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.