I think this might not be as true in an improv setting — but working technique, I really wrestled with it.

There was a lot of, “Can I do this?”

Or, well —”Should I do this?”

Can hasn’t been the problem, generally.

So we really focused a lot of, basically, the falling down part of modern — the safety release, wherein you fall through a roll over a sickled foot  and, amazingly, A) your ankle doesn’t break and B) Agrippina Vaganova does not appear in a cloud of sulphur to drag you away to the place where Bad Ballet Dancers go. Mainly because, let’s face it, she doesn’t countenance modern to begin with.

So I managed both to lay down some impressive bruises on the metatarsophalangeal joints of both my feet and to finally lay down some nice safety releases, even in the ones falling from a standing position, which make my inner Russian completely foam at the mouth.

Beyond that, I couldn’t remember a sequence to save my life today, in part because of the ever-present fear of exacerbating my injury (so confuse — very distraction — wow) and in part because, I dunno, wrong phase of the moon, or what have you.

Sadly, even Modern T eventually caught my Sequence Learning Disorder, and we all got pretty confused.

Fortunately for Modern T and my fellow student, R, however, I had to stop before we really worked the final sequence.

Ah, well.

The afternoon’s choreography session became more like a planning session with dancing, and that was fine. It is really hard to remember to turn off the turnout. On the other hand (other foot?) we percolated some cool stuff that involves one dancer in a more modern style (with strong ballet lineage) partnering another who uses a strictly classical ballet style.

It yields an effect like two people speaking two dialects of the same language, sometimes with great harmony and sometimes with miscommunication — which, in turn, really works for the production we’re hatching.

We also made some programming changes, which is fine. Little by little, we’re creating a thing that is coming to have a shape and a structure. Elements of the actual choreography are beginning to gel, so for the next few sessions I’ll be selecting a couple of pieces of music for each so we can begin to create more detailed sketches.

Some will be a challenge to implement because we have two dancers and not six (or twelve) — but we can begin to lay down paths and shapes, and that will be a good start.

I also blood to regard my current injury not as a frustrating in this process, but as the kind of limitation of uses to challenge one’s self.

I need to think, “Okay, I shouldn’t jump right now — what can I do here instead?”

Tomorrow I’m back.to the aerials studio, though with limitations and with and supervision by my charming PT/husband 🙂