Yesterday was one of those classes in which things start out pretty well and mostly remain that way, with occasional deviations towards the ludicrous.

Barre was fine: we continued to think about where to put our pelvises; meanwhile, the fondu-développé combination slowly turned us all into jelly. We did it twice in either direction.

At center, I kept losing it during the first go at an adagio combination — though, to be fair, not losing it as badly as I once would have, by any means. It was more that I was doing something funky during the promenade that kept resulting in my body getting ahead of my supporting leg.

I took my socks off (they were, for some bizarre reason, slipping inside my shoes, which is an extremely disturbing sensation when you’re trying to promenade in arabesque) and pulled myself together, man!* and it got better.

Edit: Oh, yeah. And we got to do attitude turns. W00t!

Across the floor, I was actually able to remember the combination without difficulty … at first. For some reason, I would run it just fine, then lose it halfway through on the second side.

This is particularly mystifying in light of the fact that, in this particular combination, the second half on any given side was simply to repeat what we’d just done, like, five seconds before. Exactly.

Ah, well.

For some reason, likewise, although I managed to nail down most of the medium-ish allegro combination (which started out like every such combination ever — glissade-assemblé — and then did unexpected things), my brain and body refused to accept that the end was chassé-chassé-grand assemblé arriere-contretemps-repeat on the opposite leg.

Instead, no matter how hard I tried, my brain insisted on making the step after the second chassé into a cabriole … which would, in turn, interrupt the thought process (as I realized, “FFS, I just did it wrong AGAIN!”) and cause me to hesitate.

Then, since we were all traveling diagonally, I had to get the heck out of the way before J. (who usually does evening class, but is currently directing a play and joined us in the morning) crashed into me — while, of course, attempting to get my brain and body sorted before the next assemblé.

The end result was … I don’t know, imagine the snowflake scene from The Nutcracker, and then imagine that one of the snowflakes has forgotten what she’s supposed to do and is instead bouncing around like a crack-addled reindeer.

Ugh.

You would think that I could have applied a lesson from cognitive psych — if you spend the entire combination visualizing what you did wrong instead of what you did right, you simply increase the likelihood of doing it wrong on the next run — but, somehow, that didn’t occur to me.

Sooooooo. Ummmm. Yeah.

Except for those points, though, it was quite a good class.

So there you have it.

Next time, I’ll try to do less thinking.

À bientôt, mes amis!