Swan Lake tomorrow. What earworm soundtrack does my brain provide in eager anticipation?
Nutcracker. What else?
Author Archives: asher
That Just Happened
Scene from advanced class.
We’re preparing for terre-a-terre. JP counts us up and says, “There’s, what, nine of you? So maybe five and four.”
We start arranging ourselves.
From somewhere in the pack, a timid voice pipes up, “Um, there’s ten of us.”
JP pauses for a sec, then says, “Nine, ten, whatever. I can only count to eight, anyway.”
❤
PS: notes forthcoming, but life craziness had intervened. They're on my tablet.
Also, Swan Lake was awesome. Awful lot of, "OMG, that's my teacher!" (Or classmate. Or friend. Or all three.)
Wednesday Class: Perception versus, um, Perception?
I had a good class today, for the most part — my turnouts were turnt, port de bras ported, etc. For once, I managed not to rack up the greatest number of “support your elbow” reminders in class (instead, for me, today was all about “Lift out of the hips sockets!”).
Adage felt shockingly solid. Somehow, somewhere along the line, I’ve more or less completely stopped sucking at adagio? Part of it was definitely the music. No idea what it was, but it was beautiful, and I was like, “Ohhh yeah, feeling this music, w00t,” and not all like, “OMG OMG I HAVE TO GET MY LEG UP NOW AND NOT FALL DOWN OMFG. OMG NOW I HAVE TO ROND EN L’AIR. CRAP, WHICH ONE IS THIRD ARABESQUE??!!! O NOES O NOES.”
(Some of that, BTW, was simply the effect of finally being able to feel confident about remembering which arabesque was which. It’s amazing how much just NOT HAVING TO THINK helps with arabesques.)
Turns terre-a-terre were just like, “Doubles, sure, why not?” on the first pass. Like, doubles happening without even thinking about it. Just: Ohai, that was a double! Ohai, that one, too! On the second pass, I was busy thinking about a transition detail (a part that went tombe-pas de bourée-fondue arabesque-to-relevé, failli through, turn en dehors, pivot with rond de jambe) and threw out a mix of singles and doubles, but that was okay.
By the time we got started with jumps, though, I was feeling tired (in fact, I already felt a little cooked after grand battement). I made it through the warm-up jumps and the first petit allegro combination (in fact, that one went shockingly well in terms of remembering what was supposed to happen — it was just, like, there when I needed it, pas de basque and everything).
But then we got to our last combination, which was basically medium allegro, and it was jsut like … bleh.
My assemblés sucked. I felt slow and heavy and imprecise. Beats happened (more or less by divine intervention, as far as I can tell), as did, by some miracle, this jeté-coupé-balonné thing that I didn’t think I even had. Beyond that, though, the whole combination felt, I don’t know, dumpy. By which I mean, more or less what I think a dump truck would feel like if it tried to do medium allegro.
After class, though, I said something to Ms. B about feeling way out of shape, and she replied, “Well, you didn’t look out of shape!”
So, basically, my perception was that I was a gigantic mess by the end. Hers, on the other hand, seemed rather otherwise.
I guess this says a lot about how often we only see the worst in ourselves.
And then, this was another of those classes that, looking back, I realize I couldn’t have done a year ago. Not like I did today. I would have made it through, but it would’ve been harder, and I wouldn’t have danced as well.
Bit by bit, we move forward.
Anyway, that’s it for now. No class with BW tomorrow because Swan Lake is happening. I’m going to see it on Saturday. Can’t wait!
Things Left Unsaid
A long time ago, my Step-Dad said to me, “You won’t be able to keep eating like that when you get older.”
At the time, it pissed me off. I was like, What does he know? Who is he to tell me how I can and can’t eat?
And, in point of fact, there were a lot of things he didn’t know — which, if we’re really honest with ourselves, is pretty normal even for parents who live with their kids, and my Step-Dad wasn’t living with us yet at the time (in fact, he wasn’t even officially my Step-Dad yet, though he’d been in my life for several years by then). Kids are independent beings — the more so they older they get — and while it’s important to know the important stuff, it’s impossible to know all the stuff.
Anyway.
If I remember correctly, I was working my way through an entire stack of Saltine crackers, rabbit- (or possibly typewriter-)style: gnawing my way horizontally across the cracker, then back the other way, until each cracker was gone.
Basically that’s what I lived on during the day — Saltines, ramen noodles, Chunky soup, sometimes hot dogs, the occasional grilled cheese sandwich(1).
- True story: it took me until I was like 18 to figure out that if you put butter in the pan or on the outside of the bread, your grilled cheese sandwich will taste a bazillion times better. I persisted in not understanding this even though I regularly ordered clam rolls or hot dogs at Friendly’s largely because I loved what they did with the buns. Apparently, I imagined that this was some kind of unknowable Restaurant Magic. Seriously, childhood self: WTF?
I mean this, by the way, more or less literally. This was during a long stretch (read: my entire life) during which I found it nearly impossible to fall asleep before 2 AM and thus rarely woke up with enough time to eat breakfast; during which, to compound matters, I found most of the offerings of my school’s cafeteria singularly inedible (okay: in fact, I had never found school cafeteria food at all edible). Had it not been for the deli cart that sold little sandwiches on Kaiser rolls, I would have eaten literally nothing during any given school day.
So, basically, I would come home and shove Saltines (or ramen, or Chunky soup, or hot dogs, or… and almost always or rather than and, by the way) into my face because I was more or less starving. But, of course, my Step-Dad didn’t know that. He came from a world in which kids eat breakfast at home and lunch at school and maybe a snack in the afternoon. He had no way of knowing that one of those things wasn’t happening at all and the other was happening, but inadequately.
And I had no way of explaining any of this, because it was all just normal to me. I didn’t think there was anything weird about the fact that I never managed to fall asleep before 2 AM, for example — that’s just how it had always been. Your own normal is your own normal, and as a kid it’s not always easy to tell when your normal, like, maybe isn’t.
Normal, that is. It’s still yours.
Anyway. I digress.
So, basically my immediate response, because I’m a hot-headed little prick and frankly it tends to be my go-to, was anger. I did not welcome what felt like unfair and undue criticism from someone who still, at the time, seemed like an interloper(2).
- This wasn’t, by the way, his fault: I think he did a very reasonable job, under the circumstances, trying to integrate into a family in which it is both fair and actually pretty accurate to say that the kids had more or less been raised by cats up until then. In case you’re wondering, cats don’t do a great job teaching you how to human. I love cats, but in some ways they make lousy humans. Anyway, my sister and I weren’t having any of it.
In fact, all I heard was unwelcome criticism. I didn’t hear the part that went unsaid: that this guy, in fact, actually cared about me.
The content of the message, of course, is debatable in 2016, in a world in which we’re beginning to see the question of body diversity very differently than we did when I was 12 or what have you … though I suppose a steady diet of Saltine crackers is probably less than ideal from a nutritional perspective, at any rate.
Even in the last few years, we’ve really begun to rethink the way we approach nutritional issues with kids (if not, sadly, so much with adults). We recognize that, in a world already rife with soul-destroying messages about size and weight, we have to be really thoughtful about how we talk to them about food and body size and everything in that whole arena.
So surely there could’ve been a more body-positive way to have that conversation — one with a little more “Hey, Saltines are great, but you could probably use some hummus or something to go with them so you don’t get scurvy, because scurvy is going to make gymnastics/skiing/horsebackriding/dancing pretty hard,” and a little less, “Whoa, there, buddy — you’ve gotta learn to slow down, or you’re going to get fat when you’re older,” with all its unspoken implications about the validity of fat bodies.
But, at the end of the day, cultural baggage notwithstanding, there was that other, more important message — the one that’s so hard to hear, so much of the time, when the people who love us offer what they very sincerely intend as constructive criticism.
It’s the message that goes, “Hey, I want you to be healthy and happy, because I care about you, and I want you to avoid these pitfalls that I’ve fallen into myself.”
~
Things have changed a lot in the intervening years. My Dad died when I had just turned eighteen. My Step-Dad was an unexpected ally: he understood my hurt, my anger, and why I wandered around wearing my Dad’s Air Force jacket all the time. My Mom and Step-Dad married when I was nineteen (like so many other important events in my life, including my own birth, that involved a major blizzard: does anyone wonder why I scheduled my own wedding for May?). My sister and my Step-Dad reached a detente, then an accord.
I realized, most importantly, that my Step-Dad makes my Mom happy, and that they work well together, and that, in the long run, that’s what matters.
We are still a family that talks in ellipses; a family in which so much is left unsaid. After a while, you learn to kind of hear between the lines. You figure out that, sometimes, “Hey, you should put something warmer on,” really means, “I love you; don’t get frostbite.” That, sometimes, the Yankee stiff upper lip makes it hard to pronounce the words.
Not to say that everything’s perfect now. On our trip to Marco Island, I was kvetching about my eternal nasal congestion and how it makes sleeping difficult, and Step-Dad piped in with, “Especially when you get older, you should make sure to get checked for sleep apnea.”
From somewhere in the depths of my psyche, my preteen self awoke and bristled and almost said something like, “OMG DAD SRSLY?!!!”
And then I took a breath and realized that I was missing, once again, the thing that went unsaid: “Hey, I’ve had a couple of friends who’ve really suffered with this thing. I care about you, I worry about you, I don’t want you to have to go through that.”
I’m not sure if I gracefully said, “Oh, thanks, yeah, good idea, I will.” I think I said something more like, “Oh, yeah, I know a couple people with sleep apnea, it sucks.” I don’t actually remember, because I was really kind of busy being annoyed at myself for being annoyed in the first place.
But I hope that, whatever words made it out of my mouth, that my Step-Dad heard the things I left unsaid.
That he heard, “Thank you. I love you, too. That means a lot.”
In Which Driving Is Surprisingly Exhausting
I took a day off today — perhaps imprudently, perhaps not. I am an intensely driven person whose drive occasionally gives way to sheer, unrepentant laziness.
Fortunately, that rarely lasts more than one day. Also, I suspect it may simply be the fatigue that visits itself upon me from time to time attempting to masquerade under a different name: if I call it laziness, I can pretend it’s a choice up until it really cripples me. Maybe taking the rest before it reaches that point is a better plan?
After all, sacrificing one day in order to save four or five makes sense to me. It’s a more efficient way to reach what I’m driving at.
That’s not what I’m talking about when I say that driving is exhausting, by the way — I mean sitting in the car for a day and a half, most of it at the wheel.
They(1) say that the brain uses about 25% of the energy one takes in just doing its job. Given the relentless focus required to drive more than a thousand miles amongst apparently homi-and suicidal weekend travelers, I don’t doubt it. Seven hours behind the wheel makes me about seven times as tired as seven hours in the studio.
Anyway, today I woke up at 8:45 AM (All by myself! No alarm clock needed!), briefly considered hitting up Modern class, then essentially said, “Ah, frack it all,” and settled down to read.
This concerns me slightly, as if today’s scheduled class was ballet, I would have gone. As such, I’m questioning whether I shouldn’t just re-devote Mondays to ballet, which in turn makes me feel partly like a quitter and partly like perhaps re-narrowing my focus won’t kill me. At the end of the day, Modern is great, but Ballet is the thing that sets my hair on fire. Right now, budgetary constraints force me to choose between them. It’s not an easy choice.
I opted not to invade the Monday morning ballet class for similar reasons — I guess it smacked of opting for the thing that you really want instead of the things you want less (Modern, rest) but which are good for you. Apparently my Inner Virtue Ethicist mistook ballet class for the Easy Way, and since said IVE values doing what is hard, perhaps it’s confused. I should remind it that ballet is quite hard enough, thank you very much.
In fact, now that I’m analyzing it to death, my inner conflict about this morning’s class, and the resulting decision, seems rather dumb. When ballet is the Thing You Do, how can it ever be wrong to go to class? But perhaps a rest day was, in fact, in order. The cat certainly approved.
I plan to try Friday class instead, at the beastly hour of 9 AM, since this week I’ll have today and tomorrow as rest days.
Tonight we’re taking the truck up to Elizabethtown, so evening class isn’t an option.
In the long run, there’s a part of me that feels like it’s foolish to give up a ballet class once a week to take modern once a week. It’s difficult to make much progress on such a constricted schedule; meanwhile, I’m going like gangbusters in terms of ballet progress.
I feel like there’s a decision pending that I don’t want to make because it shouldn’t have to be an either/or thing, but will remain so until we get our finances really hammered out. I suppose I’ll talk to BB about about it on Wednesday.
In other news, I just learned that a piece I submitted to a scholarly(2) anthology of autobiographical essays by queer athletes has been accepted! So that, at any rate, is quite exciting.
- Whoever “they” are (weasel words!). Can’t recall who exactly and can’t be bothered to look it up right now; laziness pervades.
- I kid you not, Autocorrupt suggested “sparkly” in place of “scholarly.” Though, to be fair, I for one am at least as sparkly as I am scholarly.
Arabesques Made Simple*
*Unless you’re following an RAD syllabus, in which case, ignore this completely.
Today, M r. C gave us a brilliant shorthand for keeping arabesques sorted by name. None of this “same arm/leg vs opposite arm/leg” confusion, just clarity.
I’m listing them here in the following format: “Arms; legs.”
- Open to audience; open to audience
- Closed to audience; open to audience
- Open to audience; closed to audience
- Closed to audience; closed to audience
Obviously, this doesn’t tell you what what to do with your head, but I don’t find that difficult to remember. I just get the names of the arabesques confused, so up until now I’ve just tried really hard to make sure that I memorize the arabesques visually, because I haven’t reliably been able to remember which is which verbally (except first arabesque).
Anyway, I think this is brilliant, and I hope it helps you as as much as it helps me.
Long-Necked Wading Birds of Southwestern Florida
Florida’s Gulf Coast is home to numerous bird species, and the southwestern tip of the state is no exception.
An excursion by boat through the mangroves at the edge of the everglades reveals many species of long-necked wading birds.
For example:
The Roseate Spoonbill, a year-round resident that, like the pink flamingo, takes its color from small crustaceans in its diet.
The great white egret, an elegant shoreline bird that often appears as a solitary, ghostly figure in the marsh.
And whatever the hell this thing is.
The final specimen in today’s brief collection of wading birds may be the Lesser Dancing Nincompoop, a migratory fowl often found in non-linear disarray.
The Lesser Dancing Nincompoop spends most of its time in the American Southern Northern Eastern Midwest, but regularly ranges as far north as Chicago, Illinois, as far west as Nevada, and as far south as southwestern Florida.
Interestingly, though it is a non-native species introduced from the southern New England coastal corridor, it has not proven invasive. It has adapted reasonably well to life in the interior, though ornithologists suspect that its migratory habits reflect a yearning for salt water, open skies, and critical dietary elements like really good bagels and legit New York-style pizza.
Ornithologists also suspect that, like the Spoonbill and the flamingo, its color may be dietary in origin, and that it derives its pasty hue from the exoskeleton of one of its preferred prey species, the Lesser North American Baguette (a distant relative of the European variety endemic to France).
PS: These shots were all taken on a really cool 2-hour Everglades Eco-Tours boat tour this morning. We had a great time and learned a lot 🙂
Monday Class: Vaganova Vacation Edition
Last time I came to Marco Island, I didn’t have a real driver’s license, so I couldn’t just dash off to ballet class in Naples by myself.
This time, I do have one, so I decided check out the local options and find a place to take class — and then DD and Mom decided to come with me anyway so so they could go shopping 😀
This morning’s class at Naples Ballet was quite good. Mr. C, who teaches a Vaganova programme, focused on some of the same things BW went over on Thursday and explained some of the bits that I have still not mastered. It helps to do the same steps with different teachers, as each can illuminate something you didn’t catch in another’s class.
We did a lovely combination with an Arabesque turn, which was good, because I don’t think I’ve done one of those since … July? Also grand jeté, Bournonville jeté, entrelacé, and saut de chat.
We also did turns from second, which was fun. We do those very rarely at home.
Also a lot of correcting of my arms, which are generally the part of me that needs the most work.
It wasn’t my best class ever, but wasn’t my worst ever, either, so I felt pretty satisfied. I’ll be going back definitely for Friday class and possibly for Wednesday class.
After, we ate lunch and then went swimming without first waiting an hour(1). Mom and I swam in the Gulf for a while, then joined Denis in the pool until a thunderstorm chased us out.
- Presumably, that’s what angered Poseidon and/or Zeus, hence the storm that I’m now watching from my veranda.
I love the way rainstorms over open water obscure the horizon until it disappears. The world feels at once intimate and limitless, as if another world might lie just beyond the point at which things blend.
From the balcony/a million drops of rain/obscure the land’s end.
Wednesday Class: How I Make Decisions
We have a new lyra teacher on Tuesday evenings, and she’s lovely and gives a great class — but I’ve decided that I’m going to bow out of that class, because Ballet.
Basically, there’s too much in that class that trains the muscles I’m trying to de-train a bit (hello, quads; greetings, hip abductors), and the result is that Wednesday morning is a struggle to counteract those effects, which means it’s a less-effective class than it should be (qv: today my left split was laaaaame and my turnout was, by my standard, only meh).
Wednesday is legitimately the hardest class in my week, much of the time, and I want to be fully able to take advantage of it.
Once upon a time, I used to ride my bike a lot more. I cut back on that for similar reasons — I am constitutionally unable to refrain from stomping up hills, destroying my turnout all the way, so I simply ride less.
Dancing has made it easier to decide what to do and what not to do. It feels akin to religious conviction: when conviction is very strong, the decision to live by the tenets of one’s faith is not as difficult as it might otherwise be.
So this is weird, in that now and then I realize I’m sacrificing things on the altar of ballet — but also not weird, in that deciding what to do and what not to do has never been simpler.
Basically, this flowchart governs my entire life (photo by Amy Merrick).
I kind of wish I’d figured this out as a kid. So much of my life has been needlessly complicated.
On the other hand, I had some amazing experiences, and it’s really awesome to have all these other interests in my pocket in case I ever mysteriously tire of dancing.
Class this morning was also complicated by the fact that mold-and-ragweed season has descended upon us, bringing with it asthma and pleural pain. I had to take my inhaler before class this morning, so things were harder than they should have been. I’m still having issues, so I’m taking the night off.
Basically, taking the inhaler before class is rather like taking a nice hit of cocaïne before running wind sprints, only cocaïne is better at turning off the Governor in your brain that makes you slow down before your heart explodes. Basically, you tell your body, “Okay, fondu now, and DO IT RIGHT,” and the governor sticks its fingers in your body’s ears and says, “Don’t listen to him; he’s a putz,” and your body is is like AAAAUGHHH DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO and half-arses its way through everything.
I finally started to assemble my proverbial waterfowls in a linear array during the adage at centre (because by then the initial kick-in-pants offered by the inhaler was wearing off).
Ironically, perhaps, I did better in petit allegro than in just about anything else, though I had to think entirely too hard about the entrechat trois for some reason at first (possibly because we generally do cinq?). It was still rather an uphill struggle, though.
Tomorrow night, I plan to do BW’s class, after which will be heading out for Marco Island early Friday morning. I’m ambivalent about the trip — I know I’ll enjoy it, but I’m not in love with the idea of taking off again just as I’m getting back into the swing of things.
On the other hand, this trip should be a lot more relaxing, and when I come back my life is is like SwanLakePilibolusShowPilobolusClassWendyWhelanTalkMovingCollectiveNutcrackerWinterShowcase, and that’s just the part that isn’t ballet and modern classes.
I’ve also involved myself in the parents’ and adult students’ group at the ballet school, which is pretty exciting. BB and I have sort of become the de facto adult program delegates, which is no big surprise, since we’re basically always at the school anyway.
Anyway, I think that when I come back from Florida, I’m going to switch to Flexibility & Mobility on Tuesday nights.
In other news, I cheated on my favorite shoes by wearing my white stretch canvas ones, and I’m forced to admit that I quite like them. Too soon for a full review, though.
danseur ignoble 