I have, once again, rather fallen into the habit of perkily reporting on my ballet is adventures whilst staunchly neglecting one of the other legs of this ostensibly-tripedal blog: the bipolar part.
That said, I suspect that I often do this when I’m struggling. Keeping a stiff upper lip (which, no joke, autocorrupt wanted to parse as “soft, upset lip”) was a central tenet of my upbringing. I am a Yankee of the old school by birth and breeding; we’re supposed to be stoic and taciturn and to solve our problems by regarding them severely from beneath or beetling brows, or what have you.
I think part of me still believes that As Long As I Don’t Say It’s Happening, It’s NOT Happening.
…Which is almost hilariously untrue.
I’ve noticed that I do this to Denis: often he doesn’t hear that I’ve hit a rough patch until either A) I’m on the third or fourth consecutive night with less than six hours of sleep, B) I’m curled up in a ball.on the kitchen floor literally trying to hold myself together when he arrives home from work, C) I’m curled up as in B whilst freaking out about A, or D) I melt down completely, hit full-on fight/flight mode, and proceed to get in a fight with with the oven or the cupboard door or some other highly-threatening inanimate object.
I suppose, dear readers, that I do this to you as well. And that I have been.
As a whole Burning Man was great this year — but there was also a thing that happened which cut too close to old wounds and very much re-awakened the part of of me that is aggressively hypervigilant. This has made coping with the transition back to my normal routine immensely difficult.
Couple that with a couple of extremely-stressful situations at home, add a shot of hormonal chaos and the inevitable weirdness that crops up as the seasons change, and everything has gone right to Helena Handbasket (she’s a busy lady, that one).
So I haven’t really slept in several days, and now I’m debating whether I should try to go to 9:00 class or try to sleep. It probably says a great deal about the situation that I’m not so much worried about whether or not I can dance — in my current state, I’ve noticed, I always get a miraculous little hit of energy as I belly up to the barre — but whether or not I can drive.
Part of me considers it surprising that I can lie here and write about this lightly and humorously. It feels like hell. I’m getting through it a few minutes at a time, an hour at a time, by mindfulness: that is, by the practice of reeling my monkey mind in when it starts to go “OH G-D OH G-D I CAN’T LIVE LIKE THIS I JUST CAN’T I AM NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO SLEEP AGAIN ETC” with the knowledge that I don’t and can’t know the future, but I’m here now, and this is, in the famous words of Avenue Q, “…only for now.”
I remind myself that I might still feel feel like this in ten minutes or I might not, but that right here, right now, I can sit with this — with fury or despair or anger or terror or sorrow or wrath — and just experience it without either judging the experience or buying into the idea that it will never never end.
It will and it won’t.
The stream of arising phenomena is unending, and so it shall be until the universe cools or torches itself or we all reach Nirvana or Messiah comes (“… I apologize that I took so long…”)
In the calmer moments, like now, when I’m not actively frothing at the mouth, this is a comforting thing to think about. In the other moments, it’s at least something that lets me hang on until.
Meanwhile, I know that getting back to class on a regular basis will help, which right now feels like a Catch-22 (How can I get to class if I don’t start sleeping? How can I sleep of I don’t make all all my classes*?), but I remind myself: that’s only right now. It will come.
Anyway, I’m finally feeling feeling like I might actually be able to sleep a little. Maybe I’ll make class, maybe I won’t. That’s in the future ,and i can’t live there, but I can live here.
Anyway, there’s always noon class.
Bonne nuit, et bonne chance.
Tonight was my first class back with Company B.
There were only 3 of us, the more advanced members of the class, so he taught to a fairly high standard. (I should say, he always teaches to a high standard, but in this case he also gave us fairly advanced material).
At the beginning of barre, I was worried I wouldn’t be up to hanging with the cool kids, since I’m still fresh back from my Off Season, but once we got into it, I felt fine. My body woke up and remembered that dancing is what it does, and after that everything went fairly smoothly.
I got my left split back today. That’s a huge improvement. I’d been having trouble recovering it after yoinking something in my hip at the July intensive, but a month off seems to have un-yoinked said something. Now the only thing making life difficult is a tight spot in the top of my right quadriceps, but it’s not preventing me from getting that split all the way down, just making it slower getting there. It’ll come.
So that’s another keen reminder of how sometimes it’s good to take some time off, let the body just recover.
In other news, I had developed a weird hait of fouette-ing out of my renverse, and I got that sorted tonight a well. I was, it turns out (har, har) turning (ha!) my renverse into a turn, which, as M. BeastMode reminds us whenever we do renverse in his classes, it patently isn’t. It’s just a fancy way to change the direction of your body, really.
Anyway, if you turn your renverse into a full turn, you wind up doing a crazy kind of fouette thing to face yourself back into the correct direction. That sort of defeats the whole point of the renverse, and while it looks cool, it almost certainly isn’t valid technique.
On the other hand, being able to float through a full rotation in renverse means you have the balance working, so there’s that?
So basically, renverse is a fancy pivot that takes you only halfway around your imaginary box (generally from one corner to its diagonal opposite) and not a turn. And it looks awesome.
We also drilled down on pas de bourree en tournant, which is one of those steps that, at this level, many of us have just been faking forever with varying degrees of success. CB pointed out that it’s helpful to think of the en tournant part as quarter-half-half, and mentioned that even our resident Russian-trained-in-actual-Russia ballerina (and, yes, I’m using that term in the technical sense) says you often wind up having to fudge it a little. So you might go quarter-half-half and then sort of pivot subtly in sus-sous, or whatevs.
Anyway, excepting one instance of my prodigious ability to do the should-be-impossibly-wrong turn, my turns were good today, as were most other things once my body woke up. So that was good.
I love Company B’s class, because he tends to give a slightly slower class (possibly because he legitimately has a full 90 minutes, whereas my other classes are nominally 75 minutes long, but generally run closer to 90 anyway), which allows more time to absorb the finicky little details.
Which is good, because finicky little details are, to some extent, the heart and soul of ballet, though of course they mean nothing if the technique underpinning them isn’t there. They are, however, what puts the finish on.
So that was class tonight.
I apologize for my lack of diacritical marks, by the way.I’m trying out a new Bluetooth keyboard and am too tired this evening to go back and add them after the fact. I suppose I could’ve just used HTML mode on this editor, but I didn’t think of it ’til just now.
Choreography Study Group tomorrow, Advanced Class on Saturdau, teaching on Sunday, back to Modern on Monday now that my car is back from its maintenance visit.
Also, I really quite love this little keyboard, even if I keep mistyping “keyboard” in various creative ways.
First, I’d like to point out that while “Look at noun go!” is idiomatic, it still sounds hella awkward to my ear in this context. I really want to say, “Watch those goalposts go!” but that doesn’t have the same cultural sense. Maybe I should’ve written: “Those goalposts — look at ’em go!” Or … well. Whatevs.
Anyway, today marked my first Killer Class since before I departed for Burning Man, and while it was predictably a slog because, while well-rested, I am also not quite on form(1), it was also objectively a pretty good class.
(1) I should probably note that I’m really talking about a difference in fitness similar to that in cycling, in which “Fit” and “Racing Fit” are very discrete states.
That being said, I felt like I got through pretty well. Well enough, in fact, that I finished class aware that, once again, the goalposts are on the move.
I took it easy and, for the most part, kept my extensions relatively low today — but I also realized that no longer means working at 45 degrees. 90 degrees is sufficiently comfortable avant and à la seconde to qualify; arrière it’s pretty much the default. It didn’t feel like any trouble to work an from an extension avant or arrière through fondu coupé through développée à la seconde just above 90.
A little of this is a question of strength, but mostly it’s a question of knowing how to use my body in a way that, not too long ago, I didn’t. That, in turn, I owe to really good instruction.
A year ago, I was fighting my own body for higher extensions, and it was largely a question of not knowing how to get there. I knew I was supposed to keep my hips level and that the working leg should be lifted from behind by the same muscles responsible for turnout; I just didn’t actually know how to use my body so those things would happen reliably. Thus, I tended to devolve upon using my quads to lift my working leg.
Anyway, using the right set of muscles has become, essentially, automatic. I no longer battle physics and physiology every single time I work in extension. Pretty cool stuff.
Likewise, even though I was feeling a bit draggy by the time we got there, petit allegro was better than it had any business being. We did:
Echappée, changement, changement, soubresaut,
Echappée, changement, changement, soubresaut,
Glissade avant, glissade arriére, glissade a côte changée, glissade a côte changée,
Echapée, echapée, entrechat quatre, entrechat quatre.
And:
Glissade, jeté, temps levée, temps levée
Glissade, jeté, temps levée, temps levée
Balloté, balloté, balloté, fouetté(2)
Cut under to sous-sous,
Tombé, pas de bourrée,
Glissade, assemblée.
(2)Technically, this was sauté fouetté.
These aren’t difficult combinations (though maybe Me From One Year Ago might disagree?), but both offer ample opportunity for leg-tangling (also know as pas de bébé girafe, a subset of the extensive group known collectively as pas de problème … yes, that’s a pun).
In neither case did I fumble into Baby Giraffe Mode (even though I kept forgetting that the ballotés were coming and doing that thing where you think, “Oh, yeah!” and then do the first too one fast to make up for lost time.
This all compares favorably to where I was a year ago, or six months ago, or probably even one month ago. I just tend to forget, when I’m in class basically every day, that I’m actually making progress.
That said, this habit of checking in with myself and making progress-based comparisons also made it abundantly clear that I’ll need to get my core back together again, since I spent way too much time working swaybacked.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I’m pretty much back in the swing of things, ballet-wise, though still decompressing otherwise.
Sep 13
This gallery contains 9 photos.
I’m not afraid of heights per se, but standing high above the ground on an unstable surface can certainly be a workout for the adrenal system. Especially when you’re standing on a surface made from steel punched with little cut-outs that lead to a kind of flexing beneath your feet as the wind blows up […]
Since returning home from That Thing In The Desert, I’ve been playing catch-up and haven’t been able to resume my normal schedule because reasons, so my apologies for radio silence over here.
Anyway.
Just made a quick shopping list, read it to myself, and am feeling vaguely appalled because it reads:
+bread
+cucumbers
+hummus
I feel like I should put bacon (the ultra-processed kind, not the free-range artisan-crafted kind) or hot dogs on there just to de-hippify it a little.
Not that there’s anything wrong with hippies; it takes all kinds. But, wow.
We’re out in the dust, doing all that setup jazz.
For me, right now, this mostly translates to taking care of the domestic end of things: setting up our home for the next two weeks, making sure people get fed, and so forth. This also leaves some time for reading and writing, both of which are happening.
Once our other two camp leads are settled in, of course, the real push to build a village in a couple of days will take off.
Right now, we’re just an assorted grouping of campers, vans, and storage trailers (we bought two this year); by Monday, we’ll be a cohesive mini-community of 35, home to a dance space with barre, a bar with dance space, a public lounge, a camp kitchen and lounge, and (assuming all goes well) our own aerial observation deck.
For the moment, though, I’m enjoying the time to myself, in a space that I’ve (mostly) organized according to the way I work, which occasional forays to dance in the dust.
I miss the structure of class and the rhythm of my normal week (though perhaps not the breakneck intensity to which I’ve consigned myself by tackling both aerials and dance at the same time), but I can make my own structure until the Burn officially begins, at which point there will be enough scheduled technical dance classes to comprise another one-week dance intensive.
I’ll be mostly offline for the next two weeks — after the gates open, in fact, getting online will quickly become impossible.
As such, here are a couple of pictures is one picture because WP’s Android app is being dumb. Inevitably, during the actual Burn week, I’ll mostly fail to take pictures. I’m fine with that. Build week is actually my favorite part, and I’m okay with the momentary and serendipitous things that happen during Burn week being just that — momentary.
I've been decorating (hooray for liquid chalk).
So I’m off for now. I might get around to posting again before I return to the Default World, but I might not.
So, until then, à bientôt, mes amis.
I realized this morning that the Acro 2/Killer Class turnaround is going to be tough.
I was definitely pretty stiff this morning at the start of barre — the kind of stiff you feel when you’ve spent the previous day helping a friend rearrange some furniture or something.
My Achilles’ tendons took longer to loosen up than my hip flexors — my calves in general felt like bricks through almost the whole barre. They did finally loosen up for fondu, heh.
My analysis? Moar stretching after Acro 2! And moar warm-up time before Killer Class. I ran way late this morning; squeaked in under the wire — 3 minutes left before the start of class. Definitely did not get a chance to get get the blood flowing! (FWIW, my usual routine, currently, it’s it’s just passé-par-terre followed by attitude swings and, if time allows, a light stretch for the calves.If I’m really, really early, I tend to pace around the studio, looking like I’m ready to go for a jog in mid-December.
Anyway, things were mixed today: you know that thing where you scare the crap out of of yourself by actually doing good turns, and then panic on the second side? That was me all all the way.
I’ll take that, though, because adagio was good and our choose-your-own-adventure grand allegro started out a little rough but then magically clicked on the second run.
Every now and then, I forget to panic when doing saut-de-chat, and then I actually do them well. That happened today: first run, I did:
Zig: tombé, pas de bourré, glissade, pas de chat;
Zag: tombé, pas de bourré, glissade, pas de chat Italien
… And the landing on the Gatto was a bit abrupt.
The second time, I didn’t even think about it; I was just focused on getting more travel in my glissade — and for some reason I finished with a saut de chat that felt light, quick, and free.
Looking back, I think it was at this same time last year that I despaired of ever achieving lightness (except in my pas de chat, which, oddly, has always been light) and quickness. Now they happen sometimes as of by magic in completely unexpected places.
All of the trip prep is now done. If we’ve missed anything, we’ll either have to live without it or pick up a replacement in Nevada.
In five hours we’ll be off and running.
Yeah, I’m not usually up making posts at this time of night, but this’ll be quick.
A friend of ours, EP, who is well over 6 feet tall came to acro tonight, and I got to stand on his shoulders.
I’m forced to admit that this was, in fact, a little bit scary — but also amazing! This has been one exhausting day, and I almost begged off on acro … So glad I didn’t!
By nature, I’m a pusher. I come back from illness or injury and push myself to jump right back in where I was when I left off.
That’s not always the best strategy, and I’m learning to listen to my body a little more; let it tell me when I should back off a bit.
Today was one of those days: we’ve entered that time of year in which the late-summer/early-autumn molds and pollens start kicking my butt, and the simple act of breathing becomes depressingly complicated.
I also woke up feeling yesterday’s lyra work a little — my mount involves using my adductors and hamstrings under pretty heavy load, and it just never really lets up after that.
Because the posterior chain is just that — a chain — the lyra work basically just left my legs tight from the bottom to the top (or, ahem, from the bottom to my bottom? I just can’t even today…). Seriously; even my Achilles’ tendons have essentially no give today, and my Achilles’ tendons are surprisingly awesome most of the time (at least, it surprises me: it’s counter-intuitive, since they’re SO FREAKING WIDE).
As a result, I took my time working into my turnout, working into my plié. I tried to keep my movements small and soft and let the legs warm up on their own schedule.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this worked pretty darned well. By the time we got to the warm-up jumps, I had quite a lot of sproing happening: powerful lift-off working through the feet; soft, quiet landings rolling back down into a cushy plié.
Prior to that, we did some really nice work through balloné more or less à terre — the same motion as the usual, but with the toe of the working leg brushing across the ground — and in pique-fouetté (proud to say that if we had been a band of hunter-gatherers, we would have feasted on mammoths!*) and arabesque turns (from fourth and fifth, one after the other).
*How I envision this actually going down IRL:
Step 1: Mammoth be napping in the fancy grass. Via my imagination and Microsoft Paint.
Step 2: Time for grand allegro! (Paul Jamin, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)
So, anyway, working into my body poco a poco worked really well today.
This is something I’ll have to keep in mind.
The next three days will be a flurry of packing, dancing, and cleaning, so I may or may not do much writing here. As such, fear not, because…
From Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, via teh G00gelz, obvs.
YouTube: BOSU Balance Series
danseur ignoble 