How double pirouettes are like meeting a cat

I lost my double pirouettes this winter.

I don’t know how long I’d had them because I don’t remember the date that a double pirouette first came to me, but I do remember the moment. We were all masking in class, so it was before vaccinations. Mine was purchased at the studio: black with tie-dye text that said “DANCE MODE: ON” above a drawing of a little toggle switch. I took to the center of the floor with my small group, did the lead-in butterfly steps Miss Diana teaches, the prep, a single, the lead-in again, and, suddenly, a double. The room erupted in cheers. Jill ran up to me, clutched both my hands and cried, “Dance mode! ON!”

I was happy my first double came to me surrounded by friends, but I’d put in the groundwork at home, painstakingly repeating rotations every day in quarter-turns, half-turns, and singles; following along twice a week with a conditioning workout for balance, core strength, and ankle strength; practicing my relevés on the train and in the line at the grocery store.

The next winter, we started learning our new recital choreography. I’d had an extraordinary mental health crisis in the months between my first double and the day it left me, and I had an image in my head of my self-worth like a battered boxer stumbling back into the ring with a black eye. Miss Diana asked if everyone in the class had a clean double pirouette. It didn’t occur to me that my answer was no, but then I tried one. And I tried one again. And again. After a clean single turn, I’d fall out of it every time:

• “It’s the weightlifting,” I said to my skeptical personal trainer, “my muscles are heavier and it’s throwing my balance off.”
• “I just haven’t been maintaining it,” I told Jess on the drive home from class. “I’ll start doing those workouts twice a week again.”

Those workouts did not work.

Then came April: The weather changed, accessing my joy steadily required less effort, and I got some news that made me late for a work call because I was busy crying Miss-America-tears in my bedroom. I’d been cast as a lead in a musical, something I’d desperately wanted since childhood and never straightforwardly achieved. Most of my showbiz successes I could explain away:

• “They needed someone to step in at the last minute,” I told my castmates in Grease when I played Sandy. “I was just good enough so they didn’t have to audition more girls.”
• “Maybe it’s because I’m selling a lot of tickets,” I suggested to my coworker when I advanced through a singing competition in a cabaret venue. “Or, even though everyone else is obviously better, I’m improving the most.”

But this time I could grasp for no other explanation than that I was good and they wanted me in the role. I was forced to integrate that fact into my reality, and it was dizzying.

A few days later, we ran the dance. Miss Diana reminded everyone that those pirouettes in the chorus are doubles, not singles. Like magic, it came back. I saw the shock register on my face in the studio mirror, then the excitement. A quote from the tv show Scrubs popped into my head: “Well done there, Barbie. You’re exactly where you were three years ago.”

I thought about a crack my ex-boyfriend made one time: “Use your big brain to don’t think about it.” I thought about how, when you’re meeting a cat, it’s way more likely to climb onto your lap if you sit calmly and let it approach you. I thought about the chiding I always hear when the choreography isn’t clicking: “Trust your body, not your brain!” I thought about trust and faith.

Samuel Beckett said “Dance first, think later. It’s the natural order.” When I read that quote, I felt as seen as I did defensive. I was never going to consciously calculate the exact level of torque with which to push off from my prep, never going to bully myself into finding my balance.

In dance, you need to memorize, drill, and condition; but ultimately the only way to let the movement shine is to set your logical mind aside and relinquish control. That’s the hardest part for me, and I’m not there yet because I won’t ever be. “Finished” is not part of the equation here. There’s only the path, and treading it arm-in-arm with your fellow wanderers, getting lost in the prettiest flowers along the way.