Dancing Lessons

There are things you invariably learn before, during the course of, and after a classical dance performance. Some lessons are born inside you, some are learned through painful and painstaking experience, and some – to echo a bard – are literally thrust on you. But these lessons are by nature ephemeral and quickly fade off if not penned for posterity. This is an unpretentious attempt at it.

If you are not ready to lose at least 500 hairs from your otherwise fast-depleting hair treasury, think twice before sitting down for that tight bunching up of hair to the left side of the head, where it will resist gravitational pull with the help of a bottle of mousse, hair spray, and at least two-dozen pins. The immediate side effects are a splitting headache, a crick in the neck because of all that unbalanced weight, and a permanently arched right eyebrow. And of course, the lost hairs.

Never forget to wear your bangles when you dance on stage. There is nothing as unsightly as a pair of unadorned wrists amidst all the finery.

Alta (the red ink worn on hands and feet for dance) runs and smudges when you sweat. Permanent markers in red also have the same propensity. There are two options – don’t sweat or don’t touch your white costume when your hand sweats. Or you will have a white costume with red blotches. Yes, it does disguise your cracked feet and your callused hands to perfection. But don’t forget to tell your four-year-old that it is not blood.

Backstage managers are angels in human disguise. There is obviously no other explanation to their endless toiling in the darkness of the backstage – wiping sweat off your brow, arranging props, straightening jewelry, running to get Pocari Sweat for you, listening to your constant grumbling about your hair, costume, and lights, and a thousand other unlabeled tasks – for absolutely no personal gain.

Resist the urge to stop your dance and wave when you hear a familiar trill from one of the front rows, “acha, that is amma in blue” (Dad, that is mom in blue). Remember there are 300 others watching you.

Also resist the temptation to wonder whether your husband has captured you on camera when you are posing as a sinuous vine – what you consider as your best posture in the show. You will forget your next dance move and that can end in disaster.

Always remember it takes huge talent to produce a show and only a modicum of it to dance in it – especially when you are the only adult classical dancer (self-proclaimed) other than your teacher in a 50-mile radius. Also the audience who later tell you that your dance was brilliant are genuinely nice people who are either myopic or do not want to use the word “average.” You know this because you have already seen the dance video that your husband has meticulously recorded and you know that your dance was not “brilliant”.

Nevertheless, at the end of it all, you enjoy yourself tremendously. The huge success of the show somehow rubs a little on you too. And there will be some things that always make you laugh. In my case, it was this press coverage that we got for the show. I reproduce the exact quotes:

“…..with the melodies of the percussion ensemble interspersed with couple of haunting songs sung by two ladies.” (Our male singer, who has a rich baritone, went into paroxysms of frustration reading it. We are still looking for the ghosts of the two ladies who sang haunting songs.)

“…..performers took turns dancing to the music, playing with the metallic ringing produced by the bracelets on their red-striped feet.”

That alta always spelled disaster!!