Everything Was Beautiful At The Ballet

A joyful Parkinson's dance class at English National Ballet

Making friends at the dance class

At 11am on Sunday I was not in a good way. I’d arrived at Canning Town station in East London, hot and bothered after a complicated journey involving a train and two tube lines. I was late for an appointment and with my Parkinson’s pill due, I was in that “off” state, where my walk had turned into a shuffle and just making my way through the tube barriers and finding the route to my destination felt as big a challenge as running a marathon.

Yet just fifteen minutes later my worries had melted away and I was beaming with delight, as I sat with dozens of other “Parkies” learning how to perform a dance routine. Because my destination was English Natinal Ballet’s docklands headquarters where I had signed up to take part in the Dance for Parkinson’s Open Day.

ENB has been a pioneer in promoting the idea that taking part in ballet can be beneficial for people with Parkinson’s, running classes since 2011. I had been to a couple of other dance classes, including one at World Parkinson’s Congress in Barcelona last year, and had found them mildly enjoyable. But when I walked into the rehearsal room at ENB HQ in Hopewell Square it was clear that this was on a different scale.

Learning the steps

An instructor was taking the. setaed “Parkies” through a sequence, with two ballet dancers demonstrating the steps on a platform, and a pianist and a clarinet player providing an improvised accompaniment. Learning the steps engaged the brain as well as the limbs, and I began to understand what I have often been told by my wife, who has taken ballet classes for forty years - that when you are dancing you concentrate so hard that you cannot think of anything else.

After a while, we moved on to a more free form passage where we had to improvise to the words “extend”, “melt”, “swivel”, and “connect” and those of us who were more mobile were invited to stand up.

We were learning a routine to a rap track, and the instructor was endlessly suppportive, telling us how quickly we were picking it up. I was pretty sure that she hadn’t been looking at me, as I lurched and stumbled, always feeling I was one beat behind my fellow dancers.

I am one of the world’s least coordinated dancers - my wife often tells the story of my best friend’s wedding where, to her great relief, the bride’s father cut in on me during a formal dance, sparing Diane more painful toe trampling.. But as we built up our routine, section by section, it felt increasingly liberating to fling my arms and legs around in the company of people who shared my lack of dexterity.

And then we put the whole thing together and performed it, with other dance “hubs” around the UK joining in, linked together by a video stream. As we completed the routine for a third time, ending with a bow to the audience, I looked around at my fellow dancers and the joy on our faces, and came close to tears. We are all on the same journey, some nearer to the end than others, but we had found comfort in a communal artistic project where our individual sometimes jerky and inelegant movements somehow merged into a thing of beauty.

Then we trooped out to enjoy the (free) sandwich lunch laid on after the (free) class by ENB and its generous sponsors. And we did what Parkies do when one or more are gathered together - swapped war stories and had a bit of a laugh and a bit of a moan. A perfect outing.