Author’s Note

It is not often that I have the pleasure of sitting down with a friend—someone who has inspired so much fortitude and beauty in me—to discuss such enriching things as vulnerability and compromising with your mental health. I wanted to share a small story to show the immensity of gratitude I have for Chelsea Marie Keefer and our friendship which grew from sharing the same tables in the same coffee shops and the same bars. It was exactly a year ago that I was at work and she gifted me a ticket to the ballet on Valentine’s day. Last winter was dense, grey and I was blighted by a heart attack I spent months recovering from and still feel the emotional and financial pressure from. It made me feel, simply, that life would be hard and brittle here on out. I left work early and in my work clothes sat in the absolutely must-see Capitol Theatre during a demi-performance of Swan Lake. This isn’t the part where I tell you how great it was (it was pervasive and immense) or how orchestra’s in general are how I form thoughts. This is the part where I explain that specific moment that holds specific emotions that can never be remembered clearly.

But I remember thinking as I watched Chelsea on stage: this is a good thing. A good thing I deserve, and she knew that. She knew that before I did.

This is, in a way, a psalm to sharing more stories and more cups of coffee, or maybe a bottle of Rosé, together.

Thank you.

Part 1: Biography of Body

All text in italics are direct quotes from Chelsea Marie Keefer from two interviews in the winter of 2020.

There are 1440 minutes in a day.

How do these minutes get filled? How many of those do we spend obsessing over how many we have left in the day?

How many caring for ourselves? Our bodies? For those around us spinning the energy of ballet. She feels the ecstatic flight of breath leave her. And in the inhale—a simultaneously mundane and life igniting action—comes the resolution of anxiety. The anxiety that she must frame herself minute by minute, or in any way at all.

1438 mins.

Later, during a yoga retreat when she was 18, she would name this framing: meditation. This naming became a habit. This habit became the routine of mindfully balancing a calculating brain, one which counts the minutes, one which defies them.

1436 mins.

When you pivot, oscillating of all the parts of you in the balance of ballet, in the mirror over the bar where you don’t get paid to rehearse—in church—you don’t think about the minutes you are spending but instead those you have left in this spin. Left in this room, in the mirror, in your mind, alone: the moments you have to yourself to be yourself. This self becomes a tether to a routine becoming a structure.

1430 mins.

After all, ballet is a structure for someone’s life. A structure for vulnerability and that relationship you can have with your body to be vulnerable.

In the morning, in meditation, she focuses on the open and full function of the activity of how to understand what will fill the minutes.

1420 mins.

I was raised in Huntsville, Utah because there was a lake. My parents commuted 3 hours each way to dance rehearsal in Salt Lake City—she would do her homework in the car. Ribbons of the Northern Utah beauty glancing in on her in the early morning or evening light.

1300 mins.

School never resonated with me. I just had to get A’s or B’s— and that would be enough.

1289 mins.

This would lead to a natural aversion to other structuring forces that attempted to categorize her—one which would follow her closely into college.

1280 mins.

At 16, for a variety for reasons, her parents rented out a one bedroom for her in the Avenues — what juxtaposition. Starting college, living with her parents, who would switch off coming down to the apartment, and dancing fervently.

1265 mins.

I lived mostly alone at 16—until my brothers and parents moved in later. She had someone from the company or school over every night. She remembers these evenings after completing just-enough-homework and resting her body steeped in a stupor, both crisp and murky, as if her young body had plunged into deep water with open eyes.

1255 mins.

Again the need for balance followed her here; she was both wide awake with the vibrant life of youth and tethered to this pinned-down feeling that returned when rehearsal finished, or when evenings faded to the moments where her mind—this the most powerful and uncompleted muscle—would develop at 16. This would be the naming of a motion towards expression.

1205 mins.

There is expression in ballet; in a consumption of dance. A fastidious certainty folded away in practice hours and other moments of such gratifying expression. To be able to express myself daily is what has driven her forward with ballet. She has devoted her body to this wordless art of movement.

1185 mins.

Here is five of her body’s minutes to express that to you:

1: I watched from a young age Giselle, Romeo and Juliet, Odette/Odile in Swam Lake and other roles I have had now. She sees this as a revolution of sensory seeking for a sense of self in the seasons of change. A revolution of a feeling completed through praxis and catharsis where she is arrested now by the rarity to experience it as one’s own.

2: Each season brings its challenge to the company, or the art form. My body feels more at home in contemporary but the demands of classical are a necessary challenge. The expression of a prevailing art must be an articulation of a peculiar weight. One which strikes the wearer with such tremor.

3: Autumnal but only in the way you smell detritus at your nose through dead leaves and things lost in the season of great length and change. This is the feeling from her point to the pivot in the hip. This is the feeling of attachment to a muscle destined to be carved and shaped by change.

4: I am grateful I never suffered any major injuries (said while knocking out 2/4 notes on a wood table.) Let us all believe in the sweet and somber nothings of dedication if you are to survive such turbulence as Cerebella work, or audition seasons at fifteen, at sixteen, at twenty-one.

5: Godspeed the ice baths, cryogenic and e-stem therapy, and that blood which fills me relentlessly. Blessed be the torn callouses that form great gripping caverns in the soles of my feet. God bless the feet and her body’s resilience to being dissected and for its ability to explore its physicality in a sacred act in her church of rehearsal.

1180 mins.

The Tulsa Ballet came next: she moved for the company on her own and at eighteen entered what would become the evolution of a routine to a scaffolded structure of how her body would be built into a temple:

Wake up early and have a small breakfast, then take a set amount of time for meditation-or-conscious-breathing-conscious-thinking; go to rehearsal for six hours, then eat quickly and lightly before teaching yoga four days of the week; then eat again? The nights would consist of rock climbing and other invocations of mental decompression to revolve back to the mental conditioning started during meditation in her youth.

This being done five times a week.

780 minutes.

The deliberate expression of mental release became the pillars of the temple. To understand what is my body and how do I work it to be its very best, she needed to understand how stained glass windows and austere tones of echoes ring. How a performance of resonate construction of that unformed organ. Her mind needed to listen to my body in the moment and give it what it needed.

400 mins.

In her mirror—in Salt Lake City, Utah again, with Ballet West—she is falling in love with the curve of her back over her hip. A lot of ballerinas have a complex relationship with the mirror. In reflection on life in Tulsa, both gasping for a youthful release of the daily grind and the full reckoning of that release as a 20-something, she becomes hers. Full and harrowing months away from home as a teenager, she found herself in the Quarter Life Calling yoga retreat with a community of fellow spiritual architects striving for an intimate connection to a body in which they were being told so much how to feel about.

350 mins.

She sees her ribs feather with delicate worry over the charges beneath them. With Coby Coslowski and the retreat, we spent a painful amount of time being in space with others. She made me aware of my self-sabotage behavior. We would sit, inches from someone’s face, and scream, and talk, and cry, and you would have to just listen. To hear. To be present. This presence is a promise made to the body every morning in meditation, every minute wasted, every moment alone, and every minute to:

Be heard.

Be present.

Be.

300 mins.

Out the window of the rehearsal space, the tire spilling traffic of winter rolls sleepy Salt Lakers to work. The train churns its metallic bellow beside those in their cars. All of this below her window. I am grateful for Coby Colowski’s guidance. For her friend Dana Regan, my life coach who guided me through everyday anxiety and offered tools for a life of balance. Balancing, the air tilts enough to season the scene with snowflakes. Here, in her most precious release of expression through improvisational dance is the religious dissection of balance and reflection.

Here she is rehearsing her most primal importance: herself in balance with her body of expression.

245 mins.

She senses—in some ageless manner— her body caress itself into the ephemeral weight of the air’s thrumming suspension. Each minute coming and staying for some new and meaningful while with her here. She fills this minute (minute 244) with gratitude and expression, both unknown and known. Her body becomes the architect and begins building a scene for the laborious mind to construct a balanced foundation.

243 mins.

She feels sentiments go into the trust her IT Band has with the muscles running up her behind. The sensational compounding of a composition in parts:

First the ballet narrative as being problematic.

Second, thinking of the people, stagehands and donors I have had fired for their exploration of her body in that problematic space. This juxtaposition posits an alarming amount of sadness in this part of the body. Knowing here that these most traumatic moments can hold within her, she fills it with a breath full of expression to support her leg fixed below and this—this complex pursuit for a voice—comes from it.

200 mins.

She feels the attention her joints at the knees and elbows give to contemporary movement when the arabesque opens—to be reaching here in this step of improvisation. Reaching to give a hand to the 16-year-old her in need of a space to spend time practicing with the mind. Reaching out to thank her brother for driving me hours and hours to practices in the early morning of summer when he was a teenager. What a sacrifice; homage paid with a hand plant which fills her forearm with flares of strength and unity.

180 mins.

Her achievement of perpetual pride; the beautiful and frustrating audience and narrator: her mind. It comes in here to remind her of responsibilities. Of limits. Of time going by and by.

I was given a contract.

Work ethic must reflect that, it says. To that she reminds herself who inside this vibrant vessel is currently in charge and turns down its volume with a loud exclamation that finds the left knee swing in a way dancers don’t have a name for (lets name it le vulnérabilite ansamble) and lands in what can’t be called perfect—perfect doesn’t exist—but let’s name it an “important balance.” Her mind agrees.

129 mins.

Her breath returns when she sits on the ground and just exists. She gets to just be here for a time.

126 mins.

The nature of her mental health hinged on how other’s, even her mind compartmentalized me: too curvy or need to lose weight. But also, needing to be something—in any sort of productive direction in order to be a dancer. To be successful or full. But now she gets to name that also.

And that name is to just be—as the Buddhists say: everything is temporary.

106 mins.

Then, rehearsal—church—begins. I am Monya in this upcoming production of Giselle, so she should start acting like it. It’s a joke, and she is grateful to have a relationship with her body to joke about those things now. A marvelous symbol of release. Now mundanity settles within her.

46 mins.

She is home now and the light hangs parts of itself from the sun in long shadows. Her pointers get placed on the bed. She looks out the window to the most perfect sunset: the reds blend to memories of sunrises in the car with her parents, with her brother, with the ballet troupe of her youth. The ghostly gold is a wedding present for her partner in vulnerability—her mind. And it gets to turn off and just be bathed in this light now. The shapes of the Uinta’s, the dots of birds in a fissured but brilliant sky are all a part of the space she lives 1440 minutes in each day. And tomorrow will come again. And she am grateful for it too.

And I feel my best version of myself.

Part 2: Best Version of Vulnerable

Chelsea Marie Keefer is a soloist for Ballet West, a self-published podcaster, and the creative director behind an upcoming experiential event called Metamorphosis. This distinctive event happens on Feb. 28th to benefit the non-profit One Small Miracle, an organization devoted to helping individuals of the service industry find aid for all health related expenses.

It is a generous gift Matthew Pfohl (the founder and director of One Small Miracle) gave to me as the creative director in charge of not only the choreography of the event, but the curation.

A remarkable and ambitious event I, the author, already feel the power from 15 days away. Keefer has balanced the performance around the image of Metamorphosis.

It is a powerful image for a caterpillar to enter a space, become goo, then end up a butterfly.

Paired with the piece of music Metamorphosis by Phillip Glass (a body of music I image angels and other illustrious pillars of light listen when falling asleep,) — It just sucks you in—The performance positions the six different emotions embodied by six dancers.

The information is all here. Email for tickets and questions.

On her latest podcast, Chelsea talks about audition season: a huge cattle call style affair. She goes through the process of getting ready with attentiveness and goes into the details of her experiences. It is here you catch the passion in her when the heartened, glistening tone of her voice spills and with tears retelling the story of her rejection and hardships. I was told early as a writer we live everything twice; once when it happens, and once when we write about it.

I hear the courage in her voice to keep going—to apologize and continue with being vulnerable with the listener: the reminiscent power of reflection.

Listen yourself

To live twice through the powerful narrative of her life up to 2020 is to be an activist of the sort of relationship Chelsea wishes for everyone.

If I could tell anyone one thing, it is that I hope they can be vulnerable. You are on your own voyage and in charge of how you share your voice. Be the best version of yourself and allow for growth.

We must perform together for vulnerability to take center stage. For the voices of those in its experiential hold to be heard. For all of us to become an ensemble of growth and harmonious deliverance from trauma and anxiety.

I know Chelsea will be on that stage with you. And I know she wants to know:

How will you fill your 1440 minutes a day?