Before Anything Else
by Claire Hastings

Before anything else I learned to count to eight.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. one set of plié's at the bar in first position. eight sautés. eight skips in a circle, four claps, rest four-two sets of eight. a room filled with pink leotarded girls, all of us pointing our toes, lifting our heads, stretching our knees, and counting to eight.

The goal, between the ages of six and eleven, beyond mastering the basic steps of ballet, was to master the art of dancing 'on the music'. Nobody ever questioned the wisdom-would it not be better to strive to dance with the music, instead of bashing it to death under our still underdeveloped feet?-so, on the music we were. Step by step, beat by beat.

One of the older ballet mistress' had a cane, which she used to tap out the rhythm of the music on the floor. The movement would be slight at first, a mere absent affirmation of the tempo of the pianist. As we slid further and further off the music, Madame's tapping on the floor would become more pronounced. Hammering the beat of the music into the floor she would simultaneously count out loud wondering with increasing frequency if we were all afflicted with pre-mature deafness.

Beats were slippery things. A simple exercise could move from comprehensible to impossible if a particularly sneaky pianist decided to 'up the tempo' or in a flight of fancy, play in three/four time. (Three/four or waltz time, uses a count of six for each phrase, thus completely confusing our octo-indoctrinated brains).

In time we learned to harness beats and create our own dances out of them, we were tested on our "musicality" by being asked to perform the same choreography to completely different music. We pushed the boundaries by experimenting with syncopation, half beats, triple time. Like the rebellious teen-agers we were, my posse of bunheads and I took jazz lessons, modern dance, flamenco and belly dancing in an effort to escape the rigidity of classical ballet. Disappointingly, everything was counted in eight beat phrases.

Even though we sought to escape the eights, they were and are essential structures. Without the count of eight (or six for the waltzers) beats were just random musical components-seemingly arbitrary accents that underpinned any melody. But each beat is paired with a movement, each movement leads to the next, and suddenly: dancing. No matter how badly I screwed up a particular set of steps, I knew that would be able to find the beginning beat of a new eight and resume my attempts at grace. The eights are safety nets.

I stopped dancing seriously about five years ago. It's taken me a while to stop counting the radio music in eights.