Hi, loves. 🌿
On doing it for love
My husband and I spent the majority of the last two weeks on the floor of our kid’s dance studio. Rather than organize a Christmas show, the studio offers something far more complicated — a casual 10-minute showing at the end of every single class. This works well if you have a dancer enrolled in a class or two, but if your kid lives her life there, you will spend it driving back and forth approximately 300 times to sit for short stints on the studio floor, your spine up against the mirror, phone perched on your knees so that you are sure to record every single moment of every single dance (see motherly error of yore).
No matter. I find the whole thing so delightful because of its ragtag nature. This is not a show that has been whipped into perfection after months of rehearsal. There are no costumes, no makeup, no lights, no chairs for the spectators! The kids know the combination, but not always terribly well and there is absolutely nowhere to hide — not behind hours of rehearsal, not behind lipstick or hairspray. The audience is right there, at their feet, our faces staring up at them, full of nerves and hope. We are not a blob of blackness out in the distance.
Perhaps this is why the whole thing makes my heart break in a way that the staged performances simply can’t. We can plainly see the fear in their bodies as they wait for their turns to chaine turn across the floor; the embarrassment when they mess up; the awkwardness of trying to start on time with the music, failing, then looking over at the teacher, panic already set in.
My own kid makes me cry, sure, but it’s actually the kids who struggle mightily and show up anyway who turn the experience into something Shakespearean. It is one thing to watch someone do something they are meant to do — for my kid, this happens to be dance — but it feels somehow more human to watch someone attempt something they are not naturally gifted at, that they do only because they love it. Rarely, if ever, do adults do this in public.
Dance — like music, like sports — is one of those things that many kids have a go at early on. All five year olds are cute, no matter how inept they are while trying to kick the soccer ball or plié or play Frère Jacques on the squeaky violin. But we all know how this changes. A 14-year-old who leaps across the floor with only a modicum of grace is not cute in the same way.
And yet it’s those kids who make us feel because they render the trying so apparent. When we watch a professional dancer or cellist or a star athlete do what they do, we are transported — the trying, the hard work, has been wiped clean and we gaze upon them in awe. We know we are witnessing something extraordinary, something beyond our lowly, humble means. Watching Michael Jordan or Misty Copeland? These are some of the greatest wonders of being alive, but very few of us watch and think we are anything like them.
But when we watch mere humans perform as mere humans, it touches on something else, something closer to home. It reminds us of our fallibility, our aching hearts that try and try and often fail. It reminds us that life is difficult and heartbreaking and awkward in a million different ways and still worth showing up for. That we are allowed to love what we love, to learn something even if we will never do it on a grand stage. That most of us are trying to get through this grand adventure feeling joy in our bodies and our souls, that this is not the privilege of the very gifted, but a very fact of being here at all.
Sending love,
Abs xox
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So beautiful, Abby!! I wanted to immediately jot down that last paragraph. 💖 💖 💖