AaaaAaaAAaaAaaaa…
So! Our AD emeritus, who once gave me an extremely memorable correction about my supporting leg, will be teaching Advanced Class going forward o.O’
I don’t know why I find him intimidating (possibly because he’s been dancing longer than I’ve been alive?), but I do. As such, I’ll be working on relaxing and keeping my head together. Which I’m working on anyway: I don’t get nervous on stage, but I do get very charged up, and sometimes that translates to doing things faster than I should. Learning to dial things back will help in either situation.
Anyway, Le Directeur Ancien takes over next Saturday.
I’m hoping he’ll take us to task on port de bras. Yesterday, I finally remembered to ask Señor BeastMode for input on this year’s ballet goals, and his answer was, “Get the whole body working together—that coordination will take you to the next level. You’ve got the legs and the feet.”
That’s strikingly similar to BW’s input. Also a pretty nice vote of confidence from the BG (AKA Señor BeastMode).
I haven’t checked in with Killer B and J yet, but I’ll try to do that this week. I should see both of them tonight at J’s Monday night class.
Saturday class this week was edifying, except for the moment in this very simple balancé x2 — soutenu — balancé combination when I was thinking so hard about refining my balancé that I forgot to soutenu. Erm. Oops?
It didn’t really screw anything up, though, since that was the option for newer students anyway. There were 15 of us all jammed into the tiny studio, so BG came up with a waltz combination we could all do at center without killing each-other (we also did a nice terre-a-terre waltz). The only time I’ve ever seen more people in Studio 5 was the time Paul Taylor Company showed up en masse.
My piece for the show on the 28th is essentially done and dusted. I ran it about 10 times today with Denis reading for me (the whole show is set to poetry), then I took a break and danced with my scarf (which is definitely going to become a thing in my flow repertoire).
I also got to chat with my actual reader, L, about prosody. Next Saturday, we’ll run the piece together a couple of times, and I think we’ll be set. The show is the final weekend of January. It’ll be a nice way to launch this year in terms of performing.
Tonight I’m finalizing my application to perform at PlayThink, even though I really have no idea what I’m going to do, since I don’t have an acro partner. Basically, I need to decide whether to choreograph a solo piece or recruit a partner. I’d really like to work with a partner, but I’ll have to poke around and see who’s going.
I’m really excited about the beginning of rep class and our upcoming piece for Spring Collection. It’s looking like we’ll have more of us than I expected, which is nice (though it would’ve been cool in its own way if there were only three of us).
This week we have two Cirque workshops as well as the normal array of classes and so forth. It should be an awesome week, but also heckin’ busy—as will be the rest of the first half of the year.
So that’s it for now.
Posted on 2018/01/07, in balllet, cirque, class notes, performances, repertoire, Uncategorized, work and tagged incoming!. Bookmark the permalink. 5 Comments.
danseur ignoble 
balancé x2 — soutenu — balancé
Mmm, creamy. Pity about the forget but we’ve all been there. Also, I took the improvers’ that runs before my usual Sunday ride and…it didn’t seem so bad at the time but today, I know I was in the studio…
“Creamy” is exactly it–just what BG wanted from us.
I know those feels. Also, I think sometimes it’s the “easier” classes that hurt the worst the next day, since there’s so much time to think about engaging all the things and working through the entire foot and finding the deepest of the deep rotators. Top it off with Even More! and you’ve got a recipe for some nice DOMS 😀
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that forum post and wondering how hard H’s quasi-Russian stylings/”intermediate but slower” really is. I mean you definitely learn how to do scarily long relévé balances and you get strong, but…there’s a fair bit of “yes, I can do this barre in my sleep but I probably won’t because I only have studio dreams on intensive week” there too.
That’s consistent with my experience of classes that are, one might say, more physically demanding than they are technically demanding. I think some of it comes down to the weirdness that results when anyone tries to extract the Russian/presumably-Vaganova approach and drop it into another context.
Vaganova proper is an eight-year program that builds slowly, and I think often when we get a Russian-style class in a context that isn’t Vaganova-specific, we get the equivalent of, like, a second- or third-year class … kind of a yawn-fest technically speaking, but physically speaking an arduous death march of the kind that would be useful if we encountered it day after day, but perhaps isn’t as useful as an occasional hiccup in the ballet calendar.
In that vein, Rayevskiy’s masterclass in Detroit was both a revelation (also barking mad, but that’s Vaganova for you). IIRC, my childhood teacher owed much of her approach to Vaganova (though she didn’t teach a pure Vaganova syllabus), but even her classes weren’t as demanding as Rayevskiy’s.
Not only was his barre, like, *forever* long, it was both physically and technically challenging (as was the rest of the class). There were definitely parts of the barre that I didn’t have the physical strength and endurance to really do, though I tried my hardest. Very few of us, in fact, completed all of every exercise at barre: one or two of his most advanced pre-pro students (the ones who had been in the program longest) managed everything beautifully; the rest of us suffered along to varying degrees. It was clear that he expected this; that he had assessed us all quite well (even me, who he’d never seen before in his life) and knew quite well what to expect from us and how hard to push.
Honestly, I think if I could take his class even three times a week, I’d be a fecking powerhouse of a dancer in about six months’ time. Sadly, though, Detroit is a six-hour drive from here 😛
The funny part is that BG tends to teach a fairly fast-paced class that doesn’t necessarily offer a great deal of time to focus on just building strength, control, and power. When he does, though, I think they’re his best classes.
well, despite everything I took H’s class last night, and got snapped at for yawning during battements fondus (“Good morning!”), so made a special effort with grandes battements. on demi pointe? why not. as a result I discovered it’s possible to dance hard enough that your ears pop.