Before I could walk, I have been told, I jumped. In the Minneapolis apartment my parents rented, using a convenient door frame, they hung what was called a Johnny Jump Up.
Often, when my parents, now in their eighties, take me on a journey down memory lane, they recall my spending hours in the Johnny Jump Up and share how they then thought I was destined for an athletic future. They didn’t imagine that my energy and joy in jumping would find itself a home in ballet.
They didn’t consider this option because, other than the likes of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, the popular male movers of the time were athletes. The athleticism of dance was not generally celebrated in America. And besides, was dance really meant for boys?
As a child growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, I loved riding my bicycle, running, climbing trees and playing guitar. Once a week, I would accompany my mother to an international folk dance gathering held in a large room at Princeton University. Those nights, I would always come home drenched in sweat. The combination of music and dance, and the connection of both to culture, was an invigorating experience.
As a junior in high school, I befriended a male doctoral student at Princeton, who was an avid folk dance enthusiast. This friend encouraged me to join him in a jazz dance class he took, once a week, at the Princeton Ballet studio. Not long after taking my first jazz dance class, I ran into another Princeton student who studied ballet there, and convinced me to try the ballet partnering class.
Journey into the world of ballet
Before this first journey into the world of ballet, I had never seen a dance belt, I had never worn tights, and frankly, had no idea of the appropriate dress for a male dancer.
Carrying the dance belt I purchased in the little boutique at Princeton Ballet, blue women’s tights my mother had lent me, a canvas belt from my father’s days in the Navy and the plainest white T-shirt I could find, I stepped into the small men’s changing room at the Princeton Ballet studio. Having arrived shortly before class, I was rushing to get dressed when, fortunately, another male dancer entered the dressing room before I exited with my dance belt on backward.
My life experiences, prior to this class, suggested that the smaller part of men’s undergarments was worn in the front and the larger part covered one’s bottom. That day, I was spared considerable embarrassment by this male dancer, who stopped me from departing the dressing room with the thong part of the dance belt in front!
There I was, a senior in high school in my mother’s blue tights, entering the dance studio where the other male dancer stood, in black tights and a plain white T-shirt, alongside 20 women who were wearing pink tights and black leotards. For the next hour and a half, it was as if I was engaged in an unusual form of wrestling sweaty, nearly “naked” women, performing steps that I was seeing for the first time, while being directed by the instructor to approximate graceful movement.
Just days before, I had watched the movie The Turning Point. The love scene that seamlessly takes Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne from the dance studio to the bedroom (all to Prokofiev’s entrancing music from the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet) was my initial inspiration, yet nothing could have been further from the reality of my awkward attempt at keeping a room full of very tall women on their toes.
While I had thought that ballet might help my popularity with women, my clumsiness was not earning me any favour. Exhausted and discouraged, my involvement with the world of ballet may have ended there, if not for a chance encounter while scooping ice cream at one of my many jobs in senior year.
Telling a story through dance
There were no other customers in the shop when the Founding Artistic Director of the Princeton Ballet Workshop entered, and requested permission to post a notice of an upcoming audition for her summer production of Giselle.
Questions I asked led to her requesting that I stand in the first position (a stance where your heels are together and your toes point outward) and bend my knees as far as they could go, while maintaining a vertical posture and my heels on the ground. Later, I understood that I was being pretested, prior to being invited to attend the real audition that was planned for the following weekend.
It was this summer production where I experienced telling a story through dance, while discovering a vehicle to express my enthusiasm for jumping! We danced for six to eight hours daily. When rehearsing my role in the peasant pas, which involved jumps with beats (jumps where your legs either change from front to back or come together and open again), I was simply instructed to change my feet in the air, as many times as I could, before landing.
I was well aware that everyone else in the studio knew far more than I did, but I was given the impression that I could catch up. I felt at home. I had found a world where my expressive and physical passions were required, and on occasion, even celebrated! There was no going back. It was the summer before my first year in college, and I was changed forever.
When you sign up for a career in dance, you are attempting to work your way into an extremely competitive field, where your chances of earning a living are slight and the potential for injury great. But I was too attracted to the combination of artistry and athleticism that transforms dancers into moving representations of art, to notice or be concerned about the challenges that might lie ahead.
Fortune presented itself again when at the end of that summer, I was offered a scholarship to a four-year college, where I would be trained as a dancer while earning a degree that focused on the teaching of ballet. The director of this program became one of my life mentors.
I especially admired how she had developed her own dancing career—from dancer to teacher to director—and had ended up owning a dance school and directing the company she founded, while maintaining her full-time position as Chair and Professor of Dance. For the next four years, I was both a member of her regional ballet company and a teaching major within the dance department.
Strenuous work can take its toll
Upon graduation, one of the guest choreographers who was brought to our college hired me to join the company he directed. His name was Robert Barnett, and the company was the Atlanta Ballet.
Dancing with the Atlanta Ballet was a dream job. In addition to daily classes and rehearsals, I often took advantage of an open invitation to take extra classes and receive individual Pilates coaching for free at the company’s school.
While beginning my serious pursuit of a dance career at the end of high school meant that I would have to work hard to catch up, I didn’t mind. In fact, it was a labour of love.
But strenuous work can take its toll, and while I never had an injury that kept me from performing, there were strains, sprains and aches that, on occasion, had me receiving one form of physical therapy or another. It wasn’t until my second full-time position with a professional company that I actually had to sit out.
In the summer of my second season with Les Grands Ballet Canadiens, during a tour of Europe, we were stationed in London, England, while giving performances at the famed Sadler’s Wells Theatre. One night, before the curtain went up on Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), while I was practicing some moves backstage, I felt a popping sensation in my lower back. After this, I couldn’t put weight on my right leg without experiencing both weakness and pain.
It was a feeling unlike anything I had previously experienced, and was certainly unlike anything I had ever felt onstage, in performance. The curtain was coming up, so there was no time for me to pay attention to my injury.
For the next half-hour, my only concern was to somehow manage to be where I needed to be, at the time I was called to be there, and to appear as if I was still performing my expected movements. Frankly, I don’t know how I accomplished this.
At the end of this ballet, the closing piece of our concert that night, I stood with the company bowing onstage, but I could not put any weight on my right leg. While tears flowed down my face, I patiently waited for the final bow to be over, got down on my hands and knees, and crawled up the stairs to the men’s dressing room.
I had herniated a disk in my lower back, and danced an entire ballet in that condition.
Dance is not a seasonal endeavour
Generally, the most common injuries for female ballet dancers relate to their feet and ankles, while back injuries are more prevalent among male ballet dancers. A herniated disk does not have to result in the termination of one’s dance career; however, once a joint in your body has been compromised, it is forever at a greater risk of reinjury.
As it turned out, I did end up with a reinjury, within a year. And while this initiated the end of my dancing days, it was also the beginning of a paradigm shift that affected my mental and physical perspective on life.
After the injury at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, I knew that I had to be careful, and being careful was the opposite of the type of energy and joy I felt as a child, in my Johnny Jump Up. There is a big difference between the power and grace that appears to be achieved with great ease on the stage, and the gruelling reality of having to maintain almost no body fat, while committing to a rigorous schedule of demanding dance training and performances for more than 40 hours a week.
Unlike various sports my parents may have envisioned for their jumping child, dance is not a seasonal endeavour. Dancers truly have no season, and few free days. While dancers may be forced to take time off in order to recover from a serious injury, a dancer is required to stay in top form for the entire year.
Being careful meant spending time with physical therapists, and taking pain and anti-inflammatory medications. The first year I attended a performance of my former company at the beautiful Place des Arts Theatre in Montreal, Quebec, I remember sitting there with tears streaming down my face, the entire time. I was not in physical pain, but I was mourning the death of an invincible physical self, one with a body and spirit that could spend eight hours in the studio and still be ready to perform that night.
Then, as my career evolved from dancer to teacher, I gradually realized that the body, which had quickly led me to a career as a professional ballet dancer, was no longer resilient and able to quickly recover from injuries or daily overwork. In fact, in order for me to feel good physically, instead of spending time in the dance studio, Pilates mat classes and trail hikes allowed me to keep fit and feel energized, productive and pain-free.
As I continued to teach, there were still days when the music and movement swept me up into a joyous state of mind, and I would attempt to perform a jump full-out. I always paid for this after, and the payments gradually became more than I could afford.
Surgery
Last year, after spending a year crawling up the stairs to our second-storey bedroom after a day of teaching, I decided to see an orthopedist. During this visit, I discovered that, in addition to the damage done to my lower back, I had substantial arthritis, with my left hip socket bone-on-bone.
For a year, I tried to deal with this through physical therapy. I even got a cortisone shot, guided by an X-ray, into the hip socket. I met with another orthopedic spine specialist, who ordered an MRI, in order to determine the relationship between the condition of my lower back and the deterioration of my hip joint.
Collectively, we arrived at the understanding that a full hip replacement might enable better physical movement, and with proper therapy, I might avoid a future operation to fuse two vertebrae. My surgery was scheduled for March 16, 2020.
Full of anxiety, yet resolved to my course of action, I counted down the days. Meanwhile, daily news reports were filled with stories of COVID-19, a worldwide pandemic that was becoming a major concern in America. On the day of my scheduled surgery, the governor of Ohio ordered a hold on all elective surgeries. I cancelled. Then, I waited.
In May, I was informed that calls would be made to reschedule, starting with the earliest cancelled surgeries, as soon as the governor lifted his ban. Two weeks later, I received my call, and June 5 was chosen. Soon, instead of bone on bone, my joint would be comprised of a porcelain ball in a hard rubber socket.
In my mind, I wrestled with disappointment and self-criticism. How did this happen to me? What did I do wrong? As I discussed my angst with other dancers, including my mentor Robert Barnett, who replaced two hips at over 90 years of age, I realized that I was joining a little-known club of sorts.
Several dance friends came forward with stories of successful hip replacements. As young dancers, we never considered how the injuries we appeared to recover from remained part of our physical degeneration, until such a point as the one I now found myself in.
Determined, I decided that pivoting my perspective would help me find my way back to the joy within me. I have been happiest when creating and expressing. As a child, this joy came out as continuous jumping. As a dancer, I learned to refine my jump to be graceful and articulate. As a teacher, I would strive to inspire my students.
And now, with a new hip, I was learning to adjust the way I teach and choreograph in order to motivate, educate and create.
Pulling the plug on logic
According to medical literature, the risk of dislocation after a total hip replacement is approximately 2 percent. This is something I learned during my pre-surgery consultations.
In the weeks following my surgery, I was reminded that I needed to stay away from posterior extension and rotation, and gradually progress through a series of exercises meant to build strength, prior to exploring my joint’s range of motion.
The reason for this precaution is that posterior extension and rotation is the method used to take one’s femur bone out of the socket, when performing the anterior approach to total hip replacement, the surgery I had chosen because it involves no cutting of the muscles.
Ten weeks of physical therapy flew by, prior to the start of the fall semester. I was gradually increasing what I was able to do, but on occasion, I felt something very strange in my hip. It felt like a shift or sliding of porcelain in rubber, especially when I tried to stand in the fifth position (the position, in ballet, in which you stand on two feet with your toes pointed outward, and the heel of the front foot touches the toe of the back foot).
At this point in my recovery, I thought that focusing on how I demonstrated exercises when teaching via Zoom (because of COVID) would replace my physical therapy exercises, which were gradually becoming based on ballet movement anyway. Then, on September 23 at 1:20 pm, I experienced something I hope none of my readers ever do.
What I will now describe happened while I was demonstrating a simple tendu soutenu derrière, which, for non-dancers, is a movement where you bend the leg you are standing on with outward rotation, while your other leg is stretched and pointed (while also rotating outward) straight back.
When teaching on Zoom, especially after a total hip replacement, I wanted my students to feel and understand the concepts I taught, even though I could not demonstrate any significant leg extension to the back. And while my back foot was touching the ground, the combination of rotation and extension to the back was enough for my newly designed femoral head to come completely out of the hip socket, while I was remotely instructing my students.
What took place next—the ambulance, the shock of my university dancers and colleagues, the 911 call and the emergency room—were all part of an unreal horror movie that I was the unfortunate star of! When this happened, it was as if someone had pulled the plug on all logic.
Close to blacking out, I managed to hang in there until an hour later, when I woke up whole again, after the emergency room doctor had put me to sleep and put my leg back into its socket. I had become a member of the 2 percent club, a club made up of hip replacement patients who are unfortunate enough to completely dislocate their new joint.
The joy that jumping brings to the soul
With this new membership, one gains a new status. One out of three patients who dislocate a new hip will re-dislocate that same hip. How amazing, an upgrade from 2 percent to 33 percent! Having one’s leg “fall off” is not something to repeat.
My paradigm shift, prior to surgery, did not prepare me for the patience required going forward. Prior to my surgery, I heard the success stories of friends who had the same procedure. Having generally good health and an ability to heal and recover, I never expected to be part of the small percentage of people who have the surgery and end up with this extended vulnerability.
My hypothesis of mind over matter was further challenged. With Thanksgiving days away, plans were in place to join family via Zoom. I was directing a virtual dance concert, to be streamed via the internet on the same dates that were originally planned for the theatre, but for an at-home audience.
In my recorded Artistic Director address to the audience, I applauded the passion and commitment of the dancers who overcame obstacles and created a virtual dance concert during a world pandemic. In celebrating the brilliance of those I directed and collaborated with, despite the handicaps I have had, part of me was still that little boy in my Johnny Jump Up, full of the joy that jumping brings to the body and soul.
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image 1 image by Yogendra Singh from Pixabay 2 image by 建鹏 邵 from Pixabay 3 Photo by Luna Lovegood from Pexels 4 Photo by Luna Lovegood from Pexels 5 Photo by Lucas Pezeta from Pexels 6 Photo by Jonathan Borba from Pexels 7 image by Elimero from Pixabay
