When I was three years old, I was enrolled in my first ballet class. I loved the tights and tutus and pink, though a future in the ballet I did not have. I learned to plié and pas de bourrée, but, due to the dramatic nature of my untimely departure from the art form at the ripe age of nine, I developed a perception of myself as ungraceful. Not one for wallowing, I soon thereafter discovered my next and lasting passion: writing.

I continued to admire dancers through my adolescence, entirely because my beautiful, poised, best friend was one. During high school dance assemblies—our all-girls’ school’s version of a rowdy sporting event—Shaina reminded me of the power of one’s body to speak; to me, hers spoke of the wonder of angles and the grace that I lacked. While Joan Acocella (2007) was not writing about Shaina, she could have been: “On the stage, particularly when they are moving to music, [dancers] can seem to us a dream of the perfect physical life, in which the body is capable of saying all that needs to be said” (p. 186). Throughout high school, I scribbled away pages of words that often echoed without meaning, while Shaina leaped and jumped and the world grew heavy with truth. When, in college, Shaina asked me to write poetry to complement her senior dance thesis, I began a self-conscious attempt to capture in words the theme that she had taken as her subject—the shift between our mode of expression when we leave the self-abandoned freedom of being alone and enter into the company of others.


This is an excerpt from Expanding Our Vision for the Arts in Education.

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