Favorite Ballets – The Lark Ascending

There are pieces of music that can catapult me immediately into another time and place. Allegro Brilliant is one and another is “Lark Ascending”, by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Even recently, a healer put that music on while they were working on me … and I cried and cried the whole way through the music.
For me the music reminds me of the hopeful and youthful desires to become something uplifting and wonderful. This music makes me feel that eternal yearning to create a life that refuses to let go of that feeling of that we are light, and we are flight.
That music reminds me that I must strive to reach through the human restrictions within my own mind, that intend to keep me down. It reminds me that I am here to learn to push against the forces of gravity that want to stop my soul from soaring.
And it reminds me that I cannot do it alone.
While certain pieces of music, can be short (this one is only 16 minutes long). They can also be perfect in their brevity and complete in the journey that they take us on … as they lead us towards a conclusion that embodies freedom, hope, and expresses a deeper love inside … that each of us holds to evolve into the ideals of what our souls preciously carry inside.
Honestly, before Ballet West, I had never heard this piece of music.
When Bruce Marks gave me the opportunity to dance this role that he had so masterfully choreographed, I did not understand the impact that it would have on my psyche … or my life.

The music starts as the dancer seems to emerge from an egg and begins to spread its wings and try to dance and fly.
In his own words, he says, “This ballet is a metaphor for the struggle to achieve, to create, and triumph by reaching one’s potential. Lark is about the journey of life, that eternal fight against gravity. Each time I see the lark ascend; I know why we dance.”

This ballet was the epitome of what this life felt like for me inside and out.
This ballet was hard because of the degree of yearning that it required to move through my body and out into the air. It was hard because in a unitard, one cannot hide and every movement is showing something. It was hard because they hand painted my point shoes and in doing that … those shoes shrunk and were very tight on my feet. It was hard because those shoes hurt every performance to the point that my feet would start cramping in the end of every performance because of the tension in the shoes, and the requirements of the very specific and technical requirements of this role.
I wanted to literally energize the air with my desire to fly and allow the passion of my emotions to call a strong wind to me that could eventually allow my soul to ascend higher and higher until I became one with the wind, a part of the bright light of the divine, and ignite a beacon of the hope within each person in the audience. I wanted them to feel their soul striving to reach outside their known reality with me.
But this ballet was also a reflection of the struggle of my inner feminine to become whole.

In this ballet, there are five men who support, encourage, and help my feminine learn to fly. They are not there to hold me down but to help me feel into the lightness of my being.

I could see how this powerful metaphor is for all of us.

As a woman, I have learned that I need and yearn for the masculine direction to help me achieve something great inside.

The masculine has a potential to be able to feel into the longing of the feminine heart and give her energy and a vehicle to go on a journey that deep inside she longs for but in her mind does not know how to manifest.
In the masculine’s highest form … I see it as a beautiful, powerful unicorn that can take the feminine on a magical ride that will allow her to discover a new world. One that was in her dreams, but she did not know how to manifest into a reality … on her own.
I believe that we all need each other. We need the duality. We need both the masculine and feminine inside our own being and outside in this complicated world.
Both are essential and have gifts to share and offer if we learn how to let them in.

To me this dance was also a dance of sexual maturity. One that shows the process of being a child, maturing into an adolescent, and finally learning to fly with the energies of passion, power, and the creative feminine potential.
My partners in this incredible dance were, Bob Arbogast, Raymond Van Mason, Peter Christy, David Wirth, and Webster Dean.
All wonderful men that showed not just talent but deep dedication to the art and the deeper meaning of this ballet.

They were the lift in my jump, the elongation of my heart, the support for my desire, and the platform for me to soar.
They embodied the purity of their intent, the power of their connection to the earth, and their willingness to allow the feminine her freedom of flight.

This quintet was integrated with each other in forms of powerful, masculine determination, neutrality, and positive intent to gift me the opportunity to express feelings, beliefs, and emotions that were limiting me, and holding me down.
They gently coaxed me into moments of transition that led me to the conclusion of this Lark finally lifting off and feeling the beauty of merging with the freedom that this world does offer.
Music stirs me into action and feeling deeply into the flow of what the composer was reaching for, and what they were attempting to express.

This music is a masterpiece of intention, longing, striving, and arriving.

I hope you can hear this music and find a place to soar with the crescendos and allow your heart to take flight with the passion of the human potential.
And I want to thank Bruce Marks for creating such a beautiful ballet with the choreography that I could tell … that he and I both understood that could express a deeper feeling inside that was so beautifully manifested through his choreography.

~Suzanne Wagner~