I was recently lucky enough to get tickets to see the Royal Ballet Company perform at their home theater in London. The experience was one of the most amazing of my life. Sitting on my bar stool seat, one row in front of the people standing, I still had a perfect view of the stage.
The space was beautiful, covered in red velvet and lit by soft lamplight, the great curtain rising up before us, my seat was just eye level with the massive coat of arms sewn on the second smaller curtain framing the top of the stage. The lights dimmed. The music started (I will never be able to convey the beauty of hearing a live symphony). The curtain rose. Finally, with the light tap of pointe shoes and the swish of skirts, the first dancers promenaded onto the stage.
I had seen all this before. The beautiful theatre, the incredible backdrops and costumes, maybe even these exact same dancers had all become familiar to me through the internet. YouTube was a beloved friend to me in a town that rarely saw professional ballet performances.
First as a mechanism to learn choreography, then to add context to the dances I was learning and later to follow the professional dancers who were quickly becoming my personal celebrities. Eventually, YouTube became the place I could see full productions, resplendent in every way, all the way in rural old Boone, NC.
When I was 11 I went to see the Bolshoi Ballet perform Le Corsaire at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. I remember the backdrop, the costumes and how unbelievably high the men jumped, but I don’t remember the excitement or the anticipation. Years later, I found that exact production online and watched it so many times that the magic of seeing it live got all tangled up in my memories of watching it on a woefully small computer screen. I didn't know then how much seeing a company like that live would mean to me now.
The only sport I was ever much good at was dance. I didn’t work well in teams, I was never competitive, I didn't like running. So ballet became “my thing”. I loved it! It made me feel beautiful and powerful. Even through the negative moments that inevitably come with constantly staring at yourself in the mirror and comparing yourself to a room full of other people, I always felt a sense of joy and love towards my art. But ballet was never a career for me, it was simply the best way I had found of artistically expressing myself.
Leaving for college I knew I was nearing the end of where ballet was a possibility for me to continue. This was an art form that was physically demanding in ways I was not capable of continuing. It had already wreaked havoc on my hip joints and, although I was otherwise healthy, the time required to maintain that health and safety was not something I could manage alongside schoolwork and trying to move towards a more permanent career path.
As time passed, YouTube became even more of a solace to me. I watched EVERYTHING. I kept up with the choreographers at the Royal Ballet (my favorite company) along with their principal dancers. I watched productions alone in my room that made me cry with their beauty, their humanity, their artistry.
The process of moving from a participant to a spectator has been harder than I thought. I still get distracted by music, it makes me feel like I should be dancing or something would be wrong. I still feel most confident when I assume the exaggerated posture that had been required of me for years. I still find the movement of the human body to be the most real and beautiful art in the world.
As the curtain closed on the ballet, I was suddenly enveloped by the sound of thunderous applause. Hundreds of people all sharing the same joy and appreciation for ballet that I did. I wasn't alone in spectating. This was something that more than my childhood dance friends followed and loved. Finally, I wasn’t watching alone, I was among a community of other spectators. Content to watch, content to feel. And it was marvelous.
