Mme Danilova

We don’t get over things—they are stitched into the quilt of our lives.

Remembering sitting on the edge of a velvet theater seat—we were close up—like third row or something, so I was really looking up at the stage. I was five, sitting with my mother and sister. It was Coppelia, the ballet. Dr. Coppelius is a doctor who has made a life-size dancing doll. Franz becomes infatuated with the doll and sets aside his heart’s true desire, Swanhilda. She dresses up as the doll, pretending to make it come to life. Ultimately all is well and Franz and Swanhilda marry.

I remember the beautiful ballerina dressed as the doll with her face painted larger than life, and all the dancers on the stage; I was mesmerized.  It was the beginning of knowing where my heart was. Something about the ballerina, the stage, the theater….a feeling of familiarity, of home. My heart knew it and my mind was set. It was the journey of my heart over twenty-one years….and it was all I wanted.

The memory of that theater, of all the studies, the adventures, the whole progression of a career fully lived—until I broke my foot. Sometimes I feel that was intentional—I don’t know―but my life was coming to a turning point that night when it happened because my mind was split between a spiritual pull toward a very compelling path to the heart and my career also had my heart.

Mixed in there was the familiar saboteur—my mother’s voice which I now owned, making sure I knew I wasn’t enough or should be doing something else. I was taught in my family of origin to sabotage any genuine call of the heart especially toward the arts, at which my dad’s side of the family were professional. My mom called the shots. The competing voices inside were throwing me into a conundrum. Anyway, I was out of kilter when I took off into the tour jeté and landed on the outside of my foot. The bone snapped. The battle of those voices was going on in the background and my foot made the call.

What happened after that? It felt like I was sucked into a vortex and suddenly shot out into another world altogether. Depending which way you turn, water was flowing in or already left. But hey, I was going with the flow! Just not where I thought I was going. I had met a spiritual Master and my life entered another world altogether and my heart was pulled in. But there was the grieving of leaving something I really loved with all my heart as well; the dancer in me never felt finished; that love remained.

Sometimes, even when I forget my career, my heart goes on looking for it, as if it must be in the next room…but then it’s not. I could not see my way clearly as I had, and simply followed the light down the unknown trail. 

I miss learning my parts, the smell of the theater, the energy, the anticipation, the warm up, the wings, the lights, the long hours, the performances, the whole thing. I remember classes and auditions, and jobs like the one in Iowa City. where that winter I built an amp system for my stereo in my kitchen on Saturday nights— because I wasn’t much good at socializing and it was something to do when I was not rehearsing between riding my bike to the university and back to my little walk-up apartment on the top of a rickety old house. My heart knew where it was then anyway. It was home wherever I was dancing.

I can’t tell you anymore where home is though my friends and even strangers tell me, I need to find it. I want to tell them, I just don’t know. So I wander. We don’t get over things. After a while, perhaps we realize that life is a river anyway and it’s best to keep moving and it’s probably better not to swim upstream. Only the salmon can do that and it’s not easy for them, though it’s their destiny.

I don’t feel propelled like I used to, to get up and hit the day with passion, more in a state of wondering how to go about living the day, but I am going down stream on a raft with the current now, watching the scenery go by, lazy slivers of light on the water, or on the leaves, or on the clouds as the day glides into evening or morning glides into the day. I do miss those days. It was home and I just don’t know where that is anymore. And where my heart is. 

I even miss the day I was at the New York City ballet school in a line of forty preteens at the barre, doing a tendu exercise. The Madame, a flamboyant Russian dame with lots of make up and a chiffon skirt over her pastel pink leotard, was tapping her stick on the floor as she walked along the lineup. Abruptly, she stopped by my side, glaring at me. The entire room went dead silent. “Dahling, here we are on the moon and you can’t even do a simple combination.” Even that I remember with love. She finished, “If you are going to make a mistake, make a big one.” Those words sent me through the floor, and then they propelled me onward, filling my sails with wind….onward!  There will be another opportunity. Let the pain be the pain. Keep sailing.

Yes, I’ve made big mistakes, Mme Danilova, but exactly the kind you wanted me to? No. Walking out on a career at its peak was a gigantic one! You would be proud to know I have a string of big mistakes. Another one happened because I had written to share how well my teaching was being received after studying so long under a teacher; I was excited about sharing what I had learned there and how many people were attending my workshops. Some unknown girl called me and declared I could not teach what they taught…I did not respond because I was in shock, that I had shared with my students copious references to the source. That call smacked of the familiar sting—of a heartfelt piece of me crushed. I was terribly wounded, completely deflated. My heartfelt intentions dashed. I let that person kill me—which means, well, Madame Danilova, I made a big mistake! Ask for confirmation, then kaboom! I was spent.

I lost my heart and still I keep thinking it is in the next room, under the next inspiration—but then it is not. Every day since then, I have been trying to locate where DID I put my heart?  Maybe all that has transpired is called dancing with life. You know, when you throw the technique out the window and just dance! Wherever, whenever, however; you just go with the tune on the radio. Like when you are jumping between the rocks over a rushing stream on the trail or diving under the big wave threatening to consume you in the ocean—sometimes you slip and fall in between the rocks and soak your shorts, or you swallow a quart of salt water going down like I did on Fire Island that time and had to be fished out by my boyfriend—but then you are bobbing on the surface again waiting for the next wave, or jumping on to the next rock, until you fall again. There’s a rhythm that comes when you get the gist of it and then you are dancing.

Reminds me of being in Douglas Dunn’s company, Lazy Madge. Douglas had had extensive ballet training as I had and he had performed with Merce Cunningham’s company for five years and before that with others on the cutting edge of modern dance in New York. One work I saw, “Performance Exhibit.” involved him lying still for hours a day…the loft was filled for that event that went on over several days. Performing with him was refreshing for me because I could take advantage of my solid training without emotional content. Each performance was the exploration of the performance space without borders or boundaries, playing with form and movement for its own sake, and the element of chance which made every performance unique among the ten dancers. I loved the possibilities for play with the variety of personalities and their style. For each performance we had the freedom of using whatever we chose from a long, personally tailored phrase, with or without consecutive order, as a fragment or in total, from any place off stage or on stage, interacting with no one or whomever was on the stage, facing any direction, and then stepping off the performance stage at will. It was full of surprises and fun. I had a blast. Every performance was a kinetic work of art that was never solidified, always changing. It was a meditation, fully unfolding as it went and finishing when it would.

When I walked to the subway the night I broke my foot, I had to be barefoot. That is how I got home. As a friend used to tell his football coach— you can’t make me quit! I just did what had to be done and looked forward to getting back to work after the cast came off. That runs in the back of some of our heads. Just crazy enough to know we can beat the odds—and then we do. But that time, I made another huge mistake…or maybe it was because I chose to follow the pull to spend time with a spiritual Master and that was a love that never died though it raked me over the coals after he passed. I was dancing with him, my own heart, and God. A three way love that exploded into ecstasy inside me. There were so many days when my heart filled up to bursting and then hurt from stretching to hold more love. So in the end I scored the love anyway but I still miss the theater and I still miss dancing.

Then there was the time my work was taken without my permission. The good thing is no one can steal you and only you can do what you do. And maybe that’s the lesson: To matter to yourself and let the world be the world. So Mme Danilova, I will most likely keep making big mistakes and they will be from me shining my light maybe too brightly for some people. But how they react—that’s their business.

We don’t get over things—they are stitched into the quilt of our lives. I am guessing, when my grand kids look at the quilt in years after I have gone, perhaps they will wonder what did grandma do when she was a dancer? And after that, was she a walker on the wind, Mama? Did she ever find home? Did she ever find her heart again? Mama might stroke their heads, then pull out Harold and the Purple Crayon like she did with you, and read to them. And closing the book, tell them, that’s a life well lived.