Last month, Dance Magazine published an article I wrote about the ballet dancer Guillaume Côté and the piece he is choreographing for Olympic gold medalist ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir.  You can read the whole article in Dance Magazine.

There’s a special thrill that comes from seeing your name listed as author.  It’s not the same feeling as publishing a blog post.  The key difference is the third party, which legitimizes the whole thing.  This isn’t just me writing for myself and my wonderfully devoted followers.  This is me wanting to tell a specific story and someone else deciding it’s worth sharing.  That realization is at once exhilarating and terrifying:  people from around the world might be opening up Dance Magazine’s website right now and reading it.

But I’m sure you aren’t reading this because you want to hear about my feelings. Are you?  Probably not.  Mostly what I wanted to do in this post is expand ever-so-slightly on a couple of topics that the article didn’t delve into.

Guillaume Côté
I had the pleasure of seeing Côté perform the title role in John Neumeier’s Nijinsky when the National Ballet of Canada brought it to San Francisco last year.  (You can read my thoughts here.)  He’s a ballet celebrity in his own right, and I knew who he was long before I saw him perform.

When I spoke with Côté, he emphasized his commitment to trying new things as a dancer and choreographer, to pushing both his own and ballet’s expected boundaries. A Google search reveals a passion project:  his “Lost in Motion” ballet film, a short video that features Côté performing his own choreography, occasionally with slow-motion effects that emphasize the sheer physicality of ballet.  This was a conscious decision; in an interview with OZY, he talks about the need to capture a different, newer, wider audience for ballet and how the medium of film and the vehicle of the internet can hopefully put ballet directly in front of more people—and win them over.

Here’s “Lost in Motion.”  It’s great, it’s gorgeous, I hope you enjoy it.

Mental Training
At the end of the Dance Magazine article, Côté touches on the topic of mental training.  During the Olympics last year, Virtue and Moir spoke about working with a mental prep coach.  I had no idea what that meant but was immediately fascinated by the idea. As a joke, almost, I started noting all of the scenarios in daily life when some sort of mental preparation would be beneficial.  They were everywhere.  Clearly, mental training should not exist only for Olympic athletes!  I remembered performances of my own where I either couldn’t get a grip on my nerves or couldn’t summon the adrenaline. Heck, look at auditions! What a perfect ballet-world example of a situation that calls for being mentally as well as physically in shape.

I have a vivid recollection of standing on a BART platform mulling over the concept of mental training.  I Googled it, and the first link I clicked on was this one, on Self.com.  It’s an interview with Colleen Hacker, Ph.D., the mental skills coach for the U.S. Women’s Hockey Team.  More than a year later, one specific point Hacker made in the article is still with me:  “We don’t want to get rid of butterflies. We want to teach them to fly in formation.”  Isn’t that the most beautiful image?  You’re nervous for a date or a job interview or a performance and all the butterflies in your stomach settle into patterns like the corps in Swan Lake.  Highly encourage reading the piece!

The mental training idea spoke to me on a personal level because of some health-related anxiety I have been dealing with.  That’s why I Googled it to begin with!  So I was thrilled when Côté brought it up in our conversation.  He too sees potential for those tools to be used with professional dancers—who are of course elite athletes as well.

Virtue and Moir
Hopefully, I get to interview these two about their perspective on the choreography process at some point, as a counter to Côté.  I did in fact blog about them during the Olympics last year, in this post entitled “Fever.”

To my readers, thank you for reading, and for giving me an audience to write for!