If I’m ever having one of those blue days where I feel less-than-noticed (or downright invisible), a guaranteed cure would be to show up in jeans to observe a Saturday ballet practice.  I know this after my recent visit to the Birmingham Ballet.  Even three feet inside the front door, someone was able to herd me to the right place after noticing my conspicuous chromosome and my almost total lack of grace and coordination.

Then, just you try to feel invisible sitting in front of a giant mirror while the adult-in-charge explains to a room of (mostly but not totally) (potentially hyper-critical) teenage girls to ignore you (and your friend walking around with a video camera) and just go on about their practice.  Yeah, right.  Whatever you do, DO NOT THINK ABOUT THAT PINK ELEPHANT!

Whose feet?

But I noticed y’all right back.  So there.

My temporarily elevated profile reminded me that ballet is about concentration.  The dancer’s focus on the routine and the audience.  And the audience’s encouraged focus on the dancer.  There’s no way around a dancer becoming hyper-conscious of all that attention.

At practice, the mirrors let (or make) you scrutinize every move.  Mentors are always observing and correcting.  It’s constantly reinforced that Big Brother or Santa Claus might always be hovering right there to check on your hand and foot position.  Or, at least, to remind you that you’ve got a collision course date with a real, live audience.  Which might be made up of forgiving people like Mom and Dad.  Or less-forgiving people like your little brother.

One of the most insightful things I’ve recently heard about dance came from a world outside of dance.  A political commentator was discussing how some politicians and government officials often talk without saying anything.  Or they clumsily fudge their way through press conferences and interviews without being particularly talented or rehearsed.  Then the commentator offhandedly suggested that politics works a lot differently from something like dance, where it would be obvious (and probably shocking) to an audience if a performer was blatantly unrehearsed or unprepared.  It’s virtually impossible to fudge your way through a ballet performance.  It can be the most independent, isolating, and exposing of experiences, out on the stage with just you and your body.  So you’d better be prepared.

Such preparation takes significant training and I was both entertained and puzzled in listening to the highly-specialized language of ballet.  There’s an episode of the TV show Friends where Joey lies about how much dance experience he has at an audition.  The director or casting person or choreographer or whatever (again, my use of dance language is limited at best) explains a quick combination to Joey to teach the other dancers.  He fails miserably because he doesn’t understand the language.

I don’t comprehend it either, but it’s pretty amazing to watch a ballet teacher quickly talk out the steps of an exercise – which I can’t even begin to quote here – and look around the room to find everyone nodding, and then start the music.  The combinations are several steps long, but I’d be stopping to raise my hand even at the first step to ask, “Um, what was that beginning again?”  Sometimes it even seems like there’s an ESP thing going on – because those couldn’t have been the teacher’s fully expressed thoughts.

It reminds me a little of whenever I learned about the names for football pass patterns as a kid.  I didn’t discover the joy of football until later in high school, but I remember going through some elementary drills in PhysEd class early on and being completely lost.  Stand in line while the coach yells out to run a “Fly Pattern” or a “Post Route” or a “Button Hook”.  And then getting to the front and having no idea what to do for a “10-Yard In Route”.  While they all assumed we knew that stuff, I was hopelessly confused.

There’s also a good parallel in law.  Just about the entire first year of law school – right or wrong – is spent just learning how lawyers talk.  The professors pretty much say, “Go read this stuff that’s way over your head until you start to understand it.”  Revelation through full immersion – much like John the Baptist.  Eventually, you start to understand whether a judge is talking nonsense when he asks you whether Rule 403 applies for jurisdictional matters in a case which might proceed under section 1367.  Well, maybe you will.

Which maybe explains why I think dancers are smart.  There’s so much to learn.  And quite a bit which isn’t just “move this way” – even if that in itself was a simple thing.  It’s eyes up, contact with the audience, giving good and appropriate facial expressions, and relation to the other dancers.  Every time I’m allowed to watch up close, I understand a little more.

Thanks very much to Cindy Free and the Birmingham Ballet for inviting me and giving me an unusual behind-the-scenes look.