What is vacation for a dancer? George Balanchine once said that “the time for resting is in the grave.” If death were really that – a permanent, socially acceptable and well-earned rest – that would be very inviting indeed. I once said as much to some gravestones in a cemetery I used to walk through in Dayton, Ohio. “Hellooo, Dead People,” I said. “I hope you’re having a nice rest. I have 150 papers to grade.” To which I heard one of them reply, as Mary Oliver might have, “You are wasting your life. Your one wild and precious life. What we wouldn’t give for just one more day.”
When I was a dancer, I did not long for grave resting. Instead, I wished that I didn’t need sleep. Sleep was an annoying interruption in the work.
It seems I am trying, and failing, to identify what vacation is for a dancer since all I seem to be able to get to is what it is not. Is vacation rest? In terms of rest the only vacations I can think of having when I was a full-time dancer were either the one-day-a-week rest day recommended for injury prevention or mandatory rest because of an injury. Neither were rest in the sense of being enjoyable. All I wanted to do was dance.
“But didn’t your parents take you on vacation?” I can hear readers asking. “Didn’t you have snow days? Didn’t you ever travel?” Well, yes. But even in Maine or Vermont or Florida (these are the places we would go on vacation) I would still stretch in the mornings and at night. If there was a pool or a body of water, I would work on my extension (legs float up beautifully in the water!) or I would run through its resistance as a kind of strength-training. If there was an outdoor path of some sort, even if it were a mere flat patch of grass or a trail, I would go jogging – the strange kind of splay-footed jogging I did where I floated more than bounced and where my weight was too far backwards with my feet out front.
I would spend these “vacations” fretting. How much weight was I gaining? How leaden would my body feel when I started moving it again in a class? How much would the time away set me back?
The concept of time works against dancers. You start dance training, let’s say, at the age of six. It takes 10 years to reach an expert, professional level, and then (if you’re lucky) you have 10-20 years of a professional career. That’s not much time to dance. That’s not much time to waste. There is no time, no will, to spend any of that time vacating.
In this way, too, dancers are not like other people. Perhaps this is because dancers are firmly entrenched in a vocation and a true vocation negates the ability to vacate. Maybe I should say this because it is alliterative: “There is no vacation for vocations.” I can hear readers once again protesting that this can’t be true. That all people need vacations. But, then, what would a driven, impassioned dancer know, or care, about what all people need.