voice slightly slurred and hard to understand.
I frowned and shook my head, trusting my small watch to alert me when I needed to be ready to hop onto the bus. I didn’t want to check my phone either because I was worried the battery would die and then I would have no way to order an uber or anything like that once in Los Angeles. And yes, I had forgotten my fucking phone charger. Don’t remind me.
I was failing at this hard core.
Inhaling deeply, I tried to center and relax. I desperately wanted to listen to classical music and go to my happy place. Where was my happy place? Dancing. Forever and always dancing.
In ballet, you didn’t have parents who didn’t listen to you.
In ballet, you didn’t feel the weight of expectations on you.
In ballet, you didn't have choices being made about your future.
In ballet, everything was different. The medium of dance itself was difficult, it required years of intense training to mold your body into a perfect tool for the art form that I so desperately loved. But once you reached a certain point? When you were comfortable with your body, relying on muscle memory, it became something so much more than a physical activity.
You became an extension of the art itself.
I was no longer Colette Allard. I was a tool to express the stunning choreography that someone had hand crafted to a masterpiece of music. I was art itself, rather than a girl who was voiceless to everyone. Invisible. Unimportant.
It had been a difficult choice to leave the current company I’d been studying under. Despite being only seventeen, I’d been working with a ballet company out of Maine after they had seen one of my performances at my home academy a year and a half beforehand. I’d been all but groomed to enter into the company, despite not being sure I wanted that. I loved dancing, of course, but did I want to do it for money? I wasn’t positive. It was so sacred to me, and somehow making it a job took away something from that. My thoughts wandered to my most recent practice.
“Again,” Anatoly shouted, his thick Russian accent causing me to jump slightly.
I rolled my shoulders back and placed myself at the barre, ready to move past our warm up already. I knew we would be practicing a sequence from The Firebird today. It was by far one of my favorites.
As the music came on from the old stereo system he insisted using, I found myself staring ahead into the mirror. I had a love-hate relationship with mirrors. As a dancer, I valued that they could help you position yourself until you could find the placement of your hips and arms on your own. I also hated the mirror because it often showed warped images of your body and its movement. A happy medium was necessary.
I shook my limbs out as I rolled through my pointe shoes, their black satin color matching my convertible tights, leotard, and insulated warm-up pants. I winced, feeling my right big toe pulsing with pain from yesterday when I had bled through the lamb’s wool protecting my toes as well as the satin on the shoes. Fun shit, right? That was why I always wore black. Blood didn’t bother me, but it did make it look like I enjoyed brutally hurting my feet… which I suppose wasn’t terribly off base.
Tchaikovsky’s classics had a wonderful effect on me and I was falling into the warm-up before I even realized it. I rolled my neck and shoulders as I continued to work through my shoes, needing them warm and less stiff than they were currently. I could feel my energy building as I mentally prepared for the next few exercises.
I lost track of time as we worked through a combination of plies, tendus, and glisses. My arms swayed as a natural extension from my elbow as I closed my eyes, refusing to compare and focus on the other dancers around me. I knew it wouldn’t do any good and would probably just mess up my current precise movements.
When the crescendo of one of his songs hit, we worked our way through ronds de jambes, fondus, and frappès. My movements, which had been deep and developed, turned quick and sharp as I allowed myself a bit of creative freedom when it came to my arm placement.
My instructor was probably scowling at me, but I think he took it easy on me considering I