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Eugene author and ballet fanatic Lauren Kessler's resolution to dance in The Nutcracker late in life was more than a pet project, it was a lifestyle revolution. And her new book about the journey to Eugene Ballet Company's stage, Raising the Barre (Da Capo Press, 272 pages, $24.99), is more of about kicking yourself in the ass than Balanchine.
"My husband is used to me doing crazy things," says Kessler, who previously subjected herself to hypnosis for a book on anti-aging (Counterclockwise) and spent a year testing exercises for every letter of the alphabet, A to Z. The mother of three is the Oregon Book Award-winning author of such real-life accounts as Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer's and My Teenage Werewolf. But she failed as a ballerina, until last year.
Kessler stopped dancing at age 12 when she overheard highbrow instructor André Eglevsky tell her mother to stop wasting money on classes—Kessler's body type was all wrong. But the yearly tradition of dressing in her finest to see The Nutcracker stuck with Kessler, so when her husband took an extended business trip to Paris without her, she toured the country to see as many renowned productions as possible before ending at her mainstay Eugene Ballet.
Last December, she was on the stage instead, dancing solo as Clara's aunt. It's a role the ballet company invented especially for her, one she'll reprise in Eugene next week. "I wanted to push myself back to the beginning of a learning curve," Kessler explained of her decision to stop running, drag her best friend Kim to adult ballet classes, hire a personal instructor and join a ballet-centric book club. "It was huge for me to learn stage makeup," she says. "I don't wear makeup at all, so a friend took me to Sephora and loaded me up on stuff I didn't know existed." Pushing boundaries—rather than performance—was the main objective, she says. "The book is really about shaking it up when you don't have to, pushing yourself outside your comfort zone."
Though it waxes elitist at times—the premise of city-hopping and sitting with Louboutin-shod patrons because your husband has business in Paris grates—Kessler's eighth nonfiction book is a speed read that could actually interest the average Joe in ballet. She details proper scrotum placement for men in tights and how she botched a Corvallis performance. "If there's anything that's populist ballet, it's The Nutcracker," she insists. "Tickets to the UO football game are just as expensive, it has the same showiness. Is football an elitist art?
She offers stories about leotard shopping and plié practice as antidotes to midlife monotony instead of Botox or Lumosity. It's mental, she says: "How much can you hold in your head—turnout is good, shoulders are good, but then my hand is like a claw. And once I fix that, my elbow bends." And physical: "Being one with my body rather than it being an object—ballet took that away from me, so I thought that maybe ballet could bring it back."
"Even how I stand now is different," she says of her no-holds-barred undertaking, which took just a year once Kessler started her adult ballet classes and meetings with Eugene Ballet choreographer Toni Pimble.
Everyone can "raise the barre," Kessler insists, if they just commit to undertaking the uncomfortable. "I have a lot of money invested in leotards now."
GO: Lauren Kessler appears at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Wednesday, Dec. 9. Free.
Willamette Week