On dance, growing up, and sisterly love.
By Anna Patchefsky
Illustration by Etta Lund
On a Tuesday at Lincoln Center, attendees siphon through metal detectors and shuffle to their velvet seats. Split to the left and right, the audience orients toward their places in a geometric dance. Tonight is different from usual nights, because I am finally sitting in the first ring. I am among the older patrons with gray hair and too colorful glasses who, like me, have the freedom on a Tuesday night to attend the New York City Ballet. From here I can see everything. I can see the dancers’ faces, the way their tights cling to their calf muscles, and the incorrect hand placement of an awry partnered pirouette.
My date, my seventeen-year-old sister, got a free ticket for herself and snuck an extra one for me. She’s a student at the School of American Ballet and lives in Lincoln Center, across the street from the David H. Koch Theater. I was invariably late to our meal, and over fried halloumi and Jerusalem bagels, our conversation was more formal than it ever has been. We ran across Broadway, past the fountain and the Moby-Dick opera poster, to sit down and see the All Stravinsky Program of George Balanchine’s Danses Concertantes and Stravinsky Violin Concerto and Jerome Robbins’ The Cage and Concertino.
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I was born able to do a split. But my sister spent all of quarantine becoming more flexible than I ever was and will ever be. These days, I can feel my hip flexors tightening with each developpé and my back contracting with every combre. My family used to laugh about how large my sister's feet were contorted in awkward plies and arabesques, characteristic of a sister who only danced because her sister did it first. My aunt recently asked if my mom and I remembered how when she was young, we called her “Lila the graceful.”
My sister and I both grew up dancing at the Philadelphia Dance Academy: a three-roomed studio, around the corner from our home in Old City. We had both spent summers away at intensives, were both cast as the lead role Clara in the Nutcracker, and neglected the usual school activities of sports to, well, dance. I still dance at college, taking class and performing each semester with Columbia Repertory Ballet and Columbia Ballet Collaborative.
In my home there is a trap door; it leads to a basement we've never been in with things we have never seen or have otherwise forgotten. There’s photos of us and kids, and bins of childhood clothes. Under my staircase there was a red bin of costumes—Belle, Cinderella, and the white dress I wore to my aunt’s college graduation. We would throw on the costumes and I would choreograph a dance, an excuse to get out of sitting down at the table. Lila and I would hold hands and spin, intertwined in an amateurish performance.
Lila and I have different thoughts on what it means to come from a small dance studio. In other words, she’s always been more competitive than I have. When Lila got into SAB she realized something I never did: “I can do this.”
So inevitably, we were at the ballet, watching facsimile of us, but perhaps more so of her. As the company extended into flirty arabesques and punctuated tendus, she and I waited for something exciting. Only in the last group section of Concertino do the dancers coalesce in a similar movement pattern. In unions their heads bow into their arms as they intertwine across the stage. Ballets often end like this, with something that is finally satisfying, and usually just so simple. Sometimes what is beautiful is easy. And it looks like something Lila and I could have done together.