My modern dance teacher taught me how to live
It's Day 4 of Teacher Appreciation Week!
In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week (May 5-9), I’m sharing a tribute to one of my own teachers each day this week instead of my usual roundup on the first Tuesday of the month. Thank you to every teacher – past, present, or future – who’s reading this. I appreciate you and the work you do.
I’ve written before about my ballet trauma and what it was like to stand at the barre again 30 years later.
What I haven’t written about yet was what happened when I discovered modern dance in Claire Mallardi’s class as an undergrad.
Claire was in her late 60s when I was her student, and she moved with the life force of a dancer a half-century younger. She was virtuosic in the way she used language to help us understand how to access the life force of our own bodies. She described a plié as the drawing together of the sitz bones and the heels. She told us a C-curve was the shape the body made as the spine lengthened. She taught us how to contract, the animating force in Graham technique, and how to turn without spotting, the antithesis of what I learned in ballet.
She told us she never had kids because her dances were her children. Fifteen years later when I started coming to terms with not having kids either, I thought of Claire as I asked myself what I would give birth to instead.
I think of Claire every time I encounter The Rite of Spring, a work of proto-modern dance choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky to Igor Stravinsky’s score. When the Ballets Russes premiered the piece in Paris in 1913, the audience was so repelled by what eyewitnesses described as “ugly earthbound lurching and stomping” that they started a riot. Now we know the avant-garde piece heralded the modern era; at the time it was artistic heresy.
I learned the story of the Rite premiere in a course called “First Nights” my sophomore year at Harvard, and then I learned it all over again two years later when Claire recounted her presence at another Rite premiere, that of modern dance icon Pina Bausch’s version in 1975. In Bausch’s rendition, Claire told me, the dancers wore pale slip-dresses, and they danced barefoot on a stage strewn with soil. As they stomped, turned, and lifted to the relentless, pounding beat of Stravinsky’s score, their sweat mixed with dirt, and they became covered in mud. Near the end of the piece, all attention turned to the Chosen One, a female dancer who would be sacrificed in the culminating ritual.
I was riveted as Claire described the final minutes of the dance. She said that as the Chosen One danced alone in a ring of other dancers, her movement became faster and more furious, and a shoulder strap on her costume broke, exposing one of her breasts. The dancer kept dancing right to the end, right to the moment of her fatal collapse.
Claire was astounded by this epic moment. She was so enthralled by the performance that she bought a ticket for the second show the very next night. That performance was just as extraordinary, and when the Chosen One’s costume broke again she realized it was not an accident; it was Bauschian genius.
Because of Claire, I seize every chance I get to see Pina Bausch’s Rite. I most recently saw it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2017 and at the Park Avenue Armory, with a company of dancers from across Africa, in 2023. Earlier this year I even got to see a video of the Joffrey Ballet’s 1987 recreation of Nijinsky’s original Rite at an exhibit at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
And each time I see one of these performances, I think about Claire, who died in 2020 at the age of 91.
“How would you dance, if you knew you were going to die?” Bausch said of the inspiration for her Rite.
Claire danced and taught as if she was asking herself that question every day.
She lived in the world of the body. She knew she was going to die.
Because we all are. Probably – hopefully – not today. But eventually.
We all know we’re going to die. And we all decide, given that knowledge, how we will dance.
To Claire, and all the other teachers who teach every class with the full force of their one wild and precious life, thank you.
I appreciate you.
Your turn:
If you have 5 minutes: Share a comment about something that resonates with you. First draft thoughts are welcome!
If you have 10 minutes: Send a note to a teacher you appreciate – a past teacher of your own or your child, a colleague, a leader, or anyone else who helps others learn. Better yet, send them a gift subscription to the Cocoon for Teacher Appreciation Week, Mother’s Day, or Father’s Day!
If you have 30 minutes: Schedule time on my calendar to chat. What are you working on right now? It’s a free half-hour of thought partnership!
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Carolyn Yaffe, Executive Director, Valley Charter Schools
Thank you for reading this issue of The Cocoon. I’ll see you tomorrow for my next Teacher Appreciation Week post and on the first Tuesday of next month for my next regular edition.
And if you’re interested in the pleasures, perils, and politics of mid-40s, post-divorce, perimenopausal, red-state dating, please visit my other Substack Red State Blue Balls. It makes a great birthday or just-because gift for yourself or someone else!