The Evils of "Pure" Dance

I admit that I found myself very lost in this week's readings as well. The only piece that grabbed me explicitly was the Pratt piece on “Jazzercise”, for a number of reasons. First, the expected, that I don't have much experience in texts from the disciplines at hand and found the language confusing. Second, because I have experience with the world of dance and have even been one of those “real dancers” who have looked down on hybrid dance-exercise while at the same time feeling jealous of the comfort and camaraderie that it boasted.

I took a combination ballet/jazz/tap class from my fourth grade to my sixth, twice a week, three hour meetings on Tuesday and Thursday. My instructor was one of those gray-haired women straight from Russia who had once been stars but now carried around long canes that yes, they actually used. I thought they were myths until she came along. I don't remember her name, but I remember her long thin stick that she'd use to poke whichever part of us was out of line.

There's a reason that, once it came time to move onto pointe shoes, I declined and instead moved into swing dance. Many of them are mentioned in Pratt's piece. I wasn't interested in learning the “physical poise” that seemed to train daughters to become like their suburban giant-pearls-and-pink-cardigans mothers, mostly because my mother wasn't like that (ironic that my mother was the only one out of all of them that had once been a professional ballerina). I didn't like being judged and fit into pegs based on how far I could torture my knees into a proper turn-out or how quickly and easily I slid into positions. I hated competition, especially when I definitely didn't fit into the ballerina's conception of beauty and was actively encouraged to skip meals (by other dancers, not by the instructor) in order to reach toward it.


But the point that Pratt makes about the “collectivity” of dance-exercise still rings true about those days. While the instructor shouted “One, two, three, four,” and walked slowly up and down the rows of girls (“militaristic”, as Pratt describes the hybrid forms), we all knew that we were equally in danger of getting jabbed at by a long willow stick. We were united in our identical movements and in our identical buzz of displeasure and hope. Girls that I had absolutely nothing in common with and whom would never speak to me outside of that gymnasium would wait at the water fountain with me and complain about the impossibility of certain movements or muse about the dream of one day being chosen to dance Clara in the Christmas Nutcracker. That connection with other people made the decision to leave ballet an extraordinarily difficult one, especially since it was my first experience in an organized dance class.

This camaraderie was one that was more focused on the fear of not being good enough than the kind of comfort described in the dance-exercise classes, and I think a lot of the “pure” dancers who look down on the jazzercise class are acting out of the worry that they might have made the wrong choice. Still, while I felt better when I moved from a community that was degrading into a community that was uplifting, I still occasionally end up nostalgic with another former dancer about the days of never being quite good enough.

-Caitlin Rodriguez