Dancing Through Life

I hope everybody had a great holiday weekend, and thanks to all of you first responders, hospital workers, retail folk, and everybody else who worked their hinny's off to keep us alive, safe, and able to spend way to much money at insane hours.  At my house the Christmas holiday always starts the weekend after Thanksgiving, now this year is a tad different because Thanksgiving was a little early this year, but the spirit is still there.  What better way to start off our holidays then with a little ballet.

Bunheads is a book that I pick up off the shelf completely at random and it turned out to be a good little book.  The book follows Hannah, a 19 year old dancer in the Manhattan Ballet Company.  She has been dancing since she was little and moved to New York at the age of 14 to live and attend the Ballet Academy. After graduation she became part of the corps de ballet which is the group part of the ballet.  Hannah does not like being called a ballerina because that is a very specific role in the ballet company and she is just a dancer. Which is not to say what she does is easy.  She and her fellow dancers work hours and hours each day to not only perfect each move and step, but to be able to do them together in perfect sync.  Hannah meets a musician one night while she is out trying to relax and is intrigued at his sheer lack of a plan.
Jacob has done a lot of things during his life, while in contrast Hannah has devoted every waking (and some dreaming) moment to perfecting her art.  The two start a sort of relationship and you can start to see the two view points of the different characters.  Hannah sees Jacob once or twice a month and feels like she is spending all her free time with him, while he feels that he hardly gets to see her at all.  Meanwhile back at the dance company competition is fierce for the solo spots and Hannah is not only in competition with the company and her friends, but herself as well.  She is horrified to discover that she has finally developed breasts (stunted puberty is very common in very athletic women) and director of the company has said she would be dropped from certain pieces if she could not fit into the costumes without a bra.  This causes Hannah to work even harder, to go to the gym more and to take extra classes outside of the ballet.  Meanwhile the son of a rich donor has taken

interest in Hannah, which is flattering to her and also nice because he understands how much work being a dancer requires, unlike Jacob who is losing patience.  Hannah's work pays off and she is awarded a solo piece in Rubies which a part of the Jewels ballet.  Her friend gets promoted to soloist status and Hannah realizes that all of the work she put in would only get harder and longer if she too made it to soloist.  She is terrified to do anything other than dance, not only because she has devoted so much of her life to it, but she does really love it as well.  Hannah eventually decides to finish out the season and then leave the company to go to college and try the life of a normal person.  She doesn't give up dance completely, she teaches children at a smaller studio and still takes the occasional class, it just becomes one aspect of her life instead of the whole thing.

I liked this book a lot, partly because I love anything to do with the performing arts and partly because it was a fairly realistic look at what a real dancer deals with.  The author herself was a dancer in the New York City ballet for 9 years so you can be pretty sure that those parts of the book are fairly authentic.  The basic storyline of a girl who meets a boy and has to decide between dance and a normal life was pretty  basic and predictable, no new territory explored there, but that was okay because I think it was just a framework for the world the author was trying to show us.  I loved the fact that Hannah was a working member of the
ballet, not some kid in school auditioning for a part in the company or a starring role that she miraculously got at the last second.  This is a kind of brutal look at girl and her job, in fact Hannah refers to the ballet many times as going to work, which is pretty accurate.  I have never been able to do ballet, way to much discipline involved for way to brief a career, but I have been in dance and acted in a theatre company for many years so I do have extensive behind the scenes knowledge.  This book was pretty accurate in portraying the kind of blahness that doing something almost everyday brings, even if you love what you do.  The banter, the getting ready, being thrown on stage, rushing to grab a sip of water the 5 seconds you are off stage, this is all part of what really goes on when you do this on a daily basis.  You tend to lose the specialness...until you get on stage.  That was another thing I really like about this book, Hannah loves dancing, it is hard and exhausting and sometimes even boring, but those few minutes at a time when you are on stage and you are in a completely different world, usually makes up for all the rest of the crap. Overall if you have any interest in what it is like to actually be in a performing company, when it becomes your job this book is great.  Again the story is nothing to special, but it is a pretty quick read and full of insights and information.  I found it a great start to the holiday season (even though it is not a holiday book)  I give it 7 out of 10 sugarplum faeries.

What behind the scenes do you want to see?  Do you think you could ever have the discipline it takes to do this as a job?  What play, ballet, song, do you never want to perform again? (Aladdin for me, if I never perform that one again I will be a happy girl!) Do you think all of us artsy folks are slightly off our rocker?