Pas de deux
On Christological bodies and a trip to the ballet
Gentle reader,
Last weekend, I made a trip to the ballet with friends. We saw the Joffrey’s Studies in Blue and stopped at Shake Shack for some decadent food and conversation. I feel fed—body and soul—by dance, and cheese fries, and friendship.
Unlike Augustine of Hippo, I came early to the love of God, but I came late to a love of ballet, and—as much as human art is able to image that love of God—I can’t help but think of Augustine’s cry in his Confessions:
“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you.”
—Augustine
I’m grateful for beauty and bodies and friends, all pointing us to the love of God.
With some amazing academics I’m honored to call friends, enjoying the ballet.
Why did my love come so late?
Maybe some beauty requires maturity and may not be appreciated by the young. Besides ballet, I think here of the novels of Marilynne Robinson or The Great Gatsby; my teen daughter just bought her copy for school, as we persist in assigning it to students unready for Fitzgerald and likely to discard him, unable yet to practice “reserving judgments” as “a matter of infinite hope” (from the Gatsby, which I read again when I was old enough to appreciate it, with apologies to Mr. Potter, my sophomore English teacher).
My late love for the ballet comes, too, with my own changing relationship to embodiment. I believe myself all klutz, all clown, thick ankles, devoid of grace. In fact, my mother was asked to remove me from preschool ballet class, though, to be fair, that was for incorrigibility, not incompetence. When I tried dance again at the ugly duckling stage of life, I didn’t get far.
But as I age, as my body is revealed to be less and less a matter over which I can continue to hold any illusion of control, the bodies of the dancers on stage seem miraculous.
How odd, that we live in a world wherein a teenager might well assume the ballerina’s body as the paradigm, the norm to which she must aspire. Older now, I can see that norm as the striking alien thing it is: a body so very practiced—so carefully and narrowly trained—that only a few can begin to mirror it, a body in which every muscle is known and drawn and exercised, a body made a bowstring, taut with power. Maybe sixteen year old me turned away from the ballerina’s body in shame, knowing I lacked both the preternatural thinness and the hard won iron grace. In middle age, though far thicker and less flexible than I was in my teens, I’m freed to love the ballerina’s body as the strange body it is, pared, by discipline, to suprahuman power, trained to the very edge of flight.
And, as a dance mom, I know something now about that training. I know the hours of sacrifice and the years of care behind the achievement of one line—leg hyper-extended to heaven—behind one unnatural movement made second nature at the barre. I know a little of the sweet dreams and desperate hopes of the dancer in training, and I know how often elegant ballet shoes hold in bruises and blood. Christians, too, know sacrifice and discipline. We’re those in lifetime training, called to “press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3: 14). I know all this, and those balletic bodies appear to me, now, Christological.
Hans Frei said there are no Christ figures, and Stanley Hauerwas taught me that my personal sufferings aren’t to be equated to the cross. Fair enough. Jesus is irreducible, sui generis, nonfungible even.
Even so, that same Jesus has room in his body for all our bodies, and the pouring out of any body is revealed to me, more and more, as a precious thing, a thing that hearkens of the blood poured out by the only Jesus. I stand amazed that the bodies on the stage are opening up a little window in time for which they have already paid in decades of preparation and will continue to pay for the rest of their lives, in their very flesh, in tendons and tears and pain. They pay that toll to open that window for a few years so their bodies might tell something wondrous, might shimmer with the possibility of human transformation.
The Joffrey Ballet's Victoria Jaiani and Dylan Gutierrez in “Hummingbird”; Photo by Cheryl Mann, courtesy of the Joffrey Ballet
In this digital collage, I’ve grafted Mary and Joseph into a couple performing ballet pas de deux. I wanted their faces to be as bland and recognizable as possible, so their bodies might be all the more surprising. Mary’s face is quoted from Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato’s painting of “Mary worshipping the child” (1640-1660) and Joseph’s from Georges Becker’s “Saint Joseph protecteur de l’enfance de Jésus” (1874), both in the public domain. The serpent finds himself beneath Mary’s toe en pointe, her whole self concentrated in power in that foot. But she is not alone, as she and Joseph join their bodies in the dance, and the power of the Spirit holds them. I crafted the serpent using AI, which is, in my opinion, a fine little joke.
Feel free to share this image. High-res images, without the watermark, are available at my Redbubble store.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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A fine little joke indeed!
Don't sell all high schoolers too short. Gatsby was one of three novels I read in high school that began to crack my mind open to a bigger world.
A fine little joke indeed. Errr. In Truth. Jenn beat me to it.
Gatsby confused the snot out of me because, homeschooled that I was, I was introduced to it after college under the mistaken impression that it was a hilarious novel. I don't know why I believed this. Just that I, and kept reading with an increasingly surreal confusion waiting for the punchline.