Finding Balance

The Cross Training Special: How To Survive Nut Without Cracking

November 7, 2012 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

cross training for nutrcracker — Cross-training tools

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…Nutcracker season, of course! Nutcracker has never lost its magic for me. The fire was lit inside my nine-year-old soul as I hid under Mother Ginger’s skirt with eleven other curled, beribboned, lipsticked little girls, wanting more than anything to someday sit on the glittering throne upstage center. Fifteen years later, that throne is my domain for half an hour each Nutcracker night until a tiara and a tutu transform Clara into the Sugar Plum Fairy, bringing all her (and my) childhood dreams to life.

That’s the candy coating, anyway. Nutcracker is not a kind ballet, physically speaking. Classical pas de deux are lopsided as a rule, and it sure doesn’t feel great to sit still on foam-covered plywood for thirty minutes before dancing one. Many companies’ Nut runs are a dozen or fifty shows in duration, or involve extensive touring. Injuries are often rampant this time of year. In preparation for all things Nutty, this installment of Finding Balance is an early Christmas present to dancers in Nutcrackers everywhere: the Cross-Training Special (or, How to Survive Nut Without Cracking).

The first (and probably, the most important) step in developing an effective cross-training program is to identify what your general and specific weaknesses are, and to realize that they will (and should!) continually change as your technique and choreography do. For example, most ballet dancers are stronger/tighter on the left side and looser/weaker on the right, and overall our adductors and hamstrings tend to be weak. That’s a general and probably constant issue to address. Specifically, if choreography involves one-sided, one-directional, or very repetitive movement (many releves on the right foot, leg extensions mostly to the front, consecutive press lifts, etc.), building opposite or complementary actions into cross-training can prevent or alleviate symptoms of overuse.

Dancing alone can’t provide the strength to dance well, and it really pays off to be proactive. Time and money are two things most dancers need a little more of, and we can save both long-term (along with our sanity) if we take good care of ourselves to begin with. My routine is one I’ve developed and adapted to meet my particular needs, but it’s always evolving. I’m sharing it not because it’s a generic solution to everyone’s problems, but because of how much I’ve learned about my body and my dancing from developing tools to help myself. [Read more…]

Dracula, Choreography & Artistic Ownership

October 10, 2012 by Ashley David

by Emily Kate Long

ballet quad cities — Ballet Quad Cities dancers Lauren Derrig, Kelsee Green, Margaret Huling, and Emily Kate Long

Last month I had the opportunity to return to the role of Mina Murray-Harker in Deanna Carter’s Dracula. It was the season opener for Ballet Quad Cities when I joined the company in 2009, and my experience then was radically different from now. The process of re-learning got me thinking about the dancer’s function in the existence of a role. To remember and pass on steps is one thing, but what about the aspect of characterization? We must preserve, but we must also advance. Interpretation and personalization are inherent in live art. How can we go about our work in a way respects the choreographer’s wishes?

Mina was the first real character role I ever danced, and Dracula was the first ballet I ever performed as a full member of a professional company. It was the beginning of my awareness of the huge clash between the academic, black-and-white (or, perhaps more appropriately, black-and-pink) framework I clung to as a student and the messy, splatter-colored, pick-your-own-adventure world of a professional career.

My professional performing experience up to that point had consisted largely of being the third-shortest girl in a line of umpteen in hundred-year-old tutu ballets. Conformity was the order of the day, and I quaked in my pointe shoes at the prospect of sticking out—being noticed usually meant you had done something wrong. We had a saying at Milwaukee Ballet among the trainees: “Know your role and shut your hole.” Great for staying out of trouble, not so great for artistic self-discovery.

I had anticipated that professional life would just be an extension of what I already knew: take class and do as I was told, learn choreography and do as I was told, perform choreography and hope I didn’t get reprimanded afterwards. Feedback or not, there was always the nagging question of whether my work had been good enough. Little did I know that being an artist has a lot more to do with being honest and generous and responsible than about being right by arbitrary standards. [Read more…]

Finding Balance: Dancing Through Summer

August 15, 2012 by 4dancers

The town of Minturn, CO taken on a hike in the mountains

by Emily Kate Long

2012-07-09 to -12 SSDI Fun & Classes 128 — Fun & Classes 128 Partnering class at SSDI (photo credit Susan Blackburn)

As I wrap up my summer travels, I’ve been working to identify a theme for the experiences I’ve had over the past two months. It’s been a summer of learning what to do and what not to do: in the studio as a teacher and student, onstage and in the audience, and in how I interact with other people and with myself. How do I take everything in during class while holding on to what I know works? What about carving out time for physical and mental rest and recuperation? How can I be an open yet critical audience member, and how can I more easily drop personal hang-ups and anxiety to fully experience each moment of performing?

To begin with, a great aid in approaching my physical needs honestly was Dr Linda Hamilton’s most recent book, The Dancer’s Way (St Martin’s Griffin, 2008). Hard science wrapped in compassion and empathy, The Dancer’s Way was a timely reminder that I’m not the machine I’d like to believe. My body—and everyone else’s—needs what it needs, period: fuel and rest. That means sufficient calories, macronutrients, and fluids every day. It means 8-10 hours of sleep each night. It means time each week for restorative activity. It means giving muscles a chance to forget about dancing for a little while and repair themselves every few months, and then giving them enough time to return to a full rehearsal schedule. Put simply, we are people first—physical beings with physical needs that must be acknowledged and met before we can demand anything more of our bodies or minds. The Dancer’s Way is the collection of information I would have loved to have when I was a student, and I plan on sharing a lot of this information with my students.

My strategy this summer was to avoid the trouble of getting back in shape by not planning any rest. Bad move. I would have avoided serious physical and emotional burnout, along with a lot of guilt and self-judgment, if I had just built rest into my schedule to begin with! It’s still a process, but realizing my body can’t take care of itself enabled me to relish being completely immersed in dance all summer.

Being present at two summer intensives (Saratoga Summer Dance Intensive and Vail Valley Dance Intensive) as both a student and a teacher allowed me to analyze every aspect of class. It was wonderful to take multiple classes per day and test endless hypotheses on myself and on others. On an interpersonal level, I got to observe and engage in many different communication styles, classroom organization strategies, and the particular learning processes of different age groups. Being in classes of mixed ability shone light on the importance of teachers’ knowing all the building blocks and progression of technique in order to accommodate students of different levels. [Read more…]

Finding Balance: Artistic Exhange & Trust

June 25, 2012 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

Lately I’ve become increasingly aware of—and increasingly excited by—how much hard science goes into this esoteric and ephemeral art form. The study of technique is, at its roots, a study of kinesiology: physics applied to the human body. Broadening the scientific scope a bit, the emotional, intellectual, and sensory exchanges that happen in the studio and onstage are roughly analogous to biological mutualism. This installment of “Finding Balance” is a look at the fine balance between needs and gifts of the participants in artistic exchange and the trust that’s required to achieve equilibrium—the balance of science with something greater and less measurable.

In biology, mutualistic relationships are categorized as obligative (the relationship is necessary for the survival of one or both participants) or facultative (useful but nonessential for one or both participants). Additionally, the interaction can be described in terms of what is being exchanged between parties: services, resources, or both.

Often the focus is on the relationship between performers and audience, but there are a lot of other players here. Teachers, directors, choreographers, musicians, production staff, and stage crew all make necessary contributions to the presentation of the artistic product, and each derives benefit from the process and the product. The right balance of mutualistic relationships in nature encourages the success of ecosystems. The right balance in professional dance is necessary for the survival and advancement of our art form.

Dancers require opportunities to hone our craft, opportunities to share our art, and individuals or ideas from which to draw inspiration. Classes and rehearsals offer opportunities to perfect movements, and for those things, dancers need a facilitator—a teacher, director, choreographer, or stager. Sharing our art can’t happen without another party present; that’s where the audience comes in. Dancers draw inspiration from a multitude of sources: the audience, the facilitator, the dance itself, the music, fellow dancers, emotions, and past life experiences. Our relationship to all of these things is largely obligative—we cannot intuit technique or dance exclusively by instinct. We cannot be our sole source of motivation and we definitely can’t watch ourselves from across the footlights.

The primary need (arguably, the exclusive need) of the audience is an exceptional sensory and emotional experience, which is delivered directly by the performers, choreographer, musicians, and designers. Of course, this delivery would be impossible without the work of directors, coaches, and crew as well. The audience’s relationship to the performers and facilitators is ambiguous in terms of being essential or simply beneficial—certainly, society at large benefits from art, but only individual audience members (and sometimes not even they) know whether they need to engage in a relationship with dance. [Read more…]

Finding Balance: Dancers On Coping With Injury

May 11, 2012 by Ashley David

by Emily Kate Long

Last month’s “Finding Balance” explored the relationships among dancer identity, passion for dance, injury, and age. A month after writing that column, I can’t get away from the topic—it utterly fascinates and confounds me. I was directed by a friend to a widely cited study by Linda Hamilton (American Journal of Sports Medicine, March 1989) titled “Personality, Stress, and Injuries in Professional Ballet Dancers.” In it, Hamilton states:

“[The] dancer must possess extraordinary dedication, a limitless capacity for hard work, and the ability to persevere through more or less continual pain, in addition to having a specific body type and talent….[The] personality traits that are programmed into success in this profession may ultimately prove detrimental to those dancers who have not learned to work within the natural limitations of their bodies.”

The italicization of that last phrase is my own—is that the key to balance between doing our best and doing too much? How can we push ourselves hard enough that we achieve highly without letting those “success traits” run so rampant as to destroy us? How do we learn what our natural limitations are? How can we expand them?

Hamilton’s statement compelled me to seek out dancers I admire and view as highly self-driven, and ask them to weigh in on the subject of coping with and learning from injuries. Of those I contacted, three dancers were able to contribute to this article. My utmost thanks go out to them for taking the time to answer my questions candidly and thoughtfully.

Jeanette Hanley was a Leading Artist with Milwaukee Ballet when I was in the second company there. Her dancing and her spirit and her enthusiasm made a great impression on me—I never saw her get injured or upset, and her energy and motivation seemed endless. She was like superwoman, or the energizer bunny. She has since retired from dancing, but I still think of her as a role model. I decided to get in touch with her for this article to discover what strategies kept her going throughout her 21-year dancing career, and how she felt about retirement. She shared with me that her love of yoga and going to the gym made it easy to stay in good physical shape during layoffs, and that she never had trouble with injuries while she was dancing. With the birth of her daughter, healthy diet and exercise got her going again. Now that she’s retired, it has been helpful to have a new line of work that she loves. Always learning, Jeanette also takes karate with her daughter, and they will both be receiving black belts in the fall.

Katie Rideout and I attended Milwaukee Ballet School’s summer intensive in 2007 and spent two years together in Milwaukee Ballet II, 2007-2009. Katie has struggled with lower leg injuries as long as I’ve known her. In November 2011, after dealing with intense pain in her tibia for almost two years, she made the choice to take a break from dancing and finish her Bachelor’s degree from Point Park University. She later found out she had been dancing on two stress fractures. During her recovery period she struggled most with making decisions independently of a career-oriented framework. Addressing the reality of her injury –its severity was a direct result of overuse and denial—forced Katie to begin freeing herself from obsessive passion for dance in order to return to dancing and avoid re-injury. This, in turn, allowed her to establish new training habits: integration of Pilates work and a focus on technical efficiency rather than an exclusively aesthetic aim. Finishing her undergraduate degree also gave her another aspect of her person to cultivate: an understanding and exercise of her intellect, measured separately from dance achievements.

My good friend Jason Wang tore his Achilles’ tendon on August 30, 2011 and underwent surgery to repair it three days later. Naturally a planner, he, like Katie, found one of the greatest challenges in his recovery to be the uncertain timeframe and absence of a familiar “roadmap” in his decision-making process. The stillness that was necessary while waiting for doctors’ orders quickly degraded to depression; Jason felt he had been “stripped from [his] lifestyle without [his] own consent.” Also significant for Jason was the difference in coping with this long-term injury versus the short-term ones he had previously sustained: “…sitting and watching dancers do what I loved for weeks on end made me extremely stressed and depressed….[If] you’re not clear and sound in your mind then your physical side will become its collateral.” He felt it was important to step back and take time to clear his mind before deciding how to approach re-entry into the dance world.

I consider Jason, Katie, and Jeanette all to be high achievers. Pushing themselves to the limit and beyond just seems like a natural thing for them. However, in Katie’s case, pushing led to chronic injury. In Jason’s case, his inability to work led to feelings of uncertainty, depression, and isolation. Jeanette, however, was able to push herself through a two-decade career without major setbacks caused by injury. What’s her secret?

Could it be than Jeanette is simply older and wiser?

I recall another of Milwaukee Ballet’s leading artists telling me once that the time she spent in Boston Ballet II was the hardest of her life. Perhaps the more time we spend with ourselves, and the more adversity we face, the more we can come to understand that one of the “natural limitations of [our] bodies” is our very own psyche.

Readers, what dance-related experiences have forced you to face your inner demons and come out on top?

Contributor Emily Kate Long began her dance education in South Bend, Indiana, with Kimmary Williams and Jacob Rice and graduated in 2007 from Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School’s Schenley Program. Ms Long attended Milwaukee Ballet School’s Summer Intensive on scholarship before being invited to join Milwaukee Ballet II in 2007. She also has spent summers studying at Saratoga Summer Dance Intensive, Miami City Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School, Pittsburgh Youth Ballet, and Ballet Chicago.

Ms Long has been a member of Ballet Quad Cities since 2009. She has danced featured roles in Deanna Carter’s Ash to Glass and Dracula, participated in the company’s 2010 tour to New York City, and most recently performed the title role in Courtney Lyon’s Cinderella and the role of Clara in The Nutcracker. Prior to joining Ballet Quad Cities Ms Long performed with Milwaukee Ballet and MBII in Michael Pink’s The Nutcracker and Candide Overture, Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadére, Balanchine’s Who Cares?, Bournonville’s Flower Festival in Genzano and Napoli, and original contemporary and neoclassical works by Tom Teague, Denis Malinkine, Rolando Yanes, and Petr Zaharadnicek.

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