Dance Like No One Is Watching (Or Filming)
No one ever believes I did ballet
To assuage his industrialist conscience, Andrew Carnegie, one of two main funders of the American eugenics movement, dumped huge amounts of money into Pittsburgh’s library system. As a result, there is an impressive number of libraries named after him.1 The big one is Carnegie Main, which is not to be confused with Carnegie Free. There’s even one called the Carnegie Carnegie because, you guessed it, it’s in the town of Carnegie, which is named after your man. It is the music hall associated with this location that is said to be haunted by Andrew himself.
To be specific, he haunts the upper seating area. They say it’s closed for renovations, which seems awfully convenient.
Abigail was the one who informed us of this ahead of the dress rehearsal for our upcoming ballet, which was a murder-mystery set in the 1920s. “You’ve got to see the portrait of him hanging in the lobby,” she added, “He was SO HOT when he was young!”
The dress rehearsal took place on Friday the 13th, during a full moon, a pair of facts that I made sure all the girls were aware of. Standing on the stage with Maddie, squinting through the white lights into the darkness of the seats, I pointed to the upper balcony and said, “Make sure to look out there—you may see his ghostly form during the show.”
“G. Marie,” she said, rather peeved, “you don’t really believe this stuff, do you?”
I grinned maniacally and went to my spot in the wings, only to run out a few seconds later, yelling, “MADDIE, MADDIE, I FOUND A HEADS-UP NICKEL BACK THERE—WHAT DO YOU THINK IT MEANS?”
This goofy behavior had nothing on the performances themselves, which could only be described as unhinged. I regret to inform you that I was once in a show that drew inspiration from both Into the Woods and the latest Star Wars movie. I do not know that our dance teacher, Miss Amy, had seen either film. The show used music from both. We wore romantic tutus (the flowy knee-length ones) and danced with lightsabers, often holding them at both ends, to the consternation of nerds everywhere.2 I feel like there were flower crowns. This was a mortifying experience and I tried to destroy all evidence of it.
One reason why our shows were so weird was that we rarely had anyone to play the princes, so a lot of plot had to be made up to excuse their absence. Have you ever wondered what the story of Snow White would look like in an all-women society? I have a recording of a dance performance that could give you the answers.
Sometimes, though, when there was a pupil who was really good, or who was a particular favorite of our teacher, it would be decided that we had to learn partnering, and some of the guys from the Ukrainian Orthodox church down the street would come in and serve as the male leads for a show. They were trained in Ukrainian folk dance, not ballet, but they were game to learn the lifts.
Every show had a party scene, usually at the very beginning. In this scene, someone would inevitably grab something from the main character and go running around, waving the stolen item above her head. I don’t know why this is, but it always happens in the dimension where ballet plotlines come from. Those binches get to a party and immediately start stealing each other’s hairpieces or nutcrackers or whatever. It’s like offering a glass of wine or saying “my name’s Jennifer” for them. A choreographed tug-of-war almost always follows.
We would always think these scenes were gonna be so funny, real crowd-pleasers, but no one really laughed. Tini assured me that they were pretty incomprehensible if you were not super into the genre of amateur ballet performances.
The mastermind behind these zany shows was Miss Amy, a woman who was probably four eleven and somehow still terrifying. Ballet teachers are, generally, a strange breed—they usually have been trained for one thing, which is to perform, and they often do not know how to relate to people outside of a performance context. Their teaching style reflects this.3 They are by turns imperious and jokey, and you, the student, are expected to appreciate all their jokes, even if you have just finished an exhausting exercise (perhaps especially then). They are often kind of mean, too, and when they are being mean to other students, they expect you to play along with their meanness and will be put out with you if you do not. They fluctuate wildly between acting like your theater-kid best friend and a bully.
One year we did a Wizard of Oz show, which is to say that we did a show that started with a pretty straightforward plot based on the movie and then devolved into madness that I can’t even remember. About three quarters of the way through the show, and mid-dance, our music guy accidentally bumped the iPad and started playing the incorrect song. We did what you’re supposed to do—keep dancing!—and it became a mild train wreck. We were doing the choreography to all the wrong songs and struggling to stay in sync with each other. This went on for about three dances, when the sound guy finally realized that at the end of a song he could just switch back to where we had been before he bumped the iPad. Then we did the three dances all over again, this time with the correct music.
All things considered, we thought we handled the whole thing pretty well. Miss Amy was another story. She was distraught at the afterparty and acted by turns dazed and angry for weeks.
During that time, she would come into the break room with us before class, sit on the pink bench among the fuzzy pillows, and chat like we were at a sleepover. This could go on for an hour or more, and then she would suddenly remember that we were there for dance and would lead an extremely abbreviated class. Other times she’d go over the whole show debacle again, agonizing over the decisions we’d made on a library stage for an incoherent ballet about Glinda the Good Witch. “You did a mambo to a waltz,” she would wail. We weren’t sure how to respond. It’s rare, but sometimes the situation does in fact call for that.
For us it was just a dance show. Like it didn’t even have that much to do with the Wizard of Oz. It sucked that it had gone so badly, but would anyone have been able to figure out the plot anyway? At least we had all gotten through our solos before the mix up—those were really the part of the show that mattered, as far as we were concerned.
All this to say, her reaction was pretty concerning, and the moms considered having an intervention. But then Miss Amy pulled it together and began teaching normal classes again. Or as normal as they had ever been. Everyone just pretended the Wizard of Oz show never happened.
Perhaps this will come as no surprise, but at some point we were banned from having dance shows at the Carnegie Carnegie. I can’t remember why, but it had to do with some drama between the librarian and Miss Amy. There we all were, gathered with the boys from the Ukrainian Orthodox church in the creepy cement basement of a library, listening to our ballet teacher tell us in hushed tones that we would never again dance in Andrew Carnegie’s haunted hall.
I haven’t seen that terrifying Pittsburgh show Dance Moms, but against all evidence I choose to believe this sort of thing is what it’s about.
From Wikipedia: “Five out of the first seven, six of the first ten, and seven of the first twelve libraries that Carnegie commissioned in America are in Allegheny County. Also, eleven of the first fourteen Carnegie funded libraries to open in America were in Allegheny County. In all, 19 libraries were commissioned in the county and several of them are more than just libraries but are cultural centers as well.”
Full disclosure: I once attended a Star Wars party dressed as Captain Kirk. If you are a Star Wars fan I love you and you’re very welcome here. I just want to be honest with you about my history. It’s not pretty.
My sister Jasmine always says that teachers should really be people who both enjoy teaching and are trained in educating (take that, private schools). I imagine my dance education would have been very different if these criteria were applied to ballet instructors.
Release the Tapes.
Shoutout to pedagogy!