Nearing the finish line of a year devoted to the making of 9, I’m finding more time to reflect on the tireless and miraculous journey I embarked on 12 months ago. Born from not just a script, but memories and experiences that shaped my childhood, the story of 9 drew me into a year long inquiry into the cultural conditioning of the feminine and how 9’s young heroine confronts these conditions and then integrates them into the larger context of wholeness.
Ballet is 9‘s vehicle to tell the story of how perfectionism and order can distort and even maim the creative expression when out of balance. In the 15th century, ballet was born in the European courts as part of the cultural rebirth that was the Renaissance. This rebirth included a significant shift in human perception. Philosophy, science and medicine were expressing a new paradigm of Reason. The feminine was regarded with suspicion as an inferior and unruly force, like nature itself, and further reduced to an unimportant status with masculine values of reason and control seen as superior. Death, nature, woman, the body and sexuality were often clumped together as things to be controlled and overcome. It follows that around the same time the Church had a heightened emphasis on the virginal feminine as the ideal woman which further encouraged the split between spirit and flesh. Early forms of ballet became an expression of this split, further emphasizing virginal perfection over carnal earthiness. Devotion to Mary as universal mother continued to spread and some believe that many of these early forms of ballet were just that - devotional dances to the Virgin.
Transcendence. Idealism. Purity. Reason. Order. Many young maidens today wouldn’t use these words to describe their own adolescent pursuits. But when taken to extremes, they can feed the perfectionism pervasive in our modern culture, inhibiting a natural maturation into an embodied feminine wholeness. Our preoccupation with order has sequestered chaos and mystery to the darker corners of our psyche.
And for hundreds of years, with the help the church as well as Disney, we often personify this “other half” - death, chaos, darkness, mystery and destruction - as the archetypal witch. The Black Madonna. In 9, ballerina meets witch. Maiden meets Crone.
In many ways, the unexpected death of my father when I was 18 was my own introduction to the witch. Suddenly my shiny fortress of perfection built from pointe shoes and leotards felt unsteady and false. However, this violent and harsh encounter with the unknown only reinforced my need to make sense of the world, so I traded slippers for science. Pliés for reason. Instead of welcoming the wisdom of the Crone into my home, I locked her out.
My father’s death may have formed a crack in my foundation but it would take another decade for the house to fall. I found a new passion in pursuing perfect health and chasing degree programs in medicine, all the while my own body crumbling under the stress of avoiding the inevitable - the emotions that didn’t have answers, the mess I felt inside that didn’t respond to pills or herbs. As Jungian analyst Marion Woodman notes in her book Addiction to Perfection, “Perfection is static, unlike life which is constantly changing and moving. Therefore, perfection is more closely related to death than it is to life, and the pursuit of perfection can be seen as the unconscious pursuit of death.” So on the one hand, in the pursuit of my dream of fulfillment, I did everything in my will to avoid the pain of the unknown but on the other hand, within that very darkness lived the vitality and passion that I needed to bring my dreams to fruition.
When we avoid the darkness we are also cutting ourselves off from a limitless reservoir of intuition, insight and energy that are burning at its core. Many of us live entire lives without really immersing ourselves in this heat or use addiction to skirt around its cathartic edges. When 9’s protagonist comes face to face with her own transformation, her street that was once full of magic, serendipity, aliveness and booming orchestral notes is nothing more than an unresponsive, empty city block. She is small and insignificant, no longer in control, and the street answers back with silence. Baba Yaga, 9’s archetypal Crone, appears in our heroine’s journey to challenge her to step into the fire. To go beyond an immature, dualistic stage of development and into a world that embraces opposites.
She meets the witch and opens the door.
We are both perfection and chaos. Light and darkness. Our journey is full of understanding and meaninglessness. We are made of magic and wonder and we are also water and carbon. Our entire human existence is this duality. To dance is to embody this dichotomous tension, constantly listening and responding to the opposing forces that live in and around us. As Nietzsche once said, “The tree that would grow to heaven MUST send its roots to hell.” The trees have been doing it for millions of years. So why are we so afraid?
So with arms stretched to the cosmos and feet grounded into the earth, the maiden and the crone fall into step. The silent sky is their orchestra. And we, the fleshy, exquisitely graceful and messy nerve endings of consciousness, become the dance, dancing itself.
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