Stop! Roller Time!
I spent another half an hour with my foam roller this morning. How did I not “get it” before now?
Also watched a documentary about the Kirov in which a dancer said something like…
…If a dancer doesn’t wake up with at least some pain, that means he’s probably dead.
So that makes me feel much better about my achy mornings of late!
… Off to work on the video.
Posted on 2015/12/08, in balllet, choreography, life and tagged ballet: if you're not sore in the morning - check to make sure you're not dead. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
danseur ignoble 
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…If a dancer doesn’t wake up with at least some pain, that means he’s probably dead.
Hmm, depends on the training method.
Good old russian school needs some pain – if it doesn’t hurt its no ballet.
But I know lots of days waking up after ballet (or modern) with no pain besides stiff legs as I always have in the morning. I’m not fresh from the factory anymore, soon there is the 5 in front of the age…
My ballet teacher read a new book a few weeks ago about the importance of sleaziness(hope it’s the right word, I’m german) in dance, even in ballet.
Taking modern class helps me here a lot – after the stony beginning (literally, it takes a time before “The floor is your friend” works out) you need often only the half energy for movements than before. Doing things with as little energy as possible, instead of engaging all muscles for nothing useful.
Now I loose lot of tension after modern class – but be warned, after the first few ones you have lots of bruises and are sore in multiple places.
Sage advice, Monsieur Faun! Merci!
Hmmm, “doing things with as little energy as possible” sounds like a good plan. It’s similar to the first law of long-distance bike racing, in a way — he who finds the perfect balance between laziness and speed wins (in the sense that good technique on the bike saves tons of energy,and there is nothing a long-distance bike racer likes as much as saving energy).
This also makes sense in terms of what we were working on today — a fractional adjustment to my pelvic tilt means that développé (and its relatives) require so much less energy because I’m no longer working against my own body. It feels as if gravity had been turned down or something. Ditto the arms: in the last few weeks, I’ve learned to use my arms much more efficiently, but that was a side-effect of observing the technique of some of the best instructors and company dancers and shamelessly copying them because I wanted my arms to stop looking dumb. I found my trapezius a bit sore for a while, but now it has adjusted and my arms look a thousand times better, but are way less sore (or, in fact, not sore at all, because I’m not engaging the wrong muscles in bizarre ways). Hrm.
I can relate to the point about after the first few modern classes — when I took modern in high school, that was very much my experience! I’ll have to bear that in mind at grad school next year, if I don’t find a way to shoehorn in a modern class before then 😀
The “modern means bruises” thing is true. Back in January I would fall asleep on one side, wake up in the middle of the night in pain, roll over, fall asleep, wake up an hour or so later in pain on the other side, and realise the floorwork phase really hit my obliques hard as well as leaving odd spot bruises all over the place. Since then, not so much…perhaps this is progress? It’s certainly an absolutely brutal core workout.