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.