Elizabeth Alexander Traces How Dance Self-Assessment Became Poetry

Elizabeth Alexander spent her twenties chasing dance, fibbing about her age to keep up with professional training programs, and studying with legendary teachers at Philadanco. She never became a dancer, but she learned lessons there that shaped her poetry.

In a recent essay, Alexander reflects on how dance — the daily practice, the corrections, the relentless self-assessment — prepared her for a writing life. The physical discipline translated directly into her work with words.

The Dance Years

Alexander took classes in Philadelphia at the Philadanco school, studying with Denise Jefferson, Milton Myers, and Jimmy Truitte. Truitte was one of the first practitioners of the Horton technique, which she found suited her body better than ballet or Graham technique.

She assessed herself ruthlessly. Her back was strong and flexible; her feet were adequate rather than distinguished. Her turnout was average, her hips were stiff. She jumped high and leaped wide, loved to cover ground, and her feet were precise but not quick.

The honesty mattered. “There is simply no point in being anything less than honest,” she wrote.

What Dance Taught Poetry

The parallels between dance and writing surfaced naturally for Alexander. Counting beats in a dance studio trained her to count without thinking. The wooden studio floor was an austere blank space, a literal blank page, where curves and patterns emerged from rectilinear walls.

She compared the two arts directly:

• The devotion to dance is daily, warming the body each morning.
• The same exercises, repeated over and over, refine the body’s movement.
• There is no substitute for today’s work.
• Discipline, without which there is no art.

The simple practices — five positions, repeated exercises — let the body move, bend, make shapes, speak, fly. Writing, she said, is the deep-sea fishing expedition to find words stored in the brain.

Teachers Who Touch

Alexander remembered specific teachers vividly. Mary Craighill’s sharp index finger pressed into her back, aligning her posture. Cara Gargano pinched her bottom cheeks, hissing “Tighter” as she prowled the room with eyes that missed nothing.

These physical corrections translated into literary ones. Aligning the back for a beautiful line mirrored smoothing the bumps out of a poem’s line. The poet’s own eyes must be as swift and precise as the gimlet eye of dance class.

Self-Criticism and Second Spring

Dance taught Alexander to be self-critical. Corrections in class were swift and precise: left foot fixed, not pointed. Hips thrust right. Soften your hands, unclench your jaw. Tilt your head a smidge to the left. Straighten your knee all the way.

Those corrections demanded honesty from within. A poet must look at her own work with the same gimlet eye.

She also learned the difference between steps and dancing. Once the body knows what it is supposed to do, it must move through space with integrity and composure. Dance teaches sudden changes of direction, changes of pace, stopping on a dime. It teaches keen estimation and calibration, running in a circle that follows a strict perimeter.

The Center Holds

All movement begins from a strong center. Even if you cannot see it, there must be one. The poem can be off-center, but the writer’s center must hold.

Alexander’s essay is a love letter to both arts. She found the discipline of dance in her writing, and the honesty of writing in her dance.

The lesson is simple: what you do with your body informs what you do with your words.

Source material: “Elizabeth Alexander on Finding Life in the Second Spring of Middle Age,” Literary Hub.

dance · Elizabeth Alexander · poetry · self-discipline · writing habits