erin tozier’s Reviews > They're Going to Love You > Status Update

“The body, which doesn’t understand time, remembers movement. Once class starts, my body falls into positions like batter filling a pan. And James’s voice, the way he arranges steps, describes them, lifts his hand to sketch a tempo for the pianist, are like sentences from a beloved book. This window, the view of the buildings opposite, the feel of the barre under my hand, it’s all homecoming.”

“Your father wasn’t forced to react the way he did,” Freya says. “It wasn’t some kind of inevitable consequence. And you weren’t out to hurt them.”

“But I knew it would. A part of me always knew.”

“That doesn’t disqualify you from being loved.”

People are moving around me, inside their own choreography. Here I am. Standing. Unsure.

Set this to music and it’s a ballet.”

“Ballet didn’t start here, but it’s been remade in America’s image. We want Americans to feel a national pride in their ballet companies. To look at the work and say, “This is us. This is who we can be.”

“I look at the other dancers on the stage, all real things. I do not envy these better dancers. I love them. I’m proud of them.
I want something. I can almost feel what the something is.”

this feeling resonates deeply with me

“Will I be allowed, then, to come apart? Will I have earned it?”

*saturates with metaphorical highlighter ink*

“I love rehearsal rooms. Watching the dancers come in… the way they get to their feet and come forward, eager, haughty, open, nervous, hopeful, canny, detached… when the ordinary and extraordinary parts of themselves are fully visible together… I suppose rehearsal rooms are the least lonely spaces I have ever occupied.”

can’t fit the whole paragraph (it’s so good) but noting so I can come back to it

“I want my work to be seen, to be part of the conversation of my art form, to collaborate with people I admire and respect. But these things are only important. They aren’t sacred. The sacred thing is to feel— if only for a moment— that I am not consuming or forgetting or losing the things of this world but adding to them. That I have made something true or beautiful or both. That I might do it again.”