For fun...
Fat, middle-aged male Neocon professor of American Studies at BYU hides his tutu and ballet slippers but can't restrain himself from occassionally performing in front of his amazed students..
Enjoy. The world is big.
chronicle.com
By KERRY SOPER
I will never forget the first time that I performed ballet in front of an introductory American-history class.
I was executing an especially energetic pas de cheval or "step of the horse" (not an easy task for a middle-aged man of my girth who fancies corduroy pants and flat-knit sweaters), which nicely illustrated some of the more draconian measures of the Marshall Plan that had been advocated by old-line, classical economists. The reverential calm of the large classroom (180 freshmen!) suggested that my point was being well taken. But then I heard it — a faint snigger from the back of the classroom.
The derision was obviously limited to that one ignorant student, but it was still too much for my fragile dancer's ego. My proud bearing — which had resembled, just moments before, the nobility of an exceptionally virile Lipizzaner stallion — collapsed, and I ran from the room loudly sobbing into my trembling hands.
It took me weeks of anguished soul-searching before I got up the courage to "promenade" my skills in front of a large group of students again. But as other talented professors can attest — those of you who can both "teach" and "do" — the performer's passion, once ignited, cannot easily be extinguished. Whether those few callow rubes in my survey classes liked it or not, I was destined to gracefully leap across the great gulf that sadly divides theory and practice in our métier.
I must admit, modestly, that I am a self-taught ballet dancer. Although I have spent countless hours (and worn out several pairs of sweatpants) perfecting my craft in front of a mirror in my basement, I would hesitate to compare myself with masters such as Nureyev and Baryshnikov. I am still, and always will be, an eager student of this demanding art.
I had been attracted to "the natural nobleman's dance," as I like to call it, from a young age. Sadly, however, a fragile constitution, sedentary habits, and a bookish personality prevented me for a long time from lifting my metaphorical toe to the barre. But then in my graduate-school days — that crazy, tumultuous period in the early 1980s when campuses were abuzz with the electricity of Reaganomics — I rediscovered my first love. My fellow graduate students and I felt so strongly about politics that we weren't content to just sit around and merely talk about what was happening in the country; we had to dance!
Some of my confused classmates — those whose politics pranced to the left, as it were — found themselves attracted to what was then in vogue on most liberal college campuses: a sort of ersatz miming or interpretive dance that had been corrupted by the free-form chaos of post-Marcel Marceauvian deconstruction. (It was an abomination: mimes pretending to defy gravity, tearing holes through figurative walls without even breaking a sweat, or collapsing in the middle of a performance into ironic "metagiggles.")
But my fellow neocons and I would have none of that. We were enchanted by the unapologetically proud and earnest grands battements (big kicks) of old-school ballet. Here, indeed, was a physical form of expression that could do justice to the ideological elegance of the Ol' Gipper and "trickle down" economics.
As a young assistant professor who had to hide his "tutu and slippers," as it were, from hostile colleagues, I chafed against the restraints of the traditional lecture classroom. Day after day I had to pontificate dryly as the students passively scritch-scratched into their notebooks — when all the while there was a whole realm of gloriously active learning waiting in the wings.
I often wonder how many of my early admirers in those classrooms noticed that I would occasionally, almost unconsciously, execute an understated détourné (a smooth turn made by pivoting on elevated toes) while moving toward the chalkboard to emphasize an important point. And did they appreciate that impish petit jeté (little jump) I could not seem to contain whenever I felt compelled to add a visual exclamation point to an argument? Who knows, but the suppressed smiles of admiration I occasionally glimpsed on some faces suggest that those rhetorical flourishes did not go entirely unnoticed.
Now that I have achieved tenure (by the skin of my lightly calloused toes, I might add), and learned to silence the sniggers — at least in my own hyper-focused, dancer's mind — I can share my talents in the classroom with abandon. At last students now benefit from witnessing some of the following visual clarifications in my large survey courses: the glaring flaws of Roosevelt's New Deal policies dissected with the help of a series of deftly executed entrechats (a startling jump in which the dancer's legs scissor back and forth with lightning-speed precision); a re-creation of the tension surrounding the Bay of Pigs crisis by remaining en pointe (elevated on the tips of my toes) for as long as possible (20 seconds on a good day!); the sad fall from grace of President Richard Nixon given metaphorical expression through a dramatic, lingering penché (a slow, graceful tilting of the body toward the horizontal).
I have to admit that I occasionally let my newfound spontaneity as a dancing lecturer get the best of me. For example, in class last week I dare say that I gave a young female undergraduate the thrill of her life when I pulled her from the front row and initiated an impromptu pas de deux. I wanted to illustrate the delicate peace negotiations between Anwar el-Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David in 1978. Her coy resistance to my effort to lead her through a series of sweeping tournés was actually the perfect embodiment of Sadat's early suspicions of the Israeli leader's diplomatic intentions.
I recently unveiled my pièce de résistance during a capstone lecture on contemporary American history (to be specific, a discourse on the budding legacy of the Bush administration). To the strains of Stravinsky's joyfully martial Rite of Spring, I performed an athletic, 15-minute-long, tightly choreographed celebration of the war on terrorism. For the first time I took advantage of all the space in the auditorium-size classroom and ended with a beautiful grand jeté (a long, horizontal leap, legs outstretched) over the heads of several awestruck students whom I had strategically placed on the floor in front of the lectern. I found this performance to be so emotionally and physically exhausting that I was forced to end the class 30 minutes early, right there on that high note.
I know that there will always be colleagues (and perhaps some of you readers) who look askance at my use of ballet in the classroom. But can any of us deny who we are, or where our strengths lie as instructors? By relating my successes in making American history come alive through the talents with which I have been blessed, I just hope that some of you will be empowered to bring your own hidden abilities (accordion? clogging?) into the classroom and the lives of our young charges.
And now I bid you adieu, make a slight curtsy, andwith one final, magnificent jetéexit stage right.
Kerry Soper is director and associate professor of American studies at Brigham Young University. |
