Ballet as Soul-Making With Barbara Demaree

A Guest Essay by Beth Robertson

By Beth Robertson

(Editor's note: Barbara Demaree, who died in December, is something of a legend in Boulder, where she danced, choreographed, and taught ballet for some years before taking over the Boulder Ballet Arts studio in the mid-1980s. Generations of little girls and teenagers trained with her, some followed by their own children. It wasn't just technique and performance that Barbara taught--though in her classroom teaching was immaculate. She also communicated a grace, elegance, and musicality that was purely her own and lasted her students a lifetime.

            At a recent celebration of Barbara Demaree's life created by her daughter Kristen, herself a dance teacher, at the Dairy Arts Center, students of several ages danced, sang, or spoke of their experience in her classes.

            As some of you know, I've been thinking and writing about teachers and teaching for a while and when I heard Elizabeth Robertson's beautiful encomium I asked to share it. She agreed, and I know her words will speak to many.)

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Ballet as Soul-making with Barbara Demaree

By Beth Robertson

As someone who has taught literature for many years and therefore who has been immersed in a world of words, I am surprisingly at a loss when it comes to talking about the medium of art that most often is without words, ballet. I will try to capture here some of the life-changing experiences I had as one of Barbara Demaree’s students for over twenty years.

I arrived at Boulder Ballet Arts in my forties, long after it was realistic to master a discipline as exacting as ballet. I became part of a group of older students that Barbara called her “ladies.”  Her intermediate ballet classes in the evenings and on Saturday mornings soon became part of my regular routine. There is not a single Saturday morning that goes by without me thinking of Barbara.  It was difficult to fit ballet into my far too busy life working at the University and caring for a small child. I had a bad habit of dashing into ballet class just as or after it started. Breathless after rushing up the steep stairs to the ballet studio, I left behind the commerce of Pearl Street even as I was greeted by the penetrating smell of French fries and hamburgers rising up from Tom’s Tavern. From the first chords of pianist Derrick Hamley’s music, I was transported into a completely different world—one of concentrated but silent physical work.

Despite the absence of talk, the world I entered was one of intense communication with Barbara who even without words noticed each student’s success –a well-turned out tendu or an expressive port de bras, for example.  Her classes were like no other I have ever taken-- even in such places as the American Ballet Theatre School or San Francisco Ballet School-- in their superb organization and carefully infused musicality. I marvelled at Barbara’s ability to match each exercise exactly to the length of music she had chosen and to fit the whole class into the hour and a half we had. There was always ample time at the end of each class for a beautiful reverence. To Barbara, teaching us to listen to the music carefully was as important as showing us how to move a muscle or to string movements into steps. Our musicality was just as important to Derrick who on occasion in a fit of fury would slam his hands on the keyboard and march out of the room in disgust at our inattentiveness to the music. The center combinations were also skilfully composed-- the beginning barre exercises fit like puzzle pieces into the later larger floor exercises—a rond de jambe exercise would recur in an adagio with a renversé for example. I could see the influence of English choreography—especially Frederick Ashton ‘s–on Barbara’s graceful compositions either for class or for the stage.

Luckily for us, Barbara passed on her acutely attentive skill, gentleness, and deep musicality to her daughter Kristen who has produced a Barbara-like visionary pedagogical practice, that is nonetheless distinctively her own.

            Over the years, Barbara and I became close—in part because we both suffered cancer losses at the same time—hers her husband’s and mine my father’s. She taught me how to manage grief through ballet. We got to know each other after class, and we often met for coffee —joined later by Robin Haig, Kristen and others in those meetings.  For many years, Barbara and Kristen attended our Dickensian Christmases. Cleaning up was always accompanied by Kristen’s fiddle playing.

            Over the years, I came to know the trenchant sense of humour and voracious reading that formed Barbara’s sensitivity to the needs of the living. But I already knew Barbara in the silent communication we had in class. It is the paradox of that communication that intrigues me, for even though every class involved rigorous physical training, what ultimately mattered most of all was not the body, but rather the mind, or perhaps we might call it the soul.  Every now and then I would feel the soul driven expressiveness that is at the essence of ballet—in a perfectly balanced attitude, for example, or a surprisingly successful pirouette or in a momentary soar in a grand jete. Though I was far from being a ballerina, Barbara taught me to dance-- and ballet with Barbara for me became an act of soul-making.  

            I am not a religious person. If I were I would say, as Balanchine did after Fred Astaire’s death, that Barbara is teaching the angels how to dance.  I do know that her soul lives on in the bodies of all her dancers. I have seen her in her students who became professional dancers—in Ana Claire’s graceful performances for Boulder Ballet, in Mara Driscoll’s beautiful presentation of the opening of Serenade,  for example, or as I recently saw in London, in Annette Buvoli’s carefully placed arms as a solo swan at the Royal Ballet. I am certain Barbara is here now in this room with those of us remembering her.