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Like Rosin, Part 4

To talk about Division IV that fall, I have to back up.

I started taking at the school when I was four years old,. I grew up in the dressing room, the hallway, and the three studios.

When I was eight, I started taking jazz, mostly because Ms. Elena told me that it would be good for my dancing. I don’t remember if this was something she said to everyone or if she thought it would be particularly good for me, but at that point it seemed silly to not dance as much as I could.

I am always identifiable as ballet-trained. The younger girls at Turning Pointe the summer before college—and by younger I mean eleven to thirteen or so, the only ones I could keep up with when we turned—called me a ballet dancer, and I corrected them to ballet-trained. It feels silly in retrospect, but I didn’t identify with ballet at that point. I was taking it again, even pointe, and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t where I felt most like myself.

That’s even more true now. I can’t shake my ballet sensibilities, the early way it shaped what feels correct to me. But jazz and modern take me gendered as I am, and they build me up instead of pressing me in. They always have. I was a ballet dancer first, but jazz taught me everything: my hips, my core, my turns, my leaps, my joy. And very, very belatedly, my gender.

Modern taught me Leah. Later on, it taught me to breathe.

Nazrin moved back to the city from Nashville in the summer that I was eleven. When she arrived, she had a broken foot, and none of us had any idea who she was. But she was a good teacher; that was what mattered. We all liked Nazrin, that one technique class per week, and when she showed us barre combinations, she did all the releves on one foot.

I was a snob, then, and didn’t take summer jazz. I wish I had, a little, because it was in jazz and modern that I came to love Nazrin.

Promotions between divisions at semester were unsurprising but always few. The next spring, there were five of us who were new to Division IV: Sydney, Addison, Marie, Katrina, and me. Sydney had been in Division III for two and a half years and had been working really hard to move up. Addison had improved so much over the past year. Marie had recently come over from gymnastics and had just needed a semester to figure out ballet and pointe. I honestly don’t remember what I thought about Katrina. But me? I was excited, but I didn’t understand.

Kristi was a better dancer, and Bella. So why me? I didn’t look like a ballet dancer, I wasn’t that good, and I hated pointe with a passion.

But I moved up, and that meant I was in Division IV for Recital. For Division III, Ms. Elena choreographed a very pretty, classical piece in white. I’m sure I would have enjoyed it; I like Ms. Elena’s choreography.

But.

For Division IV, Nazrin choreographed a more lyrical piece to “Out of My League” by Stephen Speaks, and I’ve never loved a ballet Recital dance so much. Our class section had to be en pointe because our dance wasn’t, and Division IV is a pointe division, but it was okay. It meant we got “Out of My League.”

Nazrin divided the seven of us into two groups. One group, made up of Marie, Katrina, Sydney, and Addison, she called ‘the leapers’ because they did a lot of sauts de chat in the dance. The other group – Danielle, Mia, and me – she called ‘the turners,’ because we did pique turns en dedans and en dehors.

It’s been fifteen years. I don’t have all of that dance, but when I listed to “Out of My League,” I get snatches.

That year, Nazrin not only choreographed my favorite ballet Recital piece ever; she choreographed my favorite jazz Recital piece ever, too: “Gone Daddy Gone.” There were four of us in jazz that year: Kaylee, Meg, a younger girl named Rae, and me. I was a head taller than the others and had done jazz for two years longer than Meg, who had a year more experience than Kaylee or Rae. It was a playful, joyful class, I loved them dearly, and one part of “Gone Daddy Gone” looked like a mother duck with ducklings. It was a perfect dance, making all of us, despite diverse abilities and heights, look good and have fun.

Nazrin was incredible at bringing out the best in us.

Once, I told Leah that I was late to her first fall class with Nazrin, and she thought that maybe she remembered. But it turns out I was off by a year. I was late to my first class with Nazrin the fall before. When I came in a couple of minutes late, while I was putting on my shoes, Nazrin asked me my name. I was a little hurt, I remember, because I’d had her that summer. It wasn’t a fair feeling – think of how many names she’d had to learn, and it had been more than a month since summer session ended! – but I wanted her to remember me.

I had no idea.

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Like Rosin, Part 3

Once upon a time, Leah compared an experience to water slipping through her fingers, and I told her that she should make it into dry water, a solid made of silica cages around water molecules, something she could hold onto. But when I told her that, I had never made any of the stuff myself. I had read a lot of research papers, but that’s not the same at all.

A Few Things I Have Learned About Dry Water

The silica… puffs, I suppose. We pour the silica under the hood because otherwise it gets everywhere and we would breathe it.

The dry water floats away, too, when poured. Like the silica.

A dry water particle is more stable than a water droplet, but that does not mean it won’t evaporate.

Dry water particles are microscale, and something that small can, in fact, slip through your fingers.

At the end of my mentorship senior year, my professor gave me two little vials. One had some hydrophobic silica in it. The other had some of the dry water I had made.

Over time, the dry water broke down. The second vial is now two layers: silica and liquid water.

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I’m Oklahoman and thus obligated to reblog photos of the Five Moons <3

rosella hightower photographed performing as kitri in don quixote by fred fehl

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olivia bell photographed rehearsing in balanchine’s ‘tarantella’ at the 2022 vail dance festival by christopher duggan

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The music for “When Love” is Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, a piece that my favorite dance teacher used a lot in the first modern dance class I ever took (which was the person who was my best friend at the time, said teacher whom we both adored, and me), so like, I cried watching an incredibly short clip of India and Christopher dancing this

ETA: lol I forgot that my blog name was literally from this piece

india bradley and christopher grant photographed performing in helen pickett’s ‘when love’ at the 2022 vail dance festival by christopher duggan

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lauren lovette and calvin royal iii photographed rehearsing as giselle and albrecht in ‘giselle pas de deux’ at the 2022 vail dance festival by christopher duggan

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calvin royal iii and lauren lovette photographed performing as albrecht and giselle in ‘giselle pas de deux’ at the 2022 vail dance festival by chris kendig

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clover mathis and lydia abarca photographed in jerome robbins’ afternoon of a faun by martha swope

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Like Rosin, Part 2

In college, I figured out that written word and dance were how I most naturally prayed. And it clicked then, that of course they were what I turned to when I was upset. My junior year of high school, the week before Nutcracker auditions when I was still new and felt so raw inside about everything, my roommate took a shower after study time, and I danced alone in our room to Valse des Fleurs. My senior year, the day someone asked me out for the first time, I turned off the light and danced to no music at all with steps I couldn’t explain but still—just a little bit—remember, trying to handle the growing knot in my stomach.

I’m not that person anymore. I used to wonder how someone could stop dancing. But now, I know that it just happens. You let it go, bit by bit, until it fades. Until it’s just snatches of occasional desire or memory. It’s not that I never find myself choreographing short phrases in the kitchen. It’s not that I wouldn’t take a class if I easily could. But it doesn’t feel like something at my core anymore.

The same process is supposed to happen with friendships. Most of the time, you grow away from someone. It’s not a clean break or a messy, ragged one. Your lives go in different directions, and you talk less and less, bit by bit. You think about each other less; you become less tied up in one another. The care fades. That is, the love fades.

It doesn’t mean it was never there. I have trouble with that, sometimes.

But when I was younger, dance was part of the very core of me, and right beside it was writing. It’s not coincidence that one of the most intimate relationships I’ve ever had, one of the friendships that most defined me, was based on the two means of expression I used to talk to God.

I made a mistake, I guess because I thought I could make it. In the fall of my first year of college, my boarding school email was deleted. I had gone through and saved some emails, but very few of them were emails from Leah. I think I was daunted by the hundreds – thousands – of emails there, and I knew that Leah had all of them. I thought that was enough.

When I first started to write this, I was working for the summer at a chemical engineering lab, and I had a lot of free time while waiting. (What no one tells you about experimental research is that it can involve a lot of waiting.) Some of that time I spent going through old emails, and as a result I read thousands—I truly believe that is not an exaggeration—of old emails and chats between Leah and me. But because I didn’t have the boarding school emails, there were gaps, both noticeable and unnoticeable.

There are other gaps, too.

Leah says that the first time we met was in the hallway of the ballet school her first summer there. The only person she knew was Marie, who was in my class, one above where Leah had been placed. In Leah’s telling, I walked by where she was standing, said, “Hi Leah,” and kept going. But the truth is, I’ve never remembered that moment. If it happened, then Marie must have told me who she was. Sometimes I thought I remembered – was I nervous about saying hi? – but most of the time I think I remembered Leah remembering.

So maybe – though I can’t really say, not anymore – I came to know a little of Leah through Marie. And in turn, Leah came to know a little of me entirely separate from the school. She went to camp, and she met one of my church friends. All along, church was a part of how we began, but it was another year before church entered into the story of how we became us.

It’s a little funny, you know, that words and dance were what bound us together, these ways that I prayed, and that church was there, woven through the foundation, whether we knew it or not.

I don’t think it was important in how we unbecame, any of the times. But it was always there nonetheless.

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“I was reading.”

“You’re always reading,” retorted Sandry. “The only way people can ever talk to you is to interrupt.”

“Then maybe they shouldn’t talk to me,” Tris said.

  —  The Healing in the Vine (Tamora Pierce)  

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One of the best sibling duo <3

JUNE AND ALEX 🗝

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Like Rosin, Part 1

I’ve told you before that I don’t feel comfortable telling our story, that you’re the one who does that. I’ve never been able to explain it well enough to satisfy you – or myself – but part of it probably comes down to something else I’ve told you before: you understand people better than I do.

You said that you don’t write fiction because it ends up too close to the truth. But that’s exactly why I write fiction. I understand the characters by design, and maybe it lets me figure out a little more about the truth. I wrote Heights to understand my relationship with Amy Grace. I started Film to understand what Vidhya might have been like, in a different world, and then... well. You know how that turned out. In the end, it was about you.

In truth, a lot of the fiction I’ve written in the past ten years has ended up that way, whether I intended it or not.

When I write nonfiction, there are always other people involved, and I don’t understand, not fully. It feels like I’m leaving a gap, their voice missing, and too often, it means I’m making a mistake. When I first started writing this, eight years ago now, I wrote that it might be a mistake. Now, I know that it is. But we do some things as closure, and we do some things in lieu of closure.

You decide which one this is.

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Like Rosin, Part 0

Once upon a time, I would have written to you the story of my day, something long and rambling, stretching out wide for connection. I would have sent you a dozen texts about five different things, the only kind of presence I could give. We would have walked circles and circles in our nostalgia, pressed our memories into ourselves like shoes in the rosin box.

Once upon a time, we found life in dark and cold December nights. It was pitch-black when we walked out of ballet class, the wind bit as we dashed from the car to the stage door, and we stuffed everything but dance into stolen moments and too little sleep. But through all of that, we found life because December meant stories.

Some stories we told to ourselves, silently or in whispers, in front of a mirror or just before an entrance in the wings. Others we told to family or friends as we went back and forth among studio, theater, home, school, no one else quite seeing us the way we saw ourselves. Some we told to each other, sprawling on a studio floor or in a dressing room. And of course, some we told to a full house at the theater.

Our stories wrapped us and our worlds and shone out colorful and bright through long nights, like the lights on the downtown trees. And maybe, in the end, they were too bright and too tight.

It's okay. It's okay that we grew and needed different stories and different people to tell them to. I know that now. This is just me, reaching back into the past for a moment and telling myself this story. Letting myself press these memories in because on this particular night, it will make it easier to dance without slipping.

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que bellas y que vestidos tan hermosos, Jalisco es diverso ❤️ 🧡💛💚💙💜🇲🇽🏳️‍🌈

source: @jaliscoes (twitter)

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Galina Ulanova in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (Kirov Ballet, 1934)

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Alexei Ratmansky correcting Melanie Hamrick Photo from Daniil’s ig.

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Hannah Fischer and Piotr Stanczyk in The Winter’s Tale (National Ballet of Canada, 2017)