Words by Gus Hodgson.
It’s strange where our minds go when we’re in extreme pain. I remember lying there desperately trying to work out what time it was. I was going in and out of consciousness as waves of pain radiated from my chest. It was my second week of university and, walking back to my flat from a lecture, I had collapsed.
I remember panicked voices above me; the sound of people running; a car passing. “What’s the time?” I tried to ask but couldn’t get the words out. I heard myself make a sound I’d never made before. I can’t remember being in the back of the ambulance or getting into hospital. Those memories found nothing to stick to through the morphine I’d been given. It was the afternoon of the next day when a doctor came to tell me that something had gone wrong with my heart.
Later a nurse came to change the cannula in my arm. It had been put in in the back of the ambulance and had gotten sore. I looked away as the new needle went into a vein in my wrist. I wanted to cry – I was scared and exhausted. My chest still hurt. This nurse had surely seen lots of people like me. People who had never really thought about their relationship to their bodies, who had never thought that something could go so wrong so quickly.
“We’ll have you dancing soon enough”, she said, bandaging up her work.
I laughed. I had never danced before – never even thought to try it. Through the following year I was back in that hospital very often. I continued to have collapses and chest pain and doctors ran tests and did procedures to work out what was going on. I had surgery and started on medication.
Every time I collapsed I was horribly embarrassed. I hated that it scared my friends and worse, that passersby on the street would be forced to give me first aid as they waited for an ambulance to arrive. If I could get words out through the pain, I’d tell them how sorry I was. I’d never see these people again. I wish I could thank them.
Through this time my relationship with my body changed completely. Before this, I was very lucky to have rarely thought about it at all. It had always done what I wanted it to. I was a little clumsy but at most that cost me a spilt cup of tea every so often. My body felt like a part of me: I was it and it was me. But after becoming ill, suddenly I questioned what it was now capable of doing and when it might hurt and embarrass me. I’d notice how soft floors were and where defibrillators were. My body became something to be negotiated with and to second guess. I was scared of it and what it could, at any moment, do to me.
To be ill is a kind of learning. Some boring and practical – what can I eat with my medicine that doesn’t make me feel sick – and some emotional, the complicated, messy, learning of who I am again. It is a process of learning to reclaim oneself.
Things slowly got better. Doctors began to work out what medicine would help me and the procedures have mostly succeeded. I haven’t collapsed in a long time and most days I don’t think about my heart at all – except when I hug someone and the metal implant in my chest presses against my ribs. My body is beginning to feel like me again and I don’t know where the nearest defibrillator is to my new flat.
Last week I was on the tube on my way to my first ballet class at the English National Ballet. I couldn’t quite explain to myself why I wanted to learn ballet. I had been to drama school to train to be a director and, during that time, done some moving about – nothing which could really be called dance and nothing where there was a ‘correct’ way to do it. I’d seen some ballet and liked some of it but wouldn’t call myself a ballet fan. I felt and feel, that the most classically inclined echelons of ballet had been too closed-off and standoffish. Why then, had I chosen to begin classes?
The start of class had a nervous silence. A room full of beginners, all in brand-new shoes, found spaces on the barre. Nervous ‘nice to meet yous’ were exchanged.
“We’ll have you dancing soon enough”, I heard in my memory. I had forgotten it until that moment.
Class was nothing to be scared of. The teacher was kind and funny and had none of the authoritarianism I had expected from the stereotypes. We all listened to her quietly, enjoying being in that gentle focus that comes from being instructed by a great teacher.
She taught us how to stand in second position. I felt I was using muscles I had never used before. From the barre we practiced tendus – a completely new movement for my body. I concentrated on leading with the heel and keeping some sense of flow through the movement. With each repetition they became a little better, a little more natural. The same with my arm movements from first to second position. It was difficult and came to me very unnaturally.
The movements themselves were tough but the process of learning them was not. I realise now that my time being ill has taught my body how to learn. It has made me more malleable. In class I found myself made emotional by the fact that I was no longer learning how not to suffer – learning what I could do – but that I could do what I had chosen to learn. Bodily learning was no longer a necessity to survive – a process of finding out limits – but a challenge to do something beautiful. With each tendu I felt more like myself, more like my body was mine and doing what I told it to do. For the first time in a long time, I was allowed to demand difficult things of my body rather than it demanding difficult things of me.
Towards the end of class, we were putting together a few of the moves and positions we had been taught. Our arms and legs were working as one and our concentration was being spread more thinly across our bodies. I was calling out the steps in my head to keep on the right sequence but then, at first without my noticing, I stopped. The moves came without thought, my legs and arms moved without needing to be asked. I was dancing.
Martha Graham tells us that, “every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart”. I’ve often thought that part of my sadness about my heart condition is that I’ve been robbed of a metaphor. The heart is the standard metaphor we reach for when we need a site of the soul: we can be “broken-hearted”, or wear it on our sleeves or it can be “heavy”. It is what we have chosen to represent the things that really matter. Where our joy and despair live. For a long time, I’ve felt divorced from that: my heart has had to be a real existing thing. The graphs of my heart have been thin red lines with doctors’ annotations. This is what I want to take from ballet. I want to dance my way to a point that my heart is a metaphor again. I want the graph of my heart to be found through the sequences I practice. I want to be my body again. I think ballet might give me that; that it might be the last proof of having healed.
Before I began classes I asked a ballerina if she had any advice for me: “enjoy it all”, she said,
“it’s beautiful”. She’s right, it is. That my body can do it, even just as a beginner, is a beautiful thing too.
“We’ll have you dancing soon enough” . Yes, you did, I’ve got class again next week.