Sing It Again

I've been a dancer on and off since I was a kid. I've taken classes, performed in dance concerts, and watched performances here and there, but my most consistent habit (compulsion?) is learning choreography. I pick it up from anywhere: from High School Musical, to Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's repertoire; from Lady Gaga's music videos to the Youtube videos that came out of LA's dance studios in the late 2010s.

In high school, especially, I would watch clips of dance over and over until I understood. I'd have to flip the movements too, to get it right. If the dancer lifts the arm on the left side of the screen, it's actually her right arm. I would do the math to dance it the exact way she did it. Learning choreography as an amateur dancer is a tedious process. You get one move – a turn, a step – and piece it to the next until you have a complete phrase. Then you add the next step. You think and experiment to figure out how this step connects to the next. You mark the steps, get the rhythm of the music and the shape of the movement. You figure out how the two are connected, try to understand what the choreographer meant to express. Then you repeat what you know over and over until it's smooth, until you can enjoy the way the music moves you instead of concentrating on the steps. Then you start on the next phrase, step by step until it's done.

While I was in this phase of learning choreography, I attended a semester program at a school in Vermont. The English class I took there introduced me to another kind of memorization. It was the first time I had heard someone recite a poem from memory, seemingly off the cuff. My English teacher once recited the entirety of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" after we had read and annotated the poem for homework the night before. I kept thinking that he would stop before the end because how could someone have the whole thing memorized? But he did. Then he told us that we would be expected to memorize and recite an assigned poem as part of the course.

This shouldn't have come as a surprise to me. Both English and Humanities courses required us to give speeches with fewer and fewer aids until we were able to stand in front of our teachers and peers and speak confidently with empty hands and nothing on the podium. It felt good try a new kind of performance, so I happily memorized William Wordsworth's "My heart leaps up" and Gary Snyder's "For the children" and recited them spontaneously with my classmates.

It wasn't until last year that the connection between learning choreography and committing poetry to memory crystallized in my brain. I was housesitting for a friend who lives off the grid – solar-powered, no wifi, and one bar of cell service in one spot in the house – and took the opportunity to return to the practice of poem memorization. I worked my way through Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" line by line the same way I built up my running. Get one mile, then add a half mile, next time go for 1.5 miles straight, then add a half mile. On and on until I could confidently run 10 continuous miles. I worked my way through the poem the same way I learned choreography. One step at a time until recognizable shapes emerged and they make sense with the rhythm of music.

Then it hit me. "Mending Wall" is a poem with no breaks or stanzas. When trying to divide the poem into manageable chunks, I drew the comparison of these chunks to phrases in a piece of choreography. I immediately understood the poem as a dance, flowing from one idea to the next. Which meant that reciting the poem was like performing a dance. So I applied the same technique I used to learn choreography to the poem. Everything in the world is exactly the same.

Once you know a dance or a poem well enough, you can shift your attention from away from simply recalling the right words or the right steps and towards expression through the words or steps. Instead of stringing Frost's words together, I was imagining the farmers in the poem walking on either side the stone wall and speaking the image into existence. I embodied the speaker who was questioning the necessity of the wall and wishing his neighbor would join in on his silliness.

When I need to warm up before a workout, I dance "Turkey Lurkey Time" from the musical Promises, Promises once or twice. That's more than enough to break a sweat. When I need a mental companion to bike over the double-climb of Williamsburg Bridge I recite "You belong to the world" by Carrie Fountain. It requires just enough focus to distract from the burn of pedaling a single speed up and over the East River. It turns a slog into a treat: an opportunity to mull over the continuity of life.

One of the fundamental motifs in the musical Hadestown is repetition. Hermes, the narrator, tells the audience that even though the story they're about to experience is a sad tragedy, "We're gonna sing it again, again, again." When the show ends, the characters reset the stage and return to their opening positions and lines. I'm realizing that I've been singing again and again my whole life. Committing art to memory lets me "sing it again" whenever and wherever I want.