My teacher on Thursday is Jessica Kreyer, who has for a number of years been the Children's Ballet Mistress for the Boston Ballet's annual production of The Nutcracker. One thing she likes to emphasize is how hard ballet really is, how the traditional way the dance is practiced is designed to push you to the very limit of your strength and endurance until you literally cannot go on. Obviously that's not how we're taught, but she says it is not unusual for the training of top-level professional dancers. She emphasizes this to help us feel better about how often we simply lack the strength to do certainly things correctly. Balance, for example, takes a huge amount of strength! To illustrate her point, she told us about the dancer who played the Sugar Plum Fairy in the most recent Nutcracker at the BB. Her choreography looks light, ethereal, like she's a floating weightless nymph. But to achieve that air, to execute that choreography so beautifully and technically perfect, she has to work so hard that the minute she came offstage she collapsed in a gasping heap. Jessie told us the students of hers who were also in the ballet were shocked to see it, 'cause the movies make you think that dancers just prance offstage with enough breath to have dramatic conversations and possibly stab their costars. But that is how hard the highest levels of ballet really are, and that sort of thing happens once the dancers get offstage all the time.
It was interesting to think about. That for even the very best practitioners of the art there are, it is still so hard, so demanding to them. That to do it right, even when you are a master you will never be able to give less than everything you've got. As one of my all-time favorite quotes says, from some random movie I saw in French class about Edgar Degas, it takes supreme effort to make it look effortless.
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