First full draft of choreography is written down with timings (but not counts yet; going to have to work that out tomorrow).
It feels good to be unstuck!
Author Archives: asher
Derp Alert!
I just realized I never finished and published my class notes from Wednesday. Derp.
Ummm, yeah. I’m gonna need me to work late tomorrow … and we need to talk about my TPS reports.
To my defense, I got caught up in fall cleaning, opera, and a bunch of other stuff over the past few days. So … um … in short, I’d like to say, “Excuses, etc.,” and leave it at that.
I’m theoretically planning a trip up to Chicago early in November and hoping to catch some classes at the Joffrey … it looks like, due to scheduling, my choices are Intermediate Ballet, Intermediate Ballet, and Intermediate Ballet, so I’m just going to have to hope that Intermediate Class at the Joffrey is comparable to Intermediate Class at Louisville Ballet (which, to be fair, can be pretty challenging, depending on how many company dancers show up on any given day).
Because of an attack of Epic Laziness (aided and abetted by a good, solid, ongoing case of I’m Not Worthy!) this morning, I did not haul my behind out of bed and try Advanced Class.
Given that the Met Live in HD Opera broadcast schedule means I can do either Advanced or Ballet Essentials on opera mornings, I’ve been trying to just bite the bullet and give it a go. I’m probably not really qualified for Advanced class, but I’m not at all certain that I was really qualified for Intermediate class when I first started doing that, either, and we all seem to have survived. Worst thing that could happen is that I go and do barre, completely humiliate myself, bow out before centre, and then weep quietly into my sleeve throughout an entire opera. The best thing that could happen is that (GASP!) I might surprise myself, learn something new, and expand my comfort zone.
That’s a gamble I don’t really mind taking.
As penance (well, okay, really because I was full of caffeine and popcorn), I spent this evening doing traveling chains of cabrioles (which require extensive planning, because my house is tiny, and you kind of have to cabriole around corners a lot) and various kinds of Sissones.
Ballet people, you know you have a really awesome spouse when you can randomly Do All The Sissones in your house’s tiny little hallway and the spouse in question doesn’t even look up and say, “What the heck are you doing in there?”
At this point, though, I think he’s become totally inured to my balletic weirdness (and that thing where sometimes we’re standing around outside a restaurant with friends, and they’re chatting, and I’m thinking about choreography, and randomly start marking out what I’m imagining, kind of thinking out loud with my feet).
So that’s it for now. Autumn is upon us — huzzah!
“In the Beginning, It Is Always Dark”
…And I say this because I want to do a thing, and I’m completely in the dark about how to make it happen.
On numerous occasions, I’m sure, I’ve kvetched about the lack of performance opportunities for adult dance students around here. Likewise, I’ve kvetched about the relative lack of body diversity in dance.
After class on Saturday, I mentioned to B. that I’d like to put together a performance for local adult dance students — and that, ideally, I’d really like to see that performance reflect the diversity of body types and abilities out there.
B. said, “Oh, you know, this could be a great fundraiser!”
I think that’s a great idea — to create not just a chance for adult dance students to perform, but a chance for us to work together to do something for the community at large.
Later, I thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to use that performance to raise funds for either for an organization that harnesses the power of dance in a therapeutic way, or for an organization that works to help people with disabilities gain access to dance classes (or maybe even to the arts in general)?
…And thus was the germ of an idea born.
When I asked him if we had any existing organizations that do that kind of thing around here, Denis pointed out that Metro Parks Louisville has an Adapted Leisure program that both offers recreational opportunities (including social dancing) for people with disabilities and that helps make Metro Parks’ other recreation and leisure activities accessible.
That seems like a great place to start.
Beyond that, though, I have absolutely no idea how to proceed.
Hence the quote above: I’m sure it’s a line that’s cropped up in a bazillion places, but I always remember as spoken by The Childlike Empress in the film version of The Neverending Story, which I probably watched 14,000,000 times as a little kid (and, for that matter, as a not-so-little kid: yes, I have totally been guilty of feeling my bike sink into swampy terrain during a gravel race and shouting, “ARRRRRRRRRTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAX!”).
So, basically, yeah. Thinking about this again, today, I realized that everyone begins by having no idea how to do things — and they manage to make it happen anyway.
And, yet, things happen. Wheels get invented (and re-invented); people organize events; history rolls forward.
A year ago, I didn’t know how to do a lot of the stuff I know how to do now. What I did know is that, when something looks difficult, the best thing to do is just try it anyway (hello, promenade en dehors in écarté devant; hello, remembering long combinations; hello temps de fleche — okay, don’t really entirely have that one down yet, because coordination, but it’s coming).
When you attempt something difficult and fail at first, you’re still closer to having it down than you are if you just don’t try.
So, anyway, in recognition of that vision of harnessing the potential of every kind of body, every kind of person, in dance, I’m kicking around the idea of calling this thing EveryBody’s Dance Theater.
The rest I’ll have to figure out as I go along. It seems like probably a good idea to connect with some local people who have experience doing things like this.
So there you have it.
Yup.
I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, you guys.
Turn, Turn, Turn
While usually I’m all about the jumps, today I managed to stay on top of the turns, but lost it in the traveling jumps.
We did another complex adagio combination with promenades en dehors that ended with a tricky one — promenade écarté devant en dehors into first arabesque, which is one of those things that seems really difficult until you do it right, and then it’s like magic (the promenade, especially). The cool part is that it’s easier to balance during the promenade if you bring your working leg higher (provided that you’re using your upper body correctly), so it automatically looks kind of amazing.
For once, I didn’t do any turns the wrong way. Going across, we did balancé, balancé, tombe pas de bourée thrice, with the final phrase ending in pique arabesque, failli, turn from fifth en dehors. It went rather nicely both ways. Staying on the music required using a different attack on the last phrase — it had to be sharper and faster than the first two phrases, which were very fluid and mellow. I liked that.
We followed (after the one zillion little bouncy jumps, which I do well as a matter of course) with a sort of medium allegro combination that should, by all rights, have been right up my alley — just sauté arabesque, failli, glissade, assemblé en menage … except my brain got going about port de bras and instead I bollixed it up rather completely.
I could not both think and reliably get from failli to glissade to assemblé. I’m sure at least two repetitions ended with glissade, pas de chat, while still others turned into Sissons and even cabrioles devants as I realized, too late, that I was Doing It Wrong and attempted to correct myself mid-leap. FFS. The worst part is the I think my assemblé generally looks pretty rad, but missed it almost every time.
Inexplicably, at one point, the whole thing turned into sauté arabesque, failli, precipité, saut de chat, complete with an utterly appropriate port de bras which, nonetheless, had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual port de bras we were supposed to use. Oy vey.
It was a nice saut de chat, at least? It was totally one of those moments when you just have to completely own your alternate version and be like, “Bishes, pls— I’m the soloist, here, my combo is different.”
(Yeah … apparently mine was the turkey combo?)
And then, to cap things off, something weird happened in my ear going left (which is to say, I suddenly quite deaf in my left ear unless you count the fact that it was ringing), and instead of continuing as I normally would, I sort of froze for what felt like forever.
Right in front of Brian.
Literally.
You have not lived until you’ve stood, frozen on one leg, confused panic writ large in your every fiber, blinking desperately, nose-to-dance belt with your teacher (he happened to be sitting down at that moment).
Oh, the humanity.
Gah.
The saving grace was that I wanted to work on spacing, so I opted not to go first. Had I been in front, a tragic and disastrous nine-dancer pileup would certainly have ensued.
Instead, there was only one dancer behind me, and he’s still new to this class, so he was working slowly and carefully (he’s more the “drill it ’til ya kill it” kind than the “fake it til ya make it” kind, I think). There was a loooot of space between us, so I managed to come unstuck and do the right combination, like, twice.
At the end, we just did that weird thing whose name I can’t remember in which you basically run across the floor in attitude (usually with your arms in second). I’m really bizarrely good at it, so that was nice.
If ever they ask me to rename a ballet step, though, I’m going to take that one and rename it “pas berger des chats,” or perhaps “pas troupeau des chats,” because it looks exactly like what I do when I’m trying to herd cats through a door (which, curiously, I also do fairly well, all things considered).
Today’s reverence was also strange, but nice — sort of contemporary yoga ballet reverence.
Soooooooo … yeah. That was Saturday class this week.
For what it’s worth, it was a good class overall.
But I need to remember my own First Rule:
There’s No Thinking In Ballet.
Not (Entirely) About Ballet: Cherchez Le Fem?
Sometimes, life throws me interesting curveballs (says the boy who knows effectively nothing about baseball).
Recently, life has dumped a lot of stuff about gender and queerness and otherness and so forth in my lap.
This may be a function of the fact that I’m primed to accept that stuff right now: ballet makes me think about this stuff.
I am well aware that, while it appears to be my nature to dance in a rather classically bold, masculine style, the essence of my personality is in many ways decidedly femme.
That creates an interesting tension that I suspect could be harnessed in the name of art (so much of art depends upon interesting tension!), and I’ve been thinking about what I might do with that. You know, besides lying in bed at night and wishing I was good enough to dance with the Trocks.
This has led me to thinking about What It All Means (which usually leads to me throwing my hands up in despair and crying, a la Pippin, “Oh, I’ll never find it! Never, never, never, NEVER!”).
Which, of course, is like an invitation to the Universe — like telling your friend who has access to a university’s paywalled academic journals that you’re curious about climate change, or what have you. You look up from your reverie and find a tidal wave of data rushing your way.
This is super long, so here’s a “More” tag:
Danseur Ignoble: Practical Considerations
Yesterday, I signed up for the GRE, which doesn’t sound like it will be too bad.
It’s also possible that none of the programs for which I’m applying actually require it, but I might as well get it out of the way.
I’m not worried in the least about the writing and language bits; my only concern was that I’d have to do a whooooole lot of math review, but it looks like it should be very doable, provided that I don’t leave it all ’til the last minute because SQUIRREL!
As a matter of perspective, I’m much less worried about the GRE than I was about my audition piece.
Curiously, having done the audition has somehow made me feel much more confident and capable, even though the audition itself was kind of a mess due to the fact that there was absolutely no way I could be really adequately prepared under the circumstances. I don’t know, just getting up and winging it, doing it anyway, was a huge confidence-builder.
There’s something about actually doing creative work that is deeply edifying. I may not have had much of the work done in time for the audition, but the part that was done looked like … well, it looked like real dancing, if that makes any sense? And, since then, I’ve been rocking along creating and revising, which feels really exciting.
I’m learning to think of myself as an artist (not just in terms of dance, but also in terms of the visual arts), which is something I’ve always been hesitant to do. It seems somehow hubric to do so — and yet, at the same time, I’ve realized that you have to take your own work seriously, or you don’t give it the time it needs to get done.
…Or, well, that’s how it works for me.
I’ve also started organizing information about application deadlines and stuff for graduate school. Eventually, the most pressing details (application deadlines and materials needed) will go into a table or spreadsheet or something so I can just check them off as I go.
I’m not organizing cost-of-attendance data yet, because every time I look at cost-of-attendance I really rather feel like my eyes are going to explode. I know I’ll figure it out somehow, just like I figure everything else out somehow, so for now, except for looking into scholarship opportunities, I’m more or less ignoring that whole zone.
So now I’m contacting graduate schools, signing up for open-house days for their DMT programs (in this sort of devil-may-care, I’ll-figure-out-how-to-get-there-later kind of way), and so forth.
It’s a weird place to be, somehow. A couple weeks ago, I was all, I don’t know if I’m going to be ready for this; I don’t actually even know if I want to do this. A lot of that stemmed from being persistently sick for a rather longish period, though: eventually, I’ll write about what that does to me emotionally, but I can’t figure out yet how to put it into words.
Anyway, a couple of days ago, I woke up, remembered what I want to do and why, and felt ready to get started … so yesterday, I did.
I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that this happened within a week after getting back to class.
The structure that ballet provides is so essential to my life. While I actually do very much like being a homemaker, I seem to do best when I have a schedule imposed upon me from the outside. It forces me to organize my time in a way that’s really quite difficult for me to do otherwise.
Moreover, going to class is, for me, a signal that things are normal; that life is moving along in its usual rhythm. Not going to class is a signal that Something Is Very Wrong (usually, that either my physical or emotional health has imploded).
That said, I didn’t take Wednesday class yesterday because I don’t quite yet feel like my respiratory system is up to the demands of Brienne’s class. Lingering cough is lingering.
That said, I forgot that Margie now teaches a Wednesday morning class which I could have taken instead. Derp.
I’m hoping to be back up to speed next week, but if I’m not, I’ll do Margie’s class on Wednesday morning (I’m trying to avoid doing evening classes except on rare occasions, since this time of year it means getting home at 10 PM, which is problematic for a number of reasons).
I wrote in yesterday’s post about the relative costs of therapy and ballet as part of my defense of the cost of dancing — not to say that ballet should replace therapy, but it augments therapy rather beautifully. For me, the sense of structure and, I suppose, of belonging are an enormous part of that.
Dancing is part of what makes my life whole. For practical reasons as well as purely impractical ones, it’s terribly nice to be dancing again at last.
The Relative Expense of Ballet
Back in March, in a post about the verboten topic of diet, I mentioned off hand that watching TV for ten hours per week was probably less expensive than dancing for ten hours per week.
I suspect that I might have been incorrect.
If you don’t bother with subscription services and high-end equipment, then, sure, TV might be cheaper up front.
That said, 5 classes per week (at about 1.5 hours each; roughly the same amount of actual content-time you get from a 2-hour TV show, so comparable to 10 hours of television viewing) where I dance will run you exactly $260/month — and I have known many people who spent that much every month just on cable service.
Meanwhile, sitting around for an additional ten hours per week does nothing to benefit the bodies of people with sedentary jobs (indeed, it only adds fuel to the fire that is the sedentary lifestyle). 10 hours per week of ballet class develops functional strength and flexibility, improves coordination, reduces blood pressure and heart rate, and is, in all senses, an ideal antidote for the health problems that stem from a sedentary lifestyle. It also lets you ditch the gym.
Ballet also good therapy, not to mention an excellent way to increase mental resilience and gain self-confidence. Not that I’m knocking therapy — therapy is great, and I love my therapist — but I’ve gained and grown so much through ballet, which is also one of the few things that can make my brain be quiet.
There is, of course, some equipment cost to consider, where ballet is concerned — especially for those who dance en pointe — but even that doesn’t offset the potential health-expense savings.
Likewise, watching TV at home doesn’t do much to build community (and watching TV at bars is even more expensive than dancing, unless you don’t drive, nurse one drink the whole time, and don’t eat any food).
Dancing, by contrast, is a great way to develop a bevy of equally committed, obsessive friends. I’ve noticed that adult ballet students tend to be intelligent, passionate, and good conversationalists. It takes a while to “break in” — by the time you’ve stuck it out in class for a year, you’ve probably seen a lot of would-be classmates come and go, and there’s no time to socialize in class, so dancers can seem standoffish and it takes a while to get to know anyone — but after a while you’ll become part of an organic whole that’s well worth belonging to.
Likewise, you’ll never suffer from boredom in strange cities — instead, you’ll hit the Internet and find yourself a drop-in class, where you’ll be reminded that the community you’ve joined extends far, far beyond the front door of your home studio.
And, if you’re lucky, you might even get to perform on stage someday, which is great for the self-esteem.
So it’s really quite possible that ballet is not, in fact, more expensive than television — and the rewards that it offers are far greater.
Danseur Ignoble: The Search (This. Is. Looooooooong.)
I noticed today that, for this week, the top search that led someone to my blog was “why should ballet dancers be an ectomorph?”
Grammatical awkwardness aside, I think that’s a good question, and one that I haven’t touched on in a while.
The short answer is:
“Because that’s the trend.”
My full answer to this question is really long, so here’s the TL;DR version up front:
They shouldn’t, necessarily — but because fashion and function influence each-other profoundly in the performing arts and especially in ballet, trends in the art form stemming from the mid-20th century have created a situation that makes it easier for ectomorphic dancers to succeed as professionals. Likewise, I would posit that choreography has evolved to best suit the ectomorphic bodies currently in vogue.
Since professional dancers broadly inform our cultural definition (“what a ballet dancer is“), we have come to think that ballet dancers should be ectomorphs — but really, there’s no overwhelming em>functional advantage.
Functionally speaking, some advantages exist — ectomorphs are usually light, and thus easier to lift when partnered — but disadvantages also exist — ectomorphs are more prone to osteoporosis; they’re less likely to be good at explosive movements like jumps. The mesomorphic and endomorphic body types also come with advantages and disadvantages in dance.
At the end of the day, it’s really a question of fashion.
…And now, on to the “Really Long, But Feel Free To Read It Anyway” version:
Learning How I Learn Choreography
Some of us are great at picking up choreography; others have to work really hard at it; still others fall somewhere in between.
I suspect that I’m one of the last group — though my ability to remember combinations is improving, I’m not as snappy at it as some. I usually seem to fall somewhere in the middle, and I’m better at remembering the big jumps and turns (though not always the correct turns!) than the little linking steps that come between.
In writing out the choreography for “Shadowlands,” I’ve gained a small insight: it helps me to group choreographic elements (and their associated music) into “phrases” and then link them into longer “sentences” and “paragraphs.”
I’m glad that I didn’t do this with the original choreography for the middle part of ” Shadowlands” — it was unclear and muddled, but I don’t remember it anyway and hadn’t danced it enough to get it into my bones (you know that thing where your instructor gives you the same combination you’ve done a billion times, but instead of ending it with glissade-jeté-temps levée-temps levée, he substitutes glissade-jeté-slow plie, and you look on in horror as your reflection on the mirror reveals that you’re doing it the other way?). I won’t have to “overwrite” the old circuits, which is good, because old circuits can be very persistent.
In a way, this shouldn’t surprise me. When I used to show horses, I used this method to memorize dressage tests and over-fences courses.
I think my primary difficulty with picking up choreography in class is that I tend to mono-channel: I process either language or visual information, because language requires a lot of cognitive load for me. I’m not a verbal thinker, so there’s a translation process involved, and in particular there are some deficiencies in my brain’s uplinks between verbal and spatial/mathematical/musical processing. This is why I can’t describe to Denis where the garlic powder is, but I can go get it for him; I can picture your face, but experience delays in linking it to your name and identity (which is why I’m hesitant to wave to people who appear to be waving to me: I can’t tell immediately whether or not I actually know them).
Thus, for example, unless someone says “turn en dedans,” I might not pick up the direction of a turn (because my visual processing suffers when I’m working to process words), so then I mark and perform the combination incorrectly and get it “wired up” wrong. The same thing happens where “implied” steps are involved — like, when you do pique arabesque – glissade – assemblé, there’s an implied failli between the first two elements. If I just think of the movements, I can see that, but if I hear the verbal instructions, I tend to be too literal, and I’ll try to leave out the failli, at which point hilarity ensues.
I’m really good at retaining movement sequences (possibly because operating in space, rather than in language, is essentially my “native mode”), which is great when I’ve got them right and terrible when I’ve got them wrong. Also makes me hesitant to practice certain combinations at home.
I guess this means that, given enough training, I’ll either make a fantastic repetiteur or a terrible one, depending on whether I figure out a strategy to work out the kinks.
So there you have it. It’s interesting to discover how working on a choreography project can help illuminate one’s own strengths and weaknesses in terms of picking up choreography.
Danseur Ignoble: Choreography Again, Again
It’s weird how you can be in the middle of something else entirely and find that your brain has been patiently working on an unrelated problem.
In the middle of reading a book (An actual, physical book, you guys! Can you believe it?!!!11!1one), I suddenly figured out how to resolve the most enormous problem with the choreography for “Shadowlands.”
Initially, I envisioned it with a chair at one end of the stage; a mirror at the other. Both play critical roles in the dance itself; in the story, as it were, that the dance is telling.
Unfortunately, that creates a situation in which the dancer basically wanders back and forth along one straight line between them, which looks boring (which I realized while watching Denis’ video). Instead of being a dance about anguish, grief, internal conflict, or what have you, it appears to be an addle-pated person in tights staggering back and forth incomprehensibly between a chair and a mirror and occasionally jumping for no apparent reason.
Oh, and alternately wrestling with and folding a bathrobe. Seriously, I need to learn how to work the straightening-out of that particular prop into the dance, because there’s this horrible moment in Denis’ video in which I stand on a chair, stare into space, and fold a freaking bathrobe for like 20 seconds, which feels like an hour. Booooooooooring.
I suppose that could work if I were trying to make a dance about the way I felt the last time I had a concussion, or about trying to get ready for bed after the last time I went to a bar with Denis and Kelly … but I’m not.
There are two easy ways to solve this problem:
1. Simply add a mark at the back of the stage; the dance can then begin halfway between mirror and chair and use diagonal lines between the two. The advantage, here, is that no further set pieces are needed (and, thus, no schlepping or setup of additional set-pieces).
2. Add a third set-piece. The piece as I choreographed it assumed a proscenium with wings into which the dancer walks at the end; the performance space in question doesn’t have wings, so it doesn’t quite work as it should. I could add a third set-piece — specifically a door — and neatly kill two birds with one stone. One, the triangular structure of the stage would then be formally defined; two, the lack of wings would no longer be an issue.
For what it’s worth, I envisioned this dance, originally, with a door (or, well, I came up with that idea after I gave up on leaping offstage from the top of the chair; that seems a little melodramatic and like a good way to really break a leg). I didn’t have time to work out the logistics before the audition of building or borrowing such a set-piece, though, and I forgot all about it.
Personally, I’m leaning towards the door, simply because of the lack of wings.
Of course, all this assumes that my piece is selected for this performance. If it isn’t, though, it still makes sense to hone it with the assumption that there might not be any wings wherever it someday sees the light of day.
danseur ignoble 