Blog – Controlled Wildness and the Emotional Integration of Dance

 

When I first got to Berlin, so many things were so drastically different that the levels of discomfort were challenging to navigate.

I went from ballet being my escape to ballet being my job. It was a tough switch in my mind.

Until then, I did not fully realize that ballet had been my escape, or that powerful release.
Ballet was my safe emotional place. A space to discharge all the angst and anxiety I constantly felt inside.
I knew when I was younger that I would use all my pent-up anger and frustration from the conflicts that constantly happened between my mother and my sister, to jump higher, turn faster, and repeat a sequence until I had mastered it.

It was a healthy way to discharge toxic stress.

 

When I was younger, my sister hated that I had an escape plan from our home. She instinctively knew that I got to do something that she did not, and that anger came out at me in many ways.

She would pick a fight with my mother, and they would start going off at each other. If the fight was intense enough, then I did not get to go to ballet because there was no one to drive me there.

I am sure much of it was unconscious from deeply buried resentment, but the end result was so much yelling, upset, and chaos that my desires, wants, and needs went by the wayside.

My mother also had chores that we were required to do because both my parents worked. My mother has a poster that laid out the chores for each of us to do after school.

In truth, they were not really hard, but as a child everything feels like an imposition. It felt like my parents were using me as a slave and a servant. I’m sure every child feels that way. We do not see that they are preparing us to be competent adults later on in life.

An example would be that if I was preparing dinner, then my sister vacuumed the upstairs. If I was doing the bathrooms, my sister was doing the dusting.

My sister went through a long-lasting resistance and resentment cycle. It really lasted from the time she was about 8 years old until she was in college.

She refused to help with the chores at all. She knew it would cause a fight and it was as if she wanted to subconsciously make my mother angry enough that she did not have the time to get me to ballet.

My mother had her own stresses. My father said that she could only go to work if dinner was on the table at 5:30 every day.

My mother worked till 5 pm and then it was a 5-minute drive home. But dinner on the table at 5:30 was still pushing it.

So, she would do a lot of prep before, and then I would do the final things such as cooking the chicken when I got in the door from school, set the table, and make a salad or vegetable. And my sister would do the dusting, bathrooms, laundry, etc.

Honestly, my jobs almost always took the most time. I think it was because my mother knew how much resentment my sister felt but also, she knew that my sister still needed to learn some important lessons.

But there was a day when my sister refused to ever do those chores again. She did not care about what I wanted or needed.
We had many fights about it.
Those fights were so intense that one day, she even picked me up and threw me down the stairs, injuring my ankle … badly.
So, rather than fight, I decided to do hers and my chores. It seemed safer and a way to eliminate that type of stress.
That way, the chores were done when my mother came in the door from work. There was no fighting, and she could take me to ballet.
I was never so happy as when another dancer, Mary Hall, got her driver’s license and we began carpooling. Then it did not matter what was happening at the house.
Mary showed up and I was gone!
I left them to their arguing and yelling.

Ballet was for me a release valve. A way to express my emotions without needing to hold them back to keep others comfortable. Frustration was something normal in trying to tackle some new technique, step, or skill. Emotions are a part of any ballet.
Learning to constructively express them was part of what it was all about.

It is a real trick to have enough self-control that your body does what it is supposed to do, but you can move emotion through it in a way that captivates an audience and allows the music, the dance, and the emotions to blend into the perfect flow that is the magic of a ballet.
I learned from Rudolf Nureyev, that thinking too much stopped that wildness from moving through my body and out the eyes.
He said that most dancers worried so much about doing things perfectly that while they might be technically brilliant, they were boring to watch.
He said that if you cannot express emotions in a way that explode out your body, through your eyes, and out into the audience … that you cannot captivate the audience’s energy.
He said that all great performers (whether they were in film, theater, dance, or music) were able to take their emotional states and move them so powerfully out their eyes and body and through their chosen tools … that they took the audience for a ride.
And that ride was to show and remind them of the depth that is locked within and how it also desires to be released.
He said, to never lose the wildness in my eyes. That wildness was what differentiated a principal dancer from a corps dancer.
He said that within each of us is a wild creature that longs to get out. That wild and wonderful creature is our emotions. But that creature was so powerful that it needs to have self-discipline and move through the body in constructive ways.
While the mind likes to think that it has ability to hold that creature on a leash with its discipline, self-control, and focus. What was more important was that the audience feels, senses, and then knows that this creature could escape at any moment. We are to show that the wildness within can never really be tamed.
Such a thing needs to be allowed out at times to enthrall and inspire others to remember the depth of their own feelings.
When anyone allows out their own wildness, it also gives permission for the wildness in others to find a path into more conscious expression.

He said, “Ballet can teach others how to safely move that wildness out into the world by showing them that one can work with and move with controlled chaos.”
And when it is out, we are free, we can breathe, we are the magic, and we become the essence of dance.
He said,
“Dance is the spark. The audience is the tinder. Eventually that fire of awareness can spread out into the world … changing it, deepening the emotional expressions in the world, burning through the fears that hold so many back from their potential. We are a tool that the universe uses to become the instigator for a silent revolution of emotional power, self-expression, and artistic freedom.”

~Suzanne Wagner~