So what I’m trying to talk about is the dancer’s relationship with time, the space she dances in, her own body, its talents or injuries, the mirror, technique, specific elements of technique, isolation, company, space itself, risk, failure, success, etc.

In good dancers, these are interesting relationships; building these relationships is the hidden art of the dancer. (For a poet, then, the task is to build interesting relationships with the line, white space, echoes of past writing — Paul Muldoon traces this aspect of the writing art in The End of the Poem — success, failure, the word “I”, truth, etc.)

… the dancer’s relationship with time, the space she dances in, her own body, its talents or injuries, the mirror, technique, specific elements of technique, isolation, company, space itself, risk, failure, success … building these relationships is the hidden art of the dancer.

For second-tier dancers, these relationships are apt to be simple. A second-tier dancer may have a flat conception of herself. She is used to the mirror; she likes to look good in the mirror; in her mind she flattens herself to the space of the mirror. She likes to do well, she is unhappy when she fails. She is afraid of pirouettes or she loves pirouettes. Perhaps she hates or fears her body. Not that a seemingly negative relationship cannot be interesting. I know a dancer who has an antagonistic relationship with her own beauty. Given a chance to shine, she contorts. Her outward momentum is never without a simultaneous recoil. It’s as if she thinks being beautiful is beneath her, and it probably is, given the economy of beauty and its sometimes eviscerating effect on the bearer. I’ve never seen this dancer escape from anything in the classic sense of transcendence, but the trouble she finds in even basic poses (first arabesque, first position with arms en bas) is itself an escape from stupidity and locked dichotomies.

One day, I saw L’s arabesque in class. It looked like something left out in the rain —like a ship’s prow, impervious (mostly) to the elements. It had something of the ruined castle about it too; not that it was actually decayed, more that it looked interestingly vacated — the owner gone from the windows, into the tunnels. What’s she doing in there? this arabesque made me ask. (If it were poetry, it would be the gilded screen of a perfect blank verse behind which the magician crosses his arms and considers us.)

I wondered where she’d been since she first launched that arabesque.