Our friend’s daughter danced Clara in tonight’s Nutcracker. And a friend of L’s from middle school danced the lead in the Arabian dance.
Nutcracker
dancing
Making the List
Making the list for tomorrow’s shopping is a process that takes as much planning as the cooking itself. I guess that goes without saying: you want to make sure your list has everything you need so that you don’t have to go back out. There’s no way I want to have to go out on Saturday to get anything — anything — we’ve forgotten, so making this list now reduces the chances of that happening. It began last night, sitting at the kitchen table, cookbooks everywhere, and it continued in the afternoon and evening tonight.
Taking a short dance break requires less planning. When you’re listening to highlander Christmas carols and you grew up dancing, it comes naturally. And that’s to say nothing of K.
Recital 2016
Legs
There’s a big difference between 100 km and 10 km, but when I began riding again a couple of months ago, there didn’t seem to be much of a difference between the two as far as my legs were concerned.
So when I took off this morning on a favorite ride, a ride I’d done seemingly countless times, I knew the ride, at a distance more than double the longest “ride” I’d gone on in the last few weeks, would be tough on me.
But the ride through Lipnica Mała to the base of Babia Góra then through the whole of Lipncia was a favorite. More than once I’d headed out for a quick ride after a day of teaching with no real idea where I was going and ended up making this loop.
With the views it was an obvious choice. Today, though, it was just as much the views along the way that fascinated me. While Jabłonka has really developed a lot, the villages of Lipnica Wielka and Lipnica Mała are relatively untouched. There are a few more houses, and some of the older houses have been renovated, but by and large, the villages look the same.
One other change became evident when I reached the end of Lipnica Mała: the formerly deeply-rutted road from the end of the village to the roughly-paved road that runs along the base of Babia was now a well-paved little street.
Of course, the forest itself hadn’t changed, nor had the sound of the wind through the trees, which sounded almost tidal.
Once I got to the base of Babia, though, I virtually forgot about the camera as I made my way up the most challenging portion of the ride.
It was at this point that I really understood, in a deeply muscular way, that my legs are nothing like they used to be.
The worst part of it is the memory, knowing that those climbs used to be no problem at all for me. I was winded at the top of several of the climbs, but I didn’t have to stop to catch my breath and give my burning legs a chance cool down. I didn’t stop and comment aloud to myself about the stupidity of the whole idea of tackling such a ride when so completely unprepared.
But somehow I survived, ate some lunch, and took the Boy out to help wash the car before tomorrow’s wedding.
Recital 2015: Video
Recital 2015
Jazz 2014 and Puppies
Tonight was L’s jazz concert. Greenville Ballet divides the two forms into separate lessons (unlike our former school, which had half an hour of ballet followed by half an hour of jazz), and this year they had two separate shows. If last night’s performance was any sort of standard, it was certainly magnificent.
Meanwhile, at the house, the Boy and I had our own adventure: a walk to the drug store, some swinging time, some up-the-stairs, down-the-stairs time — everything a boy and his father needed to make a perfect evening of it.
Bedtime presented its own challenges. As I was dressing the Boy for a hopefully-long, hopefully-restful evening, I slipped his puppy pajama bottoms on without thinking about the fact that the matching shirt was nowhere to be found. He was fine with it, but started asking a little later about the top: I’d laid him on the bed to slide him into his sleeping sack when he began asking, “Sapappies?”
“We don’t have the top, E,” I reassured him. “I don’t know where it is.”
Despite this reasoned explanation, the protests grew more frantic: “Sapappies! Sapappies!”
I tried explaining again, but it was not no avail: he slid off the bed, marched to his chest of drawers, and began opening them one by one. Look in, he’d exclaim, “No!” before slamming the draw closed (I could just hear the screams if he caught his finger in one) and opening the next. The third attempted was successful. “Tu! Tu!” he shouted (“Here! Here!” in English). He pulled out a pair of socks and cried, “Sapappies!”
(Note to non-Slavophiles: “socks” in Polish is “skarpetki,” so in typical dual-language fashion, he applied a bilingual double-plural to it in addition to the ineffably charming pronunciation.)
Ballet Recital 2014
We changed ballet schools at the beginning of this season: the last recital, rescheduled at the last minute to an old auditorium with no sound system and, worse, no air conditioning, all due to the costumes being ordered too late yet again — it was just a nightmare. Everyone sweaty; no one able to hear; everyone miserable. We’d been having our doubts, but it was the last straw, so to speak.
So we began taking L to one of the two largest schools in the area. A school that stages a full Nutcracker every year. A school that divides the instruction up into ballet lessons (learning the basics, the positions, the movements) and performance lessons (learning a choreographed dance incorporating all the skills from ballet lessons). This is a school that has students from ages four to eighteen. It has a beginner pointe group, an intermediate pointe group, and advanced pointe instruction.
The difference was striking this evening.
The program was arranged so that we began with the pre-ballet kids (four- and five-year-olds) showing their basic moves to the cliche clunky piano music one always associates with basic lessons and ended with the advanced ballet group put on quite a show to a piece by Ravel.
After the show, all smiles as usual.
Sick at Home, Tired at Rehearsal
The Boy, in one form or another, stays sick lately. Or so it seems. Today was my turn to watch him, to take him to the doctor, to help him with his newly-prescribed breathing treatment. We started the morning playing with cars on the sofa. It ended quickly.
That was the morning. Afternoon and evening were spent in an auditorium as the Girl prepared for her two (count them: two) dance recitals coming up, jazz and ballet. I took my little laptop along with the intention of returning to a recent writing idea that seems promising but got off to a wrong-footed start that I only really realized how wrong-footed 25,000 words into it. While writing, though, two random thoughts:
Random Thought One
The girls running across the stage, somewhat stumbling occasionally, reveal the irony of grace: in learning to be graceful, we’re often anything but. We watch a professional company’s performance of the Nutcracker, and the dancers seem positively to float across the stage. The lifts look more like the man his keeping the ballerina from soaring of into space rather than supporting her. These little girls look more like kids in the playground playing cowboys and Indians, galloping about like mad, than like ballerinas–when judged against that standard of near-perfection that professionals seem to achieve. But grace and elegance comes in many forms and is in itself somewhat relative. After seeing how spastic L can be, in the completely natural, seven-year-old way, it’s an act of supreme grace just for her to tiptoe onto the stage, hands on her hips, and slide gently into first position.
Random Thought Two
I once made the analogy with a professor that for me, faith was like watching people dance from a sound-proof chamber. “I see the unity, the ritual, the sequence, but not hearing the music myself, I only suspect what is choreographing it all.” Dr. R said that was a very positive view, and perhaps he thought then what it took me almost twenty years to figure out for myself: my professed atheism might give way to something more musical.
During the last few months, I’ve experienced the opposite: while sitting in the Greenville Ballet and Jazz waiting room as L took her weekly lesson on Monday afternoons, I heard the same song over and over. A few moments here, then stop; a few more snippets of the song, then silence again. Muffed voices as the instructor presumably corrected this or that dancer, perhaps the group as a whole. I had no idea what the whole might look like. While waiting for L’s group’s performance, it finally all came together: an older group of girls, probably just a bit older than my students.
Back home, I check on the song, apparently a band called Capital Cities:
The Girl got a little snack while the Boy got a final breathing treatment.
Busy, random, odd day.
Dancing
Watching Somebody Love Something
Donald Miller begins his memoir Blue Like Jazz with an “Author’s Note” that reads, in part,
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.
I never really liked dance until I watched my daughter dance rapturously. Any type of music will get her moving, including the pre-programmed light jazz numbers saved in the memory of the small digital piano we bought a few years ago. She shows me the new steps she has to learn in her new jazz dance class, explaining that she’s doing them very carefully now but will eventually have to get them much faster.
Then she begins improvising, a mix of the ballet and jazz she’s learned mixed with some of the Polish Highlander style her mother continually shows her and some of her own imaginative moves.
It’s a skill I hope she keeps for the rest of her life, this ability to mix classical training (of a sort) with regional traditions and her own imagination — expanding it beyond dance, there’s no telling what she could accomplish.
Parade of Princesses
Hoards of little girls in their Sunday best roaming about downtown on a Sunday afternoon could mean only one thing: the Nutcracker is in town. The Girl and I had a father-daughter day out, and what an outing: a professional ballet company performing the Christmas classic. We sat in the center of the third row, and L sat on the edge of her seat for most of the performance — until the end, when she fell asleep.
Maybe next year…
Princess Camp
Princess ballet camp every Tuesday. Can you imagine anything any better?
The final session today ended with a performance, which included a bit of insight into how the little ballerinas get ready — the stretching, the prep.
Recital 2012
The Boy’s first outing back in late May was to the Girl’s ballet recital.
Recital 2012
The Girl feels she’s been playing second fiddle for the last two weeks. She never says it, but it’s clear. Add to it the frustration she must feel to hear “No, not now” to her constant requests to hold the Boy and it’s fairly clear that we needed a night like tonight.
Recital night — the evening L has been talking about constantly for a week or more now. “Wednesday is my rehearsal,” she began saying last week, “and Thursday is my recital.” She told friends; she told teachers; she told strangers in the checkout line.
“We’ve got to make her feel truly special,” K said, and so we bought two bouquets and a box of her favorite chocolates — just what every ballerina needs.
And she got the added bonus of staying up well past her bedtime, a fact which impressed and pleased her enough that she repeated it several times on the way back to the car. Of course the evening photo session made everything a touch later, too.
Magic
Some days just seem filled with it.
A little fire, a lot of smoke, and one ends up with peppercorn-covered, smoky tenderloin magic.
A few twigs of evergreen and a sweet helper and one ends up with a charmed Christmas ornament, a mini-tree for the kitchen.
And there’s always the magic of dancing.
Why We Laughed
“They were laughing at us.” L had just gotten off stage, and K, backstage to help with the recital, was there to greet her. Indeed, we in the audience were laughing a great deal through the night, but it obviously bothered some of the children, our daughter included.
Why did we laugh? I fumbled about with an explanation yesterday, but I went to bed thinking about it and woke up with it still on my mind.
If adults had been doing this, we might have called it a disaster. They stumbled about sometimes. They often looked to the side, desperate for a cue from someone wiser. Some stood, looking at the others, trying to remember what they should be doing at this or that particular moment. They were only vaguely uniform at some points, with some putting their arms down as others just began raising theirs.
Yet because they were children, everything changed. Disasters became masterpieces: flubs became arabesques; stumbles transformed into bourre; miscues became fouette; hesitant jumps became grand jets.
Further, if these had been adult dancers, they never would have appeared on stage. Ego would have prevented it, and that’s part of what we mean when we say that these children are cute because they’re innocent. They’re not so concerned with unattainable perfection, and they’re filled with joy just to be dancing.
I think we laugh, then, because we see ourselves in these little dancers and realize that, in so many ways, they have more courage than we have, and we laugh at the joy that courage brings us.
Recital
Parenting is often about firsts when there’s only one child. First this, first that — first dance recital.
I’ve never been interested in dance, but even if I were, I’d pick a small-town dance school’s summer recital over even the greatest ballet. There’s a charm and an innocence in the young girls that unifies an auditorium filled with strangers and makes us all feel truly optimistic for 120 minutes.
Of course, it was the Girl’s scene that stole my heart.
Later, we had a sad conversation. “Tata, they were laughing at us.”
How do you explain the joy behind the laughter? How do you explain that the audience was enjoying the performance so much that it brought them to laughter? K and I tried, but I’m not sure we convinced her.
Dancing
The Girl loves dancing. We’ve known that for some time, and made videos and photos several times.
It’s such an odd thing for me, a complete non-dancer. She can hear music that she likes, and she’ll jump up and start dancing — in the kitchen, in the living room, in her room.
I imagine if any of her favorites came on the radio while we’re out shopping, she’d dance about there as well.
She dances to anything. K puts on Polish folk music and within minutes, the Girl has burst into the living room and is dancing. Anything by Chopin gets her swaying almost majestically.
Elvis Costello can get her feet moving so fast it looks likes she’s running in place.
It is the ultimate sign of a love of music.
Our hope is that it will last and deepen over the years.
Beginnings
L has been dancing whenever she hears music from the time she could stand. At first, it was only rhythmic bouncing with her knees and upper body. As her motor control improved, so did her moves.
So great is her love of motion that she’ll gladly sit and watch others dance. One of her favorite videos to watch is a clip about one young English lady’s ballet instruction, and from the first time she watched, she declared, “I’m a ballerina!”
Now, at close to four years old, she’s finally of the age that we can actually begin to make that reality.
A quick trip to the ballet supply store, a few phone calls, and we have a reluctant ballerina.
L is a cautious girl: she doesn’t just dive into this or that without concern. She is, in short, a worrier. And so on the first day of ballet, though she had been talking about it all week, she fretted that she might not like it after all.
Fear set in, and before long, she was declaring, “I don’t want to go.” No amount of cajoling could convince her.
The Opportunities-We-Never-Had dilemma set in: we never want to force her to participate in anything creative — where’s the joy in that? Yet we knew that if we could just get her there, just let her see the other girls dancing, that all would be well.
Finally, K simply declared that in order to cancel the lessons, L herself had to go with Mama to cancel the lessons.
She ended up staying.
Saturday morning, before her second lesson, L was all smiles.