K’s ethereal looks, her spectacular body, would be enough for most dancers and nearly enough for most audiences. M’s strength is the same. But M doesn’t rest in it, doesn’t retreat behind it. In fact, she doesn’t even drive it toward the conventional goal; her technique’s not rock-solid. She tends to swing around steps at the barre, over, under, her knees (a weak spot) joggling. She doesn’t use strength to shore herself up; impatiently, she flings it forward. Her body never says “done.”

All this makes M a modern dancer. You empathize with her at once, you put yourself in her place. She is a best version of ourselves: strong but vulnerable, always moving forward, beautiful without a trace of music-box prettiness.

Not really. I never met a dancer who didn’t resemble her dancing. I don’t think a dancer says to herself, I’ll be impulsive tonight, and then wrenches that out of nowhere. But then I don’t think writers (or any other artists — but I know writers best) do that either. Do you know any writers who don’t resemble their writing?

Do you know any writers who don’t resemble their writing? And if we admit — how do you do what you do? Do you conceive it and then execute it, pushing that genius thought through the engine of your skill?

And if we admit — how do you do what you do? Do you conceive it and then execute it, pushing that genius thought through the engine of your skill? Or is it a matter of our habits of reading, our ways of looking, our banal, poky tasks (seeking a word that means violent but has an “s” sound), one on top of another, layered and layered? We practice and feed a sensibility; suddenly it meets a circumstance, it seizes a chance.

No wonder we’ve covered up the art of the repertory dancer: her work reveals the limits of genius and the beginning of — what? The un-united atmospheric forces — which are not genius, not innate (not that easy!), but worked slowly into being.

S doesn’t like the idea of me writing about dancers in class, because in class she’s “in my underwear.” Class is nothing like performing for her. Still, I ask, aren’t you practicing something in class that goes beyond technique? She explains that class is a necessary evil for her. To stay in shape to perform only occasionally, she has to take class five or six days a week, year-round. And she’s been doing this for years, decades. She is bored with it — or she would be, if she didn’t play mind games with herself. What mind-games? She pretends that she is a scientist, she pretends someone is watching. “I pretend it’s the last day of my life.” She needs to find a way to love each step, she says, even if she doesn’t like it.

She thinks of these exercises as coping techniques. But all that imaginative play surfaces in her performance. S, the leading ballerina of Minneapolis, always looks alive when she dances — as if her life is ongoing, right there, in that moment. In class, she practices that aliveness, that engagement.