Something I've Always Wondered

The difference between barista and barrister:

barista: Emphasis on the second syllable; comes from the Italian word for "bartender" and means a person that serves espresso-based coffee drinks; does not require an advanced degree.

barrister: Emphasis on the first syllable; comes from Middle English and in the US, is a less commonly used word for "lawyer"; requires an advanced degree...or you can self-study and pass the bar if you're a genius.

In the UK and Canada, however, the profession of legal adviser and advocate remain split, and so the former is called the solicitor (the one who prepares for trial, and takes legal action on behalf of the client), while the other is called the barrister (the one who speaks at the trial, or in fancier language, "pleads at the bar in the high courts"); the barrister is more of a specialist and is called upon to work on a case by the solicitor.

Cappuccino

Ineffably beautiful morning ballet class, from barre to reverance (the ballet equivalent of saying "from start to finish"). Followed by six hours of making, serving, grinding, and drinking coffee. Can life get any sweeter? Towards the end of my shift, I felt a sudden inclination to say to my co-worker:

"Is it weird that I actually like working here? I really like it."

"Shouldn't everyone like their job?" he replied.

"Yeah..."

"What's your favorite part of the job?"

I pondered the question for a few seconds before deciding that I most enjoyed learning how to make the different types of coffee drinks. Becoming familiar with the different roasts. Learning to make the perfect cup of cappuccino.

During my second shift, I was fortunate enough to work alongside an experienced, long-time employee who had me pull my first shots of espresso, which I used to make my first latte and cappuccino. He taught me a basic design-- the foam separated by arcing lines into three sections. I learned to loosen the brown liquid and use the foam to push it into the desired thin, curved line. My first design was shoddy; my second one was decent!

Of course, there are factors aside from the superficial design that are much more crucial to the actual taste of the cappuccino-- the quality of the steamed milk, the weight of the tamper, the weather outside. A lot of variable elements go into making a simple cup of cappuccino. But then again, I don't think most people would notice these tiny differences, even though they like to pretend to be elite coffee connoisseurs, ordering "wet cappuccinos" and other fancy nonsense.

The customers are kind and/or colorful. There are many who have been coming to La Colombe in Center City regularly for several years-- sometimes over a decade. There are several who treat it like it is their second home and play like they are members of an exclusive club. The employees know their customers inside and out. Above all, one thing is clear: the servers behind the bar are beloved by those they serve, and every day, hour by hour, minute by minute, the tip jar grows steadily fuller and fuller...

At the end of my shift, I made my 3rd cup of cappuccino and proudly showed it to my co-worker before destroying the design with a spoonful of brown sugar and taking a sip. On the way home through Rittenhouse Park, I tried to describe to Sarah the different elements of the morning ballet class that made it so so lovely, but generally failed. For one, I am unable to do justice to Kip's amazing choreography skills; and for another, memory sucks, and sometimes you just gotta be there and accept the fact that often, beautiful hours will fall by the wayside and be forever forgotten. How ephemeral these moments are! And how utterly undependable is human memory.

Ballet fact of the day: In the precipitee step (kick-kick really fast), your feet are supposed to touch the ground. Sometimes, it's hard to tell if Kip is walking or flying.

Energy

Heaven is a beautiful ballet adagio. Earth is bowling a 40. I did both tonight!

The longer I dance ballet, the more I believe that energy is a palpable thing. On the surface, dancing seems to be purely about controlling and manipulating various parts of the physical human body. The part that we don't see, however, is the control and manipulation of energy. Striking a pose and striking a pose with energy could mean the difference between losing and keeping one's balance. As well, the way the dancer chooses to direct his or her energy could mean the difference between a captivating style and a distasteful one. Dancing ballet is as much about containing and releasing at will this invisible energy as it is about moving and positioning the visible body.

The longer I live, the more I believe that energy is a palpable thing. I am most convinced of this truth when I share a deep, private connection with another human being. What has become of me? I speak of Providence, purpose, and now energy. I swear I still have one foot in the real, rational world.

It's true that the province of ballet is in the air, but there's no doubt that it comes from the province of the ground.-- Kip, in critiquing our manner of jumping like marionettes with no solidity in landings. And in fact, to emphasize the point with a demonstration, he did dance like a marionette for us.

Romeo & Juliet

Today, I saw the Romeo & Juliet ballet performed by the Pennsylvania Ballet. Overall, I found the experience boring except for when Romeo and Juliet danced together-- then it was breathtaking. I was surprised by all the character/folk dancing and pantomime involved in this production, elements which I'd read were a major part of 19th century Romantic Era ballets.

Paris' buttocks were gargantuan. Like slabs of concrete dressed in white tights. Attached to these slabs of concrete was a pair of big hunkin' thighs. How was he able to close his fifths with such big hunkin' thighs?

As the story unfolded before my eyes, it suddenly occurred to me that Juliet is a pretty ballsy teenager. It takes balls to take a scary potion that's supposed to bring you an inch away from death. Stupid!-- but ballsy. I wondered how many in the audience had loved with the intensity that Juliet loved, and whether they thought she was stupid or ballsy. During intermission, I browsed the program and found the following dedication from one principal dancer to another, her husband:

My bounty is as boundless as the sea
My love as deep; The more I give to thee,
The more I have, For both are infinite.

He had proposed to her onstage after one of their performances together.

It was a curious experience to be a part of the audience after 9 months of being the performer for an imaginary one. I was now the conscious observer that gave directional meaning to the dancer's movements and poses. She set her arabesques, croises, effaces, and ecartes with respect to me and my fellow audience members. As I'd learned in class, ballet combinations can take on an infinite number of pathways, but logic dictates that only a few of those options will actually work. The observer (the audience member) is a key driver of that logic.

I love this about ballet. On the one hand, it's full of ideals that dancers strive for like the perfect first arabesque, or creating perfect lines and circles. Ideal beauty. On the other hand, it is a heavily observer-dependent art. Without a conscious observer, the movements take on meaning only up to a certain point-- positioning various parts of one's own body in relation to each other-- and past that point, positions cease to be defined. To maintain meaning, the dancer must also position her body with respect to an external viewer separate from herself, who maintains a separate, opposing perspective. In this way, ballet does not exist in a vacuum like Platonic ideals; rather, it is firmly grounded in reality. It is a human experience.

But I must say, it is a lot more fun to do ballet than to watch a ballet. It bothers me that I can't see things up close, like the facial expressions, the veins on the neck, the abnormally arched feet, the sweeping hand. Everything was just so minuscule and that much less impressive as seen from the distant crowd.

Two Sets of Kids

I love teaching. And I think I like my job. Today, I convinced a kid to get on his feet and climb the stairs to his classroom. He is a particularly troubled kid that I've spent all my brief time at the school developing a rapport with, and so this tiny feat meant a lot to me-- that I was able to convince him to get up from his obstinate crouch when no one else could. Later, I passed by him as I was going up those same set of stairs, and he wrapped his arms around me and kissed me on the cheek, saying that he loved me. I was so mentally thrown off by the kiss that I drew my head back in surprise and knocked it against the wall. I am fairly certain that "I love you" was not a phrase that this kid regularly tossed around.

To think that yesterday, I was ready to quit my job. I was suddenly so sick of being at the receiving end of all this bitchy behavior from a bunch of 7-year-olds. Why was this my burden? I asked myself. But later I was reminded of where these kids were coming from, and it was enough to keep me on board for the time being.

Today, after a super-challenging ballet class, which was more like a counting class, Sarah and I sat at Capogiro's until nearly midnight talking about ballet, teaching and work. During a lull in conversation, I heard MGMT's "Kids" playing and the song reminded me my kids in Kurdistan. Suddenly I missed those kids so much. I recalled the way they were so openly affectionate with me, and so happy in general. Then I thought about the faces of the kids I teach now-- mutinous, angry, sullen, and insolent being the base-level expressions of choice for far too many of them. Today, though, I drew a smile from one of the especially insolent faces, and it meant a great deal to me as ephemeral as it was.

I realize this now that I have something to compare it to: My kids in Kurdistan knew how to love and laugh easily, and their hearts were unbelievably pure. My kids in West Philly on the other hand are apparently hardened to feelings like love, their laughter is mean-spirited more often than joyful and childlike, and their hearts are prematurely sullied by the grime of their much less sunny reality. One needn't look very far to find an explanation for the disparity between these two groups of kids. One set grew up in wealthy homes with overbearingly loving parents in the isolation of Erbil, Iraq; while the other set grew up in entirely different socio-economic and cultural circumstances in West Philly. In the first set, it is the parents who suffered by the hands of Saddam, while the kids grew up in relative peace; while in the second set, it is the parents who suffer, and the kids continue to suffer with them. The two sufferings are also of an entirely different, incomparable nature.

An "I love you" from Liya in Kurdistan is an entirely different beast from an "I love you" from K***** in West Philly. Both are equally heartwarming, but one is given freely, while the other is earned. Hugs on the other hand are easily doled out by both sets of kids. I was amazed at how quickly the kids in West Philly started throwing their arms around my waist. Strange for someone like me...when I was young, giving a hug was the biggest fucking deal.

Spectrum of Behaviors

I am learning early on that the kids at my school have the capacity to be very good, but they also have the capacity to be very, very bad. One minute a little boy is giving me the sweetest hug; the next minute, he and another boy are about to pound each other on the playground.

Thinking While Dancing

Adam once told me that for an interview, you should go dressed as the person you want to be. And that I wasn't trying to become a photographer, I was a photographer! And that I had to 'sound like a Russian' when I'm trying to speak Russian phrases. Now, thanks to him, my Russian accent has improved, I go around telling people that I'm a photographer, and I go to interviews in a tutu and toe shoes. Did he turn me into a liar with a guttural laugh and perpetually unemployed by reason of inability to dress in proper office attire? Perhaps...But! On the bright side, I carried this philosophy of pretending to be what I want to become with me into the world of dance, and it has served to solidify shaky holds and straighten bad form on more than one occasion.

The Dark Age continues

I took a class at the Rock School this evening. The teaching at this supposedly reputable dance school was awful. I learned three things from this class:

(1) that it was possible for a dance studio to be too big (so that the instructor spends half her time running to and from the music and cannot focus her attention on the students)

(2) that it was possible for the music during a ballet class to be played too loudly (especially when the instructor turns it on early in order to save herself a walk across the huge room, and then gives out the combinations over the blasting music), and

(3) that I could actually hate ballet.

It depressed me to watch the other students perfunctorily and clumsily carrying out the steps which were too advanced for us; it was an insult to the art. The teacher's own form was utterly uninspiring. Where were the exquisite lines? The hypnotic grace? I could not bear the disappointment any longer, so I left early and trudged home in the foulest of moods. If I were a cow, I would have shot a cud right into the face of anyone who crossed my angry path. Luckily, no one crossed my path...and I was not a cow.  Little did I know that the end of this Dark Age of Symmetry was fast approaching.

The Renaissance

I took a bowl of strawberries up to the rooftop and ate them mournfully. I was mourning for the "tragedy" that was the Rock School experience, and I was mourning for our ballet instructor who was going through real, genuine tragedies. Sarah sat in a picnic chair next to me with a bowl of salad and joined me in mourning and eating. We were a really mournful pair up there under the stars, but at least we were eating healthful foods.

We talked, we ate. We gazed upwards and spotted one of the Dippers. That made me happy. Spotting constellations has a knack for lifting my mood. I thought of my friend Orion, who would be in hibernation until next winter. Eventually, we picked up our bowls and headed back inside. I stopped by my room, checked my email, and squealed. EEE! An email from the Symmetry listserv! Classes were "definitely" on next week! Unbelievable! Etta James crooned from my laptop as we read and re-read the email, unable to believe this sudden turn of events.

What do you think about when you're dancing?

--A question asked by a non-dancer friend of mine, which I passed on to my instructor. Rather than trying to recap our e-dialogue, I'll leave you with direct quotes:

K: When you learn to dance, an intense amount of focus and conscious effort is involved...But one thing interesting about dance is that it is an ultimate expression of a moment; there is no real conscious thought, it is a feeling, it's intuitive and emotional.  So the further that one moves along in dance the more the actual thought process changes.  It becomes less about thinking about each movement consciously than a pure kinesthetic response.

A: ...Now that I think about it, it's a lot like learning a language: in the beginning, you learn all the grammar rules and memorize a lot of vocabulary, but even with all this knowledge about the language, it doesn't imply that you're fluent in it. The fluency comes only once you've been immersed in the language and speaking and thinking in it for quite some time, and at first, this requires a lot of mental exertion and conscious translation from English to whatever language. My Spanish teacher once said that you know you're on the verge of fluency when you have your first dream in that language...I guess because conscious thought has no place in the average dreamer's mind.

Summer Sweat

Though all my days-- no matter how great-- are tinged with sadness as of late, today is a beautiful day filled with Persian verbs past and present, the youthful feelings of Rostov in War & Peace, and a foamy cappuccino from La Colombe.

The evening, by contrast, wiled itself away in tango fashion, only in reverse. I offered to be a leader for this class because there were way too many women as usual. I realized I loved learning how to lead, how to use the connection between my left hand and her spine to "convince" her to carry out an ocho, to use my spine and not the force of my hands to lead the ocho.

Through ballet and tango, I am learning that no matter the dance, the true source of movement and balance is the spine; arms and legs-- though they are the most visible, freely moving features of the human body-- are more often than not auxiliary. Learning to lead and alternatively being used by Andres as a follower during demonstrations gave me a great sense of what is expected by and of both sides. If I were ever to teach tango, I would make everybody learn both the leader and follower parts.

After this great lesson, I came home, stuffed myself with carrots (I think my metabolism is still kicking strong from the race yesterday), then slowly made my way up the stairs. As I approached my room on the third floor, the damp, musty smell of summer grew stronger and stronger, and I welcomed it. It's the smell of freedom, of college, of Korea even.

I am sad because of the sudden vanishing of ballet at Symmetry from my life, and this makes me nostalgic. Though there is still hope, even the tiny possibility that it might never come back leaves me with a constant ache. However, I'm slowly, forcibly coming to terms with this worst-case scenario, and am currently making plans to either go abroad again or start a Master's program this fall.

We shall see where this goes.

Broad Street Run

This morning, I was one of 30,000 people to run the Broad Street Run. However, I can state with certainty that I was the only one to run this 10-mile race with a key attached to my shoelace, and 2 subway tokens and a tampon nestled in my sports bra. One of the tokens was lost somewhere along the route. Throughout the race, I splashed water at my face at every water stop and ran through sprinklers to keep cool from the rising heat and humidity. For the first 7 miles, I felt as if I was running and dodging people just to get to the start of the race. Before I knew it, the race was more than half-over, and I was averaging something like 9.5 minutes/mile. Then, around mile 7, I knew I was slowing down because I started running with the crowd, rather than steadily passing up my neighboring runners.

It was around this time that I had to pull up my Reserves-- a pile of tricks that help to keep me running even though all I want to do is lie down on the pavement or jump in a pool. First, technical advice like "keep your knees up, Angie" or "lean forward, let gravity do the work". Then around mile 9, I had to dig into my Special Reserves: "You're Sydney Bristow, chasing after yet another nemesis! Don't lose him!" "You're at the end of ballet class, and the last thing you want to do is another set of royales, but he says to do it again! Just keep jumping!" And etcetera. Any strange or embarrassing fantasy to keep me going.

Finally, I saw the finish line. The sight of it was enough to push me past whatever I was feeling and just pound it. However, 5 steps before the finish line, an annoying lady got in front of me and was not sprinting so victoriously to the finish. "Get outta my way!" I thought to myself. Unfortunately, she failed to read my thoughts and continued to toddle on across the finish line. Hence, my finish was not as victorious as I had wanted it to be, but overall, it was not a bad race! I'm glad I did it.

Best sign from the crowd said "Run fast Carl! Beat Steve!"on one side, and "Run fast Steve! Beat Carl!" on the flip side.

Race Results: 96.5 minutes and seriously stiff knees. Ouch.

Rare Book Find

When I have money to burn, I will buy this. First edition of Jean Georges Noverre's "Letters on dancing and ballets" in its original French. For now, I will read the free pdf.

No Word

No word from Symmetry for a disconcerting number of days. Life feels empty. It feels like someone died. This morbid feeling crept up on me for the first time as I was doing my plie warm-up this morning. Pathetic...I fell in love with a dance. Can't even cuddle with it.

It's that damned ship's reel! That ginormous antique reel that's embedded into the wall at the new studio, right where the barre is supposed to be! That's what's causing this hold-up. They've been trying to remove it for days!

And days...

and days...

Da Vinci & the Age of Reason

This is just too cool!

I've been taken by a certain season
in the life of mankind called the Age of Reason
When all that was sacred lay
not in catechisms and cathedrals
But in the world around us
And in the bodies we've been born into
Naked
Wrapped in circles and squares
Giving birth to the proportions of temples,
those very cathedrals, and of humbler homes
A microcosm
within a microcosm
within a micrososm
of what makes things tick with clockwork elegance
and ineffable beauty
Now made comprehensible by our liberation
from self-induced minority
A fall from grace implies not a fall from ideals
The pursuit of ideals still runs strong
But they be ideals of numbers, stone and living line
Rather than of Heaven or Hell
Not afterlife but Life:
the Affirmative,
the Here and the Now

Moving Day

Yesterday, Sarah and I took a break from studying at Capogiro's and wandered "nonchalantly" over to the old studio. (In truth, we were so terribly excited about the move and were looking for any opportunity to help out.) We wandered up the stairwell and heard shuffling and shifting sounds coming from the top. Symmetry was moving at last! We popped in, offered our services to the two girls-- Fang and Nancy-- who were working within, and ended up spending the rest of the day helping them to pack up the entire room into boxes and haul them over to the new space.

It was fascinating to find out just how much stuff was actually stored into that seemingly empty, minimalistically-decorated space. Our instructor was more of a pack-rat than I had imagined, though I got the impression that much of what lay in the room had been gifted to him. I couldn't see him going out and buying an ugly garden gnome, for instance. And yet, there it stood, small and hideous. Rummaging through all this stuff felt like exploring a great-great aunt's attic. Only instead of finding say 19th century antique dresses, we found dance photos and paintings, a bamboo lantern and white glass vase, incense, dusty bottles of perrier and other drinks, a red microwave I never noticed before, mugs and pots- mostly empty but one inexplicably filled with a white powder, and another with a tennis ball inside, an electric guitar, the ugly gnome, old flyers, bundles of used-up class cards, tools, and my personal favorite, a trove of cleaning supplies hidden in an alcove in the dressing room.

"Woah," I said to myself when I pulled aside the thin, pastel-floral fabric veiling the alcove and discovered the profusion of cleaning supplies behind it. He had a rather robust interest in cleanliness, I thought. I boxed up the smaller material, then ripped apart the pink curtains that covered the dressing room partition he'd built with his father (twice over because it had come out crooked the first time, and they couldn't find a crooked door to go with it). Through the newly-created openings, I passed the heftier equipment through to the other girls-- poles, mops, a jet pack vacuum, a regular vacuum, and so on. I learned that he had inherited a lot of the supplies from his father who'd been in the cleaning business. In the earlier spectrum of his life, he'd been a military photographer and had met his wife while on duty abroad.

As Fang told us a little more about his parents, I felt a twinge of regret at never having met them myself. Later though, as I walked into the foyer leading to the new dance studio, I found a small button-style picture of his parents hanging from the handle of one of the black-laquer Korean-style cabinets, along with two tiny, careworn teddy bears. I studied this picture and saw the familiar structure of our teacher's face in his father's, and the same smile. The ears though, he had inherited from his mother I think, for his father had ears of an imposing size.

At the new studio, after the last boxes had been hauled up the mountainous staircase, we set up only the equipment necessary to hold class: his desk, the barres, and the music. I crouched in the corner fiddling with the cords until at last, I pushed the power and play buttons and set the CD spinning. Violin voices resonated throughout the room, mingling with the new-building smell and the gold light emanating from small, rotatable spotlights suspended from the ceiling. Sarah and I consecrated the new space with a plie warm-up, facing each other like mirror images. Soon after, we turned off the music and the lights and headed home, full of anticipation for our first session in the new space.

Sacrilege!

Sarah: I forget, is this an ankle bracelet?

Me: Um, no those are prayer beads.

Playing With Dirt

Yesterday, I dug my hands in good old dirt for the first time since childhood as far as I can remember. When was the last time I potted a plant? Had I ever potted a plant before? I couldn't recall, but as I sat on my haunches like a kimchi lady outside the photo studio where I work, using my bare hands to scoop out old dirt and replace it with the new soil from a pot of ivies and some pink flowers, I felt incredibly happy. This is what humans were meant to do-- work outside, work with the earth, use our bodies-- not sit in offices all day.

"I know you didn't go to college to do this type of work..." my boss said apologetically.

Stop right there, Faith! This is exactly the sort of thing I love to do. I spent an hour or more sweeping out the shattered glass, dead leaves and dirt from her back lot. Together we lined up all the trash we found there: garbage cans full of the leaves, dirt, and glass; a random bucket of sticks and old frames holding antique-looking artwork; a giant piece of glass; and a giant window frame with shards of glass still lining the inside rim of it. We propped a piece of dirt-clogged cardboard within this frame, and stood back, admiring our work.

"It's like art," I said, giggling. "Very Avant-garde." I wanted to take a photo of it, but resisted going inside and retrieving my camera. Instead, I moved on to gardening. I learned more about gardening that day than I had in the past nearly-26 years. The damp dirt underneath the dry surface dirt felt soft-- not quite like flour, but just as nice-- and looked so like crushed oreos that I felt mildly tempted to scoop some right into my mouth. Successfully resisting this strange urge, I immediately thought of the book, "100 Years of Solitude", because there was a girl in that story who only ate dirt. Oh Magical Realism. Other random thoughts floated around in my head as I crouched in the warm sunshine playing with dirt.

Leading An Anti-Emersonian Life

It's been awhile since I've thought about God (or whatever "higher being"). I've become so immersed in worldly activities that He's become a non-entity for me. Is this a good thing, a bad thing or no thing? The most spiritual I've felt in the past few months has been when I'm doing plies at the barre. It's been awhile since I've immersed myself in geography that is overwhelming in both size and beauty, like endless mountains, oceans, forests, or canyons. Instead, I've been caught up in noticing the miniscule, human-scale elements of beauty. I need to go camping.

Killer Calves

I own a pair of denim capris that I've worn three times so far since the sun came back. Each of those times, I've gotten a comment about my killer calves, which apparently "bulge" out of the pant legs when I'm standing on tippy-toes at the gelato house counter, or dancing tango, or even just walking. My killer calves have become the talk of the town! The third time, I was walking home in the dark with Sarah, when a biker rode up behind us exclaiming, "What did you do to get those killer calves?!" I turned around and stared because I thought she said something about killing cops.

To answer the biker's question, it's in the jeans. I mean genes. My dad has killer calves, and they ended up on my legs. Aside from nature, these sons of guns have been nurtured: I've spent many hours for the past 5 months balancing on my toes. My killer calves will only get more killer (killest?) since I've begun training for the Broad Street Run. By the end of this month, my killer calves will probably get stopped at the airport security checkpoints because they'll be considered a weapon.

Eating Flowers

Homecooked Indian food is as much a treat for the nose as it is for the tongue. Cumin, cinnamon, cardomom, coriander and countless other spices suffuse your olfactory senses with each bite, like biting into a bouquet of ultra-exotic flowers (containing chunks of chicken).

Tango Marathon

On Saturday, Sarah and I completed this tango-rrific week with a twelve-hour tango marathon at our Fishtown studio. Being the studio's unofficial in-house photographer, I spent most of the time with my camera slung around my neck and my eye behind the viewfinder, trying to find innovative tango pictures to take. One would think that this would get increasingly difficult-- I mean, how many different angles of couples wrapped in each others arms and doing boleos can one find? As I found out though, it's amazing the different angles, lights and moments one can encounter in a given tango event, and even in this one large, rectangular space that houses the Philadelphia Argentine Tango School.

The studio is the first floor of a three-story building standing outlandishly tall in a flat, open space, just as rectangular and nondescript as all the other buildings in Fishtown. To its left is a large yard of sorts-- a flat, unkempt grassy area randomly scattered with the most absurd objects: An abandoned truck streaked with pepto-pink paint in a camouflage pattern, a giant, red icosahedron-like object (never actually counted how many sides it has) with white numbers painted on each surface, a sign, and a couple bare, scraggly trees, utterly dwarfed by the adjacent building. Behind these objects, the blue sky stretches like a misplaced backdrop.

Fishtown appears to be a hair away from being deemed an Abandoned Town. At first, second, and third glance, a passer-by would assume that nothing much happens here. As Sarah and I followed the river painted on the whitewashed wall to the studio, we passed by a large fenced-in yard of sorts, overgrown with weeds and dead grass. Low crumbling brick walls formed the far border of the yard. A spare tire sat idlely in the center, sunk into the grass. It's so ghetto that I could only compare it to a city in a war-torn nation.

"I feel like I'm in Erbil," I commented to Sarah. We giggled.

"Is it...the run-down walls...or the random tire...or..."

In fact, it's shady, ghetto and rundown...but it's not quite abandoned. The tango studio is there now, and there are a couple nice cafes and art galleries. One only has to look beyond the forlorn exterior of the nondescript building that stands like a giant stone block on 5th street to see that in fact, a chunk of the soul of Argentina had broken off and landed itself haphazardly in the middle of this ugly town just outside of Philly central. Even before the evening milonga, workshops were taking place since 2pm, during which the guest instructors taught us how to insert boleos in all the wrong places and how to hang from your partner's arm and spin in circles until you had to center your hand between your eyes to re-steady yourself.

I emerged from the studio in the late afternoon for a break before the last workshop, and was struck by a change in appearance of the Field of Absurd Objects (FAO) next door. Under the late afternoon light, the Objects sparkled and glinted gold, and in this new light, the FAO actually looked beautiful in its absurdity. I found myself thinking that light can transform the mundane into the most extraordinary sight-- how true this was in reality as much as in photographs.

After a snooze at the corner cafe, and a few pages of Tolstoy read aloud in a British accent-- because I can't do a Russian one-- Sarah and I returned to the studio for the musicality workshop and at last, the milonga. As the dance commenced, I alternated between my camera and various dance partners, but eventually, I lost myself completely behind the viewfinder and witnessed some really beautiful tango moments from there. The sources of light were 5 or 6 small spotlights set along the walls on the dance floor and aimed toward the ceiling, a bright lamp in the corner housing the jazz quartet, a few candles along the windowsill, and a cheap, red-orange disco-globe near the entrance.

These various light sources created the most extraordinary effects within this room. An alien green light shone on the walls near the entrance, fantastically complementing the red light from the disco-globe, and the spotlights aimed at the ceiling created larger-than-life shadows of the jazz quartet along the wall opposite the mirrored one. As the room became packed with couples whirling around to tango music, the high ceiling came to life with their shadows, continually playing and morphing into each other for the entire night. The play of shadows was utterly mesmerizing.

Below the shadow theater, men and women danced in close embrace, in more-or-less counter-clockwise motion “in the line of dance“. The women are especially lovely to observe for the creativity they put into their outfits, their make-up, hairdos, and sparkly heels. One girl donned a dress that matched the entire room, including all the different colored lights and the paintings hanging from the walls. It was a beautiful moment when she passed by the blue-and-green painting with the far wall near the entrance glowing pinkish-red behind her.

 As an aside, sometimes I find it unbelievable that so many gorgeous women gather in this room, and the young men who prefer clubs and bars have no idea that tango is the place to go for the classier sort of ladies. It seems to me that tango attracts three kinds of people:

-the older crowd, men and women;

-the younger, nerdier men

-the younger women seeking elegance, romance, and an excuse to play dress-up every week.

In truth, tango attracts some really strange people, I have found. But maybe humanity in general is strange and off-balance, and I never noticed this until I had to dance with them in an intimate embrace and smell their sweat and breath.

I stood in a corner of the room with my eye to my camera, watching couple after couple passing through my viewfinder-- an arm, a back, a face, clasped hands-- over and over these body parts weaved in and out of my sight. One couple lingered in my corner for a while. The girl's large, expressive doll eyes peered over her partner's shoulder, her thick lashes casting shadows around her eyes.

Eventually, they moved on, passing out of my viewfinder.

At midnight, Javier and Kara, the guest instructors performed three numbers for us. Their style appeared to me to be more traditional-- and much more complex according to Meredith. The last one, though was performed to a more poppy song, and I watched transfixed as Kara's plum-colored skirt billowed in and out of my viewfinder, visually matching the lyrical mood of the song. Their strength lay in their hands-- both had strong, sturdy-looking hands, and placed them firmly and deliberately wherever they needed to go, with fingers splayed out and full of energy. Kara's pale hands glowed almost translucently against Javier's dark brown jacket, her nails painted to match her jet-black hair. 

Towards the end of the night, I wandered to the entrance and saw a baby carrier chillin on the floor next to the check-in table where Carolyn sat awaiting new arrivals. Inside was the tiny tango baby I had seen before in the studio, buried in his blankets and fast asleep as always. Itsuki and I cooed over the adorable boy until he awoke. If eyes said anything about the person, this baby boy would grow up to be a remarkable human being. Such serious, solemn eyes I had never seen on such a tiny face. He stared up at us without crying, only curious and alert, then delighted as we tickled its feet and played that ever-engrossing game called “Peek-a-boo”. Babies laugh so easily. They will laugh just by seeing you laugh. They laugh without even knowing why. Of course, adults may do the same.

Prasad, the tango baby stared out into the dance floor as his mother held him in her arms. Another woman came over and embraced his mother, sandwiching the baby as he continued to stare out with his large, solemn eyes. Eventually, he was carried over to the check-in table so that his mother and father could change him.

Reverie

This evening, as I walked out of the ballet studio, I felt as if I was coming out of a reverie. Tonight's class was especially entrancing. Because it was a basic beginner class, I allowed my mind to wander at times and lose myself in details. A hand, darkened by the corner lamp's gold light, rose slightly and then fell out of silhouette, then back into silhouette; out of silhouette, into silhouette. Rise! and fall. Inhale! and exhale. Hands can breathe in ballet, I realize. My eyes intently followed the motion of my own hand as it rose and curved down, then up and out during the warm-up plies, and I felt myself becoming hypnotized by its motion. It is a form of meditation, having the same effect of quieting and focusing my mind. These days, I start every morning with this plie-warm up and then more, and then my day begins happily, no matter what happens as it runs its course.

In the studio upstairs from Congressman Joe Sestak's campaign office, we learned the details of the chasse and practiced this new move across the floor with steadily shortening count for each chasse. As we chassed faster and faster, I felt like a musketeer parrying in a duel and felt the urge to shout "en garde!" as my feet chased each other across the floor. The movements of ballet had originated from the martial art of fencing in the days of King Louis XIV, and the connection was obvious in movements such as this ridiculous musketeer shuffle. In general, I've found that the job of the ballerina is to make ridiculous moves look sublimely graceful. Like how to plie in the wide second position stance without looking like one is squatting over an extra-wide toilet.

In ballet, we even learn to trip gracefully.

Half of what I learn is through observation of our amazing instructor. During Tuesday's class, there was a moment when I suddenly felt extremely lucky. How extraordinary was it that ordinary Angie gets the chance to study with a man who traveled all the way to Moscow and Latvia at the age of 16 to inadvertently train at the Bolshoi, then advertently with the Riga Choreography School, and then brought all that he learned-- not in books and paper but in his very being-- to Philadelphia of all places. I suddenly found all this very extraordinary and improbable. I listened with the utmost care as he lectured us yet again on the importance of hand placement.

"In ballet, this never happens," he informed us as his hand dipped down and paused at crotch-level. Giggles abounded. "Ballet takes the best parts of being human-- not that it denies human sexuality...it just doesn't advertise it. So I don't want to see any of this 'Mother Earth' business." The giggles exploded into outright laughter. It's not every day the word "sex" or any of its euphemisms and variations enters a ballet studio. Of course, ours was no ordinary prim and proper ballet studio. Rarely do I see my classmates dressed in the proper dress code of black leotard and pink tights, I myself wear leggings, and there is even a boy that has sported striped rainbow socks every time I've seen him in class. We were a good match on the week of Halloween, when I came in wearing purple and black striped tights with a horribly clashing t-shirt exploding with bright colors.

Anyway, what he said about ballet's humanity made sense until I thought about it later. What were the best parts of being human? It wasn't immediately clear to me, for some reason, that he was referring to the physical human body. However, it is precisely our body that distinguishes us from the angels. It is our body that rose up and learned to walk upright eons ago. I found myself wondering about the origins of ballet's now classical poses and movements: Who decided that these were ideally beautiful? And how were they created in the first place? Out of curiosity, I began to read online about the origins of ballet, and made the curious discovery that the creation of the attitude position-- with one leg extended behind you and bent at the knee-- was inspired by a 15th century Giambologna sculpture of the god Mercury/Hermes. This discovery reaffirms the dance photographer's notion that dancers are like animated statues. Truly, watching a performance gives me the sense of watching statues come alive.

Moreover, I found it curious that ballet, which takes the best parts of being human, was in this case inspired by the figure of a god...which in turn was inspired by human models. To me, this seemed to reaffirm the essential humanness of the concept of gods...or God. There seems to be very few things in this world that don't reek of the scent of us. Not that I mind. In fact, I celebrate it...with plies and attitudes and arabesques.

There is magic happening in this room every single day.

This is what I thought tonight as I closed the silver door behind me and awoke from my reverie.