Returning Home to Ballet- Part 1

A vast universe of dance styles and classes—day and night—welcomed me when I lived in Manhattan from 1999-2008. Flamenco in the morning. Check. Argentine tango in the afternoon. Check. Bellydancing one day. Lyrical Jazz the next. So many classes and endless possibilities. I was in dance heaven.

When I came to Philly, everything changed. Way fewer classes.  Sure I had some wonderful teachers. Sammy lowered the lights and set up a club environment for a sweaty energetic hip hop class, but then he left. Big Loss. When my daughter moved to Dallas, I wondered why I was still in Philly. Sammy! “If Sammy goes, I go,”I told everyone.  But I stayed.  Kat had a fun tap class for a few years, but that class ended too. And there was Mike for salsa, but he stopped teaching too.  I have been  uninspired by some teachers or disappointed that they taught only at night or  that they were too far away. NYC had spoiled me.

After finishing my book,  and space opened up in my life,  I decided to stop being mad at Philadelphia for all the dance classes that it doesn’t have and take advantage of what it does have. And that turns out to be ballet. With several ballet companies in the city, there are numerous classes to choose from.

This would mean returning to a dance that I hadn’t done in thirty years! The truth is ballet was my first love. I started at 8 years old and was hooked right away, charmed by the French language and moved by its gracefulness. I dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer and spent summers reading books about girls who went to special high schools for ballet and made it their lives. I longed for that.

To further inspire me, my neighbors Tom and Linda (also “seniors”) recently attended their first ballet class  They turned me onto this wonderful Korean Netflix series Navillera, where an older man takes ballet for the first time because it was always his dream. While watching it,  I found myself getting up and doing some of the basic steps along with the character and liking it.

Why did I stop studying ballet?  I stopped in junior hight school when I got self-conscious about my body and picked it up again in college and didn’t stop until I hit 40 and my marriage fell apart. When everything changes, everything changes.

I was ready for my new life, and started taking ballroom classes, even before the divorce. Old patterns needed to be broken!  So ballet went too. A friend told me about African dance classes in NYC, so I started going in for those. Ballet was left in the dust for the entire world’s dances which I needed to learn.

But now at the ripe old age of 72, ballet beckons. I thought about my daughter Lisa who loved ballet. We even took some classes together years back. Sooooo,  I got a pair of pink soft shoes and ventured out  to sample the offerings in Philly….

TO BE CONTINUED!