Sheila

Sometimes on a Thursday afternoon I spend an hour in the studio with Sheila Zajaca. When I first started coming to Marguerite's classes, Sheila took me under her wing and - over time - has become a real mentor. She has broken steps down for me in the way that my grandmother did with words when I was a child. I was a slow reader to begin with and the family was starting to worry but Gran sorted me out. She was a Victorian schoolteacher with a real smack of authority, tempered by some delightful eccentricities.

I recognise something of Gran in Sheila - the authority, I mean, not the eccentricities (though Sheila would doubtless proudly claim her own). Sometimes I do make heavy weather of apparently simple detail - and the right kind of authority figure can really sort them out for me (I say that because I tend to kick against authority, particularly in men: strange how I accept it much more from women - Suzie as well).

Sheila has encouraged me to believe that I can dance. She has talked to me about line; helped shape my body a bit better to a good line; helped me to dance folk steps like the polonaise that give me a vivid sense that I am dancing. Such acts of love are important. They tend not be foregrounded in your mind in the way that big relational love is, but they matter as much.

I like subjecting myself to authority in class. In The Monastery, the recent BBC2 series that I wrote about in The Tablet, Abbot Christopher talked about instilling the values of monastic life: “The aim is to get people to internalise them - to understand that obedience is about listening; that silence is about space and that humility is about being realistic. So that the way of life becomes truly their own.”

I keep relating that to ballet. The important thing is to understand the underlying purposes, in a way in which they are not always grasped by professional dancers. Geraldine Morris has picked up on this really well. Geraldine used to be a member of the Royal Ballet (from Dublin, and you would hardly know it!), and I know her through Stephanie and Roehampton. She argues in an academic paper that dancers are - too often - "balletically constructed individuals", who place a premium on discipline and conformity to a point where they reject experimentation and idiosyncrasy, and reject creativity.

If I'd made a life of ballet, I feel I'd have kicked against oppressive conformity at some point. But obedience, in the sense of deep listening, is a great purgative. And I find profound psychological value in the listening, the sense of space, and the realism that I learn at ballet class.

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