Did Brienne’s class today, and I made it All. The. Way. Through!

(Though I skipped a couple of reps of petit allegro.)

She has a really fun CD of class music called “West End to Broadway” (hence, in part, the title of this post), including some nice, slow pieces for torture fondu and barre adagio. 

Barre is improving.  

If you’re a horse person, you know that thing where if you don’t ride or school your horse for a while, sometimes the horse in question acts a bit silly when you put him back to work? That’s kind of where my body is.

I'm back! Mostly!

It does things I didn’t really ask for, then I correct it, and it’s all, “Oh, you mean those turnout muscles!   Okay.   No worries!”

However, it’s doing less of that now than it was last week.  My successive approximations are closer to the goal state.   So, Yay!

Speaking of successive approximations, at center and across the floor, we had nice combos today, and I did the traveling ones, if not worth prefect execution, at least with a lot of elan. 

Now, if I could just stop putting in failles where there aren’t any and leaving them out where there are (and adding an extra saute arabesque here or pique turn there)…

But that’s more of my body being a silly horse.  At least it’s a silly horse that’s got some style?

Which brings me to the other reason for this title: one of the things my classmates kept mentioning was the struggle to remember the combinations (some of which were fairly complex).  

The cool part is that you wouldn’t have known it, for the most part: everyone focused on performing and enjoying themselves, and most of us looked pretty good.  (I’ve determined that if you turn the wrong way on the rear point of a triangle, it actually looks pretty cool anyway, so I don’t even worry about that anymore ;)).

I’m back to a point at which I don’t freeze if I blank on the combo halfway through; instead, I improvise.  It’s a skill I learned as a musician: nobody knows you screwed up if you don’t let them know.

Of course, in class (okay, and sometimes in big corps numbers), that’s not entirely true, but what you practice in class is ultimately what you will do on stage — and, of course, mistakes do happen during performances, even to professionals.   Like we lowly danseurs and danseuses ignobles, they have to learn to make it look good.

And that, too, is showbiz.

(Come to think of it, looking like you meant to do that is an important life skill in general — ask any cat!)

So that’s it for today.  The final combination in today’s class went so well (You guys, I threw in a cabriole just for kicks!   I’m back!) that I finished up feeling jubilant, ebullient, even bubbly.

Now, home to do computery work.