“Dance is the hidden language of the soul.” — Martha Graham It’s been a long time since I was out dancing. I can remember times when I would take a nap after work so I could be fresh to leave my apartment at 11 p.m. when the night began. It was so much fun! Those were the days… I love to…
It’s a disorienting decision—certainly for someone who makes a living selling words—to choose a form of expression that doesn’t use them. But I’d always dreamed of choreographing—not for a living but for fun. I wanted to see if I could learn its own unfamiliar and difficult language. Five months ago, I started a weekly class in modern-dance choreography. I’ve studied…
In his bestselling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to become a master in a particular field. Gladwell based this claim on several studies, including one by German psychologists who researched violinists during the 1990s. The study found that, over their lifetimes, elite violinists averaged 6,000 more hours of practice than non-elite ones.…
When I was a little girl I wanted more than anything to take horseback riding lessons. Instead, my mother signed me up for ballet. The barre exercises were boring. We never once got to twirl like real ballerinas did, and at recital time we just ran flat-footed and thumping across a stage. But the part of ballet I hated most…
