By Renée K. Nicholson

It happened well into my thirties, over a decade since I’d last performed, and only a few years from publishing my first full-length collection of poems, Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center. I’d said the words thousands of times—En pointe. In French, it means “pointed,” as in, “to make a pointed argument.” It can also mean “cutting edge.” Yet, I’d heard this terminology used by dozens of ballet instructors to describe the action of rising up on the toes in pointe shoes—en pointe—and I’d read it hundreds of times in newsletters and marketing materials from ballet companies and schools all over the world. En pointe. Never once had I stopped to consider whether the term was correct or not; my rudimentary French never prompted me to question it.

I was sitting in Studio Nine at American Ballet Theatre, surrounded by other aspiring ballet teachers, some who had been accomplished dancers, in the cavernous space. We applied, we were accepted, and traveled across the country and across the globe to learn how to translate our experience as ballet dancers into teaching proper technique.  For me, it was easier to get a position teaching ballet than finding one teaching creative writing.

Raymond Lukens, one of the coauthors of the ABT National Training Curriculum and an internationally renowned pedagogue, wasn’t imposing perched on a tall stool at the front of the class. He was often warm and funny. Still, he was intimidating.  He’d traveled to all the major schools, studying the methods of the best ballet teachers in the world.

“Sur les pointes,” Raymond said. “This is the correct French. It means ‘on the tips.’”

How many times had I heard ballet teachers make such a fuss over using the correct terminology, only to use en pointe without any clue that they were butchering the French translation? Raymond was also a polyglot, slipping into other languages as easily as dancers might slip into their soft slippers. With his impish grin, he mostly stayed atop his stool as he lectured, often pausing to make a point—but not a pointe. He started speaking in English, moved into French into Italian and even, on occasion, Japanese. I marveled at these fluid transitions as I might the connecting steps in a combination across the floor. No one should execute sloppy glissade, so why were American ballet teachers sloppy, perhaps worse, ignorant, when it came to using the French language of ballet’s terminology? Guilty of this myself, I took in a long breath, tinged with the lingering scent of bodies that had recently rehearsed or taken class in this very room. Then I exhaled in a long sigh. I’d made this mistake. Me, who also wanted to be a poet.

***

Once I had a poetry mentor who pointed out to me that he could eight-count all my lines. I didn’t know if this was good or bad, but I held that comment close for many years. I have used phrases of choreography in my poems, each time feeling the sweep of language somewhere deep in my bones, as if the terminology formed the poem’s marrow: chassé, pas de bourrée, glissade, grand jeté. Any dancer will have performed this sequence, perhaps thousands of times, in class and on stage. When I read the phrases out loud in my poems, I feel the accents and the weight of the language inside me. In poetry, the line is a unit of attention. For a dancer, the choreographic phrase is a unit of attention. I feel both in my body, nurtured by the music that underpins them. My body vibrates as though to move with the lilt of the language.

***

Still, American ballet teachers, like me, have been bastardizing the French language in our studios for a long time. We may be good purveyors of technique but we are poor translators. En pointe/sur les pointes drove that lesson home for me, but it is not the only example.

Consider: fouetté rond de jambe en tournant, which in most studios is simply called “fouetté turn.” Fouetté means “whipped,” and when we shorten the phrase, it often alters how we teach this step to our students. Most imagine a “whipped” action as the movement of the leg devant (extended in front of the body) or á la seconde (to the side of the body), but the actual whipping action happens when the leg is pulled into the retire position (the “p” shape dancers make with their legs to pirouette) to execute the turn itself.

Maybe I’m being nitpicky here, especially for someone with very rudimentary French, but language matters. Having watched so many poorly executed fouetté rond de jamb en tournant, I am reminded of something I learned in my earliest poetry workshops: every word counts. The ballet student, perhaps desiring to someday nail the 32 fouetté turns in the Black Swan section of Swan Lake, can’t understand why she fails to execute them. She whips her leg front-side, losing control of her hips, losing control of the turn, because she doesn’t understand the component parts. The corrections are lost in faulty translation.

***

As a former dancer training in New York to become a ballet teacher—an act of translation all its own–I kept two notebooks, one dedicated to notes from class, the second reserved for snippets of writing, early bits of poems.

In ABT’s Broadway studios, many of my classmates were already famous teachers. One, François Perron, was an expert in the French method, a product of his own training at the Ballet School of the Opéra National de Paris (Americanized: The Paris Opera School). We befriended each other, and François took great delight in informing me that my name meant “reborn” in French. I knew this already, but he seemed so excited to translate that I simply smiled.

One day, between sessions, François, some other classmates, and I talked about Raymond’s language lesson. He leaned casually in the doorframe of the studio.

“Are we really that bad?” I asked.

“Negligée,” he said and shrugged.

I looked over at him. I’m sure the surprise registered on my face.

“In French, negligée means ‘neglected,’” he said with a classic French scoff. “What’s sexy about being neglected.”        

I nodded, as did a few others who were listening, and I probably laughed nervously. I liked François, but he had been a much more prolific performer than I was, and he had become an established, sought-after teacher worldwide, while I taught ballet in a small studio in my home state of West Virginia. He was also ridiculously attractive.

Negligée. I wrote the word in my notebook.

As soon as François was out of earshot, the woman beside me leaned over. “I don’t care what the word means,” she said. “When he says it, it is sexy.”

***

My background in poetry has long been one of my strengths as a ballet teacher. Often, I must come up with ways to explain a step to students so that they can translate it within their own bodies. I can no longer perform the steps like I could back in my youth, when my body had been shaped by the good technique of teachers past. Yet, my brain made sense of that language, translating movement into image, just like it does when I write a poem. Ballet was expression concentrated into a codified technique. You mastered the technique to become an artist. Poetry is an act of expression, as well. We write to express something that otherwise resists language. There is a technique hidden in a good poem, which allows our emotional response to it, easing us through movements of language. When I stopped dancing, I didn’t stop being an artist. My poems lilt in that eight count. They pull from the language of ballet, time and again, as if paying homage.

For a long time after I returned home from New York, I had wanted to use the word negligée in a poem—François’ word—but it always felt forced. After a while, I just forgot about it, like many transient details that wind up in my notebook and remain dormant. Lately, though, my life has been like one long string of translations, from ballet steps in my body, to the inner choreography of poems as I construct them on the page.

I re-read something else I once wrote in Studio Nine. Raymond Lukens told us in perfect English: ballet technique taught correctly makes for greater ease of movement. In the studio, I say, “sur les pointes” and the lean bodies of my students rise on their pointe shoes, an act they translate because I strive to be en pointe—pointed—about language. My French is not always perfect, but I work at it. I revise myself like I revise a poem, where every word counts. For a single moment, the dancer and teacher and poet are reconciled.

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Renée K. Nicholson is the author of Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness, as well as co-editor of Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives of Illness, Disability, and Medicine and two collections of poetry: Postscripts and Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center. She was a past Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State-Altoona, is certified in the American Ballet Theatre National Training Curriculum, as well as holds a Certificate of Professional Achievement from the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. The recipient of the 2018 Susan S. Landis Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the West Virginia Division of Arts, Culture, and History, Renée is now a creative partner in the storytelling project Healthcare Is Human. Her past ballet students from West Virginia have gone on to train at The School of American Ballet, American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, Ballet Met Academy, Charlotte Ballet Academy, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School, and elsewhere.