“Dance, for me, is different from everyday life; it is magical. Play, for me, is not pretending to be a ballerina, wearing a tutu and dancing around the house—it is the daily striving to become one.”

New Country

by Emma Love (class of 2006)

"Enter the new country.” My dad repeated that phrase to me over and over before I left home for my first long period, in the summer of 2004. I was heading to Pennsylvania for a large summer intensive, a ballet-world training camp. Five weeks seemed like an insurmountably long time. That phrase, from theologian Henry Nouwen’s book The Inner Voice of Love, a book that focuses on the growth of personal faith, calls for action—it calls for taking on a challenge. Leaving a place of contentment, the old country, to go somewhere unfamiliar, the new country, is undoubtedly a challenge. Nouwen’s phrase has come to mean even more to me in the months since I left Wichita for Seattle to study with the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. In my own “new country,” I have experienced many things that I first saw as completely new, but which I now realize have their roots in the old country, in my Wichita life.

The transition from the old country to the new is very difficult. No one wants to leave what is comfortable. Wichita was comfortable for me—it was happy, safe, dependable. I loved my family, my friends, my studio, my school, my routine. I saw the same faces every day; I opened the same books every day; I drove the same route every day. I did not want any of that to change. And yet, in the back of my mind, in the marrow of my bones, I felt that somehow, something was missing. Nouwen accurately describes this feeling of deficiency: “You are very much at home, although not truly at peace, in the old country. You know the ways of the old country…. even though you know that you have not found there what your heart most desires.”

What my heart most desired was to pursue dance even further—to turn it into something bigger in my life. I knew that I wanted to take my love of ballet beyond Wichita. So I decided to try to enter a new country. There were voices in me that said, “Stay here! Stay home!” But the voices encouraging me to go were louder—the voices of family and friends. Who wants to leave home, or their friends? Certainly not me. Yet, I decided to take my first steps toward the new country.

I have come to understand certain complexities of dance even more in this new country. Creativity and play, two aspects extremely important in all of life, have become even more meaningful for me in this new place. Creativity is originality of thought and execution. When a five-year-old finishes a crayon drawing of his dog, his teacher may exclaim, “How creative!” When Picasso painted his famous Guernica, people said the same of him. There is no standard of creativity, no bar that must be reached. The only condition that must be met is that the work be inventive, and come from one’s own mind and heart.

Creativity finds applications in everyday life in almost every job: a teacher must be creative with an assignment to make a student more interested; a chef must be creative with her blueberry pie so that it won’t taste like everyone else’s; a choreographer must be creative with his steps so that they will be treasured by dancers and audiences alike for many years to come. Moving out here to this new country, and being exposed to vastly different styles of choreography, has opened my eyes even more to the world of creativity. I recently saw a ballet in which the two dancers were suspended by ropes from the ceiling, with their feet barely touching the ground. It seems like this approach would be very awkward, that the ropes would make it hard for the dancers to move with elegance. They did not perform “classical ballet,” or anything like it, but they were able to make the dance graceful and beautiful. The choreographer who envisioned the concept and each dancer’s movements demonstrated great creativity.

Creativity cannot thrive in isolation; creativity in action is “play.” In 1938, Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens (literally meaning “the playful man”), a study of the play element in civilization and the great role it plays in culture. Huizinga defines play as

A voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy, and the conscious ness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life.’

Huizinga’s definition relates closely to many aspects of my life in ballet, in both the old and the new country. In the first part of the definition, Huizinga stresses the fact that play is voluntary. Ballet is not something that anyone pushed me into doing, or even suggested. When I was five, I saw my sister’s best friend perform a Celtic dance in which she, along with many others, leapt crisply and beautifully to a set of playful songs by the Irish band The Chieftains. They were not dressed in extravagant tutus, or wearing glittering tiaras—but they were dancing. I wanted to try. I loved it. I chose it for myself. The next part of Huizinga’s definition asserts that play is either an “activity” or an “occupation.” Play is often thought of as a childish activity—toying with dolls or trucks—but Huizinga is describing the childlike nature of play, the type of play in which the activity is creative and can become an occupation. Ballet is not my hobby; it will soon become my career. I am lucky enough to have the possibility of a career that centers on a loved “activity.” Huizinga explains that play is “executed… according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding.” Ballet has rules: the basic positions of the legs and arms, the placement of the body, the correct positioning of the foot, etc. The rules in dance are steadfast, but there are always little unique changes each dancer makes within them. No dancer’s fifth arm position is exactly the same as another dancer’s, nor is her first arabesque. Coming here to this new country has shown me how two dancers can be very different, have vastly dissimilar styles and graces, and still be equally beautiful.

There is always a feeling of joy when I dance, even through sore toes, or back aches, or cramped legs. Doing what I love always gives me joy. Yet, as Huizinga suggests, this joy is different from the joys of everyday life. A feeling of vitality and excitement fills me when I dance, an energy and exhilaration that is unlike anything I’ve ever felt. Jeffrey Stanton, a Pacific Northwest Ballet dancer, describes this feeling when he says, “There’s excitement in the air before the curtain goes up. You know something magical is going to happen.” Dance, for me, is different from everyday life; it is magical. Play, for me, is not pretending to be a ballerina, wearing a tutu and dancing around the house—it is the daily striving to become one.

Creativity, and play, first took form for me in Wichita. One evening, when I was six, I snuck down to the basement, where my brothers, pajama-clad, were pretending to be astronauts, running around and blasting aliens. I sat at the base of the stairs watching them take cover behind tables that had been flipped onto their sides. Eventually, I asked if I could join in, and, amazingly, they let me. Each of us had the whole fantasy playing out in our minds—the unknown planet surface, the crazy aliens we faced—all of it. That evening, like many others, we were being creative. We were playing.

Another person who instilled creativity and play in me was my sixth and seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Estes. At the beginning of one semester, he sat our class down and told us that we would be creating our own civilization, complete with our own unique language. For some portion of every day, we worked on our language, our life, our new world—our “Hoinga” tribe, as we called ourselves. It was something completely new, and completely our own. A second way he taught us to become more in touch with our creative side was by means of a theater game he called “improbable improv.” He would call out an unusual scenario; we would then have to act out a scene within that scenario. One afternoon, he called out, “elevator that just stopped working,” and I soon became a yelling, outraged passenger. Consequently, he decided I played a good angry person and cast me as the ferocious, female version of Tybalt when we performed our own version of Romeo and Juliet. In the play, we were forced to call upon our creative sides in order to find fitting lines and funny actions for the characters we became.

Both years with Mr. Estes we memorized Lewis Carroll’s exciting poem, “Jabberwocky.” He divided the characters in the poem among the students in the class, and we rotated, each of us eventually playing all the roles. Cleverly, he had each of us also play the narrator, just to make sure that we did our memorization homework. He showed us the core of creativity—making things as we truly imagine them. My “bandersnatch” may not have been how he or anybody else conceived it, but it was just as good as anyone else’s, because it was how I imagined it.

Imagination and play are essential to any creative process. A choreographer plays when he or she envisions movement; a dancer plays within that movement to give it life. In this new country, I have observed this process more frequently and I have come to understand creativity and play more deeply. Dramatizing each accented note of a piece of music with a precise piqué of the dancer’s foot, or conveying the feeling of a slow adagio with a drawn out developpé as high as the leg can go are works of creativity. The fruits of creativity and play—the dance itself—come as natural results of the process of play, a process of trial and error. Within this framework, apparent “mistakes,” because they are part of the process, can even be enjoyed, on a certain level. When a dancer attempts a difficult step for the first time and ends up plopping ungracefully on the floor, laughter floods the studio. When a choreographer completely forgets what step he or she has just shown, all begin to giggle, especially the choreographer. There is fun and enjoyment intertwined with the work of creativity. That is something I have noticed more and more in this new, amazing ballet world.

Things are not always so lighthearted, however; there is an unspoken pressure that every step must be perfect. This pressure can tear a person down. I know this only too well, for perfectionism has long been entrenched in my life. In school, at home, in dance—everywhere I go and in everything I do, I feel that I have to be perfect, without mistakes.

Perfectionism is harmful, but a desire to do one’s best is not. A person becomes a perfectionist when he or she conflates the pursuit of perfection with doing his or her best and forms a new theory: one’s best is perfection. The fact that I know that this formulation is false does not always make it easier for me to reject it. I always worried that people would look down on me, or at least not think as highly of me, if I did not get a perfect score on that algebra quiz, or if I did not land that triple pirouette perfectly—but the truth is, those things really don’t matter to them. When I arrived here in this new country, I was positive that each member of the company landed triples perfectly every time. I was wrong. They fall, too—and they just pick themselves back up like everyone else. No one is always completely on balance and in tune. Setting one’s sights on a personal best is good; acknowledging that that best will never be perfect, but good enough, is better.

This yearning for perfection, this desire to fit an ideal, is explained well in C.S. Lewis’ essay, “The Inner Ring.” An inner ring, as C.S. Lewis portrays it, is a group in which the members often feel a sense of accomplishment for being accepted. The group, whether it’s a clique at a school or a set of select colleagues at work, is exclusive, judging anyone not within its boundaries as unworthy. The inner ring that I long desired to be in was that of “perfect person.” This ring is unique, though, as even those who believe themselves to be actual members do not fit the standard, because there is no standard. There is no perfect person; there is no person who is perfect in any particular area at all. All fall at some point. As Lewis suggests, this drive to be perfect can take over a person’s life: “Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire [to be in an inner ring] is going to be one of the chief motives of your life.” Until I understood that perfection was unattainable, the drive to be perfect was causing me constant frustration and disappointment. I still struggle with perfectionism; perhaps I always will—but the realization that there is no “perfect” is a giant step.

One must work for the love of the art, the sake of the art, and for nothing else. Perfection, after all, was not the primary drive behind my life in ballet; it was the love of the dance itself. Patricia Barker, a Pacific Northwest Ballet principal, puts it clearly: “We dance because we want to dance, and that’s it.” There should be no other reason for doing something besides the love of doing it. And that is why I entered this new country—for my love of the art, for my love of dance.

Each day, I take a few more steps into this new world, then a few more. Sometimes they seem easier, and sometimes harder. I still hold “dual citizenship” between the old country and the new. But over time, the new grows more familiar and more comfortable. There are moments, while back in the old country, when I even find myself missing the new country a little. It was a giant step to come to the new, and I have not explored it all yet. There are incredibly dark, dreary days when I think the sun is only shining in the old country and never in the new. But then the day changes, the clouds part, and the sun is brilliant. ■

The Road Taken

by Scott Watson (class of 2007)

All great discoveries find their roots in smaller decisions. The decision of the Wright Brothers’ father to give to them a small flying toy in childhood ultimately led to machine-powered flight. James Watson’s decision to study zoology ultimately led to the discovery of the structure of DNA. On a smaller level, a decision made by my fourth grade teacher to institute a reading contest led to my love of reading.

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