Red Gumboots
The country I live in keeps ambushing me with things it invented. This week it was ballet. I had always assumed ballet was French, the same way you assume croissants are, but it was born here, in the courts of Renaissance Italy, in the fourteen- and fifteen-hundreds. It started as balletti, lavish dances at noble weddings and celebrations, where the guests were the performers and the point was to show off. France gets the credit for making it an art, and the French will tell you so. But it was an Italian who carried it there. Catherine de’ Medici, a Florentine noblewoman who became queen of France, brought her court dances with her, and in 1581 she paid for the Ballet Comique de la Reine, often called the first true ballet, because for the first time the dancing, the music and the story were stitched into a single thing. The Italians invented it, and the French put it in a tutu. I learned all of this from a woman who teaches ballet at my gym and wears gumboots in the summer.
Let me back up. This summer my belly started making itself known to strangers. I decided it needed reminding who was in charge. That meant a little pain for my wallet and a lot for my muscles and joints. So I walked out of the house to look for a gym, and I will be honest about my strategy. I was hoping not to find one. If there was no gym nearby, I could tell myself I had tried, go home, and eat less, which I was sure would work this time. Three streets down, I was ambushed again, this time by a huge sign full of models with the bodies I would pay billions for, smiling and inviting me in. Open from six in the morning to ten at night. There went my excuse about time.
The gym took up a basement and a first floor. Through the window I could see people running, lifting, stretching, and filming themselves running, lifting and stretching. Something inside me began a persuasive speech about how I did not have to suffer like last time. And while I was standing there losing the argument to myself, a woman in green gumboots came out, smiled, waved, said ciao, and walked off. That was all. I do not know why, but it was enough. I went in. That was three months ago. Today I am warming up before the weights start hurting me, and standing across the room, keeping an eye on me, is Giulia, the woman in the green gumboots. Today they are red. She gives me a thumbs up. She is my gym buddy now. She is a fitness instructor here, serious about it, never without a little booklet of workout plans for her clients. But I have learned that her real love, the thing that lights her up, is teaching ballet.
Giulia has a gift for motivating people, and all her clients adore her. She is always moving, always smiling, always looking around for someone to help. But around six in the evening something else happens. More than thirty children pour in for her ballet classes, and Giulia changes. She murmurs to them in rapid Italian, they jump around her feet and shout things at her I cannot follow. She drinks it all in. I have started to suspect that hour is her idea of heaven. Eventually I could not stand not knowing, so one evening I asked her how she had become who she is, and where the ballet came from.
Get Jochwachi’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It began when she was five, she said. Someone took her to a local ballet production, and it was magic. She went home and danced around the house, putting on shows for her parents and her grandfather, and pestered her mother for lessons until she got them. Her first real teachers were a mother and daughter who taught in their home. She danced with them for years, then auditioned on a whim for a performing company she was certain would never take her. They took her. She danced there into her teens. But she knew she would never be a professional. This was before the internet, she reminded me, smiling as if she missed it, and nobody ever told her there were paths into the profession. Her parents encouraged her, but where do you go with a dance degree? So ballet became something she did on and off as an adult, whenever she could find a class.
Then, five years ago, she had a stroke. It paralysed her right side and left her with problems in her thinking. The worst of it, she said, was the damage to the parts of the brain that plan and coordinate movement, the very things a dancer is built on. Not long after, her mother fell seriously ill, and Giulia spent two years at home as her only carer, until her mother died. The year after that, she said, was for grieving and sorting out everything that a death leaves behind. And the year after that was for finding out what her body and her brain could still do if she pushed them hard. On the fifth anniversary of her stroke, she went back to ballet, and set herself a goal. She would teach it to the next generation.
She is, in her words, smashing it. She can rise onto the ball of her right foot again, over and over, without fearing that her ankle will give way, which at her age is no small thing. Her pirouettes came back last autumn. She can do small jumps at half speed. Next on the list is the grand plié, the deep, slow bend that looks easy until you try it. She can get down, she told me, laughing. Getting back up is still under negotiation. This year she is dancing in her first Nutcracker, at fifty-seven, and taking a class alongside eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Dance is part of my soul, she said. I need it the way I need to breathe. The magic I felt when I was five is back. And your students can feel it, Jeremiah. Passion is contagious. Maybe that is why my classes get bigger every week.
I asked what she focuses on now that life is getting better. Her answer surprised me, because it was about the opposite of trying hard. By the time a performance comes, she said, the steps should be automatic, for her and for her students. If you think about the technique too much in the moment, you are more likely to mess it up than if you let the body handle it. The thinking happens in rehearsal. That is when she plans what to do if a prop breaks or a child forgets a step, because both have happened. On stage, she wants her students thinking about what they are trying to say, feeling it all the way through their bodies, aware of everything around them. If they can learn that, she said, I have won.
And there was one thing she was fierce about. She does not like competitions for young girls. She has nothing against competitions themselves, she said. What troubles her is the culture that grows around children who show talent early, the ones being raised to chase trophies rather than to discover movement or understand the art. She sees the result years later, she said, in adults who come to her classes nervous and wary, because what they lived through as children is what they think ballet is. They are always relieved to discover it is not. So in her classes, the girls are there to enjoy it. What she wants to give them is something bigger than ballet. Life gets easier when you stop running from discomfort, she told me. Accepting pain makes you stronger than avoiding it ever will. But not pain that comes from measuring yourself against other girls. Only the kind that comes from beating your own demons.
I think about that in the gym now, usually around the third set of squats, when my own demon, the belly, is winning. Here was a woman who had lost the use of half her body and fought her way back to a pirouette, and here am I, negotiating with a sandwich. Her lesson fit me better than I would have liked. The only person I am competing with in that gym is the man who almost walked home.
I still have not asked her about the gumboots. Green one day, red the next, all summer long, in a room full of trainers, on the feet of a woman who teaches the art Italy gave the world. Maybe it is a joke she is playing on all of us. Maybe it is practical in a way I have not figured out. But I have my own theory. They are the shoes of someone who has already been through the worst weather a life can throw at you, and has decided to dress for it anyway, cheerfully, in bright colours. One of these days I will ask. For now, I will just keep turning up, because a woman in gumboots once said ciao to me on a pavement, and that, it turns out, was enough.
