I started this blogging project with a few distinct motivations: about 60 % to work on the craft of my writing in a non-intimidating venue before entering PhD World, 30 % to narcissistically detail the events of my life for friends and acquaintances without, you know, having to personally correspond with them or anything, and 10 % to have some kind of emotional outlet because I am too broke to afford therapy but GAH I probably need it because these past few months have been unrelentingly dramatic on all fronts and mostly in good ways but sometimes shit has to happen before the bright shiny new paths open up and sometimes the person subletting your apartment turns out to be mildly psychotic and bars you from entering your own living room at any time because the two of you have different cultural notions of space ownership and vastly different notions of how to speak to other human beings and then a screaming altercation breaks out and you're cast from your apartment into the parking lot in 98 degree heat with nowhere to go, tears streaming down your face, shaking with indignation, a total HOT MESS.
But anyway. All I really meant to say was that this post may lean more toward the personally therapeutic than the eloquently styled. This is why: I have left Bleep U. after having been a student there for seven years, and have just moved to tropical-storm threatened YDC (You Dork City) to strike out in a new field. I know, I KNOW, what an obnoxiously stereotypical Young Person thing to do. Couldn't I have been a little more original in my life trajectory? Everyone does it, or talks about doing it, and I'm sure that there is absolutely no new observational ground to be broken in the genre of smallish-town-girl-uproots-herself-and-tries-to-make-it-in-the-Big-Schnapple. Please. But nonetheless I must personally come to terms with this momentous change, and therefore have accorded myself exactly one blog entry to wax nostalgic about the Bleep U. Era, to ponder the immutable rhythms of time, to contemplate notions of place and self... and all the rest of that crap.
To be honest, the implications of this move have not quite set in yet. I don't feel as emotionally sucker-punched as anticipated. Maybe I did most of the letting go when I was actually there, clearing out my locker and my teaching office, boxing up/ selling off/ throwing out my meager personal possessions, saying goodbye to various people piecemeal over the course of spring and summer. Or maybe-- more plausibly-- I'm in the denial stage, fully expecting to hop on a flight in a few days, ride the airport shuttle through vast stretches of cornfield, wheel my suitcase a few blocks back to my apartment in good old Snackwell Parish (incestuous stronghold of Bleep U. schmoozic students for generations), attend various stilted start-of-semester meetings, scowl at the influx of bright-eyed optimistic new blood, duck into Schitty Bakery for coffee / croissant and inevitable run-ins with everyone I know, cross the street to seek (in vain) a practice room in the teeming windowless circular building, flee to my closet-sized teaching studio in the highest room of the tallest tower and say hello to whoever else might be lurking up there, dig out my score of the Schlach two-and-three-part inventions and begin to work through them on the startlingly reverberant upright piano, let the unassailable logic of counterpoint wash over me, will myself into a place of calm acceptance at the prospect of yet another year here, start to brainstorm escape routes. OH WAIT.
It will sting like a motherfucking stinging nettle eventually, I know. My identity is rather deeply intertwined with this institution, probably more so than most other students who pass through. Prior to my seven-year student "tenure"-- and seven years in itself is a LONG time, enough time for Harry Potter's entire hero narrative to unfold, enough time for, like, twenty-nine generations of iThings to hit the market-- I spent two summers at Bleep U.'s pre-college piano intensive, a program that lured me in as a garden variety angsty maladjusted teen and spat me out the musical zealot we now know and love/ tolerate.
Things did not get off to a promising start, though. This is the story of my maiden voyage: fifteen-year-old me had boarded a connecting flight from the West Coast, through Chicago, and to Dingyanapolis, where I would take a shared cab for the hour-long ride to campus and check in at the dorms. Fifteen-year-old me had also purchased and consumed some "authentic" deep-dish Chicago pizza at the O'Hare airport. The suspect nature of this food and my natural predisposition to motion sickness culminated in a vomiting incident on the side of the highway in KKK-infested Schmindiana Nowheresville, an incident that sadly did not clear a wide berth for the outfit I was wearing. My mom had repeatedly told me to pack a change of clothes in my carry-on. Had I listened to her? OF COURSE NOT. She was my mom. So as penance for my adolescent hubris, I made a grand splash at Orientation that afternoon as the kid who had puked on herself.
The weeks that followed were a vast improvement over that first day; in fact, they may still hold the title of Best Time of My Life. The stars aligned in such a way that all at once I found my intellectual/ spiritual vocation and felt, for the first time, a complete sense of acceptance among my peers. The notebooks that I kept during this time attest to both facets of Awesome. In the front sections are meticulous records of lessons, masterclasses, and seminars, scribbled down in loopy cursive as I tried to absorb every morsel dispensed by teachers and invited speakers. Sonata form. Principles of postural alignment. Plagal cadences versus authentic cadences versus the ever-titillating Phrygian half-cadence. The psychology of performance anxiety. The Chopin etudes in (subjective) order of difficulty. Definitions of dodecaphony, aleatory, minimalism. And, delightfully, I still have notes from a guest masterclass by Teacher, as in he who became my beloved and influential professor for three years in grad school. Usually we don't have tangible relics of these first impressions; we have to rack our brains for vestiges of these individuals before they assumed important roles in our lives, and our recollections are by nature distorted through the lens of more recent interactions. But here, HERE was an unbiased account of what my future professor had to say about the C-sharp minor prelude and fugue (Book 1), the B Minor Rhapsody, and the A-flat minor Impromptu on a June afternoon in 2002. The ideas and vocabulary are unmistakeably his: the resoundingly true artistic convictions, the wry asides, the tinge of despair at our culture's descent into crassness. Oh Teacher, look at us now...
And then there were the BACK sections of my academy notebooks, which documented the social element of camp. Okay, so maybe I wasn't hanging on every word of every lecture all the time, because how then would I have had time to conduct so many illicit written dialogues with my peers? There are pages upon pages of gossip and doodles, caricatures of the faculty and their chain-smoking ways, discussions of who was ridiculously good at piano and would get into Toolyard and who liked who and who had sneaked out of the dorms to go skinny-dipping in the fountain, conjectures about which of the counselors were screwing and in what practice rooms and on what grand pianos and with what sound effects. (Years later, when a number of us became counselors ourselves and were sadly not carrying out such activities, I hoped that the students were at least concocting rumors at our expense). The in-jokes abounded, summer love blushed, and we all cried and were devastated when we had to leave and return to our non-utopian high school existences.
I was so taken with the place, apparently, that I came back, and came back again, and stayed, and then did another degree, and then oh what the hell tacked on another year, became part of the furniture, and it got to the point where Professor Schmartledge would see me in the hallway and query, in his briny Australian accent, "Shouldn't you be about DONE by now, Alaner?"
So, school was school. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Actually it never quite achieved the dizzying joie-de-vivre of summer camp, and it never plummeted to the depths of, say, seventh grade. But certainly there were peaks and valleys, and bat caves and vortices, and numerous other topographical features that typically characterize late adolescence / early adulthood / a burgeoning life in music. I was pretty insufferably gung-ho at the outset. Lessons with faculty with long impressive biographies! Let me show off how much I know to them! Music Theory is totally cool, guys! And choir? I LOVE choir! And boyfriends! I need lots of boyfriends to validate my existence and to function as receptacles for all of my intense feeling-y feelings! Also, alcohhhhhollllll! WEEEEED!!! And then, thunk. A lot of reality checks. The discovery that music performance entailed not just enthusiasm and talent but also crazy-intense, self-flagellating, oft-solitary dedication, and even after you busted your ass you were promised nothing in terms of recognition or material gains. The accompanying discovery that your relationships with your principal teachers were kind of like your romantic relationships-- i.e. all-consuming, usually not quite the right fit, plagued with communication problems, and headed for disaster. The realization that self-acceptance was a long and difficult road, one not always compatible with a career path of artistic martyrdom, and that the university system didn't really care about either your personal journey or your professional prospects as long as you chug-chug-chugged along the conveyor belt of Degrees R Us and paid all your bursar bills on time.
Anyway, let's summarize by the numbers.
Teachers: I had three-and-a-half over the years (the "half" is for a sabbatical replacement). The first professed a distaste for most piano literature pre-1830 and an abiding love for Bill O'Reilly-- we had a messy breakup, to say the least. The next one cracked the whip and cracked it good, but eventually he deemed me too fragile and loopily intellectual to become one of the sleek competition thoroughbreds that he was in the business of grooming. So he sent me to Teacher the humanist, and there I happily stayed. (Teacher! It was you all along).
Living situations: I spent two years in the dorms and divided the remaining years among three different apartments. I always had roommates, some of whom remain dear friends and others of whom I probably don't need to run into ever again because we were about THIS close to killing each other. Good times were had in every place of residence, but for me most of the memories come from Snackwell Parish, that dumpy shoebox apartment complex where everybody lived at some point. (And I do mean everybody-- in its original incarnation, Snackwell housed some very prominent music faculty. Slowly it sank into decrepitude and became the official living quarters of broke-ass students). Though I didn't officially move there until the grad school epoch, I was an honorary Snackwellian from the earliest days. There was always a party going on. It could be a legendary one in which the cops showed up and all the underagers cowered in somebody's bedroom with the lights out, afraid to draw breath-- or there was that one where a full-on fight broke out over someone's girlfriend and suddenly the whole living room crowd was engaged in a massive tug-of-war to restrain the warring factions. And then sometimes the parties were totally lame and I'd look around and realize that I knew everyone in the room and everything about them and I'd rather just go home and search for clips of Beethoven string quartets on YouTube and call my mom. But more memorable than the epic pan-musician gatherings were the spontaneous small groups or one-on-one interactions that Snackwell seemed to foster. It was here, in identically shaped but diversely furnished apartments, over tea or coffee or questionable mixed drinks, that many of my acquaintance-ships made the quantum leap to friendships. We played board games, we watched movies, we tried to cook stuff with varying degrees of success (an ice cream cake doused in flaming rum was the clear winner). One time we created an arsenal of water balloons and drove around campus ambushing sorority girls. It was a small college town: we were bored, we felt trapped, we were stressed and confused about our life paths, we didn't have a huge array of cultural events and hot bars to divert our attentions. So we manufactured our own ridiculousness, and in in the process built our support systems.
Identity crises: I had about five billion of these. On a daily basis, my thought process would run something to the effect of: Is Alana a) concert pianist material, b) an academic square peg trying to fit into a piano-shaped hole (ummm, that's what she said?), c) a writery creative type, or d) deluded, none of the above, the world's best dilettante? Ohhhhh, the navel-gazing. Part of it was me, and part of it had to do with the environment. Something in the atmosphere of the Bleep U. schmoozic school made me, and others, especially prone to insecurity. My theory: when you take a glut of talented individuals and plop them down in a remote location where the only real cultural life stems from the university, most of that ability just sits and stagnates, everyone whittling away at his or her craft with correspondingly little opportunity to actually put it into practice. And eventually everyone gets so exhausted from running on the hamster-wheel of degree requirements that networking outside the school system becomes an afterthought. Not to mention that inside the school system your primary department may be a wee bit dysfunctional... as in too busy squabbling over administrative responsibilities to communicate effectively with students, let alone assist them in career development. This is one reason why I stayed in school there for so long. I became increasingly inert. The more years I'd been there, the harder it was to conceive of possibilities on the fabled outside, and I had just enough funding as a graduate student to squeak by, so why not stick around a little longer, forestall the inevitable difficult decision-making? Thus the degrees piled up and I became, as a friend recently put it, a "lifer."
But I was lucky enough to become the favorite stepchild of several other departments over the years (choir, theory, schmoozicology). This did little to lessen my confusion about OMG what to do in life?! until one day in the second year of my Master's, the most intimidating and high-powered member of the schmoozicology faculty (Schmarvard Guy) sat me down in his office. He had been my professor for a semester and a half, and I was sure that I was in trouble with him somehow and that this would be a fearful day of reckoning. But to my intense surprise, he bluntly opined that I would be wasting my best abilities by languishing in the purgatory of performance grad school, and that I would make a better addition to the scholarly community and would probably be happier there. I rebuffed him and got all defensive. WHAT? Wasn't a life in academia the most purgatorial experience of them all? Yes, other teachers and mentors had suggested similar paths for me, but never so forcefully or tactlessly. And yet Schmarvard Guy was ALWAYS right about EVERYTHING-- I had noticed this in class; he had a formidably clear-headed view of the universe-- and it was only a matter of time before I conceded that his assessment of my character was spot-on. So in the end I took his advice and applied to PhD programs (a fun [not!] process detailed in my very first blog post). Here, finally, was my long-sought-after escape, my ticket out of this one-horse town, my chance to try out a field in which eccentricity and far-flung interests were maybe assets and not detriments.
And that is exactly why I'm in the Big City right now, typing away at 5 AM as a scary unprecedented storm system approaches. What better time to reminisce and process the last major chunk of my life than right now, when forces of nature have placed the entire East Coast under house arrest? I'm sipping a Dark 'n Stormy cocktail, listening to Bob Dylan's "Hurricane," and forcing all of my thoughts out into the ether before we lose power.
Natural disasters aside, I am so deliriously happy with the way things have worked out. Little signs keep cropping up that say, "Good call-- you're supposed to be here." Signs like my hilarious, proactive, and direct new teachers who I can already tell are going to give me the support and direction that I often missed back at Bleep U. Or my excellent apartment / roommate situation complete with an upright piano and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Or the presence of many other young up-and-coming musicians in my building and neighborhood-- it's an upgraded, more-fabulous extension of Snackwell where we can pretend to be grownups but retain some irresponsible behaviors.
Yes, I'll miss school. Yes, these were character-forming, crucial, young-adult years full of growth and first experiences. But towards the end, I felt like I'd wrung out the last few drops of what I could possibly gain from the environment. Most of my friends had left already. I was a known quantity in the school hierarchy, no longer upwardly mobile. I was getting jaded, on automatic a lot of the time, not quite my best self. I needed to go somewhere new and start from scratch, become a saucer-eyed, awestruck addition to the seething throng of humanity. Now I'm here and it's ON. Provided we don't all get washed away.
As noted earlier, my first moments at Bleep U. were defined by projectile vomit. My last night there, nearly a decade later, unfurled a little more elegantly. After a deeply stressful week that involved getting into a screaming match with my raging asshole of a subletter (see Paragraph 1) and moving all of my worldly belongings (Paragraph 3), I ended up at the only martini bar in town with a truly swell arrangement of people-- the last iteration of a quirky friend group that I always seemed to have. We ordered some classic cocktails. We shot the breeze per usual. I yammered on about my insane excitement for this next, radically different phase of life. And then the wonderful live musician at the bar consented to do a cover of my favorite favorite FAVORITE song, a woebegone Fink Ployd ballad. We sang along, boozy, croony, swoony-- I knew every word, of course, and it's one of those songs that adapts its meaning to whatever bittersweet life situation you find yourself in at the time. Every weird tight sensation in your chest, every half-regret and secret confession, everything you can't quite articulate finds expression in the simple strummed chords and sad suggestive lyrics. You remember exactly why pop music was invented and you fall off your elitist invulnerable pedestal, responding viscerally to the Common Man's language of melancholia. You use the song to feel everything that you need to feel, to say your proper, emotionally fraught farewell for which you can't quite find the words. You almost lose it a little bit right there, in front of everyone, but then you slap on a smile, buck up, and remember to keep your eyes on the road ahead. And then poof, the next day you're gone.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Life at the Chalet, Part Deux
I swear that I intended for the last post to be an actual description of my job-- there was a bullet-point outline in my head and everything. But then I got bogged down in the exposition, which in turn needed its own exposition, and then the whole thing morphed into a Russian Nesting Dolls situation wherein I was exploring the origins of my relationship with the dance world and delving into the creation myth of Alana the Ballet Pianist. I had entered a labyrinthine past walled with mirrors-- full-length BALLET mirrors in which were reflected various stages of my young balletic self. BOOM. Nine years old, performing a solo at the county fair to the Superman soundtrack. Later, going in for pointe shoe fittings with a woman named Candi. Doing barre to the entirety of Abbey Road with that one especially renowned and inspirational masterclass teacher. Learning Balanchine-ish neoclassical choreography to Corelli trio sonatas, set by an acerbic, paunchy middle-aged guest choreographer from the Bay Area. Lounging around with the other girls at one of the summer programs-- the summer immediately preceding 9/11, I remember now, weirdly, that last gasp of marshmallow-fluff innocuous Americana-- comparing our flexibility, watching Center Stage for the twenty-seventh time, doting on our token male comrade (a foul-mouthed, ferociously talented Hispanic kid from a hard-knock family whom we nicknamed "Bobbo"; he has now achieved professional success and recently appeared in DANCE Magazine as one of their "25 to watch").
And I'm off again. Sorry, sorry. All of my chapter-closing and new-phase-in-life-commencing has unleashed a wicked deluge of nostalgia and introspection. Mental furniture gets jostled around in the move. Random dusty memories spill out of shelves and desk drawers as everything shifts; I gather up these fragments to return them to their rightful, dormant places in my personal chronology, but the mere act of touch sets off a chain of associations and then I'm chasing scents, voices, faces to the outskirts of consciousness. It's fascinating, paralyzing, and sometimes gut-sockingly emotional. I've forgotten so much. I was that person? How did we get here? What else is lost and locked away?
But with great difficulty, I wrest myself back to the semi-present. Let's do this semi-bullet point style to stay on task.
*** My Working Environment: The Greater Schlockston Area ***
Although I'm a native Californian-- outwardly bubbly, health-conscious, astrologically inclined, etc.-- the East Coast has always beckoned me with promises of a pulsing cultural and intellectual life; this must be some kind of reverse Manifest Destiny. And now that I've lived there for a bit, I feel I could have almost been a Schlockstonian from the beginning. In fact, I'm related to a clan of them, which might explain my strange sense of familiarity. But no, THAT I can attribute to the widespread saturation of upper-middle-class students and young professionals, people exactly like me who read on the train and check their iPhones and frequent hipster cafes and chic little boutiques and hopping brunch spots. It's all a little too comfortable, actually. If I require a drugstore amenity, there's a CVS on every corner. Need cash? Bank of America is on every corner opposite CVS. Craving an avocado-arugula-walnut panini and some organic, fair-trade iced coffee? There are probably about five options in a ten-minute walking radius. Even as I benefit from these conveniences, I feel a niggling sense of don't-get-used-to-this. Maybe this stems from my many scrappy, frugal years in the Midwest in which I had to bum rides off of friends and acquaintances just to get shampoo, but I don't feel like I've earned the right to this easy lifestyle. Nor have all of my peers with their fancy liberal arts degrees and research marketing internships and whatever, who so confidently and unthinkingly don the mantle of adulthood. We're supposed to struggle and be poor and in the process stretch ourselves, forge our characters through not having access to everything we want all the time-- otherwise we'll completely skip over these growth-spurts-in-times-of-adversity and turn into soulless, entitled yuppie scum.
I sound like an asshole. I've been reading too much Paul Auster and William Burroughs at the Public Library on my breaks. They're so GRITTY and raw, says my inner late-to-bloom anarchic adolescent, the one who wants to rip away the insipid veil of modern civilization to reveal the seething existential nightmare below. Screw these young entrepreneurial guys on their Macs with their corporate doublespeak, these baby-voiced prissily-tweezed-eyebrowed girls on their way from Au Bon Pain to Zumba class. I want to talk to the bums, the crazies, the terminal fuckups and dark doppelgangers who lurk in every cultured enclave of the city. I want to stare into their sunken eyes and see my own naked dread reflected back. But then I also want an earl grey almond latte and a pear-ginger scone, and I want a ticket to see "Friends with Benefits," and somehow I manage to procure these things but stop short of engaging the seedy underbelly of society. And then my break is over anyway, and it's time to return to...
*** My Wonderful Artistic Escapist Job at the Schlockston Chalet ***
This has been great. I have no regrets. I actually really like playing the piano in this capacity, where I am absolutely necessary but not the center of attention. Required to be attentive and consistent yet not held to severe artistic scrutiny at all times-- in short, a utilitarian musician.
So this has been a day in the life:
1. I make a somewhat lengthy but not unpleasant morning commute from my sublet (in the 'burbs, nearer to Schmarvard) on the train, usually sucking down some strong coffee and reading the trashy free publication that gets handed out in the stations. The Ballet is downtown, a gorgeous four-story red brick building with half-moon windows looking into the city center; it contains 7 (!) studios, administrative offices, a locker room, a kitchenette, a physical therapy center, and a dance library of books, scores, videos, and periodicals. (I definitely spent a free hour watching a DVD of Balanchine's Jewels. And then Nureyev dancing in Giselle another day. And then a documentary about company life in the Paris Opera Ballet. What a resource!)
2. I play for my first block-- two technique classes, totaling three hours. The faculty rotates from day to day, and what a faculty it is. Several of them are current company dancers while others are older and retired, hailing from NYC Ballet or Europe or San Francisco or Canada. Despite their range of personalities and teaching philosophies, I have (shockingly) not had a negative experience with a single one of them. They're musical, cordial, and accommodating.
I've loved listening to their anecdotes and advice. I've learned about anatomical principles of balance, alignment, and rotation. Learned about the stylistic traits of Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, and other choreographic giants. Learned about corps work and company rehearsal etiquette. And then there was the one really hilarious, inspirational teacher who was hell-bent on getting these many docile and exceedingly well-bred students to stop going through the motions and actually emote in their dancing. In our age of texting and technological outsourcing of social interaction, he said, young people have lost the ability to be expressive with their physical selves. Facial muscles have atrophied. "LOLs" can be relayed with no outward conveyance of amusement. "You guys are so tame in real life!" he chastised. "You're like, 'I'm WILD on Facebook. THAT'S where my personality is." I quite literally-- in the flesh-- LOL'ed at that one, marking myself as a member of a slightly older generation.
3. After a break (in which I explore the city and denigrate the hipsters and yuppies from my critical pedestal, all the while knowing that this impulse actually comes from a place of self-loathing) I return for the afternoon/ evening block, another three hours of playing. This is the portion that mildly terrified me at first: repertoire class. As in, set choreography from canonic ballets, with set music. Music that I couldn't just manufacture on the spot to fit a classroom exercise ("hmmm, should I play the theme from Brahms' Handel Variations or 'When I'm Sixty-Four' for this tendu? Both would work...") No, for rep class I've had to... sight-read.
Some pianists have a natural proclivity for deciphering any piece of music placed before them and producing a recognizable rendition at a level close to their own playing abilities. I salute these pianists. I envy these pianists. I am not one of them. Some sort of trade off must have occurred long ago when the deities were doling out musical gifts : "We'll bestow a good ear, an innate expressiveness, and some degree of technical facility on this girl, but mix in a strain of performance anxiety and some FUNCTIONAL ILLITERACY just to even the score." I have, historically, frozen up bigtime when called upon to read at sight. There's an unforgivable time lag between decoding the visual symbols, hearing the music in my head, and physically rendering it on the keyboard. The catastrophically sputtering result bears little resemblance to my "real" (i.e. rehearsed or memorized) playing. People give me this look of "WTF how did you ever hack your way through three performance degrees at a prestigious university you can't even read music like W.T.F." and I wonder the same. But then part of me thinks that all is not lost. There was that one party where I, in some magical just-right state of inebriation, grabbed the Schumann concerto and read most of it rather smoothly. There was that OTHER party where, a little wine-sodden, I attempted a four-hand reduction of a Bach orchestral suite with a friend and made it through. Obviously a little bit of alcohol bequeathed me with new, fabulous talents. (Or more likely it just removed some psychological inhibitions and allowed me to process complex input more fluently. Whatever the reason, I resolved to keep drinking).
But alas, I could not show up in good conscience to my fabulous job having knocked back a few. I would have to just suck it up and try to produce some workable version of the scores placed in front of me. Luckily, the ballet rehearsal process usually involves reiteration of short increments, so I could kind of save face by scanning ahead as we repeated the first eight measures five times. Also luckily, some of the music was fairly intuitive and not too technically demanding. But unluckily, some of the music was Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev-- beautiful yet dense and difficult, and I committed some heinous crimes against those composers on first readings before coming up with passable faked versions. Still, over the course of the job, my sight-reading skills have progressed from "WTF no seriously WTF" to "hmmm, needs improvement." This is a big deal!
I was eventually assigned to a group of younger students who were set to perform an excerpt from "Sleeping Beauty." Man, did they work hard. Their teacher-- who actually hails from my university as well, though in a slightly earlier era-- was highly motivated, ablaze with pedagogical dedication, and the timbre of her rehearsals lifted my spirits every day. The girls would come curtsy to me individually afterward and say "Thank you." They asked me with awe how I moved my fingers so fast. I asked them how their feet were faring after so many hours of pointe work, and told them they were rock stars for all the work they were putting in. The teacher and I exchanged a few little gossipy departmental tidbits about Bleep University, and I started to feel strangely removed from that bureaucratically toxic, oft artistically flaccid environment that has so jaded me in recent times. I started to feel buzzy with a love for the arts, with a less-cantankerous opinion of the younger generation, with new personal potential, with being part of something bigger than myself.
I was sad when they asked me to stay on for the year and I couldn't. But the door is open for next summer, and I hope to maintain a relationship with this wonderful institution. Right now, You Dork City beckons with all its grit and excess and yuppiedom and sky-high real estate: I move to Poshington Blights on Saturday, with anticipation and trepidation for the many Schmoozicological / life adventures that await, but with ballet in my bones, in my ears, in my heart.
End scene.
And I'm off again. Sorry, sorry. All of my chapter-closing and new-phase-in-life-commencing has unleashed a wicked deluge of nostalgia and introspection. Mental furniture gets jostled around in the move. Random dusty memories spill out of shelves and desk drawers as everything shifts; I gather up these fragments to return them to their rightful, dormant places in my personal chronology, but the mere act of touch sets off a chain of associations and then I'm chasing scents, voices, faces to the outskirts of consciousness. It's fascinating, paralyzing, and sometimes gut-sockingly emotional. I've forgotten so much. I was that person? How did we get here? What else is lost and locked away?
But with great difficulty, I wrest myself back to the semi-present. Let's do this semi-bullet point style to stay on task.
*** My Working Environment: The Greater Schlockston Area ***
Although I'm a native Californian-- outwardly bubbly, health-conscious, astrologically inclined, etc.-- the East Coast has always beckoned me with promises of a pulsing cultural and intellectual life; this must be some kind of reverse Manifest Destiny. And now that I've lived there for a bit, I feel I could have almost been a Schlockstonian from the beginning. In fact, I'm related to a clan of them, which might explain my strange sense of familiarity. But no, THAT I can attribute to the widespread saturation of upper-middle-class students and young professionals, people exactly like me who read on the train and check their iPhones and frequent hipster cafes and chic little boutiques and hopping brunch spots. It's all a little too comfortable, actually. If I require a drugstore amenity, there's a CVS on every corner. Need cash? Bank of America is on every corner opposite CVS. Craving an avocado-arugula-walnut panini and some organic, fair-trade iced coffee? There are probably about five options in a ten-minute walking radius. Even as I benefit from these conveniences, I feel a niggling sense of don't-get-used-to-this. Maybe this stems from my many scrappy, frugal years in the Midwest in which I had to bum rides off of friends and acquaintances just to get shampoo, but I don't feel like I've earned the right to this easy lifestyle. Nor have all of my peers with their fancy liberal arts degrees and research marketing internships and whatever, who so confidently and unthinkingly don the mantle of adulthood. We're supposed to struggle and be poor and in the process stretch ourselves, forge our characters through not having access to everything we want all the time-- otherwise we'll completely skip over these growth-spurts-in-times-of-adversity and turn into soulless, entitled yuppie scum.
I sound like an asshole. I've been reading too much Paul Auster and William Burroughs at the Public Library on my breaks. They're so GRITTY and raw, says my inner late-to-bloom anarchic adolescent, the one who wants to rip away the insipid veil of modern civilization to reveal the seething existential nightmare below. Screw these young entrepreneurial guys on their Macs with their corporate doublespeak, these baby-voiced prissily-tweezed-eyebrowed girls on their way from Au Bon Pain to Zumba class. I want to talk to the bums, the crazies, the terminal fuckups and dark doppelgangers who lurk in every cultured enclave of the city. I want to stare into their sunken eyes and see my own naked dread reflected back. But then I also want an earl grey almond latte and a pear-ginger scone, and I want a ticket to see "Friends with Benefits," and somehow I manage to procure these things but stop short of engaging the seedy underbelly of society. And then my break is over anyway, and it's time to return to...
*** My Wonderful Artistic Escapist Job at the Schlockston Chalet ***
This has been great. I have no regrets. I actually really like playing the piano in this capacity, where I am absolutely necessary but not the center of attention. Required to be attentive and consistent yet not held to severe artistic scrutiny at all times-- in short, a utilitarian musician.
So this has been a day in the life:
1. I make a somewhat lengthy but not unpleasant morning commute from my sublet (in the 'burbs, nearer to Schmarvard) on the train, usually sucking down some strong coffee and reading the trashy free publication that gets handed out in the stations. The Ballet is downtown, a gorgeous four-story red brick building with half-moon windows looking into the city center; it contains 7 (!) studios, administrative offices, a locker room, a kitchenette, a physical therapy center, and a dance library of books, scores, videos, and periodicals. (I definitely spent a free hour watching a DVD of Balanchine's Jewels. And then Nureyev dancing in Giselle another day. And then a documentary about company life in the Paris Opera Ballet. What a resource!)
2. I play for my first block-- two technique classes, totaling three hours. The faculty rotates from day to day, and what a faculty it is. Several of them are current company dancers while others are older and retired, hailing from NYC Ballet or Europe or San Francisco or Canada. Despite their range of personalities and teaching philosophies, I have (shockingly) not had a negative experience with a single one of them. They're musical, cordial, and accommodating.
I've loved listening to their anecdotes and advice. I've learned about anatomical principles of balance, alignment, and rotation. Learned about the stylistic traits of Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, and other choreographic giants. Learned about corps work and company rehearsal etiquette. And then there was the one really hilarious, inspirational teacher who was hell-bent on getting these many docile and exceedingly well-bred students to stop going through the motions and actually emote in their dancing. In our age of texting and technological outsourcing of social interaction, he said, young people have lost the ability to be expressive with their physical selves. Facial muscles have atrophied. "LOLs" can be relayed with no outward conveyance of amusement. "You guys are so tame in real life!" he chastised. "You're like, 'I'm WILD on Facebook. THAT'S where my personality is." I quite literally-- in the flesh-- LOL'ed at that one, marking myself as a member of a slightly older generation.
3. After a break (in which I explore the city and denigrate the hipsters and yuppies from my critical pedestal, all the while knowing that this impulse actually comes from a place of self-loathing) I return for the afternoon/ evening block, another three hours of playing. This is the portion that mildly terrified me at first: repertoire class. As in, set choreography from canonic ballets, with set music. Music that I couldn't just manufacture on the spot to fit a classroom exercise ("hmmm, should I play the theme from Brahms' Handel Variations or 'When I'm Sixty-Four' for this tendu? Both would work...") No, for rep class I've had to... sight-read.
Some pianists have a natural proclivity for deciphering any piece of music placed before them and producing a recognizable rendition at a level close to their own playing abilities. I salute these pianists. I envy these pianists. I am not one of them. Some sort of trade off must have occurred long ago when the deities were doling out musical gifts : "We'll bestow a good ear, an innate expressiveness, and some degree of technical facility on this girl, but mix in a strain of performance anxiety and some FUNCTIONAL ILLITERACY just to even the score." I have, historically, frozen up bigtime when called upon to read at sight. There's an unforgivable time lag between decoding the visual symbols, hearing the music in my head, and physically rendering it on the keyboard. The catastrophically sputtering result bears little resemblance to my "real" (i.e. rehearsed or memorized) playing. People give me this look of "WTF how did you ever hack your way through three performance degrees at a prestigious university you can't even read music like W.T.F." and I wonder the same. But then part of me thinks that all is not lost. There was that one party where I, in some magical just-right state of inebriation, grabbed the Schumann concerto and read most of it rather smoothly. There was that OTHER party where, a little wine-sodden, I attempted a four-hand reduction of a Bach orchestral suite with a friend and made it through. Obviously a little bit of alcohol bequeathed me with new, fabulous talents. (Or more likely it just removed some psychological inhibitions and allowed me to process complex input more fluently. Whatever the reason, I resolved to keep drinking).
But alas, I could not show up in good conscience to my fabulous job having knocked back a few. I would have to just suck it up and try to produce some workable version of the scores placed in front of me. Luckily, the ballet rehearsal process usually involves reiteration of short increments, so I could kind of save face by scanning ahead as we repeated the first eight measures five times. Also luckily, some of the music was fairly intuitive and not too technically demanding. But unluckily, some of the music was Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev-- beautiful yet dense and difficult, and I committed some heinous crimes against those composers on first readings before coming up with passable faked versions. Still, over the course of the job, my sight-reading skills have progressed from "WTF no seriously WTF" to "hmmm, needs improvement." This is a big deal!
I was eventually assigned to a group of younger students who were set to perform an excerpt from "Sleeping Beauty." Man, did they work hard. Their teacher-- who actually hails from my university as well, though in a slightly earlier era-- was highly motivated, ablaze with pedagogical dedication, and the timbre of her rehearsals lifted my spirits every day. The girls would come curtsy to me individually afterward and say "Thank you." They asked me with awe how I moved my fingers so fast. I asked them how their feet were faring after so many hours of pointe work, and told them they were rock stars for all the work they were putting in. The teacher and I exchanged a few little gossipy departmental tidbits about Bleep University, and I started to feel strangely removed from that bureaucratically toxic, oft artistically flaccid environment that has so jaded me in recent times. I started to feel buzzy with a love for the arts, with a less-cantankerous opinion of the younger generation, with new personal potential, with being part of something bigger than myself.
I was sad when they asked me to stay on for the year and I couldn't. But the door is open for next summer, and I hope to maintain a relationship with this wonderful institution. Right now, You Dork City beckons with all its grit and excess and yuppiedom and sky-high real estate: I move to Poshington Blights on Saturday, with anticipation and trepidation for the many Schmoozicological / life adventures that await, but with ballet in my bones, in my ears, in my heart.
End scene.
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