There is an adage that it takes 10 years to make a dancer. I heard that while I was training to be a professional dancer. Based on nothing but my own experience this seems to be a rough-and-ready truism with some validity to it. It took me 10 years to go from beginner to advanced/professional in ballet classes. And it took me about 10 years before my slow, clumsy, stilted attempts at writing philosophy turned into something that I could do quickly, with the facility and ease of long training.
I think that the love of doing something, the undertaking and the practicing for hours, day after day, can be part of what makes some people willing to put in the time to develop enough skill to be a master at an art or craft. I say this even while thinking about a friend of mine who practiced piano as a child with his mother standing over him with a shoe, reading to hit him if he stopped practicing or seemed to be fooling around rather than doing his work intently. He became a professional musician even if the motivation (at first) came from without rather than from within.
Sometimes I wish I had done a little less practicing of dance and a little more fooling around during those years of intensive training. Fooling around in the sense of experimentation with dance and non-dance movements. Parodies. Stale classical variations sped way up or way down. Movements that were off-beat, all wrong, like the Elaine dance on Seinfeld. Perhaps the fooling around would have led to some creativity in movement, some talent at composing new forms of dance movement that remained latent and that I never developed.
This blog is a bit of fooling around, which is why not everything that I write here works. It doesn’t always work in the sense of being something worth reading for the person who wants to learn something about dance, or to see themselves in the experience of someone who danced briefly and who spent the rest of her life missing it. Perhaps by fooling around now I can recover some of what was lost while I was dancing.
It’s a new idea to me that I lost something as well as gained something by working on expertise for 10+ years. I’m not sure what I’m doing now with my life but it’s clear to me that a little more freedom, a little more breath, a little more ease, has added a bit of depth to me. There is something freeing about a bit of being ordinary. Ordinary doesn’t sound any alarm bells or create any expectations. Ordinary is left in peace.
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