When I was dancing full time, I sought out what I thought of as good pain. Physically, good pain was pain in the center of a muscle that you wanted to make stronger. It was an achy, tired pain. It was not pain in a joint, or a tendon or ligament, and it was not sharp, radiating, or extreme. It did not bruise, bleed, fester, or become permanently damaged. I would take a hot bath at night in Epsom salts to soothe my muscles and make it possible to sleep. But in a dance studio I didn’t want to be numb. I didn’t want to be comfortable. I wanted to push, to hit the wall, to stretch to the point of breaking … but not break.
I associated good pain, the pain of hitting a limit without injury, as a sign that I was doing things right. When I did a pirouette, for example, I knew my knee in passé was pushing backwards to help the spin hard enough when I felt a familiar twinge (“stop!”) in the hip socket of both my raised knee and standing leg. I knew that an extension was high enough in arabesque when I felt the twinge in my back that let me know that the back-extended leg had reached as far as it could go. When I went up on relevé (on the tips of my toes) in pointe shoes there was a familiar crunch of my hardened calluses in pointe shoes.
Unfortunately, I did break. (See my post on The Day I Stopped Dancing). Perhaps I did it wrong. Or perhaps I kind of wanted the break. I wanted to push it that far to see what would happen. As a kind of experimental testing of the break with life. Like driving your car into a brick wall. Will you crash through it, unscathed, full-flying freedom with bricks flying everywhere on the other side? Or will it resist you, ending your life for good?
Besides seeking out “good” pain I also sought out emotional pain. I did this by trying to goad myself into greater achievement but telling myself I was weak and cowardly. By daring the fighter in me to fight back against that voice. Are you not weak? Not a coward? Show me!
Sometimes this emotional self-provocation would motivate me when I was tired from lack of sleep, too much training, too little food (I was always on a diet), and too much homework. Sometimes I would get a second wind and then make a technical breakthrough (see my earlier post on having an On day). When my efforts led to failure in reaching a new level, or injury, though, I reveled in disappointment and despair. I gave in (too often) to purge crying, to the sense of relief one would feel after the violence of strong feelings were over. My parents, opera lovers (but I am not blaming my parents), didn’t mind a few histrionics at home, provided that they were linked to a noble cause (such as aiming for artistic excellence) and not tantrums.
I had an autobiography of Ballerina Assoluta Natalia Makarova, my idol in all things after seeing her transcendent ABT performances as a child, where she said that when she was young, she would look at herself in the mirror, with tears streaming down her face. She would say to her image, “I want the world to see this.” The world did see it. Her performances of passionate divas – as a dying swan in Swan Lake or a jilted peasant girl who died of heartbreak in Giselle and who haunted the woods forever after that – were extreme in the best possible way.
I wanted to be like Makarova – to dance, and feel, and push, to the edge of my pain and have the world see it and love me for it. Not to break but to survive and persevere in the braveness and glory of feeling the pain and doing it anyway. One can’t be a heroine without surviving through pain by meeting it where it lives and dancing with it in the middle of the fire. Or so I thought then. I don’t think that anymore. But, then, I’m no longer trying to be a heroine. And I am quite sure that I don’t want to be a dying swan or the spirit of a jilted maiden in the woods.