Night Study

This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.         —Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

With nothing but the big morning star to light his way, Van Gogh managed to see it all: the spire-like cypress bridging earth to heaven; the mute, squatting church he added—perhaps a symbol of that other, failed vocation; the moon dazzling as a comet among the lesser lights—all of them, ironically, as wide open as morning eyes. Of the dark hours, Van Gogh claimed they were, “more alive and more richly colored than the day.” Perhaps "The Starry Night," this most well known of the artist’s night studies, is a plea not to miss what’s there when the lights go out.

Van Gogh learned to suffer, to accept his life of ambiguity, to live by the light of the diamond chips that rule the night as he wandered the shadowy landscape of mental illness and poverty and loneliness. The imbalances of his brain chemistry brought flocks of blackbirds to peck at his eyes, yet he still saw and painted with flawless inner vision. He produced hundreds of starry nights, some of which survive as established masterpieces. It’s perhaps the extreme turbulence of this most famous of them, the sense of perpetual, romantic chaos there, that makes things move inside for most of us in its presence. I viewed it at 17 in the New York Museum of Modern Art on our senior trip. I’d like to think the pounding of my heart had mostly to do with the emotional vibrancy of that painting and less with the proximity of a dark-haired boy in a green sweater. Yet I must attribute the pounding to both, for to view Van Gogh is a haunting, just as love is. We can speculate that Van Gogh may have been hard wired to go at life by the light of one trembling inner morning star. There may not have been another way. Yet to walk in the dark cost him dearly. It will cost anyone who accepts the night on its own terms.

Life Imitating Art Imitating Pain

“Ladies, I don’t know who told you that dance was easy.” I use an admittedly unnecessary amount of force on the pause button on my computer. “You were misled.”

That, it seems, is how corrections are going to go today. I go back and forth with my intermediate students. Sometimes they need to calm down because “we are only doing pliès” and other times “pliès are the hardest thing we’re going to do all week.” I don’t think there is any logic or pattern to which days get which corrections. This particular class falls after a series of bad days. I am both pressed and crushed, persecuted and abandoned, struck down and one best-laid plan away from destruction, and so, in a "life imitating art imitating life" sort of way, pliès are hard today.

“You want to know what else is hard?” I continue.

“Life,” they answer in unison, and I am equally amused and concerned that I have conditioned them to answer this way. I wonder if I need to go away to reset, change my attitude, and come back with a more positive sensibility. Then maybe I can be one of those “Your pliè should feel like a rainbow glittered butterfly freely floating on waves of wind,” sort of teachers and less the “Dance is hard. Accept, move on, and point your feet” person that I am in and out of class.

Though the din of their aching muscles will prevent them from believing it, I am somewhat sympathetic to their plight. In fact, I give myself this same pep talk. A couple of days ago, it was me at the barre in a ballet class dripping with sweat and ready to clap, curtsey, and thank the instructor for an excellent class. This was after pliès (and it is here that I should probably mention that pliès are the first exercise in a ballet class).

“We’re going to do that again,” the instructor responded. She told us why and what to change. “This,” I thought to myself as the music began, “maybe the last class I ever take.” I don’t mean that in a “live every moment as if it is your last,” bumper sticker sort of way. It was more a realization that there was a pretty good chance that I was going to pass out before the class ended. I focused on breathing as my right arm floated out, in, up, and open. My hips and knees and ankles cracked harmoniously. My muscles joined and sang long, minor-keyed groans with each action, and then something wonderful happened: I did not break.

There is an Agnes DeMille quote that I am, in Sunday school fashion, trying to write on the door my heart. “Ballet technique is arbitrary and very difficult. It never becomes easy—it becomes possible.” Of course, I want to protect my students from pain. There are moments when I will go to great lengths to avoid it, but my dislike for discomfort doesn't change the fact that it exists.

The other day, one of my students raised her hand in the middle of class and announced that stretching hurt her. “Mhmm…” I nodded, and there was nothing more to say than that. Ballet is hard, demanding, and it hurts. The only way to get the flexibility and strength that dance requires, however, is to endure the pain, and the dancer that runs from it never sees anything become possible. Sometimes there are instances in which the cure for pain is to let yourself experience pain for just a little while longer. If you can ride it, out you just might surprise yourself with the realization that you can bend without breaking, after all.