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

Could the audience tell? Probably not. Did my colleagues notice? Perhaps, but they didn't say anything. But that is the quiet devastation of the professional dancer: To the outside observer, you may be seated on the throne of your craft, while on the inside you are swinging wildly between seeming perfection and failure. I didn't need anyone's criticism; my belief in my inadequacy was digging its own hole.

When I got back to New York I continued with my ballet classes in a stubborn quest for greatness. One day on my way to class, as I was waiting to cross Fifth Avenue, I saw a man on in-line skates streaming gracefully--backward!--down the street. He was bopping to his radio while his feet slipped luxuriously through loose figure eights. He looked so free. I envied him. I wanted to dance the way he skated. I could have kept telling myself that I wanted to pirouette without falling over and jete with perfectly pointed feet, but in truth, I only wanted to feel free. I wanted to be unhindered by my body. I wanted a short path from my heart to my limbs, so that the emotion I felt would be conveyed unequivocally by my body.

As he grew smaller down the street, I realized that behind the skater's ease and freedom was a huge amount of control. It wasn't control in a smothered sense, but control in a piloted sense. He knew the feel of his body in fast motion so well that the kinetic adjustments became subtle reflexes, leaving his mind free to play.

I realized there wasn't one technique that would create brilliance. Techniques are simply knowledge. Whether it is guiding the eyes in kathakali, or performing multiple turns in ballet, all of them are formulas toward the common goal of controlling the body in order to make artistic choices. I had fallen into the belief that ballet held the only key to becoming beautiful, and found myself feeling I should have been a ballet dancer. But harboring that regret only separated the expression of my movement from the execution of my movement, and I was left in the gap in the middle.

Techniques give us options for expression and freedom. However, a technique will help make a great dancer only if there is a constant braiding in of the spirit--if the mechanics, knowledge, and control are not ends in themselves, but tools in deliverance of the mind.

Rosalynde LeBlanc dances with Liz Gerring and appears in John Turturro's upcoming film Romance and Cigarettes.