Remembering Kate
She Saw Dancers in Us
Kate was my ballet teacher, and she was the best goddam ballet teacher I ever had, not that I have had many, but I have had enough to know that she was special. Not only was she a gifted dancer, but she had a unique understanding of the mechanics and emotion of ballet.
She could transform a person through dance.
She made me into a dancer at the age of twenty-three. I was in college and out of P.E. credits, so to get some movement, I signed up for an Introductory ballet course.
Kate was my teacher.
She was in the master’s program for dance at the time and got credit to teach pre-beginners ballet. For our college-level course, she used the same dance curriculum that she used to teach the preschoolers at her studio job off-campus, except that we also got to learn third position. Somewhere between age three and age twenty-three, your brain figures out how to put the heel of one foot against the arch of the other. Our class was very impressive.
Kate had spent her life dancing ballet, but she shared that at puberty, she became a dancer with boobs.
Normally a tragic event that funnels the thicker women out, but as my teacher, she was a dancer with hips and curves and soft round features. She was beautiful and graceful and thick. It felt good to all the beginners to have a full-bodied teacher that was no less inspiring on the floor. She did not dance much in our class, only to give us short demonstrations. There was nothing showy or pompous about it when she moved. She was not trying to convince anyone of her superiority, a rare feature for a dancer to have. Instead, ballet lived in her like soft memory that glided up from her arches and traced as one sinuous line through her body until it floated out her perfectly stretched fingertips. She returned to face the class and watch our attempts.
As fresh as we were, she saw dancers in us.
Kate had a great sense of humor.
She had a big smile and was a bit of a nerd. I only got to know her a little outside of our class, but she brought her grounded joy with her wherever she was. She taught me more about my body and how it moves than any other instructor that came before or after. Her dedication to the technique and skill of ballet had me fall in love with dance. I moved with more passion and precision than I had ever moved before.
I found a place in that classroom to claim an art I thought was beyond my reach.
Kate never moved faster than the pace of her students, and the result was that everyone was able to dance with a level of confidence that would not otherwise be there. She did not simply teach ballet.
She taught us love.
A year ago, I wrote to her to tell her the impact she had on me as a teacher.
I never received a response. I did not think much of it. I knew she was battling cancer. It had not occurred to me that she would not get better. Surely good, beautiful, kind, loving people always do. I do not even know for certain if that is how she died. I do know that her death makes no sense to me. I know that a death for someone so young and so — good seems mercilessly cruel.
I know that she filled the world with beauty and made it a better place to be and I know that I am grieved that she is gone.
I do not know if she ever read my letter, but I hope she knows now, from a place of infinite view, how transformative her impact was.
I hope she knows that however short her life was: how greatly her life matters.
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