A Ballet Studio is Sacred Ground

 

The smells of sweat and rosin are a dancer’s elixir of life.

I remember the feeling of walking into a ballet studio for the first time.
It seemed a magical place. Filled with the wonder of so many dreams and the blank simplicity of a canvas daring to be painted upon.

Dancers paint with energy.
We make the energy of what the mind sees into forms, shapes, explosions of color, emotion, and passion. We long to become the show that tells a story.
Dance is the energy of human emotions, as they play out with the twists and turns of the most complicated mysteries.

We paint with our body. We tell stories with layers and levels through our lines and curves, spins and leaps.

And we make that story fuller and more complex than the story line within any fairy tale.

That is because our bones and blood give the stories substance and heat. Our struggles and challenges give those stories a more personal context and a more powerful depth. We are the undercurrent that passionately propels fictious characters into living, breathing heroes and heroines, demons and angels, fairies and witches. We become the energy of seduction, the power of true love that moves beyond time and space, and our body becomes the wail of loss that screams silently in the throats of this human condition.
We are the tools that the universe uses to give dimension and detail to wild things and the those things that are confusing and unknown to our current expressions within our own being.
We weave life, energy, breath, movement, and essence into figments of imagination. We give air to flights of fantasy. We become so much more as we seek to find wholeness through the seductive flows of energy that play through our body.

We are not just dancing a role. We are becoming a living embodiment of archetypes that have been dreamed out and onto a page from a story, but then have continued to grow into their ever-evolving awakened existence.
All stories are given more life and energy by the souls of those who heard these stories and shared them, modifying them with their own insights and understandings, shaping them into myths and legends that have the powerful forces that have inspired civilizations, built cultures, stimulated art, and inspired freedom.
Dancers express how desires reach beyond the body and into the patterns of energy that call to us to the truth that there is always more.
Over time, these stories have become a living representation of feelings that are timeless and represent the struggles of the human condition, our flaws, our hopes, our dreams, and our desires.
Every time a story is told, it shapes the consciousness that continuously creates this reality.
Ballet and all forms of dance, and theater, put faces and subtle shadings on the ancient stories of old.
Music adds intensity, drama, accent, and draws out those hidden emotions and gives them a path to become expressed and more alive.
A ballet studio is a passionate space of creative insanity.

I often think that the rigid and almost military structure of the ballet world is necessary to create a container for these powerful forces of creation to roll around and play out fully … until they find a shape that fits, and they find a home to settle into within individual dancers but also find a place to land so they can tell their story and give their gifts to those that are ready.
Dancers are trained from a young age how to become a vessel for elemental forces that can barely be controlled in this dimension. We are the containers that allow for creativity to spring forth from unknown depths, realms, dimensions, and realities.
To do that we must be properly prepared.
That is why a ballet studio is sacred ground. And that ground must be purified with sweat and effort, it must be protected with passion and pain, and it must be tilled so that the hardness of robust egos becomes pliable, soft, and fertile.
Ballet training is a whip incased in silk. Where softness and subtlety are created from the endless pounding of points shoes on a wooden floor. Where egos are broken down by the sweat of desire dripping off the masks of pretense. And the humility of time is endlessly ticking away at youthful exuberance to be replaced by grace, acceptance, understanding, and hopefully wisdom.
Dance is the muse, but the soul ignites from that muse by being willing to touch something so deep, and so unknown, that within each dancer, they discover that from the moment it is touched, everything changes. Another world opens up and we taste something so divine that we will spend the rest of their lives searching for it.

Dance whisked us through a door that we did not know existed. When it showed itself, it exploded infinite stars filled with possibilities and potentials that have yet to be understood or fully expressed in this current expression of life.
We were instantly taken from the safe cradle of our old world and magically were brought into another reality where miracles are real, fairy tales live and breathe, and love is the caldron where new life is being created.
I only thought that I created the dance. But the truth is that ballet shaped and molded me.

I remember the feeling of watching the powerful and yet magnificent control that Eva Evdokimova could express just with a tendu in class. It startled me into realizing that she was completely and fully in every fiber of her foot, every nerve in her toes, she was in the impassioned push of the sole of her foot against the floor, to the extension of her energy beyond her foot, beyond the floor, and into another dimension in time.
She was fully here and at the same time she was everywhere.

That showed me that magic is always happening.

Magic is presence.

Magic is only seen by those ready to become another vessel.
All things that can be seen and felt deeply, inspire transformations to begin. That which awakens us is a tool from the divine to allow us to become aware of how much more is right here.
Humanity has so much more to offer.

Dance shows a path that energy can take through this physical realm.

I am forever committed to being an apprentice to these masters of movement, these teachers of technique, and these proteges of passion.
I am willing to be shown and taught by the majesty of the subtle worlds and fantastic dimensions that are willing to let me in.
All heroes will succeed and fail.

All archetypes and characters will shade and shape the stories of the generations yet to come.

All expressions will find a vessel to inspire, awaken, and shape into something special.

And all of us will continue to dance on the levels that we can successfully contain such energies that inspire us to leap beyond the limitations of our wounding’s.

You are not what you believe.

You are a vessel shaped by time, molded by hope, disfigured by suffering, and illuminated by universal dreams.
Just as I found a type of bliss and joy … learning in class to feel the essence of my being in the soft but firm brush of my foot in the worn canvas of my ballet shoe, when it rubbed sensuously against the floor as it moved into a tendu.
So too, I now have learned to use my words to become an extension of my essence to show you how to begin to be fully embodied in your world in such a way that your world expands into a magical potential of wonder and delight.

I have practiced that tendu in endless classes and learned the deepening wonder of feeling the passion pushing through my body and into the floor, loving that wood, and embracing its firm stability.
That is when I heard the floor whisper to me (with certainty) that I had the power to fly if I could become one with its resistance and allow my softness to give it … a gift of love.
Then in return, it would show me a feeling that would remind me of what and who I really am.

What I know is that we are all light dancing on the surface of a gravitational reality. Each step we take is a gesture of that illumination trying to merge with matter.
We are here to learn to take hard things and make them soft.
We are learning how to take hate and make it wonder at what else might be out there if we were not so closed.

We are here to take thoughts and turning them into magic.

We are here to learn to feel more not less.

We are discovering that through many artistic tools and the willingness to express mastery through them, we become a portal that transmutes suffering into creative expressions of love.
Thank you for dancing with me in this moment.
May your expansion and opening fill you with great joy and wonder.

I will wait for you on the other side of duality, where we all are whole and overflowing with the light and … darkness of this human experience.
~Suzanne Wagner