J: That’s funny. So many of the people I meet in the studio have an interest in language. Whether it’s programming language, whether it’s super good with excel spreadsheets, it’s like people who enjoy the detailed technical stuff seem to enjoy ballet for the same reason.
N: Yeah, it’s so much like powerlifting. It’s like the complete opposite of powerlifting, but there’s so many little things to think about and execute at the same time. There’s so many little dials you can improve with, but it’s the opposite side of the coin where [ballet] is lengthening and strengthening, and powerlifting is bulky twitch fiber that can fire and gets big and bulky. But you’re using technique, everything has to be in place, and you’re squatting 500 lbs or doing a triple pirouette. You have to build up to it and once you have the technique and you push as hard as you can, you’re doing a lot more and you’re doing it correctly.
J: Yeah, technique almost allows you to defy gravity and the limits of your body because you have the technique of how to use that to your advantage.
N: Right. You can force yourself into a turn or onto releve, but if you do it with correct balance and you’re on the right toes, it’s that much easier and you get that much higher, and that’s the parallel I see between something like Olympic lifting and ballet even though the main difference is you have to make it look easy in ballet and you want to look tough when you’re lifting.
J: The attitude is very different. I remember when I was powerlifting for a short period of time, my coach that I worked with had a really hard time reading me because as a dancer, you’re always supposed to be playing it cool on your face so I was lifting and he was like, “are you even working?” And I was like, “yeah I’m working really hard!” He was like, “why are you smiling?” And I was like, “because that’s what you do when things get harder!” So he was like, “you have to start grunting or something because if you’re not we’ll have to make it heavier because we can’t tell what you’re doing.”
N: Yeah, they don’t want to see your teeth, they want to see veins popping out!
J: I’m like do you know how bad that looks? I don’t want that! We couldn’t do powerlifting in front of the mirror because if my face got too intense it would be too much. So we had to face away from the mirror in order for my mind to not get freaked out by it.
N: Well, once I broke the habit of putting my head down and I would look up into the corner, that helps your back stay in the proper position. So now, when I’m up in sous-sou I’m used to looking up in the corner if I can’t look at the floor.
J: Yeah it’s a very different feeling from lifting under your chin and lifting under your ears. It’s lifting the back of the spine as opposed to the chin.
What are your biggest challenges?
Julie: You started [taking class] with me Christmas week, so that means it’s been three months.
Noabeth: Three months, yeah. And I already have tendonitis in my knees!
J: Welcome to ballet. If you don’t have some sort of tendonitis you’re not doing it right.
N: Right.
J: So you’ve been doing it for three months, you’re already extremely philosophical about the whole thing and sort of get the name of this game. What do you foresee as your biggest challenge into your next goals in ballet?
N: On a microscopic level, I’m really working on the decstarity and the flexibility of my feet and ankles because it’s just not there yet. I’m doing the pulling with the rubber band and rolling my feet out and really trying to lead with my ankles now that I feel more comfortable. Last month, my thing was getting up on that standing leg because my knees hyperextend and I couldn’t close to the back, but now I can close to the back and I never thought I’d be able to do it. But now, I’m really trying to never sickle and get that ankle forward and the toes under, which is hard for me. I’ve had back injuries where I’ve had nerve damage so my big toes can’t curl voluntarily very well, so little by little I’m working on pulling my toes under while my ankle is extended.
J: Fascinating. So can you feel your toes?
N: Yes, now it’s better. For a couple years, on my left foot, I couldn’t feel my big toe, and on my right, I couldn’t feel my anterior tibialis and that whole distal side of my right shin.
J: Wow, that’s intense!
N: Well I blew out 3 discs powerlifting.
J: That’s a lot of discs.
N: Yeah. It was S1, L3, and L4. I had three herniated discs.
J: Wow. Did they put them back?
N: No, they eventually pop off and dissolve in your body.
J: Well, all of that sounds unpleasant.
N: Yeah, back injuries super-duper suck.
J: Yeah, I had one as well. Not as bad as that, but it was pretty rough. I wasn’t able to sit for maybe a year.
N: Yeah, I didn’t sleep for two years. I would go to the chiropractor and be in the heavy duty traction and that was the only time I felt relief, and I would fall asleep for like 15 minutes. Eventually it was so bad that I had to get cortisone shots and cortisone epidurals which was interesting.
J: Ouch.
N: Yeah, so it took like 2 years and it eventually got better and I went to PT and did a lot of core work. But in the meantime, I blew up to like 300lbs because I couldn’t do anything, and then I started playing football and then I lost like 100lbs, went back to rugby, and then I retired from both.
J: So, your way of recovering from three herniated discs was playing football and rugby?
N: No, I had played rugby but had taken a break, and then I played football for a year and when I lost like 70lbs, I figured I could play rugby because my back was all better. So I went back to rugby and had a ball. Then, I played football for like 5 years and I was like, “okay this is stupid. I’m done with football.” My favorite part about football was never playing football. It was the conditioning and putting on all the gear. The toys were the most fun part. I could give a crap about playing football.
J: It’s all about the outfit right?
N: Yeah it’s like, “oh I put my pointe shoes and tutu on! Okay I’m going home now.”
J: Pretty much! Sometimes that’s half the fun.
N: Yeah, I don’t really like playing football, I just like training for football.
J: Well you did have some awesome gear the other day in class. You had the headband, the wristbands and you were all ready for that one conditioning workout.
N: Yeah, I have leg warmers on as we speak.
J: You were made for ballet.
N: Right. I need more leg warmers because these are getting stretched out.
J: Everyone needs more leg warmers. There’s never enough.
N: For sure.
J: I don’t even know how many leg warmers I have. Too many, way too many.
Talk to us about your positive mindset
Julie: You have a super positive mindset in terms of working really hard and you’re very ready to work very hard, but you don’t necessarily beat yourself up along the way, which is uncommon amongst dancers. How did you get here?
Noabeth: Basically, I’ve been a fat kid my whole life and I’m too old for that. Yeah, everyone here is skinny, but I’m not going to beat myself up for being chubby or having big muscles or having short hair, or being different than a “ballerina.” I don’t care. I like it, it’s fun. I like every aspect of it: The physicality, the concentration, the difficulty, and the continuous improvement. I don’t care how I look in a leotard-- I’m never going to wear one. I’ll wear sweatpants. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ve never been competitive in that kind of way. It’s more about myself. Can I do it? Can I get better if I’m persistent? And maybe the girl next to me has a ballerina body, but I can hold my sou-sous and she’s not. I don’t really care. But also, when I see people doing well, like I happened into a pointe class that Crissy was teaching and she had a beginner pointe student in there and I sat there and watched, and I was so excited for her. I was like that looks so amazing! So I’m more supportive. I don’t get jealous of that kind of stuff because I’m in it for myself. I’m just as excited for them as I will be for when I get it.
J: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s very much an individual sport in that regard, where it’s always you vs. you, right? It’s always can I hold my sous-sou longer than yesterday? Can I point my foot more than yesterday? That kind of thing. It’s not like one has to win and one has to lose for this to work out.
N: Right. I mean if it’s a deadlift, and I deadlift 280lbs and the girl next to me deadlifts 285lbs, I’m like, “son of a bitch! I was already blown! I guess I could do one more” but with [ballet], it’s me vs. me, exactly.
Why us, why Broche? We are lucky to have you!
Julie: Why do you like our studio?
Noabeth: Because it’s for grownups. I’ve done martial arts and there would be kids there and I don’t dislike children, I just don’t want to have to watch what I say and put on a mask. It tends to become kid-focused and I want this to be for me. I’m the most important person in the class, and then the two other people. I like that it’s small and the max of the class is 4, and sometimes you luck out and it’s just you and the teacher and it’s like, “alright, private lesson, great! Not going to argue with that.” Then it’s harder, because it’s just me. “Okay, I’ve got to do it again.” “Okay, my leg still isn’t straight enough,” and you know, “okay cool, I might die. Excellent.”
J: That’s the goal.
N: I’m super stoked about it because I’ve played team sports my whole life and there’s still that element. But it’s ballet, so it’s kind of weird.
J: Yeah, we have our aggressive ones. It’s funny because it’s definitely aggressive but we're cool about it on our face.
N: Yeah, like “mean girls” aggressive. Whereas I’m “high-fiving bros” aggressive.
J: And then the teacher is like, “do it again. That wasn’t good enough.”
N: Yeah and I come from, “that wasn’t right. Take a lap.”
J: Yeah, very different world.
