Small triumphs

If you come to ballet as an adult, you really struggle with things that a child would probably find dead easy. Yesterday there was a sequence in class that finished with two posé turns (think shoulders!) and a lame duck - so turns to the right with left leg in retiré, plié, turn on the other leg, and right in retiré. And I made such heavy weather of it. I was beginning to make sense of it in the end, and may even have it now.

One of the links from the right hand column of my blog is to an article called Dancing against Time by Rachel Cox, a Washington Post reporter. It is the best piece I have read about the adult ballet student's experience. She writes: "Recreational ballet is full of compromised perfection, of half-measures that might seem appalling, even grotesque, to a connoisseur." And she is absolutely right. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't a little like being in physiotherapy after a bad crash, where small triumphs become big ones.

The execution isn't completely the point (though it is). The joy is the effect on one's inner life. And if I can do a sequence across the room with fleeting moments of grace (e.g. nice arms), I'm thrilled.

Just one other thought for now (this is the great thing about a blog, you don't have to write in a disciplined way), but ballet heightens my sense of the need for ritual. In Catholicism the sense of ritual in liturgy has been discounted somewhat and those priests who particularly value it are sometimes stigmatised as 'liturgy queens'. While I have no doubt that care for liturgy is often expressive of a gay sensibility, this is no reason to dismiss it. We do need ritual. Years ago I worked with a wonderful Irish broadcaster. After doing a commentary for a Papal Mass, he said to several of us sitting in the pub with him, "Why is it, comrades, that I always feel randy after a great ecclesiastical occasion?" A topic for another time and place, perhaps.

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