I'm just not good enough: how one dancer fell into the black hole of self-criticism, and climbed out—and learned a thing or two about technique

Dance Magazine, March, 2005 by Rosalynde LeBlanc

I was sinking in Spain ... not from the sharp July sun, or the pitchers of sangria, or the tire-sized pans of paella at midnight, but from my own quicksand of insecurities. It was the summer of 2002, and I was in Barcelona, in the middle of a three-city tour with Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project. It was a small gem of a tour. Barcelona woke me out of bed with its nightlife pebbling my hotel room window, Valencia was last week's quaint memory, and Las Palmas beckoned with promises of equatorial sun and a beach-front hotel. I felt painfully unworthy of being there.

I had been in the company for two and a half years and was a six-year veteran of the rigorous Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Yet I dreaded the thought of having to perform each night. My confidence was that of a struggling student. What was the cause of my low self-esteem?

When I was invited to join White Oak five years before, I was hopping with both excitement and fear. I was thrilled about the chance to work alongside one of the greatest dancers who ever lived, but coupled with that thrill was the terror that I would not be good enough to share his stage. I had confidence in my ability as a performer, as I had often been complimented on my stage presence. It was the level of my technique that had me shaking. For me, at that time, technique was 90 degree angle arabesques, multiple pirouettes, and jumps framed with feet like commas. In other words technique was how much one looked like a ballet dancer.

I was almost flat-footed, my legs looked bent even when standing with my heels pressed into the floor and my muscles flexed rock hard. My thighs were so much larger than my hips that rotating them felt like stuffing two sausages into a juice glass. Sometime during my conservatory training, I silently dismissed technique from my dance quest and focused on what I considered far more important--expression.

I flourished during my years with Bill T. Jones because, at that time, he was not overly concerned with technique. I wanted to march behind him with a banner and trumpet when his criticisms in the pre-performance talk were more about our conviction than our technical execution. Yes, I concurred, let's care more about our hearts than our arabesques.

It wasn't until I was sitting opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov in a cafe in 1999 and listening to him rattle off my new work schedule, that I began to think less about my heart and more about my mediocre arabesque. Baryshnikov didn't insist on searing levels of virtuosity in order to be in White Oak. In fact, he too was more interested in who I was rather than merely how I looked. However, in the presence of consummate proficiency such as his, I felt the need to dust off the forsaken places in my craft. I feared that at some point I would be asked to do something I just didn't have the ability to do.

I worked very hard over the next couple of years, going to ballet class nearly every day. I would no longer accept from myself unsteady balances of poorly finished turns. Whenever my foot wobbled, I would sag with depression. My mind ran a ticker tape of my inadequacies. The years of unrelieved insecurity folded back and forth upon me until there I was in Spain, eight years into my professional dance career, immobilized and afraid to dance.

I had graduated from the State University of New York at Purchase, where I was a good modern dancer and a lousy ballet dancer. My modern teachers had glowing words about my ability to move through space, and my ballet teachers all wrote some version of, "She needs to work on her technique." I scoffed at the ballet evaluations; I thought they were just snobby derision from narrow-minded teachers who couldn't reconcile my muscular, kinky-limbed body into their straight-as-an-arrow ballet world. But I was hurt by the word "technique" because, whether defined or not, whether I even cared about it or not, it evaded me. I concluded that having technique was a state of being, not a process of learning. It was based on how much of the prototype of the ballet dancer's body was written in your genetic material. As far as I was concerned, technique was balled up inside a pink slip of paper in the SUNY Purchase dumpster.

By the time I was on the White Oak tour, I was dissecting all of my movements into fractious pieces. I dropped the axe on myself if I found imperfection. No amount of rational thinking about my level of accomplishment could contain the feeling of inadequacy. I spent days in my room trying to quell the nausea at the thought of having to step onstage each evening. When I was with Bill T. Jones, I used to go onstage with my mind on the expression of the dance. If my technique faltered, it only proved the force of my passion. Now, I went onstage filled with dread at the thought that I might teeter shamefully in my balances or fall out of my turns. So, I stepped cautiously, and my passion faltered under the force of my technique. Each night, I felt farther from my body, and my anxiety doubled.