You guys, Brian is amazing.

Today, we spent most of barre working slowly without accents. Very different feeling, but exactly what I’ve been needing.

Working workout accents forces you to focus on doing the entire movement correctly — so if you’re working a tendu from fifth, you make all the stuff in between the two pictures (“fifth” and “out”) really, really count.

I realized, for example, that when I tendu a la seconde from arrière, I don’t always bring my heel through, and thus I wind up losing some of my turnout.

We also tuned up balancés. M., who has only recently joined Brian’s Saturday class, wasn’t super clear on them, and Brian said, “Don’t worry — I’m 33 and I’ve been dancing since I was 14, and I’m still working on balances.”

He also gave the single most concise balancé exercise ever. I’ll have to create a little video of it — it’s amazingly easy and makes balancés crystal clear.

That makes me feel much better about my slowly-improving balancé — which, coincidentally, was 100% better when I walked out of class than when I walked in.

Little jumps were beautiful this time (Light! Buoyant! Quick!), and going across the floor I tossed in some cabrioles, a few of which were good (and at least one of which was horrible).

I think I liked our adagio and pirouette combos best, though — they were as follows:

Adagio (ish, anyway):
Balancé – quarter pique turn (x4)
Promenade
Repeat on opposite side

Pirouette:
Tombe
Pas de bourré
Arabesque turn
Failli
(repeat the above twice; on the third repeat, add a double pirouette)

So there you have it. Not bad at all for my first class in a month, I think, though my port de bras was a bit chaotic.

It’s good to be back.