Putting Dance On The Page

The day after Thanksgiving I had an argument with my husband. It was his first year as an attorney for a Silicon Valley law firm and I thought he didn’t have time to dance in The Nutcracker anymore. It wasn’t just the law firm hours, I insisted. It was also the fact that we had three small children. I was doing the bulk of the childcare, the housework, and everything else. Oh, and also? He was forty-two years old. He’d been dancing for over twenty years. It was time to quit. 

He disagreed. 

He grabbed his dance bag and stormed out of our apartment. I was upset and annoyed but as I reflected on my arguments, something tugged at me. It was as if the last piece of a puzzle had clicked into place. After years of writing Nutcracker stories that should have fit together but didn’t, I’d finally found the hook to my memoir. It was about people like my husband and me, dancers who couldn’t bear the thought of not dancing anymore.

I had been writing about the Nutcracker ever since high school when my personal essay was chosen for inclusion in San Francisco Ballet’s playbill. I’d written about the ballet company in El Paso where I’d danced as a kid. I detailed the time our tour bus was stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire and the director’s panic when she discovered she’d left the music in the glove compartment of her car back at the dance studio. 

In addition to Texas and San Francisco, I danced in Seattle, Iceland, and Italy. I’d been a little boy in the party scene, a mouse, a flower, and all the flavors of candy in the second act Land of the Sweets. By the time I met my husband, I had enough anecdotes to fill a book.

My memoir followed the narrative arc of the Nutcracker with each chapter telling the story onstage as well as the mishaps unfolding behind the scenes. But every time I sat down to write, I came across the same problem. I didn’t have a throughline. I danced in the Nutcracker—so what? So did my husband, my daughter, my twin sons and all my friends from childhood. All my ballet stories were just disconnected ballet stories. Remember the time I got a concussion during the Battle Scene? Remember when your costume tore onstage?

While my husband danced in his performance that night, I affixed stamps to holiday cards and scribbled notes for my book. A light bulb had gone off in my head. We were the roles onstage and backstage. It was so obvious. I was Clara. He was the prince. My director from El Paso was Drosselmeier—the mysterious character who can’t quite be trusted but sets the entire ballet in motion.

As a dancer I had never been cast as Clara, the little girl who gets a nutcracker; I had always been cast as Fritz, the little boy who breaks it. In my writing, I’d focused on the roles I danced but now I realized that the stories ran deeper. Perhaps I was Fritz onstage, but backstage I was the character of a little girl who has a dream. I was the one who transformed the nutcracker into a prince. I was the one who traveled with him to a fairy land. 

And, like Clara, who travels with the prince to meet the Sugar Plum Fairy in the Land of the Sweets, once I got to the second act, I sat around and watched other people dance. All the while still dreaming of dancing. 

What keeps us dancing when it is so hard? The blisters, the swollen muscles, the paltry paychecks, the constant insults from directors. If it was so, hard, why did I wish I had more time?

I unpacked this question scene by scene, chapter by chapter. When I break Clara’s nutcracker, I’m not just playing my part. I’m actually jealous of her—a dancer who was one of my best friends, but she was better than I was and she was cuter than I was. So she was the little girl and I was the naughty boy. And in being naughty I discovered the joy of inhabiting a role. 

This is dance. This is why it fuels us. This is why we come back. 

In the battle scene chapter, the obstacles are the standards of the elite ballet school in San Francisco where I trained as a teenager. The discovery is the same. As dancers, we hold joy in our muscles, and we release it when we dance. 

Joy is everywhere if you choose to look for it. It is in teaching the next generation of dancers and the moment when all the Little Angels realize they need to raise their arms on the count of four and they all do it at the same time. There is joy in connecting with my friends from childhood. Joy in mastering walkovers. Joy in the perfect double pirouette. 

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt joy in writing. As satisfying as it is to craft the perfect paragraph, it certainly isn’t equal to the excitement of landing in a perfect fish after a helicopter lift or the thrill of dancing at the Kennedy Center. 

But there’s one thing writing does for me that dancing cannot. Dancing is only in the moment. When the ballerina takes her final bow, the dance she has performed only exists in our collective memory. Once it’s gone, it’s as if it never existed.

Writing, however, has permanence. My body will never again do a helicopter lift, but my brain remembers with perfect clarity how my husband would throw me in the air, how my leg circled over his head before he’d catch me. It was a lift we did perfectly every time we executed it because we were perfectly in sync with each other’s intentions. 

In writing our stories, I relive them: the lifts, the fights, the final bows. With revision comes compassion for my younger self who never thought she was good enough, admiration for that younger self’s perseverance, and gratitude for the life that my husband and I have carved out for ourselves.

—

JANINE KOVAC enjoyed a twelve-year career as a professional ballet dancer in Iceland, Italy, San Francisco, and her hometown of El Paso, Texas. Outside of the ballet world, her distinctions include U.C. Berkeley’s Glushko Award for Distinguished Research in Cognitive Science, an Elizabeth George Foundation Fellowship from Hedgbrook, and the Calderwood Fellowship for Journalism from MacDowell. Janine is the author of “Brain Changer: A Mother’s Guide to Cognitive Science” and “Spinning: Choreography for Coming Home,” which received a National Indie Excellence Award. She lives in Oakland, California. Learn more about her life and work at: https://www.janinekovac.com/ 

Follow Janine Kovac on social media:

Facebook: @Janine.Kovac.Writer | Instagram: @Janine.Kovac

THE NUTCRACKER CHRONICLES

Perfect for The Nutcracker holiday market and fans of work/life balance books, this memoir of a ballet dancer–turned–literary curator shares the real-life journey of a dancer, wife, and mother.

The Nutcracker Chronicles, a modern twist on the beloved holiday ballet, intertwines the story of Clara and her nutcracker prince with the true-life stories that unfold backstage.

The curtain rises on Ballet El Paso’s production of The Nutcracker, where young Janine Kovac is cast as Fritz, the boy who breaks the nutcracker. Her director is Ingeborg Heuser, a German woman who once performed for Hitler and who peppers her teaching with insults like, “Why can’t you just dance like a pretty girl?” At least it’s better than “You look like a cow on ice skates,” which is what the other girls hear daily.

Onstage, Janine wins the battle and embarks on a voyage through a snowy forest to the Land of the Sweets, where she serves as spectator to a beautiful dance. She also travels offstage, leaving El Paso to study at San Francisco Ballet before landing a job in Iceland and returning to California, where she rises through the ranks from soldier to snowflake to candy soloist. Eventually, however, she is relegated to watching other people dance—her husband, her children, her students—and her claim to the spotlight is replaced by the quest to find joy in her new roles.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing