Overture: The Quiet Before the Curtain
Tendu
There is almost always music playing when I draw. Not loudly, not ceremonially, just enough to soften the edges of the room. Sometimes it is orchestral, something with the lift of strings that suggests a stage before it is seen. Sometimes it is ambient, nearly invisible, like breath beneath thought. I sit at my desk in the threshold hours before the machinery of the day begins or after it winds down. These are not productive hours in the institutional sense. They are liminal. Transitional. The curtain has not yet risen, or it has just fallen.
In ballet, tendu is the extension of the foot along the floor, a reaching outward without yet leaving contact. It is preparation. It is line before elevation. The body lengthens but does not leap.
When I place pen to paper, I am in tendu. The line extends outward from me, but I do not depart from myself. There is no ambition in the movement. No announcement. The figure begins as suggestion. It begins as an arc, a slender vertical, the hint of spine or arm. It is often a dancer, though I resist that word. I do not want to know what it is yet. I want to discover it as it unfolds.
The unnamed form carries possibility. Naming feels like departure from contact. Once labeled, the movement lifts prematurely into category. I want the foot still touching the floor.
In these first lines, I am not trying to be good. I have learned that the attempt to be good fractures the experience. The evaluative self intrudes. The movement stiffens. I become both actor and critic, and the unity dissolves. Flow cannot survive self-surveillance.
So I extend, but I do not leap.
Plié
If tendu is extension, plié is yielding. The knees bend. The body lowers. It is not collapse; it is humility within strength. Every leap in ballet begins in plié. Without bending, there is no lift.
Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” I have carried that sentence for years, but only recently have I understood its plié. To paint like a child after mastery is not regression. It is surrender. It is bending beneath accumulated knowledge. It is releasing the need to display competence.
I have amassed knowledge: degrees, certifications, books, frameworks. I have learned to navigate systems, to speak their language, to meet their expectations. And yet, like Socrates, I find myself increasingly aware that I know only that I know nothing. Knowledge expands until it humbles. The deeper one studies, the less one can cling to certainty.
Plié is that humility.
When I draw the simplified figure, I bend. I allow the body to be gesture rather than anatomy, motion rather than musculature. The childlike line is not ignorant. It is unpretentious. It refuses to perform mastery. It refuses spectacle.
This bending is not weakness. It is preparation for alignment.
Relevé
Relevé is the rising. The body lifts onto the balls of the feet. The dancer ascends without leaving the ground entirely. There is elevation, but it is controlled. It is poised.
When I look at the unnamed form on the page and feel that quiet consonance, that moment where perception and being are not at odds, I experience something I can only call Tao. Not excitement. Not triumph. Not achievement. Alignment.
In the Tao Te Ching, we are told that the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The named dancer is no longer pure movement. It has been interpreted before it has been encountered. But the simplified form, unnamed, allows me to participate in its becoming. I discover the dancer rather than receive it.
Wu Wei is often translated as “doing nothing,” but this is imprecise. It is action without forcing. It is effort aligned with nature. It is the dancer whose discipline has dissolved into grace. It is the teacher who moves between subjects without feeling the artificial borders of curriculum. It is the driver who arrives without recalling the miles.
Relevé is that rise into alignment.
The line on the page does not strain. It does not attempt to impress. It simply moves. And in that movement, I am neither outsider nor performer. I am participant.
The curtain has not yet risen fully. The stage is still dim. But already there is motion: quiet, grounded, and unannounced.
Movement I: Adagio
Arabesque
In ballet, the arabesque is extension held in suspension. One leg lengthens behind, the torso inclines forward, the arms reach outward. It is not motion for its own sake; it is motion arrested. It is balance in elongation. The body becomes linear.
This is where Kandinsky enters.
In Two Large Parallel Lines Supported by Simple Curve, there is no dancer in the conventional sense. No anatomy. No face. No narrative. There are only lines. Two dark diagonals descending, a gentle arc rising beneath them, and a small angular which interrupts at the periphery. And yet, when I look at it, I feel the body.
Kandinsky once wrote in Point and Line to Plane that the line is “the trace of the moving point.” Even at its most abstract, line carries within it the residue of gesture. A straight line is not inert; it is direction. A curve is not decoration; it is tension softened. Geometry is not cold; it is condensed movement.
In Kandinsky’s composition, the two parallel lines descend with weight, like limbs extended beyond equilibrium. Beneath them, the curve does not compete; it supports. It lifts without announcing its labor. The image becomes an arabesque of forces, an extension held in balance.
What transfixes me is not the geometry itself, but the sensation that something is being carried without strain. The work is disciplined. Bauhaus clarity. No excess. And yet it hums. It sings. It dances.
When I draw the simplified dancer, I am not attempting to render anatomy. I am searching for that suspended elongation. I am searching for movement distilled to its necessity. The body becomes suggestion. Gesture becomes essence.
The arabesque is not spectacle. It is alignment sustained.
Attitude
The term attitude in ballet refers to a pose in which one leg is lifted and bent, the body poised between motion and stillness. It is neither fully extended nor relaxed. It is readiness without tension.
Wu Wei lives here.
There is a misconception that flow is spontaneity untrained. That effortless action requires absence of discipline. But ballet contradicts this. Grace is not accidental. It is rehearsed into invisibility. Practice accumulates until it disappears.
It was difficult for Picasso to “paint like a child” not because he lacked skill, but because skill had hardened into habit. To recover childlike expression required unlearning. It required bending without losing strength.
Similarly, Wu Wei is not laziness. It is effort applied without inner violence. The motive shifts from performance to participation. The body moves as though it were always meant to move that way.
In Kandinsky’s lines, I see discipline softened into inevitability. Nothing feels forced. Nothing advertises its complexity. The simplicity is earned.
When I am with my students in our off-site space, I sometimes experience this attitude. I experience it not as posture, but as orientation. I move from subject to subject without feeling their artificial separation. History blends into literature, psychology into civics, economics into ethics. The categories dissolve. Knowledge becomes knowledge.
This is not because I reject structure. It is because I experience structure as provisional.
Flow is fragile. The awareness of flow can shatter it. The moment I think, “This is going well,” the movement tightens. The body becomes self-conscious. Tao retreats.
Attitude, then, is balance within awareness. Presence without commentary.
Port de Bras
Port de bras refers to the carriage of the arms, the way they travel through space and the transitions between positions. It is not the leap that defines the dance, but the connective motion.
This is where my alienation surfaces.
In a recent coaching session, an administrator observed that my many certifications were a weakness. “No one can be good at everything,” she said. The implication was clear: breadth dilutes depth. Integration suggests superficiality. To be specialist is to be legitimate.
I felt deeply misunderstood, not merely professionally but philosophically. I do not experience disciplines as isolated domains. I do not see Language Arts, Science, Math, or Social Studies as separate ontologies. I see them as lenses upon a single unfolding reality.
History, which I love, is holistic by nature. It refuses containment. It demands that economics converse with theology, that art converse with politics, that geography converse with power. It is the study of everything at once.
Specialization, while efficient, feels like naming the dancer before I have seen her move.
In Kandinsky’s work, line and curve are not disciplines competing; they are relational. The straight line gains meaning in tension with the arc. The arc supports without erasing the line. The composition is unified, not fragmented.
When knowledge is fragmented into silos, I feel displaced. When the form is reduced to its integrative gesture, I feel at home.
Port de bras is about transition. About connection. About the invisible movements that make the visible possible.
Perhaps I have always been more interested in the connective tissue than the isolated muscle.
Movement II: Allegro
Jeté
A jeté is a leap. One leg brushes outward and the body leaves the ground, suspended for a moment before landing. It is brief. It is exposed. It requires commitment. There is no half-leap.
Aspiration feels like jeté.
There have been moments when I have considered stepping fully into administration. Stepping into the structured center of educational systems. I have prepared. Reflected. Gathered credentials. I have not lacked effort. If anything, my preparation has been expansive.
Yet the leap requires more than readiness. It requires landing.
In that coaching session, when I was told that my breadth was a weakness, that my multiple certifications signaled lack of specialization, I felt the air thin beneath me. Not because I believed the statement, but because I recognized its logic within the system. Vertical depth is visible. Lateral integration is harder to quantify.
The leap felt possible.
The landing felt uncertain.
There was no anger in me. Only confusion, then sorrow. A quiet realization that my way of seeing might never align neatly with the evaluative frameworks of leadership pathways.
Jeté is beautiful, but gravity remains.
Pirouette
A pirouette is a turn, a rotation around a fixed point. When executed cleanly, it appears effortless. When slightly off-center, it disorients.
Evaluation is a kind of pirouette.
The modern educational system rotates around measurable specialization. Expertise must be legible. Competence must be categorized. Titles must correspond to defined domains. The turn is precise. The axis is clear.
When one does not align exactly with that axis, dizziness follows.
I do not reject specialization. I understand its necessity. But I experience knowledge as unified before it is divided. To be told that integration signals dilution is to feel slightly off-balance in a room where everyone else appears steady.
The awareness of that difference can itself disrupt flow. Much like Wu Wei dissolves under self-consciousness, confidence dissolves under misrecognition.
The pirouette is not violent. It is simply disorienting.
And disorientation, when sustained, becomes alienation.
Assemblé
An assemblé gathers. One foot brushes out and then joins the other in midair before landing together. Separation followed by union.
This is where I began to understand something essential.
I do not need to be fully inside the central structure to participate meaningfully in it. Working in an off-site location, just outside the conventional building, just beyond the standardized rhythm, I have found a different kind of landing.
Here, I can move from subject to subject without apology. I can integrate without having to defend integration. I can teach history as intersection, not silo. I can allow conversation to travel where it needs to travel. The boundaries soften.
In this space, my orientation is not liability.
I began to see that perhaps my place is not at the geometric center of institutional design, but at its margin where lines bend and curves support.
Assemblé is not fragmentation. It is rejoining after separation.
The sorrow of misunderstanding has not vanished. But it has transformed. It no longer feels like exclusion. It feels like clarification.
Perhaps I will always be an outsider in certain rooms.
But perhaps there are rooms where outsider is precisely what is needed.
Movement III: Pas de Deux
Promenade
In ballet, a promenade is a slow turn executed with assistance. One partner supports while the other rotates, maintaining form. The movement appears singular, but it is relational.
When I am with my students, I do not feel myself performing integration. I do not narrate to myself that I am embodying Tao. I do not consciously move between disciplines as though crossing borders. It simply happens.
We might begin discussing an historical event and find ourselves in psychology. We might start with literature and end in economics. A question about civic responsibility becomes a meditation on ethics. The boundaries are porous. The conversation turns slowly, supported by trust rather than agenda.
It is only afterward, when the day ends, when the room empties, when the music returns at my desk, that I recognize the quality of what occurred. There was no forcing. No rigid adherence to artificial partitions. The movement felt natural.
Promenade is not dramatic. It is sustained presence.
In these rotations, I am not leading so much as accompanying. The students who arrive in this space have often felt misaligned within conventional structures. They have been labeled: at risk, alternative, behind, even special. Here, the labels soften. The dancer is not named before the movement.
We turn together.
Lift
A lift in ballet appears to defy gravity. One body rises because another supports. But the lift is never singular. It is mutual trust, mutual strength.
In Kandinsky’s composition, the curve beneath the parallel lines does not announce itself as savior. It simply supports. Without it, the descending lines would fall beyond equilibrium.
I have come to see the off-site classroom as that curve. It exists within the system, but not fully constrained by its central rigidity. It holds tension without collapse. It allows those who did not fit the dominant geometry to find balance.
Flow in this space is not spectacle. It is subtle. It is the moment when a student who has struggled to pass a standardized assessment begins to see a concept connect. It is the shift from despair to possibility. It is the quiet recognition that knowledge is not fragmented but woven.
And yet, like Wu Wei, it is not sustainable as a constant state. There are days of friction. There are moments of fatigue. Flow is fragile. It can be disrupted by awareness, by policy, by exhaustion, by expectation.
But when it happens, it feels like the answer to a koan. Something clicks. Not loudly. Not theatrically. Simply and completely.
Counterbalance
Every pas de deux depends on counterbalance. Each body leans because the other leans back. Stability emerges from tension.
I have come to accept that I will always stand slightly outside certain structures. The earlier sorrow of misunderstanding has not vanished, but it has softened into clarity. I do not need to occupy the center to contribute meaningfully.
The outside-insider position is not exile. It is vantage.
From here, I can see the fragmentation of specialization without being consumed by it. I can integrate without being required to justify integration. I can teach as I draw moving fluidly, connecting forms, allowing meaning to emerge rather than imposing it.
In this counterbalance, I find peace.
Not because the system has changed.
Not because the fragmentation has disappeared.
But because I no longer measure myself against a geometry that does not match my own.
Finale: Coda
Enveloppé
Enveloppé is a wrapping motion. The leg draws inward before extending outward again. It gathers before it releases.
When I return to my desk in the quiet hours, music low, light softened, I often draw again. The day folds inward. Conversations settle. The movement of the classroom becomes memory rather than immediacy.
It is only then that I recognize when flow occurred. Not while it was happening. Not in the midst of conversation or instruction. Only afterward, in recollection, like noticing breath after exertion.
The dance had been present.
Enveloppé gathers the fragments, the lines of Kandinsky, the sorrow of misunderstanding, the porous boundaries of subjects, the unnamed dancer on the page, and holds them briefly together.
Not to freeze them.
Not to master them.
But to feel their coherence.
Révérence
At the end of a ballet class, dancers perform a révérence, a bow of gratitude. Not to perfection. Not to achievement. But to the shared labor of movement.
I no longer feel the need to force my way into rooms that require me to fragment myself in order to belong. That recognition did not arrive in anger. It arrived first in sorrow and then in peace.
I am at home at the margins.
The off-site classroom, the integrated lesson, the quiet drawing at my desk, these are not second choices. They are aligned spaces. They allow me to move as I am wired to move. To see knowledge as unified. To let conversations wander without apology. To teach as though history, literature, psychology, and ethics were simply different inflections of the same human question.
If I remain somewhat outsider in certain professional geometries, so be it. Kandinsky’s curve is not less important because it does not dominate the canvas. It supports what appears heavier.
Révérence is gratitude for that position.
Stillness
And yet, there is no final pose.
The dance continues.
Sometimes I participate: teaching, drawing, moving fluidly across disciplines, inhabiting Tao without naming it. Sometimes I sit one out: observing, reflecting, questioning my place. Sometimes I leap. Sometimes I remain grounded in tendu.
But always, the movement goes on.
The dancer is never fully named.
The line is never final.
The curve continues to support unseen weight.
Wu Wei is not a destination. It is a moment of alignment within ongoing motion. Self-actualization is not residence; it is visitation. Integration is not institutionalized; it is practiced.
The music does not stop simply because I step aside.
And that, perhaps, is the deepest comfort.
The dance was here before me.
It will continue after me.
My task is not to control it.
Only to enter when the movement aligns,
and to recognize, afterward,
that for a time,
I was part of it.