Ellis Elliott: Fearless

FEARLESS

She comes, alongside the others in my adult ballet class, to claim her place at the barre. Our “barre” is a padded folding chair on the linoleum floor of the church’s fellowship hall.

She comes with a sturdy brace covering most of one leg, and a post-stroke vocabulary of 3 words, “I fear fear”. Words she repeats in answer to any question, and spoken as her only means of verbal communication. She speaks these words conversationally, with the lilt and urgency one gives in a usual exchange. Sometimes rapid-fire, sometimes deliberate and slow. All with meaning.

She comes bringing an old black and white photo, when she was 25, wearing a shimmering skirt, posed with one leg higher than her shoulder. The next week she brings another photo, this one in color, of her and her former dance student, 1984 Miss America, Vanessa Williams. The ghost of loss hovers in the background of each.

She comes to the barre and into each movement as if lit from within. Her arms reach wide and lift high, as the classical music reaches it’s crescendo. She stretches her unbraced leg into a perfectly turned-out and pointed stretch.

Balanchine said, “Hear the Dance, See the Music”. The dancer fuses the music to movement, becoming one. Her face is relaxed, her lips upturned as she lets the music waterfall into her body, as it once did. Before she got older. Before the stroke.

She comes every Thursday.

—This Wednesday's Series is Inspired by our Bewilderness Freewriting Group Poetry Prompt: Blessing by John O’Donahue.

”And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.”

Ellis Elliott