“Piano or violin?”
My journey with ballet—or rather, my journey towards ballet—began with these three words, spoken by my father. I was four years old, standing in my parents’ bedroom in our newly-built house in Upstate New York. My parents sat in their bed, as my parents were wont to do, peering down at me, my father over his nightly reading and my mother over her crochet project and ball of thread, her latest masterpiece, a runner destined for the formal dining table downstairs, resting half-completed on her lap. They had called me into their room because, as I was almost five years old, they thought it was high time, as they explained, for me to acquire a form of proper artistic expression, like all well-educated young ladies of substance and manners. (You can take a West Indian out of the British colonies, but you will never take the British colonies out of a West Indian.)
My face must have lit up at the suggestion, because my parents looked at each other and smiled. This suggestion that I do something other than read and daydream all day long probably seemed to be going over much better than they perhaps had expected it would.
“Well,” my father continued, somewhat triumphantly, “Piano? Or violin?”
“BALLET!” I cried out, clapping my hands together. Their faces froze. My mother quickly looked at my father with a side-glance, and returned her focus to her crocheting.
“Dan,” my father said, in a “don’t be silly,” somewhat perturbed, and just a tiny bit worried voice. “Piano, or violin?”
I furrowed my brow. “Bal-let,” I said slowly, somewhat confused that my otherwise brilliant father had clearly failed to hear what I said the first time.
Now it was my father’s brow that furrowed. “Dan.” Said sternly now. “PIANO. OR VIOLIN.”
It was then that I realized that my choice wasn’t much of a choice at all. It was probably the first time in my life that I became conscious of a path chosen for me; it would not be the last. I sighed.
“Piano,” I said in a small voice. It didn’t matter what I chose, not to me. All that mattered was that it wasn’t ballet. My four-year-old heart sank; my father looked pleased with my selection, though, which comforted me somewhat. The very next day, he went to Sears and returned with a Yamaha keyboard (we were unable to afford a full-scale, bona-fide piano for many years, and in retrospect even the keyboard was very likely a substantial and sacrificial expense for our household at the time of its purchase), and two weeks later I was seated on the floor of my bedroom, in front of said keyboard and a piece of elementary sheet music, practicing scales assigned to me earlier that afternoon by our neighborhood piano teacher. Week after week, the bars on the sheet music that I practiced over and over again became like a little prison, the duration of my sentence meted out by the rhythmic clicks of the metronome at my piano lessons. I struggled to enjoy something that my spirit did not connect to, but it was futile. Somewhat prone to a tiny bit of melodrama, I stoically resigned myself to my fate.
I played the piano for 10 years before I abruptly quit. By the end, I could play a little Chopin…I preferred the Nocturnes…but I never actually enjoyed it, nor was I ever particularly good at it (likely because I never actually enjoyed it). It was probably my first (very long) lesson on the futility of trying to live someone else’s dreams (in this case, my father’s) in lieu of your own. Once I announced that I would no longer take piano lessons, my father, perhaps somewhat prone to a little melodrama himself, stopped speaking to me for a week, but eventually got over it; and I ultimately filled the space that had been spent on piano pursuing other respectable hobbies that looked nice on a college application. But I could never quite get ballet out of my mind…which seemed silly, because it was far too late for me to begin, at that point; girls my age, after all, were applying to dance companies to become professional ballerinas. It was impractical to spend even an additional minute thinking about taking ballet classes…a complete waste of time and energy, by all rational accounts. And so I dismissed these lingering thoughts, and life went on.
I overachieved my way into a great school, and then into a great job, and then into all of the appropriate hobbies and professional extracurricular activities that go along with being a legit grown up. But there was always something tickling at the back of my mind. The little voice of a four-year-old me would abruptly pop into my thoughts every now and then, like a tiny chipper ghost from a hazy memory: “Ballet!” Over time, as I become more settled into my practical life of practical activities and reasonable endeavors, the little voice, ironically, became louder, and chimed in more frequently…and was soon accompanied by a nagging little feeling of “what if?” Try as I might, I just couldn’t shake four-year-old Danice. She’s a tenacious one!
And so it was at the improbable age of 35 that I found myself at a dance studio in West Hollywood, clad in in all black (leotard, tights, and gossamer wrap skirt) but for a pair of not-my-flesh-toned “flesh-toned” canvas ballet slippers, with 15 other women ranging in age from their 20s to their 60s, waiting for my very first class adult beginner classical ballet workshop to begin. My journey with ballet, my journey of the soul, having stalled for over thirty years, was about to commence in earnest, in the company of this small band of fellow misfit dreamers, each of us acknowledging our own inner four-year-old, perhaps for the first time. "BALLET."
I felt good. I felt excited.
I felt like my spirit was finally at home.
As class began, I assumed my long-awaited place at the barre, and looked in the mirror on the wall; four-year-old me smiled back. My heart all joy, I took a breath, turned my gaze forward to the tightly-coiffed hair bun in front of me, and stood tall...in the First Position.