Belly Button Awareness

Belly button awareness is key to maintaining balance in ballet. In this morning's ballet class, I imagined my belly button being pulled by a thread hanging from the ceiling, then traveling slowly up my spine, past the nape of my neck, all the way through the top of my head. We used this imagery to maintain our balance as we slowly rolled up from a forward cambre on sous-sous (on our toes) back into the upright position. How strange it was to see my belly button hanging above my head, rather like a perverse mistletoe.

In ballet, the line between the imaginary and real, the intangible and tangible, the abstract and concrete is crossed so often that I find myself questioning the relative importance we place on the real, tangible, and concrete. Many concepts like balance are so far above our understanding (ie: difficult to attain) that they are best explored through imagery and visualization of more easily-known concepts like mobilized belly buttons or a docked boat pulling away or moving, tangible energy. Similarly, concepts in physics and math are often only understood through imagery and mappings (to concepts already understood) because they so far exceed the functional limits of human cognizance. It is easy to dismiss the imaginary because of its intangible nature, but the preponderance of imagery and mappings in math, science, literature, dance, and in our very language even just goes to show how heavily we actually rely on it as a tool for understanding the oh-so-important "real world".