Broche Banter #4 -- Rachel
Today on Broche Banter, we have Rachel - a 44-year-old Instructional Designer and Multimedia Specialist who recently got her first pair of pointe shoes.
We talk about ballet photography, self-acceptance, and performing as an adult.
Enjoy!
How long have you been with the studio?
Julie (studio owner): Rachel, I am super excited to talk with you today about your journey with ballet. It has been a little over a year that you’ve been in the studio, because you got your pointe shoes in January which means it’s been just a little over a year, is that true?
Rachel: Yes. I started in November of 2018 and never looked back.
J: The time just flies! I feel like we just had your preview lesson together.
R: That moment was one of the most amazing moments of my life, which sounds a little hyperbolic but I had been thinking about going back to dance for quite some time and had always felt really nervous and really unsettled, especially because I had not really been dancing for 25+ years and I have that dancer mentality of thinking that I have to do it right. So I was terrified of showing up at a class with teenagers or people who have been doing it for years and them making me look bad. When I came to your studio, I really appreciated the fact that it was just a, “hey, come in, check it out and we’ll see what you know how to do,” [sort of thing]. Not only that, but afterwards you checked in with me and kind of got me over that hump of self-recrimination and self-doubt after the fact. So it’s been amazing to be back and the studio plays a big part in that.
J: That’s awesome. It’s definitely scary to come back to the studio. Whether it’s your first time or you’re coming back, it’s very nerve wracking to put yourself out there and try something that’s meant to be perfect. Ballet is such an idealistic art form that it’s difficult to be imperfect at it.
R: Yes, very much so. I know I’ve seen this in the studio with the other dancers; we have a core of emotionally present, yet extremely perfectionist people that it almost feels okay, like it’s a safe space to screw up.
J: Yeah, which is most of the time that we’re screwing up.
R: Yes, very much so.
J: You danced as a kid though, right? You got pointe shoes but you quit shortly after you got pointe shoes as a kid, is that right?
R: Correct. I started when I was 3 because when I was a child, I started by walking on my toes even as a baby. I loved dresses and so when I saw ballerinas with their tutus and their dresses, I was smitten. I wouldn’t wear pants as a kid. I only wore dresses that went flat out when I would spin, so ballet was a natural fit. I danced from 3-15, I went en pointe at 13, and danced with a troop that travelled around. We would go to the state fair, the senior citizen home, and other community places to do performances. It’s funny, I was looking back at some of those photos and I tend to have a very expressive face, so if I’m thinking something negative, my face says it. In all of the performance photos, right after I get off stage, my face is just glowing because that was my happy place.
What was it like performing again as an adult?
J: You performed again with us at our first show last September. I know you were very nervous to perform, but you did it anyways. What was that like coming back? Was it similar to when you were a kid? Was it a different experience as an adult? What was that like?
R: It was hard. As a kid, I didn’t have as much anxiety about performing because I didn’t think about it. As an adult, I have the presence of mind to know that I’m doing something and people are watching and to care what people think. I was incredibly nervous. I think I ate one granola bar that whole day and drank one thousand bottles of water because that’s essentially how I handle my nervousness, but it was also a much better experience because everyone else backstage was in the same boat. There were people who had never performed before and there were people there who had performed hundreds of times, and we were all sitting together and essentially having a slumber party environment. Playing with makeup, doing hair, running through steps, and then getting called and we’d run out, go dance, come back in, and everyone would cheer. It was a much better experience even more so than my childhood performances.
J: I wonder what the difference— I mean, kids have a different kind of anxiety, right? It’s not that kids don’t have anxiety in a way, but it’s a very different experience and the things that they’re anxious about are very different, like you do have a very deep fear of being judged as a kid but maybe it doesn’t play in the same way as it does now in terms of performing— do you remember any differences there?
R: Yes. I think it was more not performing well as part of the group when I was kid. Wanting to not mess up because I didn’t want the group to be upset and not wanting to stand out. Whereas as an adult, my identity was tied more to my performance as opposed to being part of this larger group. Even if I’m in a group piece, there’s still the possibility that I’ll mess up and I’ll be vulnerable, which I think is a really scary thing as an adult.
J: Yeah. Would you say your identity is generally, now as an adult wrapped up in your hobbies or is it in your work? It’s interesting to explore that you mentioned identity here in the performing aspect. Do you identify as a ballet dancer, do you identify as an instructional designer?
R: It’s quite funny, I was mentioning this to my husband when we were watching Swan Lake. Someone on Twitter had responded to something I had said about, “here comes the goth ballerina!” And when I was 15, I had long, dark cranberry hair, black nail polish, lots of black eyeliner, and ballet was my life. Now, I’m 40-something, I have long, pinkish-red hair, and I don’t necessarily wear black lipstick, but still lots of black eyeliner, and I definitely still have the “goth girl” personality, and I’m a ballerina. So even though at 15 I was a goth ballerina, the fact that I’m almost 45 and people are again saying that I’m a goth ballerina, I feel like my core is present now because I’m in ballet.
Tell me about your experience as a cyclist and how that has influenced ballet.
J: You were a biker before this, right? You did competitive cycling, not even just recreational cycling. Talk about that a little bit; Was your identity then as a cyclist? Did you adopt that identity or did you sort of always know you were a ballerina and you were just waiting to get back to that?
R: Racing bikes is something I did, and dancer is something I am. Even when I wasn't dancing for 25 years, I still thought of myself as a dancer. I always knew I was a ballerina. I always had bikes. I rode bikes when I was a kid and rode bikes with my friends. I tried racing because I have a very competitive nature, and I liked the idea of racing— specifically, the kind of racing I was doing was time trials, which is I start at a certain time, I finish at a certain time, and I’m racing against myself every time— It’s very statistical, it’s very repetitive, and I love that kind of stuff so I can see my performance improvements and judge myself. However, it never felt freeing to me. I liked riding my bike but I didn’t like riding my bike out in the woods or down the street where I don’t know if there is anybody there. It didn’t feel like something I could do as a woman. There were some incidents that happened here on the bike path that were targeted towards cyclists and I felt very cautious about engaging with the community like that. When I decided to try ballet again, every thought about biking that I had went out the window because ballet just feels right in my body. I don’t feel competitive, I don’t feel like I’m not enough, I feel like I’m on a journey with other men and women who just want to continually try to be better and none of us are going to get there and we all know it. I know I’m not going to be able to put my leg up to a 180° extension, and that’s okay. The fact that sometimes I just get out of bed and put on shoes and dance is the most important thing.
J: It’s really interesting; the relationship you bring in from competitiveness into ballet. Ballet has so many aspects that could be competitive: Can your leg go higher than the person next to you? Can it go higher than you yesterday? Is it going as high as you want it to go? So it’s great to hear you say that when you do ballet, you do feel like you’re enough and you don’t fall into those traps. How did you do that? How did you not fall prey to those things and that mindset that a lot of us have?
R: I think it really helps that coming back, I was coming from an extremely statistically driven, competitive environment and I have the experience of looking back and saying, “I used to be able to do this great and now I can’t,” so I’m already coming from a point of having to gracefully accept failure. Still being accepted and still being welcomed in that graceful failure has been huge. Even though I know that there have been times where my brain decides to say, “we’re going to start being really mean to you,” and even start vocalizing, having teachers in the studio who are like, “stop, don’t talk like that.” Everybody has the ability to turn a negative thought into a shared moment and a growth moment. In a lot of inspirational discussions, there’s the growth mindset and while I don’t strictly adhere to a lot of “woo woo” vocabulary, I think ballet is actually quite good at instilling that sort of methodical approach to a growth mindset. I’m going to do pliés, and I’m going to do pliés no matter how advanced I am, I still start with a plié and I still see improvements. There’s going to be days when my plié sucks. Where my knee is folding in on itself and my butt is sticking out, but then, there’s going to be a day where I just go down and up and there’s no top and no bottom and I just float, and I feel amazing and that’s just a plié. It’s the very first thing we do. So there’s not so much of a competition, but it’s more of a mind-map. We’re going to be at different places at different times, and sometimes it’s going to be great time, sometimes it’s going to be a terrible time but it’s all still part of this ballet world.
J: That’s fascinating. I know you have a very creative mind and a mind that moves in a sort of non-linear way, so it’s interesting to hear you sort of mapping what we would generally consider to be a pretty linear process of ballet to the actually very truthful kind of scattered progress and more— all of over the place isn’t the word— but it is kind of a varied journey along the way. You don’t think of ballet very linearly in your mind.
R: I do not. I think that’s probably because I never did a strict curriculum either. I jumped from studio to studio because we moved a lot, so I never followed the RAB curriculum or the ABT curriculum, so I never had the “goal posts” of knowing when I should get to this point or that point and I think that actually helps, especially as an adult because I don’t have any external markers saying that I should be doing this. In so many other times of our lives, we have the inner voice telling us that we should be doing something, and the only thing I should be doing is dancing and having fun with it.
Do you have goals?
J: So how does this relate to having goals? Do you have goals? Do you feel that having goals adds a layer of pressure that we don’t need? How do you feel about that kind of thing?
R: I go back and forth on that. I really do because I love to achieve and so you can’t measure achievement if you don’t have a goal. It’s got to be specific, measurable, achievable, on and on. Part of me just says to make my goals more like dancing three times a week, making sure I’m putting my pointe shoes on for 15 minutes and doing little prancers just to get flexible, watch two YouTube interviews that have people talking about their experiences, watch a ballet this month. I think that that’s more reasonable goal-setting to allow me to integrate ballet into my life, rather than turning ballet into a step-by-step process that I have to execute perfectly.
J: I love that, that’s really awesome. Ballet is so much about the journey that you really can’t predict when the end is going to come. You don’t know because life is very long and winding, as we’ve all discovered. Now we’re all stuck at home which is surprising, but life is very long and winding so if you had a specific goal, that could be super disappointing, but if the journey is to just keep showing up, you can keep showing up wherever you are in whatever you’re doing, so long as you keep trying and moving.
R: Exactly, instead of having those specific points. For example, after watching Swan Lake this morning, I went through and searched other versions of “The Dying Swan” from the Marinsky performance so I saw a performance posted by a theatre in Boston of Maya Plisestkaya performing it at age 62 and I turned the computer and showed it to my husband and he was like, “What the heck! When you turn 60, do you suddenly lose all of the bones in your arms?” because her extension of her arms was so fluid and the idea that ballet can still be beautiful and an achievement and wonderful and an emotive experience no matter what age you are or what your physical appearance is. That’s something that people can’t take away even if we’re locked down or physically unable to dance, there’s still a way to incorporate dance into everyday movements.
J: That’s amazing. It’s just really beautiful that we can all be doing it no matter what the level is that we’re doing it at, we can all be super expressive. I think that’s honestly one of my favorite parts of teaching beginner adults especially is that a beginner from day one is extremely expressive. They have a life of experience that you draw from, whereas a beginner 6 or 7-year-old child learning ballet for the first time doesn’t have that same thing. They’re learning the rote process of it, but with an adult dancer from the first day of class, they want to express [themselves]. The expression is always trying to come out of them. One of my favorite things to watch is the circular port de bras because you can really see it in the dancers. It’s a moment where you’re moving and you can really feel the music and it’s often slow and pretty and you’re also kind of tired so you can move and let it go a little bit more. You can see the expression in all ages and all shapes in the studio. Sometimes I’ll just be standing there watching the dancers and I’ll get chills from all of the beautiful movements that are happening with dancers, it’s really amazing.
R: That’s such an amazing way to put it because as someone in the studio and in those moments, I have those experiences as well. Not just when we’re all doing the same thing. For example, we’re taking turns doing a petite allegro across the floor, and everyone steps back and watches while one person goes and instead of them being told what they’re doing wrong, this person goes, they get across the floor, and we all cheer. We all say, “did you see your arms? That was beautiful,” “I wish I could jump like you,” “my beats are off but yours are straight on,” and rather than it being a moment of putting yourself out there and be critiqued, it becomes a moment to celebrate and move and be. And it feels so good.
J: It feels great. For it being an individual sport, there are some really awesome group moments.
R: It is an individual sport, but also having a studio of beginner to intermediate adults, we have the best corps. We are a corps de ballet that is incredibly amazing. That has the ability to pull out soloists as needed, but we all pull together and follow along because we have a culture that we’ve created. Some people will be stronger in certain parts of it; some people want to be more social, some people are all about the practice. We all get together for watching a performance and then going out and having snacks after and sometimes, those nights go until 1 o’clock at night because everyone is so passionate and that, I think really is the core of the ballet experience.
J: It’s awesome. With the adult environment, it is a community. It is our friends, our circle, it’s someone who gets it. They can see the progress like, “oh you pointed your toes more than last week, how cool is that?” and that’s the kind of thing that we can get super excited about with each other and then help each other see the little wins.
R: There’s so much. Even someone saying, “your penché was gorgeous. Do that again so I can take a picture so you can have that.”
J: That’s the best.
As a photographer, do you have any tips for dancers taking photos of themselves?
J: Speaking of pictures, I do have a topic here that I want to make sure we cover because you are a photographer and you have photographed dancers in our studio among many other things, but I want to ask you a couple questions about photography. I want to ask you about some general tips for taking photos of yourself if you have any. I also want to ask you about what it’s like to look at yourself in a photo and how we should be as dancers when we have a photo of ourselves and what we should see when we look at it.
R: My first thing that I tell everybody is to learn your angles. That sounds silly, but especially for selfies, that is so important. In the entirety of my career as a photographer, I have photographs going back to the very beginning where I am holding a large format film camera, looking into a mirror and taking a picture of myself. The self portrait is a concept that has a history in photography. Society has given women a lot of negative feedback on the “selfie culture” and I hate that because there is nothing better than making a picture of yourself for your own consumption to elevate yourself and see what you look like to other people. So, taking selfies especially as you’re dancing or anything, learning how your camera works, whether you can set it up with a timer or anything like that, basically just learn the tools you have. That’s my first argument for anybody: The best camera is the one that you have. Second, learn your angles. That’s knowing that the closest thing to the lens is going to be the biggest thing. So, while I take a picture of my dog’s nose closest to the lens and it looks adorable, if I take a picture with my knee closest to the lens, it probably doesn’t look great. But I also don’t want to take a picture where my hips are closest to the lens, so think about lifting your camera up. It’s just like with dance and going up to go down. Go up with your camera and that way, as you’re doing an extension and you have the timer on, your arm is going to look long, your body is going to look long, you’re going to have an angle that you’re aware of. Take one hundred selfies, keep taking pictures, take as many as you possibly can. They’re just digital bits and bites of data. If they look bad, delete them. Get to know how you feel in front of a camera, that way when someone starts to bring out the camera, you can just whip out that angle. I have the tendency that if I’m not posing and not aware of the camera, I have a very toothy smile, but my “camera is on me” face has this very lifted [look], just like in ballet, I lift up my eyebrows and I call it my anime eyes because it actually looks like I have the straight across, half moon top eyes because of the angles that I work with. It’s completely an obstruction of angles. My eyes don’t look like that. My eyes are small and weird.
J: It’s interesting that you talk so much about angles, especially because ballet is angles, right? The reason we do croisé or effacé instead of facing front is for the angle of your leg. It’s the angle of the leg in relation to each other, it’s that you have an open or crossed line versus facing front where your leg looks short, so it’s all about the angles. So I think when we see ourselves in a picture, it looks so different from what we see in the mirror and sometimes that can be really jarring when it looks different than what you imagined it looking like or from what you see in the mirror. Do you have any thoughts on that?
R: Well our eyes are stereo-vision, whereas a camera is mono-vision. So your eyes, if you close one and then the other, you’ll see that what you’re looking at in the world is just slightly off because your brain is processing it and putting it together. With a camera, it’s just one lens and it’s a singular point of perspective. So there is no function within the camera of trying to shape space. The camera doesn’t actually have an emotional impact. It’s the photographer who sees the emotion and then tries to capture that. The camera is just making a photocopy, essentially.
J: It’s very flat. Whereas you’re saying that with stereo-vision it has more depth and roundness to it, but the camera is very flat.
R: Plus, when you see things in action, you’re not just getting what’s in front of you you’re getting the whole 360 view. And I think the best way to understand this— I was actually thinking about this this morning while watching Swan Lake again— I know I always feel frustrated when I see myself performing on camera because I think it’s flat. But then I watch a Kirov ballet and these dancers who live and breathe ballet are performing on stage for a camera, and it’s flat. So the camera actually has to move through space and they have to create the performances specifically for recorded purposes because otherwise it just looks completely flat. That’s just the nature of camera-vision. I think it’s really important to learn and remember that that’s just a different way of seeing. It’s not going to be what you see in real life. When you have this baseline of understanding, especially when you know what you’re looking at for yourself, then you can actually look at those selfies and videos from class and say, “I know I’m looking at the arch of my foot here, I’m looking and I see that I’m sickling and that’s the important part of this image,” or “I’m looking and that extensions is way higher than I thought I had and I’m super proud of myself.” I think that it’s very difficult to critique yourself in a positive way, I think. Because the culture, especially as women, especially as dancers, expects us to look a certain way. I think going out and just taking the photos and performing in your grubbiest grubbies, hair not done, no perfect buns, no makeup, and looking at how you look in those pictures is a great way to start to feel more in love with how you represent yourself and more in love with yourself as a dancer.
J: That’s awesome. I hope that helps some people to really start to be able to take videos of themselves and take pictures of themselves because I know from the photography you’ve done in the studio Rachel, where dancers see themselves and they’ve never seen themselves as a ballerina before. They see themselves in a new light. Photography, if you can get past the initial shock of how different you look in photos versus what you see in your mind’s eye or in the mirror, the photography can really help you shape your identity and really solidify that you are a beautiful dancer and there are aspects that you normally would nitpick in your head but in the photo you can really see the holistic picture of how gorgeous you are and how far you’ve come or whatever goals you want to see with that photo. It’s really, really powerful.
R: It is. I love the idea of self documentation as a tool for strengthening one’s identity. Being in my 40’s, several of my friends have gotten divorced (myself included), and I have noticed a very strong correlation between people coming into their own as single people and all of the sudden, they’re taking selfies everywhere all of the time. And it’s not even a matter of how good they look, it’s just a matter of being able to say, “this is the tool I am using to see myself without judgement. I am present. I am here.”
J: That’s really sweet. I love that. I kind of just got chills. I love that. That was super sweet. I love it.
R: Awesome, I’m glad!
Do you have any final advice?
J: This has been such a fun conversation. Do you have any last tips that you want to spread out to the world? I know you’ve already given us so much awesome information, motivation, and inspiration but do you have anything else on your mind that you’d like to make sure to share?
R: I would say that my biggest take away is don’t be afraid to have fun with this. Be a dork. Be silly. Be ridiculous. Post videos of yourself dancing badly. Dance badly in the studio. Finish your combination and throw up some jazz hands because you know you just did something good or bad. It’s fine!
J: Awesome. Ballet is serious but we don’t have to be super serious along the way. Like we said, it’s a long and winding journey so we might as well enjoy it along the way.
