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Patricia Vaccarino

Websites: PR for People  Xanthus Communications  

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Steps us here at last. After writing six books, too many articles, scripts, blurbs, short stories and so many childish poems, I feel that STEPS is my finest work. If it turned out to be my last work, then I will not have lived a life in vain. I will have left something behind: a rich legacy that integrates my work, my business, my family, my passion, and how much dance has taught me to weave all those seemingly fragile connections together to create a strongly textured tale.

Steps is about my not-so-secret life as an adult dancer October 8 2011
Steps is about my not-so-secret life as an adult dancer and how I move every day of my life. I train consistently in ballet. Every so often, I step out of ballet and step into another form of dance: fusion, zumba, hip-hop and modern. Sometimes, I call other forms of dance the anti-ballet because of the rambling freedom, gyrations, and the chaos. Every time I walk through the subway shuttle underpass in Grand Central Station I see homies doing hip-hop, and I want to step out and dance with them. I see any form of dance as a celebration of life. Even when I’m not in the studio, I am dancing in my head.

Coming soon–Steps, the book Sept 2011
Steps are the building blocks of dance, but the name Steps was inspired from a childhood home, an old brown colored tenement in Yonkers, New York. Steps was also inspired by the famous dance school in New York City Steps on Broadway. Every time I traveled to New York on business, I took classes at Steps. New York is home for me and certainly home for the dance world. In the past five years, during my journey as an adult dancer, I have come to learn more about the dance world than I have ever wanted to know. I was simply a woman who one day heard a voice commanding me to dance. Ever since then, I have been training to dance. Once I started to dance, I did not want to stop. And why should I ever want to stop? When you dance, you are young at heart, your body is nimble and quick and you feel that you will live forever. In some ways, you will live forever.

Sunday, July 24 2011 Falling from the sky
Saturday morning I took a ballet class at PNB and found that although my grand jetes continue to elude me, my developé & grand battements from releve position feel solid, and I can hold and sustain indefinitely. When I got into the car to head home, the song “Free Falling” was playing on the radio, which was a good sign and lended a touch of synchronicity to the day. Within hours I was going to board a small plane and jump.

I have never aspired to be a skydiver any more than I have aspired to become a dancer. My daughters invited me to jump with them. How could I say no? What better way to celebrate my youngest child’s 18th birthday and my oldest daughter’s first wedding anniversary than by jumping from a plane? I don’t recall being afraid. It was another clear blue day similar to the one I had five years ago when I had an epiphany, a small still voice, telling me to dance.

There was no voice telling me to jump; it was purely of my own volition, and I didn’t jump per se. I simply went through the plane door and out into the cold air. I felt engulfed by pure blue sky and puffs of small clouds. At 12,000 feet I didn’t really have a sense of altitude. I just knew I was going down. I didn’t feel like I was falling too fast. It was more of a rapid float downward. I could hear a rush of wind and I could see the ground below. I could see the Olympic and Cascade Mountain ranges surrounding me, lots of land, roads and freeways off in the distance. I also saw my daughters floating in the air, parachuting down slowly in a lazy drift. I called to Sarah in the air to wish her a “Happy Birthday,” but I don’t think she heard me. The sky is a grand place to be and I don’t think I will ever look at it the same way again. If you can’t yet quite master a grand jete, there are other ways to fly.

Thursday, July 21 The four corners of the room
I like trying different studios and teachers because I always learn something new in technique. Sometimes I am fortunate enough to land in a class that magically emphasizes the exact area I need to work on. Today I took an open class at PNB with Elaine Bauer who I see occasionally leading in the young adult students to take her Saturday class. During her 20 year career as a performer, she toured around the world with dance legend Rudolph Nureyev. Her style is one of soft spoken precision and her demeanor is crisp, but elegant. She had us do drills at the barre to help us to improve our positioning. Using our arms, legs and heads we rotate and turn to face the four corners of the room. She commented afterward that ballet was more than training the body but it was training the mind. Of all the instructors I have ever had, she is the only one to define the real reason why I am here. I am doing much more than practicing ballet, I am training my mind to explore excellence.

The joy of dance, excuse me? July 16 2011
Today, I returned to Pacific Northwest Ballet where the two Saturday classes, the Beginning/Intermediate and the Intermediate/Advanced were shoved together in one of the smaller studios. I am not sure what was going on in all the other larger studios, but there seemed to be auditions taking place. The studio was hot, airless and felt like New York in the summer, but the mix and the vibe was neither urban nor upbeat. The air was thick with tension that had nothing to do heat and humidity and little to do with the joy of dance.

Check out the line-up: there were serious hobbyists like me who train consistently and take multiple classes every week. Then there were professional dancers, some from the corps, a couple of principal dancers *stars*. Some of the professional dancers seemed to be coming back from injury. There were people from the beginning class who barely train once a week if at all and were clearly not prepared to be in a class with advanced dancers. Even the barre felt advanced and it challenged me. I looked around the room and could see beginning people who were looking dazed, lost and losing their footwork.

Sometimes genuine friendships emerge from being part of a community of dancers, but through the years though, I have also had my share of run-ins with hobbyist dancers who are intent on creating twisted drama on the dance floor. Carole is fifty-something, massively overweight, huffs and puffs during every bad turn she makes, and uses the word groovy a lot. Every time she sees me she takes it upon herself to correct my technique and it is not borne of good will or generosity, but seems to come from somewhere deep in her dark and twisted mind.

As soon as I saw Carole coming toward me, my heart sank. Everywhere in the room I went, she followed me and when I saw her coming, I went into the opposite direction. I had managed to avoid her until the moment came when I could not escape. I had just gone across the floor and the line of dancers was jammed tight, body on top of body pressed up against the back wall. Carole came up to me and talked into my face. She was so close I can feel her hot, sour breath and see the beads of sweat dripping off her brow. She starts telling me how beautiful and open my chest is, but how I am so uptight in my core. She went on a tirade about being uptight, and how it is unpleasant and offensive it is to watch, until I could no longer stand listening to her. I told her in my most gentle sotte voce voice to fuck off.

A lot of people didn’t make it through the class that was more like boot camp for the Navy Seals than it was ballet. The beginners and most of the hobbyists didn’t stay or try to do the floor work. This class was a futile exercise in dance. There was so little joy, and that made me sad somehow. Then I thought would I have rather to not have taken any class than to have taken this class? And I knew that any dance class is better than no class. What did I learn? I can focus on what I am setting out to accomplish, no matter how many Caroles want to rip my bodice to shreds. If you think the business world can be ruthless, try ballet.

Why Steps? July 10 2011
Why did I begin to dance? Every day, I ask myself this question. At first, I was drawn to dance as a purely accidental discovery. I had been drawn to dance as child, but it was something I never had a chance to do. I think dancing late in life is my destiny. I think I learn some things on the floor that I cannot seem to learn anywhere else. I learn to be disciplined on days when it does not feel good. I learn to stretch and extend myself when I all I really want to do is to shrink and contract the way people do when it is much easier to settle for less. Equipped with their old bones and bitter smiles, most people settle in their ways like leafless trees that have lost their finest branches. I will never be one of them. Nor should you. –PV from my new book Steps

Soaring beyond where I ever thought I could go June 19 2011
I get invitations—all the time—from well meaning professional “life coaches” who are offering me transformation, inner peace, and accelerated growth in a weekend getaway at a retreat center. Achieving transformation, inner peace and growth in a weekend is remarkably ambitious, and feels like a scam to me, sort of a fat farm for people who are addicted to junk food. The funny thing about these life coaches is they do not know how to integrate their physicality with their spiritual wisdom. Some of them practice a little bit of yoga and can hold a cobra or plank position, but I have yet to meet one who can dance.

Try taking six hours of ballet training every week for five years then we can talk about growth. Try dancing, then we can talk about joy. Ballet class is the only place where I am so totally focused on myself that I am transcended and transported out of myself. The discipline of ballet has lifted me to a space in time that defies gravity and is a true encounter of coming to terms with my own destiny. In ballet, I have embraced my strengths and I have grieved over my weaknesses, and especially over those losses in life that we must all endure. During my darkest hours when everything is falling down and crumbling all around me, I can stand tall and reach for the sky. Though every day of my life, I seek the articulation of balance, which us much more than pulling up to posse and standing on one leg in releve.

This week, in class, I felt like I was doing more than training in ballet. I feel like I am starting to dance. I am seeing little signs that I may be learning to develop epaulment, which is much more than the way I hold my head or my shoulder. I am starting to feel a natural grace that is more powerful than anything I have ever known. It has taken over five years to get here, to this space and time, to a place where I am who I should be and confident with knowing my own destiny. When you think about it, a ballerina has a lot in common with a Benedictine monk. Both keep going around the same circle, a rond de jambe, to get to a higher place. Soaring–It took much more time, discipline, commitment, sheer will, focus, and outright defiance than one can learn in a weekend retreat with a spiritual guide who will never learn to dance.

Ballet training invites physical danger June 12 2011
Ballet training invites physical danger. There is a risk associated with doing any intense physical activity. During my days as an adult dancer, I have seen many falls and injuries. During my Saturday classes at PNB, I noted one woman who was quite large, pushing about 180 pounds. She was a heavy dancer and I don’t mean solely her weight. Her movements were grand and when she came down from a jump, you could hear her smack the floor. I also noticed this woman because despite her weight, she moved so beautifully on the floor. She had a lyrical quality that blended seamlessly with the music and her movement. She had an archival memory for putting together the steps in a sequence that I did not have. Then one Saturday, we were doing glissades into a pas de chat and she came down hard, so hard there was the sound of a staccato pop like a firecracker. She came to a stop. She could not step on her foot. She tried, putting her foot down gingerly, repeatedly, but her foot was injured and could not take the weight. Holding her injured leg in posse like a pelican, she hobbled on one leg out of the studio. It happened three years ago. I never saw her again.

Otto Compane Concerto in A minor for Violin by Bach May 14 2011
The eight bells have let go. Right now I am so blown away by the experience of our performance last night that I can only speak in images. We are in the green room warming up. Sarah is stretching her leg in full extension. Behind her five hip hop dancers are standing backward facing away toward an outside window, warming up behind her. They are doing these cool moves and marking. In the foreground, Sarah is holding her extension. She is unaware of them and they are unaware of her. Everyone is warming up in their own space and oblivious to what other dancers are doing. The full extension of Sarah’s leg crosses over and courses the air and intersects across the image of the hip-hopping backs. No one has ever left their space. Sarah is unaware of how incredible it is to see this fully extended balletic leg with the hip hop dancers behind her in the background moving flawlessly like dancing wallpaper.

Then we are in the wings waiting to take the stage. Our performance whisks by in a blur faster than the speed of light. We walk off stage and back into the green room. Everyone is a tad self critical. We talk about what we messed up. One little tweak here. One misstep there. A forgotten move and a shaky turn. I didn’t do a high enough releve in arabesque, but I hit my marks. I think my timing was fast, but I love the way my adrenalin kicked in and took me up a level I did not know I had inside of myself until now. There is an exuberance that keeps going along with a feeling of letting go. For the rest of my life, I am going to keep dancing, and I will always remember dancing with my daughter at the Broadway Performance Hall, Saturday night May 14th. Thank you Annie deVuono for choreographing a memory that will stand the test of time.