By happy accident, I stumbled across a wonderful blog entry by Brendan McCarthy on the ritual of ballet class (Thoughts during a ballet class). This expresses eloquently precisely why I have found so much fulfilment from playing for class over the last 20 years. How refreshing to discover that someone so erudite is capable of saying “”I am pleased to surrender to my teachers (of whom more in later blogs), to the counts, to the music, to the shared sense of good work being done.”
If there was a secret to the wonderful atmosphere in the classes of John O’Brien, I believe it is because of his attitude which was ‘this thing [i.e. dance & music] is bigger than all of us’ – in other words, class is not a place for everyone to jostle for position or importance, but somewhere to join in the celebration of something bigger and greater. Those who claim that ballet classes are all ‘command style’ teaching and therefore automatically bad and un-PC, fail to understand the ritual nature of class, and that the great teachers surrender to the music and to the expectations of the art form as much as their students in a process which can be selfless and democratic. By contrast, those who congratulate themselves on being good ‘teachers’ in the conventional sense of the word, leave out one vital part of being a good ballet teacher, which is humbly to be part of the class themselves.