The Gym No. 1
Hey there. I hope you all are doing well. The Gym is my new letter ritual (i.e, quiet newsletter, lo-fi digital zine, finite wander zone, loose ends, accountability check).
Dance critics must join gyms.
—Gia Kourlas, "Twisting Body and Mind," NYT, Aug. 12, 2011
I never have. I allowed my little ice floe to ebb away from the dance studio for longer and longer periods, and eventually the waters between us warmed and widened. I did, as has been put by my friend Tatiana Youbetyabootskaya, make a “descent into yoga,” which I found no more a replacement for the dance class than the gym, for all I know, could be. Neither yoga nor treadmills require me to enter a flow state in order to succeed.
Such a “flow state,” according to philosopher Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, is achievable only after ten years or so of training in a skilled genre, such as piano playing or writing or figure skating, because such a state occurs when you are challenged in something you are also highly skilled in. (Varying the level of skill or challenge in this equation results in either stress, if you are not skilled in an activity but challenged to perform it, or boredom, if you are skilled in an activity but expected to perform only at a level below your skill level.) The ability to experience a flow state once in a while, finds Csíkszentmihályi, is a key to a contented life.
Pro dancers describe daily class as ritual, masochism, medicine, discipline, religion. In the documentary Etoiles, about the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, a dancer tells the camera, “I wanted to become a nun, but I was too physical.” In the New Yorker, Rivka Galchen paraphrases an unidentified American Ballet Theatre dancer’s belief that ballet, in its purest sense, has nothing to do with performance, costumes, characters, spectacle—it’s the daily class. One is a dancer, wrote Toni Bentley in her 1980 NYCB memoir Winter Season, only when one is actually dancing. Without the practice, there is no external proof of the skill.
But on the interior, what happens to the skill, and the person, when the challenge and the practice go away? What remains? The occasional set of tendus in the kitchen, the urge to take up an expanse of space with a grand allegro. The pull of piano notes in the morning; the rhythms and markings of oft-performed choreographies, sung in the head like a grocery list. The occasional dreams, welcome visitations, of studio practice and the attuned body (like a racehorse—who said that?) that came with it.
The Gym is a metonym for the exercise of working things out. It’s a third place headspace, if more diminutively fractioned, between the work of criticism and journalism and that of a day job, between the practices of responding to art and of approaching art, between being an individual and being a member of a community and a family. It’s a ritual I might or might not keep, for however long. No strings, deadlines, or promises.
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—Jonelle
Photo by Flickr user MLC School Archives. CC licensed.
