Читать книгу Body of a Dancer - Renee D'Aoust - Страница 12

Don’t tell anyone about the aches and pains. The body of a dancer is a perfect instrument. It is honed. Even when it shows the effort with modern dance, done barefoot, as opposed to defying gravity in ballet, done in pointe shoes, the body is still a tool, an instrument, an expression of the soul. And if the soul isn’t interesting... forget it.

The body, Martha Graham says, never lies.

My body lied all the time. The tiny spot on the front right of my hip, on the top of my iliac crest, was on fire by the end of my dancing life. I couldn’t let anyone touch it; the pain sent my face grimacing, involuntarily. I didn’t tell anyone I used to spend days in bed or on the floor, trying to get my lower back to release various spasms. In rehearsal, I often wore a flexible neoprene back brace. There was Velcro on one side, and I wrapped it tightly around my lower back. The neoprene held my sacrum together. I covered it with a floppy sweatshirt.