Decoding the body

These bright June mornings I'm waking very early. Which means I'm tired later on, especially on a day I take class. So I try and lull myself back to sleep. Often it's by trying to 'image' parts of the body. But imaging, as often as not, makes me more wakeful rather than less.

So at 5.oo this morning I tried something new: listening to different parts of my body and the stories they tell. The stories were a little surreal, and almost suggestive of a parallel biography. I know this other life never happened (my childhood in Romania for instance), but it felt real. Trying to make sense of it during the day, I remembered a visit to an iron works at Ózd in Hungary, when I was a producer with File on 4 . Something got into my soul that day - whether it was the futility of keeping the iron works open, or the tragedy of the lovely gypsy children with whom I played in the shadow of the factory, keeping them diverted as my reporter colleague tried to record a 'piece to camera'.

Earlier in this log, I wrote about dance as a stream of consciousness with its sources in many different nerve endings. I keep getting snagged up with the idea that learning to dance is not just learning to dance: it's unpacking and decoding the store of personal memory that the body holds. The gloom of Ózd in November 1988 was in there - and I've not thought about the place from that day to this. But it came to me suggestively in half-sleep and more explicitly later on as I drove through Richmond Park in the June sun.

Later I had a class with Sheila, and later again a class at the RAD. I had to force myself to go to the second class, but I find that a live pianist really helps gets me through it. Fewer classes have musicians now and I always gratefully remember the gifted Stuart Marsden who accompanied Suzie Raymond's classes. Suzie (a real Ashton dancer and one of his favourites) gave me a way into ballet and I shall always be grateful for that. I miss her classes and only stopped because it meant an unequal fight with rush-hour traffic.

Sometimes I wonder at the folly of it all (five classes already this week, maybe even a sixth tomorrow if the editorial meeting finishes early). It's a bit like chasing the dragon. My core stability is what it is and my stamina is what it is. Still, dance has become one of the metaphors for the inner journey. And there are discoveries most days. Watching Marguerite fondu yesterday, I became aware of a dynamism in the movement that I had missed before (I picked up on this at a class at the RAD later. The thighs need to be really squeezed in fondu before being released). Sometimes I'm astonished at the things I don't see. Over the last twelve months I must have watched a tape of Anthony Dowell rehearsing Federico Bonelli in Rossignol several dozen times (I'm cataloguing the tape for Stephanie). Not until this week did I realise that at one point Dowell goes into a series of pirouettes in attitude out of nowhere. Dowell is 62 - extraordinary.

I have this not completely rationally founded belief that there is - somehow - point to the journey. And as soon as the music starts and we're into the plies in first , I know afresh how very much I want to be in class - and how urgent it all feels.

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