Chroma, Cartoons, and How This Ballerina Made Peace With Modern Dance

Music has always been one of the most influential components of my dancing.  It influenced my movement long before my mother enrolled me in my first ballet-tap combo class down the street from my house.  I consider musicality to be every bit as important as good technique and, possibly, more important than natural ability.  Due to my involvement in soccer and art classes as a kid, my initial exposure to dance was limited: I pretty much studied ballet and jazz only from the time I was seven until age eleven.  Admittedly, I loathed the occasional modern class we were assigned to take during our summers at ballet school and regarded our polynesian, tap and folk dance classes as mere diversion--I was, after all, a "serious" dance student and in my young mind had stubbornly decided that ballet was the only "serious" dance one could study.

At age eleven, we began to have Russian character dance classes, which I quickly learned were a "must" for anyone considering a "serious" career in ballet.  I began to obsess over the intricacies and preservation of authenticity that these dances represented with the same intensity that I eschewed Disney sequels.  For some reason, I had become a bit of a dance purist and a bit of a snobby elitist at quite a young age.

Around this time I started to become aware of the existence of George Balanchine.  Our school's director, Yvonne Mounsey had danced with Mr. B's New York City Ballet in the 1950s and one couldn't walk the hallway of the studio without seeing posters bearing his name.  Although jazz classes had dropped off my plate, along with soccer and art class, I was grateful that I had had exposure to more contemporary movement.  I was able to adapt and mold myself into the jazzy "Balanchine" way of movement quite easily, thanks in part, to this experience, but I still hated modern dance.

Fast forward seven years.  Contemporary dance had now become a "thing,"  I had been exposed to more modern dance classes thanks to my summers at San Francisco Ballet School and Miami City Ballet School, and I was now in my first season with the Sacramento Ballet.  The first piece we had to audition for was a commissioned work by Dwight Rhoden, which he would later title HellaSweetPlumRhapsody.  Once again, I hated every minute of those rehearsals--mostly because I didn't get it.  I thought it was ugly.  I thought the creation process was absurd, and mostly, I was frustrated because for the first time in my life, I wasn't picking something up as quickly as I wanted to.

I can safely say, I didn't "get it" until I saw the senior company members performing it a month later on the stage of the Mondavi Center on the campus of UC Davis.  With gorgeous lighting, minimal costumes, exquisite technique, and, of course, the right music, all that absurd, ugly movement took my breath away in one instant.  I finally understood how the rules of ballet could be manipulated to become expressive in an entirely new, and absolutely gorgeous way.  I was inspired.  The next time we were faced with more contemporary movement (Septime Webre's Fluctuating Hemlines) I ate it up.  I understood that music could be more fully expressed in movements that weren't limited to the ballet vocabulary--much like a Chuck Jones cartoon, in which Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny make magic happen to the music set before them.

I have since fallen in love with more contemporary movement, including the works of Jiri Kyllian, Wayne McGreggor, Mats Ek and Trey McIntyre to name a few.  McGreggor's work Chroma (posted above) is particularly reminiscent of my favorite cartoons due to it's music selection.  My next task?--give dancing barefoot a chance--who knows?  Maybe I'll fall in love with that too...