I’m in your* fellowship hall, choreographin’ your** danz.
1 minute down, 6 minutes to go.
I should prolly video this so I don’t forget any details?
*Okay, the fellowship hall of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal in the Highlands.
**Okay, okay, my danz.
Author Archives: asher
Danseur Ignoble: En Dehors A Gauche…
… And I mean “gauche” in more than one sense.
Okay, class was actually mostly good today. There were only four of us, so we all got a lot of close-up correction.
For whatever reason, my turns to the left were crazy. We did the little balancé-pique-etc combo again, and for whatever reason, every time I would get to the pirouette en dehors on the left side, I would do something else entirely.
Edit: For some reason, I didn’t think to mention this, and I feel it’s useful intel.
Promenades are often done en dehors — that is, we pick up the heel just a tad and pivot just a scooch towards our insteps.
For whatever reason (read: because he is getting us really nailed to our legs), Brian likes to make us promenade en dedans — picking up the heel just a tad and pivoting just a scooch away from our insteps.
This requires a bit more finesse (particularly, I find, in retiré — I suspect my tendency to over-sproing is the culprit, there) — one must lift and scooch consistently, lest one roll one’s ankle to the outside, for example. It’s harder to roll one’s ankle the inside for the same reason that there are more sicklers than wingers in any given ballet class.
Seriously, I have never yet seen these dudes in ballet class (photo of Winger, the band, via Exxolon at Wikimedia commons).
For what it’s worth, I still think promenade is probably the second-most bizarre movement in the entirety of classical ballet, second only to that truly bizarre thing where you get into the ballet equivalent of a tabletop (working leg at 90 degrees, supporting leg in plie, back flat, arms in arabesque) and sort of scoot backwards across the floor (preferably without falling on your face).
Seriously, it’s not easy to do in the first place, but doing it without looking silly is nearly impossible (it works better in the midst of a choreographed piece, of course, but there’s still a part of me that’s all, “Grrrl, I respect your promenade, because I know those are so much harder than they look … but seriously, all you swans look crazy right now.”)
Brian noticed this and then made me do the promenade-and-turn sequence by myself until I got it right (fortunately, I am not afraid to look the fool in front of my classmates 😀 )
First, I picked up the wrong leg and turned en dehors a droit. Next, I picked up the wrong leg and turned en dedans a droit. Then I picked up the correct leg (the left one), but turned en dedans, because apparently I like making things harder than they need to be.
Finally, after doing every conceivable incorrect iteration, I did it right.
Oddly enough, it was much freaking easier to do it the right way than to do it any of the wrong ways. That’s ballet for you, though.
This (and subsequent events; we all got our share today) made me really appreciate Brian’s gift for knowing his students; it also made me appreciate how important that is.
I, for example, am game but sometimes sloppy: I’m willing to attempt anything, but often enough I get major elements wrong at first. I work from the big picture down (which is funny, because in the visual arts, I work the opposite way, and have really had to school myself in working out a larger composition first).
As a dancer, I’m really not at all cerebral — I have movies in my head (though not just movies; I also imagine force and movement and three-dimensional space, etc) and I try to make my body do what the “movies” depict.
Once I have the “sketch” of a movement down, I begin working on the finer details, until at last I have a polished movement.
This means that my style, as a dancer, is free and elastic and sometimes spastic, wild, woolly, and weird. Sometimes it looks like I’m having some kind of seizure mid-jump.
There’s another dancer in class whose approach is the polar opposite — she builds movements piece by piece, trying to perfect each element into a unified whole.
Once she has her elements in place, she begins to expand her movements so they become more fluid; more balletic.
Her style, as a result, is much more precise and controlled than mine, but tends to the opposite set of challenges — she can be very tight and sometimes overthinks things.
As students, she and I need different inputs in order to progress. I need to be made to think sometimes; the thinkers in class need to be forced out of their heads.
Brian seems to understand inherently that I’m going to flail around trying to do new things; once my failings begin to approximate the goal state, he starts giving me corrections to dial them in.
Meanwhile, he makes the more-cerebral students stop thinking: he gets them to just do sometimes, when thinking is the problem. Then, when they’re ready for details again, he brings back the fine-tuning corrections.
I feel like I’m learning by leaps and bounds. I’ve learned to trust my body again; as it did before my long break from dancing, it reliably does what I ask it to (even if it sometimes does so in a messy, chaotic way).
The long and short of it is that I feel like I’m learning to fly.
I’m going to have to meditate upon these different ways of learning movements. They’ll come in handy in the future, I’m sure.
Danseur Ignoble: Back on the Bus
There’s something deeply satisfying about the long, golden light of an October morning at this latitude.
I live in Kentucky now, but I’m a Yankee by birth and long heritage (one of my maternal great aunts has been known to make noises about “those Mayflower upstarts;” her side of the family — Québécois, Métis, and Iroquois with deep pre-Mayflower roots in this continent — still only half-jokingly regards the English as a bunch of arrivistes). New England suffuses my blood; informs my bones — and here, now, briefly, this glorious light reminds me of home.
The memory of bones runs long and deep.
It’s good, also, to be back in the rhythm of my normal routine, heading to Monday class. It’s good to be wearing one of those ridiculous outfits in which we arrive at class on cool mornings; good to be stuffing apples in my face as quickly as possible between busses.
Curiously, even though part of me has been bathing itself in chagrin, selectively recalling all the worst parts of my audition (seriously, sometimes my brain is like an obnoxious roommate who won’t turn off the TV), another part of me feels significantly more confident as a dancer simply because I got up there yesterday and tried (okay, the one really precise and gorgeous turn that Denis caught on video doesn’t hurt, either).
I suppose in part it’s a function of suddenly having this very concrete goal — I am making a dance, and I know it will be a good one once I nail down the choreography. It will force me to home my technique to a degree that probably should seem daunting, but doesn’t.
And even if it isn’t selected for this performance, I will keep working on it, finish it, and bring it somewhere; do something with it.
Anyway, I’m almost to class, so that’s it for now.
More later.
Danseur Ignoble: Saturday Class At Last
You guys, Brian is amazing.
Today, we spent most of barre working slowly without accents. Very different feeling, but exactly what I’ve been needing.
Working workout accents forces you to focus on doing the entire movement correctly — so if you’re working a tendu from fifth, you make all the stuff in between the two pictures (“fifth” and “out”) really, really count.
I realized, for example, that when I tendu a la seconde from arrière, I don’t always bring my heel through, and thus I wind up losing some of my turnout.
We also tuned up balancés. M., who has only recently joined Brian’s Saturday class, wasn’t super clear on them, and Brian said, “Don’t worry — I’m 33 and I’ve been dancing since I was 14, and I’m still working on balances.”
He also gave the single most concise balancé exercise ever. I’ll have to create a little video of it — it’s amazingly easy and makes balancés crystal clear.
That makes me feel much better about my slowly-improving balancé — which, coincidentally, was 100% better when I walked out of class than when I walked in.
Little jumps were beautiful this time (Light! Buoyant! Quick!), and going across the floor I tossed in some cabrioles, a few of which were good (and at least one of which was horrible).
I think I liked our adagio and pirouette combos best, though — they were as follows:
Adagio (ish, anyway):
Balancé – quarter pique turn (x4)
Promenade
Repeat on opposite side
Pirouette:
Tombe
Pas de bourré
Arabesque turn
Failli
(repeat the above twice; on the third repeat, add a double pirouette)
So there you have it. Not bad at all for my first class in a month, I think, though my port de bras was a bit chaotic.
It’s good to be back.
Danseur Ignoble: Shadowlands Begins
Pas de Don’t
Please forgive the Giant Stupid Whiny Rant to follow.
Yesterday, I had an absolutely lovely conversation with my therapist about trying to learn to sort of honor what I am, including the delicate-respiratory-system part.
Today, I’m just frustrated.
I feel like I make so much progress, then get sick and lose so much ground, and like this is an ongoing thing for me, and like the smart thing, the good-zen thing, the Good Mental Health thing to do would be to learn to accept and embrace that.
And then another part of me is all, “Ain’t got time for all that, I’m a dancer. Dancers gotta dance.”
(The painful corollary: if I’m not dancing right now, do I cease to exist as a dancer? What a freaking terrifying question.)
I have written, occasionally, about Making Dance Accessible.
I am forced, now, to admit that my own internal prejudices, or whatever, have left a potentially huge group of people out of that thought process — that is, people like me, who are talented and have been given bodies that look and in most ways act like classical dancers’ bodies but who are afflicted with chronic illnesses that make sustained training problematic.
Truth is, I don’t see a workaround for someone like me. Or, well, yes — here’s something. Short-term projects; an approach to training that recognizes that even the longest spell of good health will eventually be interrupted by illness. A willingness to be flexible about classes; to step it down a level when the body demands it.
I admit it: I don’t feel ready for the physical demands of Brienne’s class yet — and a part of me is angry about that; just furious that my body has failed me.
Another part understands that it doesn’t help to think of it that way; that this is just another wave in the ever-changing ocean. After the ecstacy, as it were, the laundry: after a stunningly-long period of quite good health, the pneumonia, the period of recovery.
And still it is painful, yet again, to run up against the limits of my being; to be reminded that I am working with mortal clay and all its host of flaws (though, on the flip-side, I remain grateful for the great gifts I have been given, and I recognize that if this is the price, or only part of the price, I have so been given an amazing bargain, here).
I also recognize that the day I accept these limitations will be the day they stop hurting me so often: I’m like a stubborn horse that doesn’t want to stay in its field, startled every time I run headlong into my fence*. The fence is always there; if I just accept that, I won’t crack my legs against it anymore.
For what it’s worth, I was thinking about backing out of the audition (haven’t felt up to extended rehearsals with Denis), but instead I think I’m just going to change horses midstream, maybe: channel all this into a dance, albeit indirectly.
It may not be a dance about all this; I have something else in mind, though something equally topical in its own way — it relates to my other ongoing struggle: how do I learn to live as the androgynous person that I am when, in a very real sense, I’m afraid to do that for reasons even I don’t understand?
That, or else something about living with bipolar (perhaps unsurprisingly, that was my first idea anyway).
Either way? Cue Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.“
Notes
*This is actually a terrible analogy. With few exceptions, horses don’t do this kind of crap unless there’s a good reason to get out of the field in question. Will they bolt through an open gate just for a lark? Sure. When they bash themselves repeatedly against a fence for absolutely no reason, though? Better check your pasture for locoweed (or scary plastic shopping bags — horses be cray).
Danseur Ignoble: I’m Feeling Much Better, Really?
Okay, so as always, this recovery process has been slower and more annoying, with more minor setbacks, than anticipated.
Someday, I’ll learn to take the Hoped-For Duration of Recovery and simply multiply it by three or four.
“I’ll be over this in a week or so” will then mean “I’ll be over this in, I dunno, three weeks or a month, give or take,” and I’ll be much less frustrated when, after a week, I’m not Good As New.
Anyway, I am feeling much better, but still not perfectly well. Still also tenaciously clinging to the hope of having something worth auditioning on the 4th. If we bust our buts (yes, pun intended: You know, “When the deadline’s neeeeeear, and it don’t look good — Who you gonna call? BUT BUSTERS!”), we might … maybe? … SHOULD! be able to at least put together a respectable audition, if not one that will make everybody say OMG WE MUST HAVE THESE GUYS!
Maybe.
In other news, we saw The Scorch Trials today and spent the whole movie making Burning-Man related jokes.
It actually wasn’t too bad: its storyline was fairly predictable “twinks versus the old ppl conspiracy versus alien zombie plague” fare, but both installments in the Maze Runner film adaptation series have done a good job mostly avoiding cringe-inducing romantic subplots whilst providing enjoyable visuals and action scenes, even if elements of those action scenes do frequently make one ask, “Haven’t you guys ever seen a movie? Hey, maybe standing around and waiting for all of the alien plant zombies to awaken within two meters of your tasty still-fully-human faces is a bad idea. Wait, what the … WHY ARE YOU CLIMBING THE STAIRS?!”
Oops, potential spoilers below for ppl who care about that kind of thing, so here comes a More Tag:
Much-Belated Self Portrait for BlahPolar
I have been meaning to get this out here for a while. Here ’tis!
This one is Prismacolor pencil and cheap ballpoint pen on paper.
My scanner isn’t playing well with Windows 10 yet, so I just snapped a photo with my phone.
Quick Update
Visit with Dr. B went well.
So while I still have some fluid rattling around in my left lung and may, in fact, have had a mild, early-stage pneumonia rather than just plain bronchitis (Denis is convinced of this), I’m mending well.
We decided against further antibiotics unless things look to be taking a turn for the worse again, since I’ve had a great response to the antibiotic I finish today.
I got a steroid shot, which really made me appreciate those “ballet muscles” in my hips 😀
Dr. B also prescribed a different cough medication, since after the first night the original one didn’t help. The new one is the standard codeine-based uber cough suppressant, and I imagine it will do the job.
Since it was time for a re-up, I also picked up my Adderall script.
Part of me was amazed that I was able to walk out of the pharmacy with not one, but two controlled substances from two different substance groups. It took a couple hours to get the scripts filled, but that was because the cough medicine was out of stock but had just arrived with a new shipment.
We had a good dinner at a local Mexican restaurant while we were waiting, so it all worked out.
I also bought more facial tissues. For some strange reason, we’re going through them at a frightening clip of late.
So now we’re on our way down to Nashville to complete our Porchlight Express cargo run for 2015. Woot!
Tomorrow I need to finally purchase or ballet subscription for this season. One of the spring productions will involve a world-premiere piece set to music composed by our Orchestra’s wunderkind director, Teddy Abrams.
I’ve been really impressed with what he’s been doing for LSO. Likewise, Robert Curran’s influence on Louisville Ballet has been nothing but positive, so I’m really excited about the spring production.
That’s it for now. The steroid shot is helping, so assuming that I sheep this weekend, I’ll probably back to class on Monday, but I’ll be taking it easy. A little at a time.
Danseur Ignoble: Back to the Doctor
…Sadly, there’s no DeLorean involved.
I’ll have to preface this with an, “I’m not dead yet! … I’m feeling much better.” (Apologies to the Python.)
That said, I still have the world’s most annoying cough and (as a result) can’t sleep for more than a couple hours at a stretch, both of which are interfering quite seriously with my ability to dance.
Denis, of course, can’t sleep either: it is hard to sleep next to someone who sounds like a robotic sea lion. I offered to sleep in the guest room until this blows over, but he told me that he would rather have me right next to him so he knows what’s going on with me.
He has been incredibly sweet and forebearing every time my cough has awakened him. Instead of being all GRAAAAAR GO SLEEP IN THE GARAGE OR SOMETHING FFS, he’s like, “I’m so sorry, baby, that sounds like it hurts.” (He described the sound of my cough as “mechanical” and, at one point, “like glass breaking,” which suggests that it sounds much worse than it feels.)
Meanwhile, I am more worried by the precipitous drop in my weight — 2+ pounds since Wednesday in addition to the 2 pounds in the previous few days.
This wouldn’t worry me if it had been preceded by an uptick; my weight fluctuates like that all the time. In fact, it has been known to fluctuate by as much as six pounds after century rides as I regain equilibrium — but always in an up-then-down pattern.
The fact that I’ve dropped four pounds below my previous “floor” is the worrisome part. The last time I lost weight this fast, it turned out that I had pneumonia. I also felt a thousand times worse than I do now, though, so I don’t think I actually do have pneumonia. It just makes me nervous.
Denis told me this morning to call our doc and get them to fit me in, and since he rarely gives me a direct order, I gathered that he was quite worried.
Needless to say, I am going to see our regular doc today at 2:30. (Ironically, Denis called them for me because I finally feel asleep around 8:15 AM and turned off my alarm at 9:00 AM without properly waking up. ._.)
In other news, I came up with two dances for the audition, one of which is a serious ballet and one of which pokes fun at the seriousness of ballet.
I asked Denis if he’d like to do the second piece with me (it requires one fairly skilled dancer and one dancer who’s willing to camp it up and clown around, but doesn’t have to be all that great at actual ballet), and though I assumed he’d say no, he agreed rather enthusiastically. Have I mentioned that I adore this man?
I can’t wait to get a video of the dance in question; I think it’s going to be pretty great. The music for the piece is the second movement to Beethoven’s Piano Sonota Number 8 in C minor — that is to say, the adagio cantabile from the “Pathétique.”
Go listen to it and then try to tell me there isn’t a built-in Charlie Chaplain Does Ballet thing going on! (Here’s a link: https://youtu.be/yyelz5Q0Z9w)
Denis is going to wear his fabulous tutu costume; for the performance, I’ll have to come up with a Serious Ballet Is Serious costume. I haven’t decided whether to go with the traditional “Ballet Prince ” look or an Austere Contemporary Ballet ensemble.
Perhaps I should take a poll! (HINT, HINT.)
So that’s a go, and we’ll be rehearsing the choreography starting next week, provided that I do not, in fact, have pneumonia (which I’m quite sure that I don’t) and can get some sleep between now and then.
In still other news, this post was supposed to be short. Ha! Will I never learn?
danseur ignoble 