by Henry Alford
We went around the circle a few times. The cascades of rhythm we produced were at once lovely and totally disorienting. It felt like my legs and feet had gone off to wave-making camp without me. I couldn’t tell when one wave started and the next began. It can’t be pure coincidence that the 1915 publication of Einstein’s field equations, which redefined gravity as we knew it and suggested that space-time is malleable, occurred just as swing rhythm was making itself known.
I’d like to be able to tell you that, as the upholder and ambassador of “the three” in this exercise, that my three was on the three, or even that each time I took my turn it had the same relationship to the three. But I have to admit that my body does not always do what I want it to, and also that numbers are a tiresome social construct.
* * *
Musicians use instruments, writers use keyboards and paper, painters use paint and canvas, but a dancer has only his own body. This is both a blessing and a curse.
The Pure Physicality function is dance at its most inimitable and quintessential; of the arts, only physical theater and certain kinds of vocalizing (e.g., Tuvan throat singing) put such emphasis on the human body. It’s here that dance shares more similarities with sports than with the arts. But more tellingly, the Physicality function shines a light on dance’s essential pathos, by which I mean that dance is a moment out of time. Dance is hugely dependent on the physical range of the body, which more than any other building block of the arts (e.g., words, paint, clay, music, video, film) is subject to the ravages of time. What is dance if not an attempt to deny that passage?
Viewed in another light, Pure Physicality might also be considered dance’s most sophisticatedly human function, too: an animal doesn’t make a lot of movements that are purely ornamental (at least, not from the animal’s point of view).
“I know my feet, all about them. It’s like my feet are the drums and my shoes are the sticks,” Savion Glover writes in Savion: My Life in Tap, cowritten with Bruce Weber. “My left heel is stronger, for some reason, than my right; it’s my bass drum. My right heel is like the floor tom-tom. I can get a snare out of my right toe, a whip sound, not putting it down on the floor hard, but kind of whipping the floor with it. Get the sound of a tom-tom from the balls of my feet. The hi-hat is a sneaky one. I do it with a slight toe lift, either foot, so, like a drummer, I can slip in there anytime. And if I want cymbals, crash, crash, that’s landing flat, both feet, full strength on the floor, full weight on both feet.”
Every dance idiom, be it jazz or hip-hop or butoh, has its own set of exacting physical demands. Swing dance instructors sometimes refer to dancers who can’t bend their elbows as having “Barbie arms.” Lil Buck, who performs the style of street dance known as jookin’, once spun so hard that he burned a large hole in his low-top Pumas. Whenever I watch Dancing with the Stars, I like to imagine a choreographer’s assistant writing down “Female: (Scissors kick, lands on Left). Male: (Rips shirt off own body).”
The bodily changes that all my dancing wrought on me were slowish—after doing contact improv for a year and a half, I went from a medium shirt to a large. But other dancers’ changes come more rapidly. Alvin Ailey dancer Linda Celeste Sims, for instance, holds the Kirov-trained Madame Darvash, one of the country’s most revered ballet teachers, responsible for lengthening her legs after Darvash told Sims one day to straighten her knee all the way. The next morning, Ms. Sims’s husband, a fellow dancer, asked, “What did you do? Your legs look long.”
* * *
Of all the idioms and their demands, it’s the rigors of ballet that most amaze me. Once you’ve stood in your office and tried to go through the motions of a ballerina’s Mount Everest—Odile’s thirty-two fouettés in Swan Lake—you get a startlingly real dose of an emotional state that I can only call stomach heave. Similarly, once I learned that the sole of one of Nijinsky’s feet could operate in such a prehensile way that it could clasp the back of the other foot’s ankle like a hand, I came to appreciate what a tiny amount of podiatric potential most humans have made use of.
Or consider diet. Though the prohibition on unrestrained eating is not specific to ballerinas, they would seem, of all dancers, to bear its brunt most acutely. In 2015, when Playbill asked New York City Ballet principal Rebecca Krohn whether she had any guilty pleasures, Krohn referenced Le Bernardin, a high-end New York City restaurant she’d never been to: “Sometimes I will go online and just read the menu.” When Misty Copeland was told by American Ballet Theatre early on in her tenure to “lengthen”—balletspeak for lose weight—she rebelled. She called a local Krispy Kreme franchise, and when an employee told her Krispy Kreme only delivered to corporations and in large numbers, Copeland told them she was a corporation. After rehearsals, she would order two dozen donuts and eat half of them in one sitting.
If you’ve ever stood in a hallway with a bunch of parents outside their daughters’ Beginner’s Ballet class for pickup, you may have noticed the parents’ bittersweet expression. Typically this expression is composed of equal parts “I am so glad my daughter is acquiring poise while giving me an hour to run errands” and “I hope she loses interest before they get to pointe.” When we see or even imagine a ballerina balancing her entire body weight on her ten little toes, we all wail in sympathy, but actually it’s even more arduous than what we’re thinking: she’s really supporting her weight on her two big toes. For comparison, imagine trying to do it on your thumbs.
Moreover, ever since ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre wrote in 1760 that “it is imperative to reverse the order of things and force the limbs, by means of exercise both long and painful, to take a totally different position from that which is natural to them,” young ballet dancers have been trying to get their femur bone to adjust within its socket so as to achieve maximum turn-out.
Gelsey Kirkland put it vividly. “By turning a bed into a makeshift rack,” she wrote in Dancing on My Grave, “I stretched myself out like a victim of medieval abuse. Assuming various positions that forced my extension beyond its natural limit, I told [my best friend] Meg to hold me down no matter how much I might beg for release. She sat on me, disregarding my groans, allowing her body weight to restrain me until the pain became so excruciating that I collapsed into tears.”
Not only does Balanchine emerge in this memoir as a relentless taskmaster—“Eat nothing,” Kirkland claims he told her repeatedly; or he’d thump on her sternum and ribs and say “Must see bones”—but Kirkland herself is wildly neurotic and self-immolating. Her frantic efforts during her tenure at New York City Ballet to reconceive her physical self led to anorexia, bulimia, plastic surgery, silicone injections, breast implants, major dental realignments, a healthy appetite for cocaine, and an addiction to speed and Valium.
Then she’s cast in The Turning Point and things get really dire: “I enacted my own private mad scene: I starved by day, then binged on junk food and threw up by night; I took injections of pregnant cows’ urine, reputed to be a miraculous diet aid; I stuffed myself with laxatives, thyroid pills, and celery juice; I emptied myself with enemas and steam baths. During the wee hours, I often made desperate trips to the drugstore to pick up ipecac, the emetic that I used to induce vomiting. I became an expert with the technique of shoving two fingers down my throat. The blood vessels around my eyes erupted with the constant strain.”
Kirkland’s weight fell to eighty pounds. And in the end, she was replaced in the cast of the movie.
* * *
Kirkland’s book is scarifying. I couldn’t put it down. I have no problem understanding how a professional dancer’s life would revolve around maintaining the physical phenom that she has spent years turning her body into. I cooed in sympathy when Toni Bentley’s memoir, Winter Season, quoted the nightly regimen of one of Bentley’s fellow New York City Ballet dancers: “First I rub this aspirin ointment on my foot. . . . Then I put Saran Wrap around it, then an Ace bandage, then a sock and a heating pad—all night. Otherwise I can’t plié when I wake up.�
�� I found it lovely when modern choreographer Paul Taylor writes about being on tour and stuffing the grids of air conditioners with tissue paper so as to block the cool drafts that would tighten his dancer’s muscles. I developed weird admiration for actor and dancer George Raft—he plays the main gangster who’s chasing Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot—when I learned how, in the 1920s, he was able to pull off what Astaire called “the fastest Charleston I ever saw”: he’d numb his feet by lacing his shoes with piano wire.
But Kirkland’s particular brand of mortification of the flesh struck me as overkill—unnecessary and pathological. That is, until I read New Yorker critic Arlene Croce’s review of a 1975 Suzanne Farrell performance, when Farrell had just returned to New York City Ballet after her long absence. This review gave me a better sense of what dancers—particularly ballerinas—are up against.
Although this tall, incomparably regal creature could be nobody but Farrell, it was not the same Farrell. She has lost a great deal of weight all over, and with it a certain plump quality in the texture of her movement. The plush is gone, and it was one of her glories. The impact of the long, full legs was different, too. If anything, they’re more beautiful than ever, but no longer so impressively solid in extension, so exaggerated in their sweep, or so effortlessly controlled in their slow push outward from the lower back. The largesse of the thighs is still there, but in legato their pulse seemed to emerge and diminish sooner than it used to, and diminish still further below the knee in the newly slim, tapering calf. Yet the slenderness in the lower leg gives the ankle and the long arch of the foot a delicacy they didn’t have before. And it shaves to a virtual pinpoint the already minute base from which the swelling grandeur of her form takes its impetus. Farrell is still broad across the hips (though not so broad as before); in pirouettes she is a spiraling cone.
Were the subject a model or actress or athlete, we’d cry foul, right? How dare a critic wax so body-specific. But something about ballet’s quest for perfection keeps an assessment like Croce’s from being wantonly cruel.
Granted, dancers know what they’re getting into. For ballerinas, the bodily rigors of their craft are well advertised from the outset: a bloodied toe inside a toe shoe is a sign of good luck, especially if the dancer is wearing her first pair of toe shoes. Moreover, all professional dancers know that their efforts to harness the full potential of their bodies is a race against time. As Jamie Bishton, the Tharp dancer, put it to me, “The sad part of dancing is that when you’re seasoned enough as a dancer to fully carry out a choreographer’s vision is also when you can’t really continue to do what you want your body to do.”
I asked him, “You mean, you have to have enough experience to fully realize the work, but that’s the same time when . . .”
“. . . You’re done.”
Toni Bentley was done at age twenty-six. She’d danced for New York City Ballet for ten years, but had been diagnosed with osteoarthritis in her right hip three years prior. Decades later, when her doctor replaced her hip, Bentley, who’d gone on to become an author, made an unusual request of him: she wanted to keep the hip bone. She liked the idea, as she wrote on the New York Review of Books website in 2010, of having “a parched white Georgia O’Keeffe bone” that would be a tangible, viewable hedge against the thousand of hours she’d devoted and lost to the ephemeral art.
But when her doctor’s office manager presented Bentley with the hip bone, it was no parched white O’Keeffe beauty. The femur head had been cut in half and it, along with lots of unidentifiable bits, was floating in formaldehyde in a Tupperware container. The office manager told Bentley that she needed to have a taxidermist extract the fatty tissues from the bone so it wouldn’t go rancid.
Bentley boiled the bones and soaked them in bleach. (“But, what if, as they came to a boil, there was a smell?” she writes. “What if my cats started yowling like they do when they smell chicken broth?”) The bones did not emerge white. Bentley dried them in the sun. Still, not white. Moreover, Bentley couldn’t pinpoint the arthritis. “Like a child, I thought my bad hip was my fault,” she writes. “I wanted to face it now, to confirm somehow that I could not, with all the will in the world, have overcome it and danced again.”
So she took the bones back to her doctor. On seeing them, he, ironically, wrinkled his nose and recoiled slightly. He told Bentley that the smooth, marble-colored side of the femur head—the only part of the bones that Bentley found beautiful—was the “arthritis,” meaning the place where the cartilage was gone entirely. Bentley writes, “Arthritis is an absence—pure, smoothed-down bone surface.”
In trying to create a monument to absence, she ended up with absence. She reached into the sea of nothingness and dredged up a different kind of nothing.
2.
Because I caught the dance bug late in life (age forty-nine), it’s easy to view my doing so as an effort in part to stave off the ravages of time. This view is not inaccurate. Like a lot of people, I tend to think of myself as being perpetually thirty-one years old: seasoned enough not to commit the atrocities of adolescence and my early twenties, but not so old as to have cut off any of my options in life. I’d like to think that, if I really wanted to, and if I really committed myself to it, I could still become a novelist or playwright or pastry chef—because to believe in these possibilities is to live at the misty intersection between hope and faith, far from resignation. A lot of my other ships in life have sailed, but in the harbor, safe behind the breakwater of my delusion, I keep a small fleet, the sails of which are perpetually luffing.
Part of this magical-thinking mindset is the concurrent belief that a thirty-one-year-old’s optimism about life need not be supported by a thirty-one-year-old’s body.
I never said I was a realist.
* * *
I came to Zumba in 2011, as I mentioned earlier, via a writing assignment: my Times editor Laura was interested in hearing about the combination of Latin dance and cardio workout that, in 125 countries, has whipped some 12 million people into a lather. I was intrigued by the fact that you can fry to a crisp five hundred to a thousand calories per sweat-soaked hour.
I started on the zumba.com website. I learned there how, one day in the mid 1990s, the Colombian fitness instructor Alberto Perez, called Beto, forgot to take his aerobics music to a class he was teaching. Using instead some salsa and merengue tapes he had in his backpack, Perez started improvising what would attain immortality as Zumba. He moved to Miami in 2001 and was soon cranking out DVDs and an infomercial. In 2005 Perez and his business partners opened an academy to train instructors, of which there are now more than twenty thousand.
Typing my zip code into the website, I learned that there were 648 classes within five miles of me. As the Hollywood adage runs, you could die from the encouragement.
I consorted with the Z, as I came to think of it, for two months before writing about it, and then another six months after that. Most of my frantic gyrating and quick quick-stepping took place at New York University and at three Manhattan YMCAs. Though there are specialty classes like Aqua Zumba and Zumba Gold (a slower-paced variety for seniors), the great majority of Zumba classes are open to practitioners of all levels, and follow this format: an instructor arrives wearing stretchy black clothing and a facial expression of militant excitement; he or she turns on some music (lots of Ricky Martin and salsa, with a smattering of the Latin-Caribbean hybrid known as reggaeton) and wordlessly starts dancing. We fifteen or twenty (primarily female) students, all in workout clothes, erupt in a Broadway kickline-ish cavalcade of flailing mimeo-choreography: squats, lunges, grapevines, cha-cha-cha.
Zumba’s slogan is “Ditch the workout, join the party.” At the Z-fest, no one is going to count out the song’s beat for you, or demonstrate the choreography before the song starts. There’s no and-a-five-six-seven-eight that transports you back to your childhood school trip to see A Chorus Line. You’re here to party, my friend, not to audit a graduate seminar at the D
ance Notation Bureau. Indeed, one of my Chinatown Y instructors told a group of us, three of whom looked to be closing in on seventy: “You need to relax your face. You don’t go to a nightclub and look all tense. Imagine there’s a great-looking guy or girl at the club.”
The effort at face relaxation alone made this the most physically exhausting party I had ever attended. Exhorted again and again to kick my feet as high as my shoulder and, on one occasion, to propel myself across the floor purely through the magic of buttocks-clenching, I made my body ache. I bent parts of my body previously unbent. I got caught up in the excitement and overdid, overextended. Meanwhile, during the slow songs, I configured my face in the classic, tragic-pensive mode of the tango dancer, trying to convey equal parts tragedy and urgency: I’d been shot in the stomach but was late for an appointment.
I operated at about 50 to 60 percent mastery of the choreography, which is average. Certain stuttering Latin beats, and the fancy footwork they foster, eluded me. But my Achilles’ heel was my overly literal approach: anytime an instructor telegraphed a coming move by, for instance, pointing to the right or holding up three fingers to denote repetition, I was sure to make these prescriptive actions the very centerpiece of my dancing. I was like the language student who greets passers-by with “Lesson 1: Good morning!”
My favorite instructor was named Yvonne Puckett. When I read on the Zumba website that this seventy-three-year-old showbiz veteran had danced with Astaire and with Marge and Gower Champion and had been in two Elvis Presley movies, I hied myself to Chelsea Piers to take her class.
In the soaring, bustling hangar that is the Chelsea Piers Sports Center, I pegged Miss Puckett at first sight: a warm, pixieish Carol Burnett type in boysenberry cargo pants and black-sequined sneakers. I gushily introduced myself, and asked, “Do you think Fred Astaire would have embraced Zumba?”
