I stepped out of the rain and into the lobby of the cramped City Ballet building and was met with an unexpected silence. Bags were strewn around the chairs in the room, each accompanied by a raincoat, with discarded shoes littering the floor. I crept into the studio with my lightest steps and peered around the corner. I saw a long, hot room lined with mirrors and full of dancers. Each one in position and on their toes. From the corner, tucked far behind the ensemble in the center of the room, my friend smiled and waved. She pointed to a small fold-out chair next to the door, amongst a mountain of water bottles. Moving over them with great caution, I sat down, the music queued, and everything around me started to move.
It was 3:00 on a Saturday and the school was in the midst of a rehearsal for their upcoming Cinderella performance (April 20th and 21st. I wasn’t at all surprised at the atmosphere of the place. The whole building was like a machine. Every dancer knew what they were supposed to do, where they had to be and each one pulled his or her own weight to bring the whole group closer to perfection. They were living cogs. All turning so fluidly that it came off as second nature. All working constantly to move each other forward. It was a beautiful thing.
The dancers in front of me began to twirl and the whole building came to life. They burst into a display that transformed the space into a ballroom. They all moved so quickly about the room, coordinated and divine. The kaleidoscopic scene gave off such a sense of love and dedication that it was apparent even to me as a visitor.
Once the scene ended, they all gathered around the teachers in a large huddle of sorts. I watched as the teachers spoke on parts of the scene. Using ballet terms that might as well have been Greek to me, they pointed out the good and the bad in all kinds of constructive and creative ways.
Then they all split into smaller groups. A few of them surrounded a large TV next to where I was sitting and watched the very scene they'd just performed. Each witnessing the dance and making little comments to one another or mental notes of how to perfect their roles.
Three dancers sat on the floor in the middle of the room. They were focused on one girl's ballet shoe (which had come undone during the scene) working in a lovely show of sisterhood to remedy the situation.
“Does anyone have a bobby pin?”
“Someone take one out of their hair.”
Many of them were in smaller groups of friends, smiling and joking. It was all very natural. Everyone seemed so comfortable and happy. I was assimilated into a group of people I knew and this sense overtook me. Everything just felt right. I’d been in the room for maybe 15 minutes and they’d already made me feel like I belonged there.
Some time passed before the teachers herded the school into two groups. I followed a few people I knew into a room nearly identical to the one we were just in, only shorter. There, they began breaking down their performances from the prior scene. Like building sections of a puzzle before putting them all together, they were working to perfect their performances individually before returning to the larger group.
The group in the smaller room was mostly the main cast from the ballroom scene I’d just watched, save for Cinderella. I watched as they learned new steps in the dance. Everyone had a smile on their face as a girl practiced pretending to be drunk and one of the stepsisters learned how to fake a kiss with the Prince, which sent her and eventually everyone else into a small laughing fit.
After some trial and error, they had each part down and my friend was brought in to add Cinderella’s part to the mix. They taught her the feeling Cinderella has when she meets the Prince, one of natural comfort, joy, and meaning. “Like it was meant to be,” one of the teachers said. Teaching this feeling was confusing to me. They were teaching the very feeling that radiated from that building. The same feeling that was evident in the character of these people, their work, and the show as a whole. The same beautiful feeling that welcomed me as an outsider and was abundantly present in the time I spent at the rehearsal.
Even from my spot on the fringes of the room, the spectacle of Cinderella and the Prince dancing was entirely captivating. With such poise, they floated around the room like butterflies. Behaving like angels, their radiant artistic love and expertise was reflected in every mirror. A piece of the puzzle that could stand alone, it took only one run-through of their dance before it was deemed perfect.
Once both groups had finished, they were brought back together in the larger room to go over the ballroom scene all together one more time. I stayed on the edge of the room so as to not get in the way of anything, and still I was enraptured by the combination of all their hard work. It was a wordless poem of decadent beauty. Each stanza unfolding into another portrayal of angelic skill. My eyes were locked on the performance of the scene from start to finish. I was witnessing the completed puzzle but it was hard for me to believe this wasn't even close to the full thing.
Up until a few months ago, I’d never seen a ballet in my life. It was completely alien to me. Now, thanks to a dear friend of mine, I'm in love with it. I never would’ve thought some of my favorite writing I'd get to do for the Chronicle would be about ballet, but that was the realization I came to while I watched a rehearsal for City Ballet’s Cinderella.