My Life in Playlists: Classical Ballet

My Spotify is my most honest form of social media. Instagram is a polished, posed image of my hilarious, cool, city girl life. Twitter is a library of my neverending witty refrains, dry remarks and pop culture commentary. LinkedIn is for the employers that don’t want to hire freshmen, and for the scammers who bug me to fill out a survey for a gift card. My Spotify is just for me. Every month, I make a playlist about the mood I am in — last October, during college application season, the vibe was frantic and depressing. This past August, right before I left for Stanford, was pure nostalgia. Every December, at least three Christmas songs make the cut.

When I started ballet at age 5, classical music became the soundtrack to my feet’s hurried skips, accenting my leaps and pushing me through the studio. My daily alarm is the Marzipan divertissement from “The Nutcracker” — every time I listen, a jolt of adrenaline rushes through my body and I remember shuffling onstage, both fearful of my teacher’s predictably harsh criticisms and excited to perform for a new audience. Now, the scariest place my feet take me is not to the stage but to class, where I may perform knowledge about a topic or confidence in myself, but where I remain decidedly in the world of day to day. Gravity, as it always does, never lets me fly too far before I’m pulled back to earth. The funny thing is, even after a decade I always jump up again, ready to soar. Ballet’s magnetism catches and pulls me back into its all-encompassing orbit over and over. It’s something I can’t shake, even if I wanted to. 

I have always loved performing. There are countless home videos of me dancing to The Beatles (real ones know from the last column installment), playing fairies with my brother and producing annual installments of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” or the Peanuts’ “A Charlie Brown Christmas” with my cousins every December. Some say I’m dramatic, others say delusional. But the magic of creating alternative worlds and fashioning life in my image is an unequalled joy. 

I started ballet to compete with my brother. In true younger sibling fashion, anything he did I wanted to do better. Unfortunately, given that he was six years older and also a boy in ballet, this dream was short lived and remains unfulfilled to this day. Thankfully, I had a productive outlet at which to hurl my disappointment: every day in class, I worked tirelessly to improve my turnout, hone my muscles and stretch my resistant extensions. Where my friends learned to dribble balls and score goals, I poured my energy into embodying different characters I portrayed — a mouse in “The Nutcracker” (high knees and pointed feet), a little girl in “Carnival of the Animals” (large jumps and precise turns), a teapot in “Alice in Wonderland” (impeccable posture and spatial awareness). As I got older and school got more stressful, I dreaded attending class and losing valuable work time, but always emerged exhausted yet clear headed. Ballet was a home. 

That being said, I have, as most dancers do, a love-hate relationship with the art form. I can’t remember how many birthday parties or bat mitzvah services I missed to attend class. When my friends were having sleepovers, I was losing sleep running variations in my head and stretching three times a day. Ballet is inherently a contradiction. You must be strong enough to hold your leg in perfect arabesque, but not too muscly so you remain feminine. You must dance with maturity, but those much coveted principal roles involve costumes tailored to prepubescent bodies. You must bend and twist and contort your limbs into unrecognizable images, but as much as you try, your body is still a human one. It will not succumb to orders so easily. 

As restricting as dance can be, it’s also incredibly liberating. I love dance for the same reason I love the humanities — there is more than one right way to go about it. Just as five people can read the same book and interpret it in entirely different ways, five dancers can be in a room and come out having learned entirely new skills. The studio is a place where people of entirely different backgrounds and identities can come together for a shared passion and find their most authentic form of expression. Beginning in high school, my exploration of modern dance opened my eyes to countless new techniques and possibilities for my future. I might never be a ballet dancer, but I could emulate the Graham contractions or the rhythmic unpredictability of Cunningham style. In my choreography, I could express myself beyond a binary of right and wrong and instead find what felt good. 

There is no doubt that I miss ballet. I’m hesitant to take class here, under a new teacher and reentering a mindset I sought to escape for years. Going home for winter break and seeing my old company perform “The Nutcracker” brought back a confusing blend of joy, nostalgia, envy and grief at a piece of my life that now stands behind a glass door. But joining Traction, Stanford’s modern dance company, has helped me find a grey area between the rigidity of ballet and my desire for artistic expression. I am inspired by my teammates’ choreography and made a better dancer watching their unique forms of movement come together as one. Although ballet is not an active part of my life right now, I look from a distance with gratitude and love for the thing which taught me to move, found me my best friends, and shaped my work ethic. 

My love of music goes hand in hand with my love for dance. I instinctively find the beat in every song, my muscles naturally moving in sync or in opposition with what I hear. When I release into the music, letting the notes fill the air and my body, I am home.

What are you listening to?

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