Dancers and Time | This Dancing Life

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“Dance is like life. It exists as you are flitting through it, and when it’s over it’s done“.
— Jerome Robbins

Time is a big subject, maybe one of the biggest. Time drives all of us, every living being– you can’t stop it, try as you may.

There’s the daily schedule for instance (class at ten, got to be in the theatre beforehand, how long is the journey, when’s the bus, what time do I need to leave, when have I got to get up, how long have I got for breakfast, how much time do I need to warm up, got to find my practice bag, phone, glasses, keys) and so on, for every rehearsal, every performance, every tour. Built into this is lead time – you can’t just walk in off the street, jump into costume and hurtle onstage, so every step needs a preparation phase which must be factored in. Dancers’ timetables become studies in micromanagement, planned in exquisite detail, even including the time they will have to wait for the lift from the canteen in the cellar to the ninth-floor rehearsal studio… Somewhere along the line there need to be grocery shopping, dentists, bank, bills, family, cleaning, laundry, sleep, physio and the messy, time-consuming business of daily life. (This of course also applies to non-dancers — parents especially).

“Life is the dancer, and you are the dance“.
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Dance, however, relies on other aspects of time – intimately, for example, on musical time (I’ve just re-posted ”Musicality in Dance”, which I wrote a few weeks ago). There are so many different ways to “time” a step; within a musical bar, dancers can move smoothly or jerkily, stealthily, suddenly, and so on. This is intentional recruitment of specific muscle fibres (fast-twitch, slow-twitch) in a planned sequence, varying speed and power in time for visual and kinetic effect. Even your heart is poetically said to beat in ¾ time.

A good dancer in peak condition can dance far quicker than someone less experienced, less talented or less fit; batterie for example requires speed, with six, eight or even ten beats to fit in before you hit the ground… Bring on those rapid-reaction adductors. There is also the subjective perception of time – everyone knows the kind of rehearsal which seems to whiz by, everything clicking smoothly into place… and the other kind, which just drags on for hours, with frustratingly little to show at the end of it.

“Most dancers I know, especially the talented and successful ones, seem to possess (my dog’s) knack of living moment to moment. You see, their idea of time is related to those infinitely short moments when they are onstage, being their superselves“.
— Paul Taylor, Private Domain — An Autobiography

The time of day also matters. At certain hours, depending on workload, weather, amount of daylight, stress levels, circadian and homeostatic rhythms and other factors, dancers and athletes work more efficiently than at other times. (We touched on some of these areas in a recent post, “Dancers and Sleep”). This is one reason why, almost instinctively, professional dance companies try to schedule class in the morning, when people are awake, fresh from a night’s sleep, alert and keen to move – training after lunch can feel heavy and demanding by contrast.

Children and young students come regularly for class, day after day, week after week, not really noticing the passage of time. You get a little taller, maybe jump higher or turn more, but it’s gradual, and many people don’t pick up on it. Things just roll along with no real change – same faces, same exercises — until suddenly one day, something happens (puberty, non-dancing commitments, graduation, social life) and you realise a lot of time has silently come and gone. People experience growth spurts, their speed, proportions, strength, range of movement, co-ordination, even motivation change radically within weeks. They feel different, look different and behave differently, and it’s often rather sudden. Somehow things are evolving, surprisingly fast…

And there’s the time when you’re preparing as hard as you can for an exam or assessment; these are, literally, trying times (not to mention the endless, agonising suspense as you wait outside the studio door for it all to begin). There are the weeks and months coming up to, and finally performing, a show, which are simply wonderful, and the times when you’re injured, waiting every day, all day for so many, many days, to get back to class — those times seem to last forever. There’s the time when you’re hoping against hope that you’ve been selected at an audition or accepted for a course, yearning for a chance to show the world what you can do, watching professional dancers every chance you get, desperate to be up there with them.

When you finally become one of these golden creatures, you will have, unforgettably, “the time of your life”. This expression was with us a long time before the wonderful “Dirty Dancing”, and of course it encapsulates the excitement, exultation, drama, love, beauty, delight, exhilaration of dance.

“When you are fifty, you’re neither young nor old; you’re just uninteresting. When you are sixty and still dancing, you become something of a curiosity. And boy! if you hit seventy and can still get a foot of the ground, you’re phenomenal.”
— Ruth St. Denis

It also means something else, no less important. You start as a young dancer. Gradually you become an adult dancer, then an experienced dancer, then an older dancer, and then…? What then? That’s the big question every dancer has to face – how you yourself are going to answer it depends on a lot of factors, the most important of which is, what do you want for you? (We’ll look at this in a future post.) The time of your life is about your own life – life as a dancer and life as your own life, your earthly, cradle-to-grave, first-entrance-to-last-curtain existence. As a young dancer, your life is right there ahead of you, bursting with promise, opportunities, wonderful things still to come. You grab this, and you do it, with all your heart, all the life-force, energy and commitment inside you, and yes, it’s wonderful.

That’s good. It needs to be wonderful, and long, and packed with excitement, because at some point, it’s going to change. Nothing stays the same, not even dancers (however immortal they sometimes feel). Be very glad of it while you’ve got it – enjoy it, love it, make the most of it, do it all full out. You’ll have a great, rich, intoxicating hoard of memories to treasure, unforgettable, funny, passionate moments from the extraordinary adventure that is this dancing life…