Life Moves: Late to the dance
By Moira Walker
Tchaikovsky’s music pours forth from my laptop. Standing in the middle of my kitchen, I curve my arms around my face. Fifth en haut. With my glasses on, I can see the rest of the class — we’re all seniors, I’m 68 — who appear in a frieze of frames. Centre screen, our teacher, Annemarie Cabri, leads us from her Toronto home.
How did I get here?
I met Annemarie in the late 1990s, when she was living up my street in Victoria, British Columbia. She’d recently studied with Anne Greene Gilbert in Seattle. Gilbert’s work consolidated what Annemarie knew: movement coupled with music changes the brain.
Annemarie relocated to Toronto over a decade ago, where she brought her work as a brain-compatible dance educator to the National Ballet of Canada and Canadian Opera Company. Last winter, she called to ask if I would like to join her Zoomed seniors’ dance class that combines brain work with ballet. Although I haven’t taken ballet since I was five, I said, “Of course.” Putting down the phone, I did my first jeté in years across my kitchen.
Annemarie’s senior classes combine physical exercise, some of which is a set of patterned movements designed to strengthen and change neuropathways, with memory and balance practice. Music and rhythm, known to increase neuroplasticity, enhance the quality of physical expression and mental engagement.
Slightly before 8 a.m. PST once a week, clad in a loose T-shirt and exercise pants, I click open the Zoom invitation. Annemarie appears. So does the group of older women, most of whom live three time zones away in Toronto. After a brief catch-up with one another, we’re off, Annemarie leading us through movements to awaken our bodies and minds. While we initially sit on a chair, it then transforms into a barre. Now I’m a dancer!
I flex my feet, curve my arms lovingly around my head, draw my body up. My kitchen pots thrum to the music of Chopin, Fauré, and Stravinsky.
I respond to instructions dusted with French: port de bras, en croix, rond de jambe, pas de chat. My mind spins back to being a little girl in black slippers, trying hard to please Alberta Short, my childhood ballet teacher in Oakville, Ontario.
Annemarie offers us senior dancers continual praise. “Beautiful. Beautiful,” she tells us. While I’m certain my ballet movements aren’t beautiful, a little part of me melts inside as Annemarie’s kindness folds itself around me.
After some customary ballet warm-up moves at the barre, Annemarie breaks down sophisticated ballet movements. Once we grasp them, she often shows us the steps as performed by dancers from the Bolshoi, Paris Opera Ballet, and the National Ballet of Canada in such productions as The Nutcracker, Giselle, and Swan Lake. Watching the clips, we can now drop into the world of ballet at a deep, meaningful level, having a felt-sense of the moves.
Weaving into the class anecdotes from her own classical training at Canada’s National Ballet School and her professional dance career with Dutch National Ballet, it’s as if Annemarie ushers us backstage into the Green Room and then onto the stage. Beginning in September, she selected ballet movement drawn from Balanchine’s Serenade, a 1934 work the National Ballet of Canada reprised that fall. For those class members in Toronto, attending Serenade must have been a treat. They knew the dance on their pulses.
Too soon the hour-long class is over and I am offering Annemarie, to the delight of my dishware, a grande reverence.
