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“All right,” says Miss Diane, striding over to our very old and battered stereo. We line up along the barres, two to each one. Miss Diane turns on a Grade Five CD. “Feet parallel. Plié.” We all bend our knees over our toes. It hurts in parallel.
“Stretch,” Miss Diane continues. “Roll to a rise. Girls on pointe, you really need to pull up.” She stops the music and rushes over to a girl on pointe, named Danielle. “You have such long, slender legs that you need extra strength. I shouldn’t be able to get my hand through here.” Miss Diane sticks her manicured hand between Danielle’s legs, just above the knee. Danielle suddenly contracts her legs, squeezing Miss Diane’s hand. I can see her thigh muscles straining under her pink tights.
“Ahhh!” Miss Diane exclaims. “That’s what I mean.” She extracts her hand. In our class, such touching is not at all unusual. Miss Diane has been known to spank a girl to get her to squeeze her buttocks together. Not hard enough to actually hurt that much, but enough to make the rest of the girls afraid enough to tighten up.
The music starts again. We continue through the steps as Miss Diane calls them out: from parallel to first, heels together, toes turned out. Then to second, heels a shoulder’s width apart, toes turned out. We skip third and move to fourth position, one foot in front of our bodies, the other in the back, always turned out. I’m worst at fourth position rises; it’s so hard to get one’s balance.
Then we move to fifth position. One heel is in front of the opposite toe joint, essentially crossing one foot in front of the other. Miss Diane tells us to spring to a relevé, which is a rise with a slight jump to get there. She turns off the music and walks along the barres, correcting each of our fifths. “Emily,” she tells a short-ish girl in flat shoes, “you need to build up your core muscles.” She slaps Emily lightly on the stomach. Emily giggles wildly and falls off her toes. “Otherwise, how will we ever get you on pointe shoes?” Miss Diane continues along the barre, saying, “A relevé in fifth is a dancer’s safety net. Whenever you see a dancer go up it fifth, you know she’s about to do something fancy on one leg. This gives a dancer her balance. From a relevé, you can go anywhere.” She grabs a girl’s leg—Sophie—out behind her in an arabesque. “You can go into an arabesque, a pirouette,” —she draws Danielle’s leg up to her knee so her foot cups the kneecap, and Danielle spins around, doing a single pirouette. —“almost anything.”
Miss Diane reaches me. “You need to get your feet closer together. I can fit my hand in between your feet.” She puts her hand between my feet. Once her hand is safely removed, I draw my feet together, as tightly as I possibly can. “That’s better,” Miss Diane says. “See how long you can stay like that.” I stand while Miss Diane finishes her rounds. I spring lightly down once she restarts the music.
The rest of the lesson is hard. We learn a new step, and practice old ones. By the time four-thirty comes along, I’m sweating and dying for a drink. I’m not the only one.
As a last thing, we do changments (shon-shuu-mongs). Those are where you start in fifth, jump in the air, switch your feet so the foot opposite the one started with is in front, and land. They’re very easy to start with, until you have to do sixteen more, and more and more. I’m panting heavily after sixty-four changments.
“All right,” Miss Diane says, clapping as she always does. “Thank you, ladies.” We curtsy, and so does Miss Diane. We race out of the room, all of us wanting to be the first at the drinking fountain. I toss on my clothes and go outside, where my mom is waiting. Now I just have to get revved up for tomorrow’s lesson.