A world of pure imagination

On Saturday I took a master class taught by Dominic Walsh. It was the second time I'd taken his class, and this time I actually got some corrections. I'm usually not nervous when a teacher watches me, but I'm usually not taking from one of my favorite dancers ever, either. I tried to remind myself that he's just a regular person, like the Nobel Prize winner with whom I once shared an elevator. (I take it back. That guy was a practically a force of nature. It's the other Nobel Prize winners that I knew whom I saw as regular people, because I first knew them as professors.) I was so distracted that I totally blew the arms on one center combination. Geez, you'd think I was some nerdy guy trying to speak to a female. Anyhoo - the point of my story is that DW talked a lot about dance as imagination. In giving a correction on grande battements, he likened the feeling first to having lasers shoot out of your hands and feet, then to being a hose and having water gush out the end of both appendages, and finally to having paint on your fingers and toes and reaching for the canvas. He stated that in order to develop as a dancer, you had to use your imagination to guide your movement. It's true that ballet classes are filled with corrections that start "Imagine that...", but I never thought of imagination as an important skill for technique. Maybe that's why some students don't get my corrections no matter how many times I explain. If they can't see it in their mind, how can they feel it in their bodies? We did a lot of improvisation in my modern classes in college. The teacher quickly dispelled the notion that we were trying to "be" trees or bees or whatever. Instead he said to use the motion of the tree to inspire movement; don't be the tree, move like the tree. Although frankly, there are some days I'd rather be a tree. The moral of this story? Dance is a simile, not a metaphor.