I was lucky enough to grow up in the land of Pilobilus, so I first encountered modern dance (and a pretty innovative form, at that) as a little kid.
My only real experience with Modern dance as a dancer, however, took the form of two years in high school during which I took modern as a non-major at my arts magnet. I enjoyed it, but at the time I was taking a veritable pharmacopia of drugs for bipolar, which was, to say the least, discouraging.
Since then, the first two years (have I missed my own danciversary, you guys?! OMG, I need to check…) of my return to dance have been entirely devoted to ballet.
I’ve waffled about adding modern into the mix: although I always seem to be kind of a generalist in life, some inner part of me wants to be a specialist — no, not even just a specialist, but a purist.
Sometimes, though, life shoves shoves you off the board while you’re dithering about which dive to try.
Hm. I just realized that I need to update my system for abbreviating dance teachers — there’s already a Ms. T and a Ms. B, which accounts for all of my modern teacher’s initials, and somehow I can’t bring myself to call her Ms. TB!
So we’ll call her “Modern T.”
Modern T is the founder of our local professional/semi-professional modern company, Moving Collective, a beautiful dancer, and (as I’ve discovered today) an excellent teacher. She also often takes Hard Mode Ballet class on Wednesday.
Anyway, a convergence of forces led me to try her modern class today — and I’m forced to admit that I loved it.
This may not be true for everyone, but for me, modern infuses fresh doses of freedom and expression into my dancing.
(Oh, and as several of my fellow dance bloggers have pointed out, bruises! Ha. I should have remembered that from high school ^—^ I now have a giant chain of bruises right down my spine from a somewhat-excessively-enthusiastic roll-downy thing.)
Modern uses the body differently, which is also great — an antidote, in a way, to over-expressing ballet technique (you know: that thing where you focus so hard on the placement of your shoulders that you wind up misplacing them anyway, for example — over-correction).
It’s also quite new to me, so I’m not getting hung up on being RIGHT. I’m just, like, following along, trying to do things, feeling it out. Dancing more, thinking less. It works!
I was worried I wouldn’t be able to manage this class because of my relative paucity of modern experience — it’s an intermediate/advanced class — but the ballet training translates well. Enough of the basic terminology is the same, and ultimately you’re still moving the same body.
The funny part was I’d just read an article criticising the excess of modern pieces (in Australia, anyway) that basically involve dancers rolling around on the floor … And now, having spent the first quarter of the class doing exactly that, I feel like I kind of get it a bit.
Yes, the floor is your friend, but it’s a rigid, unyielding friend — so figuring out how to work with it in that way is a challenge!
I think the criticism is still valid — if we want audiences of people who aren’t all dancers, we need to include elements in performances that you can readily appreciate without having done them (which, by the way, Moving Collective does really, really well!).
But I think that as a dancer-choreographer, it’s very much like stuffing your ballet full of promenades. To a dancer, a promenade is a display of strength, grace, control and technique. To the non-dancers in the audience, though, it often just looks weird.
So that’s something I’ll try to think about as a choreographer, even though as a dancer I really enjoyed the puzzle of figuring out how to use the floor and my body together in new and challenging ways.
Our work at center, meanwhile, is going to seriously help my ballet technique in ways that I totally didn’t expect. Modern T has an amazing gift for imparting lessons in placement.
I also really liked our final combination, which went something like:
Pas de Basque x2
Saut de Basque
Pique arabesque-y thing with circly arms in second, lower heel to plié
Stag leap
Sauté Développé front*
A kind of star-shaped tour jeté to lunge
Sweep
*On first pass, I did this with the “ballet” knob turned all the way up. It was kind of funny.
The music was really cool, and I really enjoyed playing with the feeling of it.
There were only two of us today, so I tried to both maintain spacing (instead of wandering off upstage or what have you) and evoke a feeling that meshed with what my fellow dancer, A., was performing.
If my Friday mornings continue to be free, I might take Friday class with Modern T as well. If not, I’ll definitely be making the most of Modern Mondays.
*Teaching dance, that is.
Today we did acro balancing, during which we built three-high tabletop stacks, played around on the silks in Open Fly – I finally got my dancer’s foot-lock down! — and then buckled down for Dance for Aerials, which is a very cool class, it turns out.
Weird. I had captioned this, but WP ate my caption. Anyway, I’m not in this stack, because the pictures of the stacks I was in have readily-identifiable pictures of younger kids, and I don’t feel right posting them here without parental permission. But you get the idea!
I’m apprentice-teaching this one, and that was awesome. I get to poke people and fix their placement and so forth, and the class as a whole is very receptive and engaged. Eventually I’ll be putting together some combinations for the choreographic bits of the class.
I was really impressed with the students’ natural placement of the torso — for the most part, everyone hit the shoulders-over-hips sweet spot without coaching (unlike me!). Likewise, I didn’t see a single dancer forcing turnout.
The challenge for everyone will be carrying the arms from the back and learning to place the shoulders, arms, elbows, wrists, and hands to maintain a graceful line, but that’s the same challenge everyone works on forever and ever in ballet and Western dance in general.
Fortunately, I’ve had plenty of time to think about that, excellent instruction, and great models, so explaining that part to new dancers is very doable. I got good results, and Ms. A said I did a good job.
I have a bunch of books to read that I’m really looking forward to getting into, and I’m really excited about next week’s class.
One more today.
I think I’ve written about this in the past — and I know that at what point we get to call ourselves dancers is a frequent topic of conversation in the Adult Ballet World.
I think JustScott really sums it up beautifully, here — and we can all use a reminder from time to time.
I remember the first time I was called a dancer. My first year taking ballet as a teenager, my first teacher, Sherrie Siebert, told all of us in the class we were dancers.
Only I didn’t feel like it.
I was surprised to be called dancer by my modern dance teacher at the University of Alabama, Edie Barnes, when I went into her officer to inform her I was going to have to drop her class because I cracked my ribs.
I caught me out of the blue. I felt like I just stumbled around in her class.
And I have a lot of respect for her. She took a mediocre dance program that was modern dance-oriented, and turned it into one of the most respected ballet-led programs in the country.
I remember being in class one day a couple of years ago when Mr. O asked the class full…
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Ha. Forgot to post this the other day. Derp. So, here it is, a few (okay, four) days late.
A fine class today: except for a touch of wheeziness, barre was good; at center, I threw off a beautiful turn from 2nd, then got cocky and kept putting too much power into the rest of the turns in that combination. I backed it off when traveling across the floor in the next combination and things improved vastly.
I have discovered that I get excited about things like renversé and sometimes kind of lose my head. I worked on keeping it together, though my failure to take my Adderall this morning made that a bit more challenging than it might have been.
Our final combination, however, was not challenging, just:
Sissone
Pas de Bourée
…Eight times. The cool part is that you’re constantly switching the direction of your hips and shoulders through each pas de bourré. It’s easy to do, but looks really cool,especially if you can get high Sissones and clear épaulement.
I managed both, and felt quite good about myself, thank you very much.
After class, I took a few minutes to practice entrelacés/tour-jetés, because it would be a travesty not to leap on Leap Day.
Thanks to a second-hand note via Yorksranter (thanks, Yorksranter!), Mr. B, who was chatting with someone but still utilizing the Ballet Master’s All-Seeing Eye called out, “Good! Again!” then gave me another note that resulted in a series of, “Good! Again!” séquences.
So that was Monday’s class. Wednesday’s class was also quite good, though I was still not back at “full power,” so to speak. Nonetheless, there were some good moments, and I didn’t hose up absolutely everything.
I made it all the way through, as well, even though it was a billion degrees in the studio and I was already somewhat dehydrated at the start.
My promenades are improving again. For what it’s worth, I love promenades (and turns) in attitude. They just look cool. My turns are also coming back together.
Also, a quick shout-out to the amazing Kathryn Morgan, whose excellent video on Renverse has greatly improved mine. A few weeks ago, we had class with J.P., and he mentioned the part about renverse beginning as RDJ (grand/en l’air, of course); Ms. Morgan takes it a step further, pointing out that you want to make it all the way to arabesque before you think about getting to attitude.
Otherwise you just do crazy, dumb things with your legs and lose your turnout and stuff. Um, but she puts it much more eloquently than that.
Anyway, go watch her video; it will help you immensely with your renverse (or, if you’re already a master of the renverse, it will help you explain it to other people).
Also, pelvic placement (the Theme of The Month, apparently) really helps, but indirectly: forget your heart — if your pelvis is in the right place, you’ll have an easier time with turnout and extensions, both of which are necessary to RDJ, which is necessary to renverse.
Aerials this week have been a mixed bag. I didn’t expect to be awesomely strong after sitting on my tuchas for a week and a half, and as such was not terribly disappointed in myself, though at times I was frustrated.
That said, Trapeze on Wednesday rocked. I kind of feel like trap is my “thing,” aerials-wise — I love being up there and I find it fairly easy to do things well. It probably helps that I find heights thrilling, rather than frightening, since a lot of trapeze work involves either standing on your toes on a skinny little bar or dangling from ropes above one or your knees below one.
It also helps to have freakishly strong legs and abs, which apparently I do? I haz the knee beats, y’all. CL is teaching now and has a fantastic gift for conveying subtle technical details.
Thursday I had some weird and alarming stuff going on that led us to go see my doc today. She doesn’t think I’m going to keel over dead or anything, but did order some bloodwork to check on various things, including my thyroid function.
On the upside, my vital stats are still stellar, with blood pressure of 107/63 and a heart-rate (including the uptick for Adderall and caffeine) of 71. w00t.
Anyway, that’s it. Advanced class tomorrow, then various Suspend-y things.
Feb 28
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One of the nice things about Suspend is Open Fly. Most of us don’t have aerial apparatus (or qualified instructors) hanging around our homes, so being able to head down to the gym and play is a great way to keep skills sharp (or, at any rate, less dull). In case you’re wondering, the open […]
If you’re planning to visit a new studio (say, in another city, like Chicago) and you want to be sure you can identify appropriate classes at a glance, here’s a quick visual guide:
Brought to you by Wednesday class (nominally intermediate, but it’s wink-wink-nudge-nudge intermediate) and Saturday class. Also, if you’re crammed together this tightly on the barre, that might be a problem.
You’re welcome.
In other news, I am about to be inundated with PLX website updatery, so here are all my “before” pictures for our Back Flexibility Challenge at Suspend. Sure, I could put them in a separate post, but this was the lazier more efficient way!
You guys, I am not going to win this one, I promise. It isn’t about how flexible you are, it’s about how much improvement you make, which is exactly as it should be. There are several people who are less flexible than I am by nature, but who have a lot more ground to gain than I do.
Also, my camel and king pigeon look terrible because I had no idea how to do them 😛 On the other hand, that gives me a goal, amirite?
“Mulberry 2” legwarmers (61cm) in light blue from Sansha:
These got their first run yesterday.
I quite like them so far.
First, and perhaps most importantly, they stay up even though my thighs are unreasonably large. Given Sansha’s reputation for sizing for extreme ectomorphs, I wasn’t actually sure they’d make it up past my knees. In fact, they did. For full disclosure, I intentionally popped one stitch in the top hem on each warmer before class yesterday morning, since they were just a hair tighter than I liked them right at that one spot. This doesn’t seem to have affected their performance, but did make them rather sublimely comfortable.
Second, they have stirrup feet and are thin enough to layer, which is really nice. My other legwarmers are just Tubes and not long enough to pull down onto my feet while still keeping my knees warm, so they do nothing for my arches, leaving a gap between “extreme fluffy warm-up socks” and “light socks or naked feet in ballet shoes.” (Yeah, you’re right — this is a First World Ballet Problem.)
On cold days, I now have the option of pulling my legwarmers on over my light socks, then layering the fluffy warm-up socks — which are lined with faux lambswool and warm as all heck — on top of everything.
I don’t usually wear shoes during most (often all), of barre, but if I do put my shoes on, or if I decide I need leg warmers at centre, these leave the contact patches on the soles of my shoes free. I don’t have to wear them inside my shoes to accomplish that end.
The ribbed silk blend knit has a roughish hand, which can be a little problematic in a tight sous-sus, but which is otherwise helpful, as it keeps the warmers where you want them (it doesn’t work as well on bare skin). It’s also warm and breathable.
I’m considering the purchase of a second pair of these in another color (just for variety). The light blue is really nice with my all-black ballet class wardrobe; with my old neon-green legwarmers, the whole thing screams, “PUNK RAWK! \m/,” which is okay but feels a little weird when I’m visiting a school where I’m not a regular.
The light blue legwarmers with the black-on-black tights-and-shirt, meanwhile, politely says, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to work. Do you mind if I share your barre?”
Not sure yet about laundering, though. I admit, I tend not to wash my legwarmers all that frequently, less by intention than by default. I tend to shove them into my dance bag and forget about them.
Silk is a great insulator. Yesterday evening, it was too warm to bother wearing warm-ups atop my tights when we went to cirque classes, but the temperature had dropped considerably by the time we left. I dug my Mulberry 2s out of my dance bag and threw them on, and they kept my legs from freezing.
In summary, the Mulberry 2s are warm and long. Size is doable for thighs measuring 50cm/~19-20″. The texture provides a fair bit of grip, which is both good (they stay up) and bad (sous-sus can be … interesting).
“Silhouette” soft ballet shoe by Sansha:
My initial impression of these has been quite good. The Silhouette combines the refined appearance and durability of a leather shoe with the flexibility and ventilation of a light canvas one — specifically, thin canvas panels in the arch afford a close fit under the foot and allow the feet to breathe a little better. I find that they really display a well-arched foot very nicely; there’s no bunching under the arch to obscure things.
I often forego socks in my ballet shoes, and these were quite comfortable without socks. Sansha’s footliners tend to feel quite nice.
I am especially pleased to report that no rolling-off of the heel occurred in my Silhouettes even when I was stretching with my foot in the barre (the same goes for my new Pro1cs). I think that’s a question of fit, though. Although I wear a narrow in normal shoe sizes, in Sansha’s sizes a medium or wide seems to work better.
My sole (ha!) caveat is that the foil ink on Sansha’s soles can be … um … interesting the first time or two you wear a new pair. Both of my pairs of Pro1cs have been slippery; the Silhouettes are squeaky.
You guys, it is hard to tour lent or promenade when you’re trying desperately to hold in the laughter. On Wednesday, I just about died every single time. It was like, “Squeaky … squeaky … squeaksqueaksqueaksqueakysqueak…” all the way around.
I’ll review the Silhouettes further in the future. I didn’t wear them very much on Wednesday, so if I make it through more of class on Saturday, I’ll have better data. So far, though, so good.
That’s it for tonight. Tomorrow I’m going to part 2 of the Semiotics Workshop, which should be fun, and then we’re going to see Moving Collective! I’m really excited about that.
À bientôt, mes amis!
Little by little, piece by piece, Ms. B of Hard Mode Ballet Class is making a dancer out of me.
Not just a guy who knows how to execute a bunch of ballet steps, but a dancer — someone who executes a bunch of ballet steps with élan; who uses his head and his eyes and his port de bras; who relates to the music intelligently and expressively; who doesn’t grip with his neck, for frack’s sake.
In order to do that, one must learn one’s own body in depth: how to feel the minute muscles in the hip socket; how to knit the ribs together without collapsing; how to open the collarbones without throwing the shoulders back behind the hips.
One must also learn how to get out of one’s own way.
There’s a magical thing that happens when you learn how to get out of your own way: suddenly, things get easier.
In order to execute a high, smooth grand rond-de-jambe, you must know where to place your pelvis so you don’t block either your extension or your turnout. The first time you find that balance (perhaps after having had it and then lost it), it’s like magic.
Curiously, some dancers naturally find it early in their training only to lose it again as they begin to work more consciously on turnout, placement, and extension.
That’s pretty much what happened to me: I started really thinking about pelvic placement about a year ago — and at first I over-corrected, as is my wont. As I began to work into more advanced classes and to work towards higher extensions, I found myself inexplicably blocked at times: and then Ms. B got around to sorting my pelvis, and it turned out that I was basically getting in my own way.
Once I let my pelvis find its own neutral spot and stopped thinking so hard — once I got out of my own way — my extensions got better, my turnout got better, and I could start really thinking about other stuff.
Ironically, the whole source of the problem with extensions and turnout resulted from a conscious effort to place my pelvis so I could … like … better access turnout and alignment.
I think this makes a good allegory.
Often, in life, we get so concerned about being correct that, in fact, we over-correct. We try really hard to do things just right, and we find ourselves stumbling into unexpected road-blocks; tangled in the intricacies of the details.
In short, we get in our own way.
Sometimes, the best answer is to stop thinking, stop concentrating so hard on being correct, and get out of our own way. (This is, I am almost certain, a corollary to the rule, “Don’t make it happen — let it happen.”)
So there you have it. If you’re having difficulty in your dancing or in your life, maybe try loosening the reins and getting out of your own way. It might just help!
So that’s my Ballet Lesson for today.
In other news, I apologize for my recent absence. I’ve had a sinus infection, and the first really noticeable symptom (besides, randomly, pain in my teeth) was a wicked fatigue that seemed to come from nowhere. I haven’t been posting because, in short, I’ve had nothing to post. I’ve basically been asleep, for the most part, for the past week.
I did do part of class (and part of juggling class) on Saturday, but I was actually too tired to write about it afterwards, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. If I’m too tired to write, I’m probably too darn tired to do just about anything.
*Not really. Please seek qualified instruction before attempting this yourself.
Or, of course, firefighters of your preferred gender.
Last Wednesday, when I got my new shoes and dance belt, I looked for some knit warm-ups or garbage-bag trousers to keep my hip flexors and various turnout-y muscles warm, but the only ones that the ballet shop had were either too small, waaaaay out of my price range, or both. (I would love a pair of houndstooth foldover warm-ups, but not that much!)
After class on Saturday, I checked out Sansha’s website to see if my shoes were available in leather, and discovered a link to their NY store, which has an online shop. Of course, I had to check that out — so I wandered over there.
To my profound delight, I then discovered that they’re having an enormous clearance sale on all kinds of things, including various warm-ups, legwarmers,and other warm things. (Aside: Am I correct in assuming that the sudden proliferation of men’s and boys’ white ballet shoes on ridiculous clearance in January and February is related to Nutcracker Season?)
I found some foldover warm-ups there for $10, added some other things (including tall silk legwarmers for $5), and wound up spending maybe $35 (including shipping) on four items that will be very welcome in my ballet wardrobe, including a second pair of shoes in a different model that sounded intriguing, but for which I’d be hesitant to pay full price without trying them first.
Anyway, if you need warm-ups, legwarmers, a sweater, tights, or blue satin lace-up pointe shoes (seriously; I’m tempted to order a pair of those just to hang on the wall or something), it’s worth checking out, and shipping is quite reasonable.
Here’s a link:
http://www.nydancestore.com/catalog/frontend/category/id/1124/
That’s all. Now I’m going to go back to convincing myself that buying blue satin pointe shoes that I’ll almost certainly never use for their intended purpose is a sacrilege or something. Fortunately, they’re priced at $50, and that’s a fairly strong deterrent.
YouTube: BOSU Balance Series
danseur ignoble 