Jean and Iryna are Dancing: Beth Kephart Poem

And the music is.
And the music is
how Iryna hears it,
how she won’t let it down to the floor
on the power
of its own acquiesce.
How she says
the battering beat is my bones,
it is the affectation of want
over repose,
and by the way,
I will be late, and that will be song.
Take it apart.
Say it again.
The music is
how the one snow thread
of Iryna’s snow dress
snaps,
how it melts,
how it is always Jean’s,
alone.

(I did not take this photograph of this gorgeous and talented couple; it was taken of them at a recent competition in Boston, where they captured the attention of the judges and the fans in major fashion, as they always do. They are on their way. You can see why.)

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This

There are days when I show up at the dance studio for a lesson certain that I'm headed for disaster. My brain is locked, my limbs are ice, I can't distinguish left from right, and honest to goodness, I think to myself, Jean (vested with the responsibility of teaching me, poor thing) is going to kill me. I apologize in advance for the coming catastrophics, and then I beg for mercy. I mean, the guy and his gorgeous wife, Iryna, are on the cusp of huge ballroom dance fame. Can you imagine how much it hurts his head to return, with me, to the basics?

Yesterday Jean took one look at me and said the following words: "Let's not worry about teaching today. Let's just listen to the music and dance." A waltz was on. Jean (the world's greatest mimic) pantomimed a bird. And then my head was arced back and we were dancing. Two false starts, but the third time there it was—the glide and air that I go to dance to find, the float that I'm perpetually seeking.

"What are your goals in dance?" Jean had asked me two weeks before, and I should have said, This. This ageless, timeless, everness. This gift of release from myself.

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Tango

... Then she stood there, hands on hips, waiting. A tango, with its blood-beat fatality. She began to dance. She didn't look at me, but her choices of where to advance and step, acknowledged my presence.

Tangos are made up of scraps of life, which have happened to survive. Scraps, rags, gathered together into the zigzag of the legs, continually obedient to flowing blood, spilt or unspilt.

John Berger, From A to X

One dance book later, several blogged confessions about dance lessons gone awry, and I have not yet said with clarity how elusive dancing is, how bound up with magic. Or how much I love dance but can't withstand dance, want to keep going, want to quit, am desperate to get it right, never do get it right, want to explain it, can't find the words—always competing thoughts in my head that make dance what? A pain? A pleasure? The beauty that is dance is nearly unattainable in all ways, except: Look at Iryna, here. And look what Berger has done with words to capture the raw "blood beat" of tango.

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Jean and Iryna Paulovich

Last night we drove to New Jersey to see our favorite professional ballroom dance couple, Jean and Iryna Paulovich. I've written of them here before. Of Jean, who has taught me to take it slow in salsa, to be late in rumba, to soften the knees in the paso, who says—not often, but enough to keep my hopes alive—"Yes, Beth, this is it." Of Iryna, who sometimes teaches with Jean, who can walk you all around a song and explain, "Now you are on a corner waiting. Now you notice the guy. Now you walk toward him, lazy, not that interested. Now you agree to dance with him. You sigh."

They held a party last night—for their students, for themselves. They extended roses; they danced. But more than anything they exemplified what a marriage can be—so full of passion for an art; so full of respect, one for the other; so happy for the chance to create, to yield a good something together.

We watch ballroom all the time on TV—those forced seductions, those assembled two-minute passion tales. What a grand thing it is, then, to see two people who deeply love each other, dancing through and for that love. To see dance the way dance is meant to be.

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