Ballet vs. improvisation

I have been dancing for as long as I can remember.

Psychology books obsessed with deconstructing the human mind have taken over my quarantine experience. These books consider hundreds of experiments to identify what we, as humans, hold in common. Maybe I find this investigation so interesting because I have spent years obsessing over the opposite. When my mother enrolled me in formal dance classes in kindergarten, the first lesson was that every single person is immutably different.

Ballet is revered, in part, because of the value it places on muting that difference. From the first day of class, uniformity was drilled into my head. A plié — the most simple movement — requires a dancer to bend the knees directly over the toes, hold the core, suck in the butt, straighten the back, open the shoulders, curve the neck, strengthen the arms but relax the hands, and then move. Ballet requires every aspect to be so perfect that each dancer knows she is indistinguishable from the next. That in itself is the allure. It is captivating because everyone is beautiful and everyone fits in.

I began learning new forms in high school, and improvisation was just one. Improvisation is the polar opposite of ballet — defined by the creation of movement that expresses human difference. It asks you to jump off a cliff and shake hands with a stranger. It requires a dancer to stomp on that fear of judgment and do whatever her body deems right at that moment: years of training coalescing into a nod of the head or a swish of the hips. There are no restrictions and no guidelines beyond the turn of the music. Improvisation embodies authenticity, when the external reflects the internal. It is captivating because everyone is unique.

Ballet rejects human difference in its efforts to portray the alluring fantasy of perfection. Improvisation embraces it in order to express it. Both take human difference as precedence. The first lesson of any dance class, though I did not realize it at the time, was to embrace our differences — because we must live with them.