This year has been a whirlwind.

I don’t want to delve too deeply into family stuff, but we’ve been through some major transitions with my stepdad, and it’s been a difficult process with a couple of major setbacks. Things seem to be on the right path, now, and it feels like there’s starting to be breathing space again.

A few weeks ago, Merkah (my lovely catto) was diagnosed with an insulinoma, a cancer that’s vanishingly rare in cats (it’s more common in dogs, though still fairly rare, in dogs). At the moment he’s responding well to palliative treatment, and our first meeting with his oncologist offered some encouraging results. It’s early days, still, so we’ll see what happens, but the main thing is that he’s got good quality of life right now. I’ll probably write a bit more about that in another post, assuming I actually get my butt in gear and do some more regular posting some time soon.

Between these two huge things and the vagaries of that #DancerLife, my bandwidth has been pretty much tapped out for a long time. I keep thinking, “I could write about this,” and then not doing it. And now it’s July and I basically haven’t posted in six months.

Anyway, things have now calmed down enough that I’ve got a little bandwidth available, so here I am. I make no promises of regular posts, but I’m not giving up the … ghost? bhlost? bloghost? … just yet.

Sunday, I’m off to Pilobolus’ summer intensive for the week. I’m really looking forward to that, since my life has a dancer has been a bit all over the place for the past couple of months.

I’m still considering the path forward, career-wise. I’ve enjoyed the challenge of working in a different dance idiom than the one in which I’ve taken most of my training, but I still miss working in a ballet company. Likewise, my current company’s rehearsals have shifted to mostly taking place in NYC, which means a 3 to 3.5-hour commute twice on each rehearsal day.

I made a decision in the spring to stick it out for another season with SPDC and see what happens, but also (given that we’ve been rehearsing on a part-time, project-based schedule) to look for chances to guest with local ballet companies and/or figure out how to start working more seriously on some of my own projects.

I’m not a dancer who would rather be a choreographer: I’m still a dancer who very much wants to dance and feels comfortable taking direction. That said, there are pieces I do want to create and, like, they’re not going to create themselves?

Teaching continues to be the most stable part of my work life, and I’ve come to really enjoy working with my students at Danceworks.

Teaching in a commercial dance setting, even as strictly a ballet teacher, is a very different vibe from teaching in a ballet-focused program — like, you get a different set of students, and they’re largely used to coming at dance from the opposite approach to the kind of students who self-select into ballet programs.

I found this challenging at first, because as a ballet nerd, I’m intrinsically motivated by ballet itself: doing six million tendus, carefully listening to my deep rotators, and honing my conditional ecarte are very much my jam.

Some of my current students are right there with me, but a lot of them aren’t, and that’s okay. They want to get to the “good stuff” faster — that is, center, terre-a-terre, allegro, and learning choreography.

A lot of them want to try difficult steps that, really, in terms of pure ballet technique, they’re not entirely ready to learn.

At first, I balked hard at the idea of throwing difficult steps at these kids. Like, everything in my own training screams “NOOOOO!” at the very idea, and not just because Ballet Is Ballet And We’ve Always Done It This Way[1], but because we don’t want to teach ineffective motor patterns (AKA “bad habits”) that our students later have to un-learn.

Then I got annoyed, thought, “Fine, I’ll give them some really hard steps and see how they like it” and … erm … actually they liked it, and it worked.

Which reminded me that, although ballet training is crafted from the inside out and founded upon the idea of building bigger skills by working to perfect the small ones, dance can also be approached from the outside in: try a big step, keep what works, discard what doesn’t.

Like: slosh and refine[2].

Which, I guess, is also a good reminder that, when it comes to dipping a toe into the waters of dance-making in a more serious sense, I can probably slosh and refine there, too.

In fact, part of the reason that I love my students is that I’ve learned so much from them.

One of the things I’ve learned is that it’s okay to let your approach to important things evolve.

And that brings me to my last thought, for now.

When I started writing this blog, it was as a young adult returning to dance — an adult student writing for my fellow adult students.

At the time, my aspirations to a professional career were still unspoken, because honestly I didn’t really think they’d come to fruition.

Then they did.

I still feel an immense affinity for my fellow adult students. I still feel that I belong as much to the community of adult students as that of professional dancers (and that there’s no reason that the overlap of those Venn diagrams should be so small).

As such, I’m trying to figure out where to focus this blog, right now.

Also I’m doing most of my class notes over on Mastodon, so I’m trying to figure out how to import those, since I think they’re a useful part of this blog.

More soon, I hope. Ideally with pictures.

It’s been a long road, but it looks like there’s daylight ahead.

1. There’s something to be said for the Great Tradition, but Sainte Agrippina herself was an innovator who actively broke with the traditional approach to teaching ballet, and as both artists and technicians we owe so much to the innovations of companies like The Australian Ballet, which have looked at the biomechanics of ballet technique and said, “Yo, dawg, if we do it this way instead of that way, we won’t just stil be able to walkwhen we’re 50, we’ll still be able to dance.”
   
2. Not that we don’t do our share of sloshing and refining even in the strictest ballet setting — we just build a framework for the slosh first, so we don’t have to refine as much later on. Someone has probably executed a perfect en dehors turn from fifth on the very first try, but most of us have to work on most things.