I didn’t learn physics from a textbook. I learned it from trying not to fall.
Long before I had words like momentum, center of mass, counterforce, or torque, my body was already negotiating with them daily—not consciously, not analytically, just faithfully.
Gravity was my first teacher, and it never once explained itself. It simply corrected me, over and over, until I learned.
I grew up dancing, but I wasn’t blessed with a classical Vaganova pedagogy. I didn’t spend my childhood inside one of the great technical traditions where every exercise was part of a carefully articulated progression and every correction belonged to a larger architecture.
Instead, I learned the way many dancers do.
I watched.
I imitated.
I felt.
If you had asked me then why a particular arm placement gave me more height in a jump, I couldn’t have told you.
I just knew it did.
If you had asked me how I found the still point of a pirouette, I wouldn’t have talked about rotational axes or conservation of angular momentum.
I would have looked at you blankly.
Because the knowing wasn’t in words.
It was somewhere else.
For years, I thought this was simply intuition. Now I think intuition is sometimes what we call perception before we have language for it.
One of the strangest things about my own mind is that I often remember right and left by closing my eyes. I don’t picture a map. I don’t recite a rule. I feel into my hands. The answer is stored somewhere in my body before it arrives in thought.
Even now, I can close my eyes and perform a tour jeté without moving. Every muscle participates. The preparation gathers in the legs, the suspension opens at the top, the landing arrives and is absorbed.
Nothing has happened in the room.
Something has happened in me.
The movement exists before it becomes visible—which should be impossible, if movement is only a thing bodies do rather than a thing bodies know.
Years later, I became fascinated with anatomy and physics. I wanted to understand why movement worked. I studied alignment, force, leverage, rotation, momentum, and the astonishing intelligence hidden inside ordinary mechanics.
And something unexpected happened.
Physics didn’t replace what I knew.
It recognized it.
My body is not performing equations. It is solving problems: how to stay upright, how to turn, how to redirect force, how to land without injury. Physics describes those same relationships through measurement, abstraction, and language.
My body encounters them from the floor upward.
The plié is where they meet.
The equations describe relationships my body has been living for decades. For the first time, sensation and explanation met each other.
I wasn’t translating physics into dance.
I was discovering that dance had been teaching me physics all along.
The how is my body’s language.
The why became my mind’s.
That distinction turns out to matter more than it first appears.
The why can be transmitted quickly. It fits on a page. It can move from one mind to another without changing its form. That is its glory: knowledge can travel farther than the body that discovered it.
It is also its limitation.
A person can understand the mechanics of a pirouette without being able to turn. They can define counterforce without knowing how to receive the floor. Explanation can be carried without becoming capacity.
The how cannot be handed over in the same way.
It has to be accumulated—plié by plié, correction by correction, across years—in a body that never performs the same repetition twice because it is never twice the same body.
The textbook gave me the language quickly.
The body requires time.
Not because embodied knowledge is less intelligent, but because every repetition alters the body that performs the next one.
That changed the way I teach.
When I adjust a student’s arm before a jump, I am not asking them to imitate a shape. I am trying to help them discover a relationship.
When I ask them to soften the ribs, lengthen through the crown of the head, or allow the standing leg to receive the floor, I am not arranging a picture.
I am reorganizing forces.
Sometimes they look at me with the same expression I must have worn as a teenager.
How do you know that?
The honest answer is that I don’t always know it first in words.
I know it because I can feel it.
We often imagine that knowledge begins with explanation.
Maybe explanation is simply where knowledge becomes shareable.
Perhaps the body is not waiting for the mind to discover reality. Perhaps the body has been participating in reality all along, and language arrives later—not to replace perception, but to join it.
If that is true, then education is not only the transmission of information.
Sometimes it is the slow recognition of what the body has already been trying to say.
Maybe I did not learn physics from a textbook after all.
Maybe I learned it from thousands of pliés, from every landing that either forgave me or did not, from thirty years of gravity’s patient, wordless correction.
The textbook taught me how to name what my body has been learning all along.
It gave me the why.
The body is still becoming the how.
Learn more about my work on my website.