Host - Blaze Ferrer
Blaze Ferrer: [00:00:01] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Blaze Ferrer. And with a five, six, seven, eight--
[pre-show music]
Yes. On this episode, we'll take a page from the great dancers throughout history. We'll put on our dance shoes, we'll find our pelvis and we'll move through the joy and the self-expression that anybody at any age can get from dance.
First up is Katie Rivard, with a story she told at a New York City StorySLAM. here's Katie, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Katie: [00:00:35] So, a few years ago, I decided to move on my own from Boston to Tucson, Arizona in July. And the trip was ominous. My car broke down twice. I got there. It was 120 degrees. It was brown. Everything looked like Mars to me, because I'm from Michigan. And so, I spent the first two weeks on my own just watching Amy Schumer Trainwreck over and over in theaters and crying to myself. But I moved out there for a teaching job, and I felt pretty confident in my teaching abilities. I'd been teaching for a while, and so I thought, I've got this.
But then, the school year started and I realized that the school I had signed up to teach at was similarly a trainwreck. I switch into type A teacher mode. I'm doing anything I can to get control back into my life, like cutting up tennis balls and putting them on the bottom of chairs, so there's no extra noise with the already excessive noise that's going on in my classroom. But I'm struggling. There's one student in particular, I'm going to call her Maria for the sake of anonymity. We're just not seeing eye to eye. She's taking those tennis balls. I'm carefully cutting up and throwing them at people and at me. And so, I do what anyone does when you're struggling in your job.
I decide to fulfill my childhood dream to become a dancer. [audience laughter] There's a local dance studio and they have auditions for an adult dance company. So, I think, this is great. This is what I'm going to do with my time here. And so, I go to the audition and I'm wearing this large gray AmeriCorps T shirt and soccer shorts from the last time I worked out when I was in high school. [audience laughter] I'm remembering, how do I stretch. There are people doing stretches I've never seen before, because University of Arizona is down the road, and it's actually like a really good dance school. The students go there to cross train.
And so, this song comes up for the audition and it's called Bury Me. The beat drops and it's going really quickly. And I'm like, “Okay, Katie, you've got this. Stand in the back, blend in, you're wearing gray. It's going to be fine.” [audience laughter] And then, I realized that they're calling up people in small groups, like groups of four. And so, they call me up and I bumble through and at the end I'm like, “I just want to book it out of here.” When Todd, the studio owner comes up to me, and he's larger in stature and used to be a prominent dancer in LA, and he was like, “Katie, that was amazing. We'll see you Wednesday.” I was like, “Okay, this is how I'm going to spend my time.” [audience laughter]
And so, the worse things got with school, the more I turned to dance. My co-teacher, who was teaching eighth grade, she had previously taught pre-school, she quit after two weeks. And I took Ballet one. And then, the principal who hired me and brought me to the school was also fired. And then I took Jazz one. [audience laughter] Jazz one was with Todd. I still remember the first class, there's a turn sequence I don't know how to do. And so, I'm just holding my arms up and spinning and feeling really free. And he's like, “Beautiful, Katie, you got this.” [audience laughter] And so, I become like a Todd disciple. I'm like, “Anything you do, I'm there.”
And so, after a particularly bad day at school, it was Día de los Muertos, which is celebrated pretty widely in Tucson. We had an altar at our school, where kids could write up names of loved ones that they had lost. And so, this girl, Maria, who I was struggling with, chose to write my name in sharpie all over. [audience laughter] And so, after crying in the teacher's lounge, like you do when that happens, I went to dance. Todd had a class. And so, this particular class we were dancing to a song from the Waitress. And so, we hadn't heard the music yet. He positions us around the studio and he says, “Stand in the mirror. Look only at yourself, and I want you to start as the music comes on, just pretending you're getting ready for work and doing your ordinary life things.”
So, I'm pretending to put on my cardigan and put my hair into a bun, because lice is an occupational hazard as a teacher. The music comes on, and the lyrics are saying, Most days I don't recognize me. Because the shoes and this apron and the place and its patrons have taken more than I gave them. I'm hearing looking at myself and I'm realizing that in becoming this teacher that I had been for many years, at that point, I had lost track of Katie. I had become fully Miss Rivard and I didn't know who Katie was anymore and I wanted her back. And so, I started to cry. I'm crying as I'm going through this entire piece.
And so, Todd always sits us down in front of the mirror afterwards and talks to us. And then, he is going down the line and he stops at me and he's like, “Katie, that was fucking amazing.” [audience laughter] I'm just like, “Yes. Yes.” I decided I wanted to make a change. So, I went back to school and I changed my discipline system. I decided to be way less buttoned up and just laugh, enjoy it more, be more myself. And things got a lot better. They got a lot messier, but they got a lot better.
One day, Maria came up to me and I rolled in typical 8th grade fashion, and she's like, “Why don't you hate me? I'm terrible to you and I don't like you.” I was like, “You keep it interesting.” [audience laughter] She laughed and I laughed, and things got a lot better. A lot came to light that was going on in her home life, and I was able to build a trust with her that Miss Rivard teacher self wouldn't have been able to do. But as Katie, we were able to form a connection and we're still in touch to this day. So, while Miss Rivard was a total trainwreck, Katie had a pretty good year.
[cheers and applause]
Blaze Ferrer: [00:06:22] That was Katie Rivard. Katie's a product designer and a soccer enthusiast who enjoys experimenting in the kitchen, dancing and being outside. She currently lives in New York with her husband. We were curious if Katie continued to dance and if the lesson’s she learned stuck with her. Here's what she had to say.
Katie: [00:06:39] I continued taking dance classes for a while and dabbled with a lot of different styles. But I recently moved and there aren't a ton of dance classes available for adults where I am right now. But I do really hope to find a studio in the future. It was just such a fun community to be a part of. That said, I still frequently dance in my living room and I keep working on my turns. Someday I will land a clean triple, someday.
Taking up dance classes as an adult really taught me a lot, primarily, how to be at home in my body, which has helped me just overall to feel more at home with myself. When I first started taking the dance classes, I was worried that my lack of skill or the fact that I had 10 plus years on the people I was dancing with could lead to humiliation. But it was actually quite freeing. It gave me the confidence to try new things despite my fears, which actually led to me putting my name in the hat at The Moth StorySLAM.
Blaze Ferrer: [00:07:36] After the break, we'll have a story that's on point, or rather on point more soon.
As a dancer, certain things can lead you to recall an old phrase or movement, the texture of a sweat pant, a song on a playlist, the smell of a wooden floor. Gestures locked inside our muscles and nervous system can awaken with just a breath of familiarity.
Our next storyteller is very familiar with those memories. Jessica Ribera told this at a Seattle StorySLAM, where theme of the night was “Wonders. Here's Jessica, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Jessica: [00:08:17] When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a ballerina when I grew up. I think a lot of kids want to do that. But I was really serious about it. And luckily for me, even though I'm from a small town in Texas, there was a good set of teachers there who had sent three daughters, these legendary daughters, off to the New York City Ballet.
So, I stayed really serious about it. As time went on, it mostly became that I just wanted to get out of my small town in Texas, and wind up in a city, and preferably New York City, because I had become obsessed with the New York City Ballet because of these daughters. Their portraits were on the studio wall and my teacher would tell us these like-- They were almost like, “You weren't really sure if they were true stories or if he was just trying to Aesop's Fable us somehow, like these and that's why you should never be late for a rehearsal.”
But one of them that he told was about Alexia, who you could tell, like, they were the most proud of. I don't think you're supposed to do that, [audience laughter] but that's what they did. And he said, “Alexia, she wanted to learn so much. She would stay in the back of the rehearsal and she would learn all the parts in the ballet, not just the one that was hers. And she would practice. One day, the ballerina was injured, and the rehearsal director said, ‘Does anyone know this part?” And Alexia was like, “I do.” [audience laughter] And then, it became her part and then she was like this big moment of jump up in her career. So, I always tucked that in my mind. It's like, “That's the dream, right? I want that to happen to me.”
As I was obsessing about New York City and getting out of town, I read every book I could get from the Tri-State library system about New York City Ballet. George Balanchine started New York City Ballet. He's credited with bringing ballet to the United States. I was obsessed with him. I really loved reading about him, just artistically. I found out, it seemed like maybe he was a little bit obsessed with Western Texas culture. He choreographed a few ballets that are set in these saloony town Wild West, just like, man who grew up in Russia.
I thought that was so cool. I felt like it legitimized me that I was this girl from Texas. But if he liked it, then that was still okay and I could still be a dancer. He's died the year I was born. But I went to his school, the School of American Ballet in New York City, and it was fantastic. I learned about this ballet, learned more about it. Called Western Symphony, it's the saloon ballet.
Fast forward. I came here to dance as a student of the Pacific Northwest Ballet. My first year in the program, I got cast to understudy in Western Symphony. And I was thrilled. I stood in the back of the studio doing my best to learn. The policy at the time was that understudies had to come to theater and check in backstage. When the curtain went up and everyone was on stage, then you could go home. Well, I didn't go home, because I was new town, I didn't have a lot of friends, and I was obsessed and so I would just get a ticket and go sit in the audience. I was watching Western Symphony, and I saw a girl go down on stage. She was clearly, badly hurt. Her partner, who was actually her real-life boyfriend too, picked her up and had to run her off the stage. And I was just like, “Oh, man, that sucks.” [audience laughter] It wasn't my position. Like, I had learned a different spot in the ballet.
And within, swear it was like 30 seconds, I feel this tap on my shoulder, and they're like, “Come backstage. We need you right now.” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, it's happening.” [audience laughter] So, I go running with him backstage stage. We're putting my hair up into a bun. No one ever would have thought that a peon like me was actually going to go on. And so, I didn't have-- “You wear black pointe shoes for that ballet.” I had to borrow someone else's pointe shoes, which if you know anything about ballet, that's just crazy. I strap on these black pointe shoes with the black fishnets, this little saloony looking outfit for this classical ballet and neoclassical, but still. [audience laughter]
So, I'm standing in the wings and my friend's scrawling lipstick on me. The director of the ballet, herself, comes to me and she's like, “Jessica, do you feel like you can do this?” I was like, “Totally. Totally, I can totally do this.” [audience laughter] And so, I went on. Later on, three years later, I was badly injured in an accident on stage, and it was career ending and totally a sad end to the long story. But that moment, doing Western Symphony, doing these steps, it was like one of the most wonderful moments of my life. It was Balanchine, it was Texas, it was all my dreams coming true. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Blaze Ferrer: [00:13:40] That was Jessica Ribera. Jessica is in Seattle, happily parenting four kids, writing novels and completing a master's in creative writing and the performing arts from University of California, Riverside. Her ballet memoir, The Almost Dancer, is available now.
We asked Jessica if she ever got back into dancing. Here's what she had to say. “I have danced in smaller companies since then, taught children and been a rehearsal director. The physical injuries required several years of healing. The emotional wounds needed decades. I wrote therapeutically about the process of rediscovering myself as an artist, and eventually, organized it all into a book.
Right now, I'm the overjoyed choreographer for High School Musical, Junior at my kid’s high school, and a writer with many projects on my Google Drive. When I work with students, I tell them that their ambitions are precious and priceless but today is what we're here for. My dancing life gave me grit and courage. Losing it, gave me the opportunity to learn compassion, find new joys, and appreciate the gift of being present.”
That's it for this episode. From all of us here at The Moth, we hope the next week is filled with as much dancing as your heart can handle.
Marc Sollinger: [00:14:46] Blaze Ferrer is an interdisciplinary choreographer and performer, who is also the staff accountant at The Moth. Born and raised in Downtown Manhattan, Blaze has performed and created work at Judson Memorial Church, Pageant, The Collapsible Hole and countless dance and DIY venues across the city. His work has been funded by Pioneers Go East, Immediate Medium, Brooklyn Arts Council, NYFA and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson and me, Marc Sollinger. The rest of The Moth’s leadership team include Sarah Haberman, Christina Norma, Jenifer Hixson, Kate Tellers, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Lee Ann Gullie and Patricia Ureña. The Moth Podcast is presented by Audacy. A special thanks to their executive producers, Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reis-Dennis. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers.
For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.