The Word of the Day is "Androgyny"

The other day, my Russian housemate showed me a ballet video online.



It's a very interesting piece of modern choreography. I like it from a dance perspective, because they do some unusual things and the fast pointe work is incredible. But it's also interesting from a gender perspective, because it explores relationships. Different people dance together in different ways, and at one point, two female dancers are dressed as men. Before that point, though, during what I thought was a more conventional scene, my housemate asked me a strange question: "Is that dancer a man or a women?"

I told her it was a woman, because the likelihood of a man doing such intricate pointe work is almost nil. (I have seen men on pointe, in the "ballet trocadero," but I have to say that the pointe work was pretty blunt. In my experience, most male dancers don't pursue pointe training at all, so would not be able to perform it with such a high degree of skill). So I told her that the dancer was a woman, but the woman was androgynous.

"How you call this? An-dro-gyn-ous?"

"Yes. Androgynous."

It led me to think about dance in general, how girls from an early age are taught to move in an exceedingly light and delicate mannner, feminine to the extreme. They are also taught to starve their bodies, so that they don't develop a shape with many feminine attributes. Therefore...when a female dancer ceases to move in the typically stylized "feminine" manner traditional to ballet, if she begins to move with force and strength, she automatically becomes androgynous, because neither her movements nor her shape indicate "female." This phenomenon is completely unrelated to her own gender identity. It's simply a matter of gender presentation, which normally goes one way and confuses people when it goes another.

I also find it interesting that of all words I should be teaching people in Russia, "androgynous" is one of the first. I'm not out here and I'm not planning on coming out, but gender is something that seems to follow me. I'm one of the people who notices gender ambiguity in the world, and this means that I end up talking about it to unexpected people, even if I don't talk about its relevance to my personal life.

We didn't talk any more about androgyny, my housemate and I, we just watched the ballet. But I'm happy that one person in Russia now knows the English word for ambiguity in gender.

Ballet and body image

I've decided this week, now that I'm living near a dance studio, that I should start dancing again. So I took a ballet class on Wednesday, a barre workout yesterday, and another ballet class today.

Ouch.

There is nothing more humbling than going back to ballet when you've been away from it for over two years. I felt like an elephant, like a bull in a china shop, like all the most ungraceful metaphors in the world all at once. My body has lost all the nuanced movement that characterizes ballet. It felt so easy when I did it all the time, but now I feel like I'm as far from that level of nuance as I am from the moon or a six-figure paycheck. My brain still remembers it all, remembers that the hand goes here and the feet turn out like so and you lift and tuck and tendu and plie and make it all look beautiful and effortless. My brain remembers. But my body doesn't. And therein lies the problem. Because my brain remembers exactly what it all looks like, and how I should look in the mirror when I do each move. But the figure in the mirror looks nothing like how it should be.

In the mirror, I have no alignment. My toes point, but not as far as they should. My feet turn out, but not as far, my legs lift up, but not as high, I jump, I turn, I extend, I pose...but none of it looks like it should. Part of it is that I'm horrendously out of practice. And part of it is that I'm at least 25 pounds heavier than I was in high school, the last time I seriously did ballet. Now, I was never a stick figure, and I never cultivated my anorexic tendencies to a point where they were relevant, but still. I was relatively thin. In the mirror now, I see every inch of my added padding as larger-than-life, an exaggerated caricature of my actual shape. And I know, intellectually, that my weight is actually just fine and my proportions are fairly normal. But you can't say that to a ballet school mirror. They're designed to make you want to become thin.

The funny thing is, I never really paid that much attention to the mirror in high school. I knew what I looked like and that I looked good, so besides the occasional alignment check it was never really relevant. I only started to get self-conscious in college, when I started gaining weight and taking different dance techniques that I didn't know as well. I learned to ignore the mirrors then, because if I focused only on what I was doing and didn't look, I didn't have to fight myself or the movement nearly as hard. And when I got good enough, I didn't have to ignore the mirror. It became irrelevant again. I'll get to that point again here inshallah, probably just in time for me to start traveling again and lose it all. Which means I'll fight the same battle through again when I get back.

Even though it's a Sisyphus-ian effort, though, I'll still do it. I love dance too much to let myself stay out of shape, and I know that in another week or two the mirror gremlins won't seem as bad. You have to wonder what's in an art form to make people stay with it despite the fact that it tends to foster self-hatred. And the answer is this: once you get past that point of self-hatred and focus on the dance, it becomes magic. Once you truly focus on the dance and attain the technique to take you farther, you can suspend normal reality. You can experience total freedom in movement. You can fly.

Which means I'll deal with the mirror gremlins until I reach that point again.