A Body of Work

by David Hallberg

  Always, when I stepped into the dance studio, anger would envelop me yet again.

  Anger at Megan.

  Anger at myself.

  Anger at my inability to be the dancer I used to be.

  We were making progress, though slowly, and Megan could see that. I couldn’t. All I saw was weakness, pain, swelling, tightness. Darkness. An inability to execute a proper plié. A bulbous ball on the top of my ankle, perpetually swollen and red.

  At night, at home on my balcony, I would look up at the sky and beg the universe, You have me. You’ve brought me to my knees. There is nothing else to strip from me. Please, give me some light. Build me back up again. Just so I can manage daily life.

  * * *

  I PUSHED ON, against my own desires to break everything in the studio and scream at Megan.

  I didn’t want her touching me.

  I didn’t want her correcting me.

  I didn’t want her imitating my weaknesses.

  The energy in the room was tense; my questions about her corrections were terse and tight-lipped. We were not working with each other.

  I was content at my local, drinking a beer alone. I was content in my apartment, watching a movie. I was not content in the studio. Should anyone ask me about my foot, I quickly shut them down. The only way through was to grit my teeth and work. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t happy. It didn’t matter if I wanted to quit. Or that I was enraged. All that mattered was the work. I would tell myself, Get on with it, David. Shut up and do what you are told. But I still resisted her.

  * * *

  THE TENSION GOT to be too much. Megan couldn’t progress with me. She didn’t know what to do or say because I met everything with resistance and nonverbal conflict. I wasn’t telling her anything.

  But my internal dialogue was pitiful:

  You are worth nothing anymore. Look at where you were and look at you now. You did this to yourself, thinking you were invincible. You worked yourself too hard, too fast, trying to take on everything that came your way. It’s over. You’ve ruined your body. Your ego killed you. Rotted you. You let it ride away, taking you from what is actually important. You’re far from a true artist. You’re a sellout. All this work won’t get you anywhere. It’s over and you can’t admit it. Life was giving you other opportunities that you ignored. To transition out of this elegantly and smoothly. You are becoming exactly what you didn’t want to become . . . an old dancer trying to hold on to the past.

  * * *

  IT TOOK ME weeks to muster the courage to make myself vulnerable to Megan. Though I still couldn’t confess everything I was feeling, I told her as much as I could. I said that I didn’t believe in myself and didn’t believe I would ever accomplish what needed to be done. I told her I couldn’t get past my anger. At her. At myself. At the situation.

  And I told her about the demons I fought internally. That’s what I had begun to call them. The demons. These were demons that coaxed me into believing that I would never dance again. Or that the pinching in my foot or the perpetual swelling at the top of my ankle would never subside. They were the ones that made me think about how my career came to a shrieking halt and about all the people and theaters I had let down in the process. The guilt of canceling shows. The stress of imagining what people were thinking.

  Megan was calm and kind. “We are now making true progress,” she said. “Up to now you have been clocking in and out. You tick the boxes. But that isn’t going to make you heal. You have to give yourself over. Leave your old self behind and realize the virtues of starting over. You have the chance to rebuild yourself. You can be something completely different than you were before. You can reinvent yourself. But to do that, you have to make yourself vulnerable. Let me in. Let me teach you. Let me guide you. You don’t know best. I don’t know best. But together we can pave the path and find our way. As of now, we are not progressing. Not in the way I know you can. It’s your choice. You don’t have to be here. We’re not forcing you. You came of your own accord. So why are you here? Why do you keep showing up? Ask yourself this. I think you are here because beneath this internal anger there is someone desperate to get out. Someone new and not yet discovered. If you surrender to this and make yourself vulnerable, when all is done, you will be renewed.”

  She had said the words I needed to hear. The next day I walked into the ballet studio and stared at Megan. I said, “I’m ready to be a dancer again.”

  * * *

  AFTER THAT, A shift occurred. I realized that anyone who was interested had to see me in my current state. The real state of where I was: socks on, out of shape, barely able to plié. So I opened the blinds and the doors to the studio and let the dancers and the students of the school watch what we were doing. No, I wasn’t the person they saw on YouTube or in performance. But it was reality. The reality of a dancer who had to do everything facing away from the mirror because he couldn’t stand the way he looked. The harsh reality that anyone can get injured, and this is what it looks like to try to climb back up from nothing. I wasn’t going to hide it anymore.

  CHAPTER 51

  Now that I had unburdened myself to some extent, the major obstacle was pain. The pain came whenever I pliéd. Dancers need their pliés in almost everything they execute. From the first exercise at the barre to the push needed to propel yourself into a jump, a plié is the most crucial part of dancing. It creates the flow and ease of one’s jump or a transition from one thing to another. The more brittle the plié, the less fluid the movement. My deltoid ligament and its surrounding bones pinched when compressed into a plié. At times it was simply a manageable dull ache; at other times, a debilitating shock to my foot. This was the crux of my misery. How could I execute what was demanded of me if I always felt this discomfort? I didn’t think I could.

  The team had a different way of looking at it (as they possessed something that I would learn to aspire to: perspective). When I couldn’t see any solution to the problem, they said there were ways through the pain. That I had to train my focus elsewhere and not obsess that “I can’t plié without pain.” I needed to train my mind to focus on the surrounding areas that could support the foot and therefore not rely so heavily on the ankle.

  My legs would need to take the pressure I had put on my foot for years.

  Beyond that, I needed to ignore my pain. Which is why, as Sue stressed to me, my happiness was paramount. She coaxed me into thinking that pain was foremost a mental issue. That I had become so accustomed to pain that I recognized it even when it might not be there. I had babied my foot for a year and a half and set up a coping mechanism to deal with its disability. I would limp when I didn’t need to limp. I would walk on the outsides of my feet rather than use the whole foot. Anything related to the foot resulted in a negativity that colored my entire outlook. I would have to focus my energy elsewhere and let the pinching resolve itself by way of a detour.

  * * *

  ONE OF THE many complex aspects of my foot injury was an insertional Achilles tendinopathy. In a nutshell, I had a hole in the lining of the Achilles tendon right at the base of the foot, just above the heel. It had caused a consistently sharp pain brought on by anything that involved a burst of a takeoff or a landing: running, jumping, landing from a turn, landing from a jump. This was a problem that arose during the rehab process in New York. To treat it previously, I had had injections and high-voltage shock wave therapy. I had tried everything to rid myself of this debilitating pain.

  The treatment for an insertional Achilles tendinopathy, according to the Australian team’s plan, was stairs. No injections. No interruption of the area with “remedies.” As prescribed and monitored by Paula, I was to walk up and down a stairwell on a half demi-pointe (on my toes, not on a full flat foot). Stepping to the sound of a metronome, adding more steps every other day. At the start, it was simple enough. Paula had me climb up and down a mere twelve stairs. It was curiously conservative. Surely, I thought, I climb more stairs than that in a day. Why not go fo
r the full flight? But each added step would be properly monitored every other day, so we knew exactly what might be too much if I woke up sore the next morning.

  The metronome app I had downloaded onto my phone was initially set at 140 beats per minute. I felt the tendon off and on. But I was being taught that pain wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Pain sometimes meant strengthening. So I stepped. Over and over and over. Each day, I’d walk into the stairwell off the long corridor of studios at the ballet center and set my metronome, letting the tick echo throughout the entire four flights of concrete. Dancers, administrators, or building superintendents would pass from floor to floor. Some had no idea who I was and why I was on the stairs every day. I would see the confusion in their faces when they’d enter to the echoing of the ticking, seeing my tall figure fast approaching to the beat. They’d flatten themselves to the wall to let me pass.

  So the methodical ticking wouldn’t drive me mad, I’d change measures. Some days a ¾ time, others a $$$. Eventually I was up to fifteen minutes of stairs, twice a day, skipping steps at 164 beats per minute. I would finish, exiting the concrete bunker desperate for air, sweating profusely. Dancers looked at me like I was mad. Surely I wasn’t dancing anything so tiring yet. But once they witnessed the workout in the stairwell, they’d simply say, “Stairs?”

  Traversing those stairs became as taxing as dancing a variation and coda. It would take an entire nine months to arrive at the full regimen I would employ for the rest of my time. Sue wanted me bounding up the stairs, a step at a time, sometimes two. It then made complete sense. Leaping up a couple of stairs was like taking off for a jump. In fact, it almost exactly reproduced the propulsion.

  Sue’s methods were designed to replicate what dancers needed to do onstage. The motions would just be taken out of context and put in another, more controlled environment. This was the assurance the team gave me whenever I feared a new exercise or step. There wasn’t anything they were suggesting that they weren’t completely confident I could do while they encouraged and watched.

  * * *

  THE STRUCTURE OF the rehab resembled ballet more and more. After I had worked with Megan for a while, I could wear tights and ballet shoes in the studio and even look into the mirror and see that the figure staring back had begun to look like a dancer. As Megan had promised, I was becoming renewed.

  I could actually bear to look and see if what I was doing resembled any form of classical ballet. I started to use the strength I had built on the stairs with Paula. Hamstrings and adductors that I couldn’t feel previously I could now activate in exercises Megan gave me.

  Each step in the ballet repertoire was added, one by one. A simple step, taken for granted when healthy, was a milestone. The first time I did one pirouette was a huge milestone. The first time I did a balancé (a waltzing step back and forth) was another milestone. Most steps caused pain at first. They felt stiff, mechanical. I would tentatively tiptoe through a step, never executing it more than 20 percent. Then, filled with fear, I would execute it as properly as I could. The movements were never at the level I expected of myself. But I had to let go of expectations. As hard as it was, I had to force myself to get over how it used to feel.

  “It will never feel like it used to,” Megan would tell me. “Maybe it will feel even better.”

  * * *

  AS THE MONTHS crawled along, Megan built combinations from the steps I could do. The class structure was much like a normal model of a daily class, except each combination was tailored to my ability at present. The further along the rehab went, the faster the pace.

  The birth of a step would be slow and methodical, then I could add on (more revolutions, a beat with the leg). While at first one pirouette had been a milestone, weeks later I was onto three, four, five turns.

  I charged on, trying my best to ignore my tenacious inner demons. Certain steps were particularly hard to manage. A chassé, a skimming step where one foot pushes while the other replaces, was as rudimentary as any step in the ballet technique. Little boys and girls did this step with ease. But the torsion when my left foot was in the back, needing to plié to push off, was extremely limiting and uncomfortable. I would cheat and chassé facing front, which bore no resemblance to the step that Megan gave. But I couldn’t bear weight on the foot in the angle the step required. Each day she would give it to me to execute, and each day she would troubleshoot it just as she had the day before. I knew how to fix it. I knew I needed to face more to the side. But that meant working into pain. And I didn’t yet trust myself to work through it. Pain still meant danger to me.

  Megan would sometimes test my abilities to do a step I hadn’t yet done, and if it proved too difficult, she would leave it for weeks. Then, one day she would give it back to me with no warning at all. Having left it and built the strength required through another avenue, I would revisit it with little problem.

  “You know you couldn’t do this a couple weeks ago, right?” she would remind me.

  * * *

  SUE CARED DEEPLY about helping me find hope. My mental state was my driving force, she believed. I knew this to be true. But I still didn’t see that hope. I literally couldn’t say the word “when.” When I am back dancing . . . When I perform again . . . It was always “if.” If I dance again . . . If I perform again . . . I knew I needed to manifest happiness. But the “what if” persisted.

  On Friday afternoons Sue and I would recap the week’s work.

  “See!” she would say, trying to make me realize that I had done what I couldn’t do previously, “You did a tombé pas de bourrée today!”

  I looked back at her stone-faced.

  “I’ll have to do a lot more than a tombé pas de bourrée onstage.”

  * * *

  THERE WERE DAYS when I would become incapable of cooperating with myself or anyone around me. The anger would well up again, and Megan was usually on the receiving end.

  Suddenly, nothing was positive, everything was grief-stricken.

  Managing these moods was exhausting, for myself and for Megan.

  As reluctant as I was to waste Megan’s time with my emotions, it was all interconnected. If I couldn’t properly communicate everything that was holding me back, then no true progress could be made.

  * * *

  ONE DAY, IN class with Megan, I tried to push on, but something was holding me back. I tried to plié. I tried to keep going. But I started to lose the willpower. It was one of those days when I didn’t have the fight in me. I couldn’t deal with the continual management of my body, begging for it to cooperate with me.

  Afterward, Megan asked what was bothering me. I choked up trying to explain it. I told her I instinctively resisted working through the pain. The conflict was debilitating and was preventing me, mentally and physically, from being able to work productively. And I was tired of it.

  “What do you think about a cortisone injection?” Megan asked. “I know we haven’t done one yet and it’s up our sleeve as an option. Maybe now is the time for it.”

  “Let’s talk to Sue,” I said, “and see what she thinks.”

  I dashed through the hallway full of dancers, my head down, hiding my tears. Sue’s office was empty. I began to sob. I couldn’t control it.

  I crawled onto the treatment table and continued to sob as we waited for Sue. Megan’s face was a study in worry and concern.

  “Oh dear,” Sue said as she closed the door and asked what had happened.

  I could barely get the words out.

  “It was pinching all day. I tried to push on with class, but something was holding me back and telling me not to even attempt at pushing through it.”

  Then it all came out. The angst that I dealt with by myself and hadn’t revealed to them. For the first time, I told them everything. It wasn’t a choice. I could no longer hold it back.

  I explained everything that I had been dealing with for the entire time I had been in Melbourne. I explained every insecurity, doubt, fear, apprehension. I said I
didn’t have the fight in me anymore. I didn’t have the strength to push on, continually managing the pain. I was alone here in Melbourne. The city offered a place of refuge and escape so I could heal, away from the tapping fingers on my shoulder asking me when I would be back and why it was taking so long. And although everyone in the building supported me, the reality was that I was doing this alone. I had left the comforts of friends and a life in New York. I’d left it all, unaware of how much time I would eventually need to heal. And I didn’t just need physical healing. Emotionally I had come stripped to nothing. And I was building everything back up again, but with people whom I didn’t deeply know and with whom I didn’t feel comfortable showing my true colors. I had to walk down the hallway with a face on, a mask of strength and cordiality, when in fact, inside I had never felt so low in my entire life. I had been fighting for so long. So, so long.

  I told them, “Most days I don’t have it in me, but I come in day after day, to fight and push on. I try not to waste your time, so I hide my feelings within myself. Then, when the day is over, I go home alone every night. The problems that you, the team, deal with during the day, I deal with every waking hour. I carry this struggle with me from the time I wake up until I finally can sleep at day’s end.

  “I can’t even fathom what has happened to me. It’s almost as if I can’t recognize where I am or who I am. I think, ‘How did I get here? How has so much time passed and I am still living this struggle? When will I feel, if ever, that the universe is working with me again?’ ”

  I said that I knew they believed that I would do it. That I would come out the other end. They had been telling me this for months. That the work I was doing was paying off. But I just couldn’t believe them. I had been disappointed so many times before. By a botched first surgery. A perpetually swollen ankle from a procedure that I didn’t even need. A second surgery to remedy the first. And setback after setback. I was brought here, to rely on them, because everything else was lost. And I secretly believed that everyone around me was slowly losing hope and giving up.