Don Quixote and the Obnoxious Duennas – Back Breathing – And The Vulnerability of Perfection

 

 

During one performance of Don Quixote, while I was playing the older governess/chaperone of a young girl, in a scene where the girls dance to get the attention of important characters and dance with the young men. All the governesses were sitting at the back of the stage in our big dresses, huge Spanish headdresses, fans, and keeping an eye on our young ladies to make sure they were behaving.

During one particular show, the taller (thus older looking) chaperones at the back of stage were watching the men dancing in front of us.

The gorgeous ballet men were all in white tights that showed the rippling muscles of their legs and hips, with those perfect ballet butts. Those beautiful butts were bouncing around in front of our eyes, and I am not sure who started it, but some of us (duennas) decided to make an ongoing pantomime in the back about the beautiful male butts, that were bouncing in our faces. The Duennas were pointing and whispering and feigning getting flushed and excited by the dancing of the young men.

I remember Peter Christie was the one closest to us and he had the classic, beautiful, ballet body. We were softly speaking but loudly enough that we could tell he was hearing us because of the wry smile that was on his face. Dance always faces the audience, but the best views can be from behind!
The rigors of ballet accentuate certain stabilizing muscles in the hips and at the backs of the legs … because of all the jumping. Ballet creates the most beautiful, long, and strong shapes in the legs … of any other sport or athletic art I have seen.

Needless to say, we got a little carried away!

It is hard to sit at the back of the stage and do nothing.
When I watch performances, I like to watch the side sagas that unfold along with the major events that are going at the center of the stage. They flush out the story. And I enjoy the distinct personalities of the other dancers as they move and flow and as they take on various characters.

After the show, again, Sondra Sugai, came back and told the Duennas to calm it way …. down at the back. We were being very distracting from the dancing.

I smiled; I think that was the point. LOL!
It is the humanness of ballet mixed with the magic of the movements and the illusions of kingdoms, lakes, palaces, and creatures that make ballet so appealing and such a draw.
There are always things going on the stage and in the backstage.
After all, dancers are a passionate bunch.
Not all things go as planned and not all things flow perfectly. But it is in those moments that the audience gets a peek at what fuels such desires for perfection. One has to be aware of it enough to notice while it is happening.

Ballet is a passion that has such intense focus that it does need to cut loose and express absurdity in moments.

Every dancer can (in an instant) do something silly, disarming, and make everyone smile.

Each company has their court jesters, their Kings, their bitches, and those that know how to break up patterns that start to become obsessive.
Ballet is an environment where the atmosphere can become suffocating with all the competition, driving ambition, over-focus on how one looks, and the need to do things perfectly.
It makes sense that we also would know how to play outrageously, be pranksters, and to do things that can touch another on a deeply personal level that show the level of emotional depth and understanding that our art requires constantly from us.
That is why nothing in life is ever like ballet again. What we share with other dancers on a daily basis is so difficult that there are no choices but to (at many moments) be raw and very real.

Dancers will dance … sick … depressed … with anxiety … injured, and we confront what our mind tells us is impossible every day. We have permission to express extreme emotions in rehearsals and performances. But we are the best at masking pain.

What we know is that our world (while normal to us) is not what the outer world deems socially acceptable. The worlds of all artists are eccentric, extreme, unusual, and fascinating.

In the outer world, people are taught to hold everything in.
In the dance world … what makes someone great is a person who knows how to let it all out on a stage and can project that feeling to the very back of the theater.
Dancers have a personal discipline of self-control that is way beyond the norm. We have an emotional capacity to express what we feel through our body in a way that is as dramatic as it is gut-wrenching.
We live inside a torture chamber of effort while trying to make extreme things appear easy and effortless to an audience.

I have watched from behind principal dancers that looked from the front as if they were calmly breathing. While from behind … I would watch their lungs and ribs expanding and contracting in the ways one sees horses gasping for air.
But from the front they seemed perfectly calm.

In yoga, they teach the three stages of breathing; that one inhales from (first) the upper chest, then the chest, and finally filling the abdomen. Only to calmly reverse that pattern in a graceful motion.

But ballet dancers, learn to keep the front of the body calm, while the back is telling quite another story. We are the masters of back breathing, and I don’t know how we learn it exactly except that we know that the illusion of ballet to show grace and effortlessness in all actions.
As we go off stage, often we bend over, releasing huge amounts of held air from the lungs, then gasping to take a large gulps of air into our lungs, and then swing our arms over our head to expand our lung capacity to gather more air before we go back on stage. Holding the arms up for as long as we can, then shaking our arms loose and relaxing and softening our neck, shoulders, arms, and hands.
In the old days, we got to have oxygen backstage and we would come off and one of the crew guys would be holding the oxygen mask ready to turn it on when we came over.
It was mostly reserved for those dancing ballets that were so difficult that it made you want to puke.
And the oxygen really did help. A few breaths and we could feel oxygen rapidly going into fatigued muscles.
It was awesome and very helpful. But because of the explosion potential and covid, it seems that they do not do than any longer.
While I understand why. I cringe at thinking what it would have been like to dance in Aspen Colorado for certain ballets that were so difficult at that altitude without it.

When one dances at high altitude, my experience was that there were long moments when I could not even feel my legs. I knew my legs were there and that they were working but I was not able to feel them or my feet in the point shoes. It was amazing that no one really got injured.
That is where training and body memory comes in strong. Ballet dancers have the mental discipline over their body like a marathon runner. I know because they did a study with ballet dancers at the University of Utah while I was with Ballet West, and they said as much.

Ballet is the art of surrender and strength.
It is about finding the balance between passion and pain
It is the expression of beauty with authentic vulnerability
It shows the power within the human potential when it is sparked with a greater mission and purpose.

~Suzanne Wagner~