#7 My Life in Dance 1

My life in dance started with a picture book called Susie and the Red Tutu. It came into my life when I was 5. I recognized Suzie immediately. She was me, I was her and we were going to be together forever.

I took my first dance class when I was 6, at Martha Nishitani’s School of Modern Dance on University Way in Seattle. It was not ballet and there were no tutus. Martha was on a mission to bring modern dance to Seattle. She had decided on this as a teenager, kept to it through the time she and her family spent in the internment camps, and brought it back with her after WWII finished and she and her family returned to Seattle. Which they could do because her brother’s wife was white, and they’d put the family truck farm (somewhere in Ballard) in her name when the rest of them were sent off. (This was told to me; have not verified)

No one said anything of this in 1966, which is when we moved to Seattle and when Mom asked around for where she should send me for dance classes. Dad was teaching at the University of WA English Dept, which meant we were in close proximity with whatever cultural life Seattle had going. What everyone said was, too bad if she wants ballet, ballet at Cornish is meh, send her to Martha Nishitani.

Martha’s studio was in a turn of the century wooden building built to house a ladies club. She had the second floor, where the ladies had held tea dances in a huge room lined with windows. Downstairs was another magic place, the bead shop. Mom would park behind the building and I’d climb up the outdoor staircase and go in the back door into a hallway lined with pictures of Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Martha with various groups of young girls and women in pieces she’d choreographed. Martha was a stocky woman with black hair always pulled into a chignon, always wearing black footless tights, a long sleeve black leotard, and a black skirt.

I loved the studio, and I eyed the barre that ran the length of the windows. Susie did ‘barre’. Martha didn’t. She kept us busy in the center of the big bare floor, tipping like teapots pouring out of our spouts, squashing imaginary bugs with the balls of our feet, prancing, making square shapes to Souza and round shapes to Strauss. She had a portable record player and a huge collection of heavy black LPs with the dark burgundy labels that meant classical music.

Martha taught triplets, sending us up and down the long length of the plank floor, down up up, up up down, down up down, down up down, up down up up down up. 20, 30, 40 years later I used those triplets in any ballet class where I needed to get the point of counting in 3’s across. Beginners, kids, professionals, it never failed. A genius exercise.

Martha was the first of my dancing guides, the first of many mostly women who gave me exactly what I needed in the moment I was ready for it. I loved her without ever feeling that I could talk to her or that she would welcome it if I did. But she saw me, she saw all of us, I could feel that. Martha’s credo of teaching was classic modernism—the truth of the body in space, the truth of gravity, the truth of bounce, of running, of lying down, of moving in 3s. That rigorousness of being purely the thing you were doing stayed with me as the essence of dancing. I looked for it without realizing that was what I was doing in every teacher, class, performance the rest of my dancing life. But-Martha wasn’t teaching ballet. I was hooked to Suzie’s red tutu. I got up the courage one day and asked Martha: :Do we ever get to stand at the barre?”

“Not in my class” she said.

Mom said that if I wasn’t 100% certain Martha’s class was what I wanted, we couldn’t afford to keep paying for it. And that was it. Dance career over, age 6 and a half.

Age 6 was also when I found out I was fat. The pediatrician, cigarette smoke curling up from the busy ashtray on his desk, told my mother so. ‘”Higher than average for her height and age.”

My mother, who could tell you the weight of each of her friends, of her mother (never a pound over 120) and of herself at any age, knew what to do. That night I was put on my first diet.

I was very confused about this illness called being fat. I didn’t feel different. I didn’t look different. All that was different was no more ice cream bars at the beach—have a popsicle, it has fewer calories—and an eagle eye on every mouthful I ate. I still find choosing sorbet over full fat anything vaguely demeaning, even if I would actually prefer the pure fruit to anything milky.