Author Archives: asher
Monday Class Notes, A Wee Bit Late
On Monday evening, we had to go pick up some wheelchair parts that a friend of Denis’ wanted to re-home, so I did Margie’s 6:15 class, which is only an hour.
Given that I had just missed an entire week of class, I felt like it went pretty well (though my attitude was a mess – I guess maybe I need an attitude adjustment?).
At the end, we did some simple choreography – just tombé, pas de bourée, glissade, assemblé. At one point I glanced up, caught sight of myself in the mirror, and though, “Holy cow, I look like I’m dancing!”
It actually looked somewhat better than this. Then, in real life, I am not a stick man.
And then, of course, I immediately forgot how to glissade-assemble, and basically fell apart.
I also looked worse than this, so it all balancés out? (See what I — okay, yeah, you’re right. That was bad. Sorry.)
But, hey, progress is progress, and we’ve covered the lesson about thinking already, right?
So I’ll take it.
This week, I’m easing back into ballet. Things are still a little shaky in here. I think I am going to forego Wednesday class and get back to the beginning/intermediate section on Saturday. Then it’s dinner and Giant Dinosaur Puppets Live!, about which my inner 9-year-old is nerdily stoked.
Sunday I’ll be attempting a century ride for the halibut with some of my crazy bike peeps, because why not?
If I survive, I’ll keep you posted 😉
In Which I Am Even More Remiss
This week has been rough.
Even though I’m learning to manage my mood issues, once in a while things get out of hand. This week was one of those times.
I feel like I’m starting to get things back in order, so with any luck I should be back to my normal routine.
In the meanwhile, here’s a selection of pix from PlayThink:
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| Dragons and Faeries at PlayThink! From 2014-PlayThink |
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| I’m just including this one because I think my legs look pretty great 😉 |
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| Not the best front tuck somersault I’ve ever done, but it’s cool that I can still do one. |
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| Spider-Denis, Spider-Denis, does the things … well, you get the picture. |
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| We got to play on the trapeze!!!1oneone |
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| For some reason I think Denis looks really adorable here. |
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| I love Tessa’s little pinny-knots in this one. Also her composure. She looks like she’s not even trying. Not bad, for a first try, eh? |
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| Alice and Phyllis joined forces to make all our wings. I think Nick’s dragon wings are spectacular. |
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| Last one (you can click through if you want more, though). The makeup is mostly the $1 stuff from K-Mart, and I think it did beautifully under the conditions. I re-did it in the evening and did a better job (it’s hard to do your makeup in little tiny car mirrors, y’all), but didn’t think to get a picture. |
Okay. That’s it for today. I am making no grand pledges for this week, because the past week was kind of a disaster, but I’m hoping for something more like normal life.
In Which I Am Remiss
I got my timelines confused last week, and didn’t get my Ballet Lessons post written up before we left. I had also completely forgotten that the site where we’d be spending Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday lies in the Land Beyond the Signal, which is awesome except when you realize that you’ve failed to post something you meant to post.
Thus, my apologies. I’m never great at planning ahead, and sometimes I’m really bad at it.
The PlayThink festival itself was a mixed bag of awful and awesome (words that, taken at the most technical level, are basically synonyms, but that’s not how I’m using them here).
The awful part stemmed entirely from the spectacular failure of our pop-up camper to live up to its primary, indeed its titular claim — that is, its failure to pop up, replete with the snapping of not one, but three aircraft-grade steel cables. This, after it sat happily in our driveway in popped-up mode for three weeks while we lovingly cleaned and prepared it!
The late-night hotel-finding excursion on Thursday night and the lack of privacy for basically the rest of the weekend were also pretty un-great (though our friends Kelly and Tessa were gracious enough to put us up on Saturday night, which largely made up for it, because we all got to sit around ’til the small hours giggling like a bunch of schoolgirls). The worst part was missing most of the classes we really wanted to do while my husband stubbornly wrestled with the camper.
The rest of the festival, however, was completely awesome. Highlights, for me, included a stationary static trapeze class and a belly-dancing class. We also made some really amazing new friends, enjoyed oceans of playtime with the six-and-under contingent (Indy is six, so we had all kinds of awesome, shareable toys along), and got to hang out with my friends Robert, Tessa, and Kelly. That last bit was really, really seriously great, since I consider myself lucky if I get to see them once or twice in a year.
That said, for me, the coolest moment transpired when I was hanging upside-down from the trapeze in an inverted straddle. The teacher mentioned that I was really graceful and asked, “Are you a dancer?”
It was kind of cool to be able to say, “Actually, yes.”
Where the trapeze is concerned, I learned that I’m graceful but weak; specifically, that my upper body is weak. No surprise there. We also learned that Louisville is home to a place where you can learn to do all those awesome aerial circus arts, and we are definitely planning on pursuing that line of inquiry. Our teacher from PlayThink is one of the teachers from Louisville Turners, and I really enjoyed working with her.
I would really like to further explore the possibilities of aerial apparatus, especially since the techniques one uses on stationary trapeze harmonize well with ballet technique. Some of the elements even share the same names — an arabesque, for example, is an arabesque, though it seems that what is attitude in ballet is … um … a king scorpion (I think?) on the trapeze.
Where belly dancing is concerned, I learned that belly dancing is a blast, and that belly dancing classes seem to be populated with strong, smart, vivacious women, along with a few gay dudes — in this case, one guy I didn’t know, Denis (briefly; he then ran off to get his face painted), and me. I don’t think I’m going to try to cram an ongoing relationship with belly dancing into my schedule right now, but it’s definitely something I plan to try again at future festivals and so forth.
Nick snapped a bunch of pictures of Denis, Tessa, and me on the trapeze, so I’ll try to re-post some of those, but it may take a while, because they’ll have to make it from Nick’s facebook to Denis’ hot little hands to my cloudspace and then here. Denis and I were also photographed a bazillion times in our winged costumes (he paired his wings with sparkly, spangled tights and a hot pink t-shirt; I paired mine with my leopard outfit, which came together rather brilliantly).
Incidentally, the wings — assembled with loving care by sister-in-law Alice and Mom-in-law Phyllis for Nick, Indy, Denis, and me — worked beautifully. I continue to be impressed by the creative abilities of the family I’ve married into.
That’s it for now. Get out there and enjoy the world!
On Ballet: Stretch Those Knees!
So during barre last night, in the midst of a complicated combination involving fondus and developpés and arabesques and various other things and also counting, I heard a distant voice saying, “Stretch that left knee! Stretch that left knee!”
We were working the left leg in back, so my face happened to be turned to the right, and thus towards the wall. I was listening intently to the music, focusing intently on not losing my place, and I thought I was stretching my knees, so I kept doing what I was doing.
…And then I felt a tap on the back of my left knee (which was extended behind me in midair), and heard the same voice — Brienne’s of course — saying, “Asher, stretch that knee!”
The tap made me realize that my knee was, in fact, not all the way stretched. It made me instantly aware: oh, hey, there is still slack in those muscles and tendons and so forth!
I had a moment of epiphany: what felt stretched and straight wasn’t.
Reflexively, I said, “Oh!” then obliged immediately and was rewarded with a, “Much better!”
What a difference a degree makes.
So that’s an interesting development (which, for the record, is different than an “interesting developpé” — of which I’m sure I did a few last night, particularly during our adagio). I know I have lazy knees*. They’re also mildly hyperextended, which is to say that if I stand with my knees together, like in a really tight first position, my heels will be a couple inches or so apart.
It never occurred to me, however, that what feels like straight might not be straight, where my knees are concerned.
That’s the interesting thing about ballet (and maybe “concert dance” in general). It makes you pay attention to your body in ways you really otherwise wouldn’t. You build habits little by little that might feel wholly unnatural at the outset.
Beyond the knee issues, class was a mixed bag last night. Some things went really well. Occasionally, I went, “Ohai! Pirouette from fourth! I own this!” And sometimes I was like, “Oh, soutenu turn? Is that the one where you nearly fall on your face and somehow wind up on the wrong leg?”
For what it’s worth, getting the combo at center has not been my strong suit the past two classes. Actually, come to think of it, I haven’t been super on the ball at the barre, either. Last night, this “tendu, tendu, pique, tendu” thing kept turning into “pique, pique, tendu, panic,” and the more I thought about it, the worse it got. I have made enough progress to know that the best thing I can do to get through a fast combination is stop thinking, but I’m not yet at the point where I can stop thinking on command.
It will come… ._.
Bike-wise, evidently it is possible to ride after Brienne’s class (though probably not after two of them). I was so busy thinking about ballet (okay, and ice cream) that I got on the wrong bus last night and went downtown instead of cross-town. That was no big deal, as home is only 7 miles from downtown, and I banged it out in about half an hour, including a stop to check out a cat some kids were worried about (turns out it was two cats, in fact, and they were having a mild territorial dispute, which was soon resolved when one of them scurried off and the other said the feline equivalent of, “And good riddance!”).
14 MPH may not be the fastest pace ever, but it’s nice to be able to ride it effortlessly after an hour and a quarter of Brienne’s super-athletic class.
It probably also helps that I remembered to stretch after class this time.
One more class this week, then it’s off to PlayThink for the weekend. Woohoo!
Notes
*Denis says this is true of everybody: we spend so much time learning not to lock our knees that fully straightening them feels a wee bit unnatural.
On Ballet! — Nerdery, Substitutes, and WTF Is Wrong With Me Today
I was back in class today after a hiatus (broken only for Brienne’s Monday class) that I will discuss more fully at a later point, once I get clearance (no worries, dear readers: it was a family emergency thing, but nothing horrible, and it all turned out well in the end).
We had a substitute; the fabulous Jessica, whose teaching style I quite like. I ran through both Essentials and Beginner/Intermediate class today; essentials, because of a timing SNAFU, was all barre, all the time, with the exception of a little adagio at the end, while the beginner/intermediate class was, in Jessica’s words, “Just like the advanced class that I taught this morning, with small modifications.”
I wasn’t exactly on form after what amounted to nearly two weeks with only one class in the middle. I wasn’t exactly awful, either, at least not until the end of the second class, when my Glissade-Assemblé mental block reared its ugly head again (seriously, what the frappé). Oh, and also I almost totally failed to spot my pique turns, because, heck, why not?
This is what happens when I start to feel overconfident. I was like, “Oh, pique turns, I got this!” And then I’m like, “Why is the world still spinning?”
Anyhoo.
So, nerdery.
During my Ballet Hiatus, I got quite cranky and so forth. It turns out that ballet is the best mood stabilizer I have ever tried, ever, hands down (or, really, heels down, shoulders down, hands can float to the top if you’re on your balance…).
This is something I’d really like to pursue as a topic of research: like, we know that Dance-Movement Therapy is a thing (and it’s a thing I’m hoping, some day, to do for a living), and we know that exercise (and especially flow-state producing exercise) as a mood stabilizer is a thing. So what about ballet as a therapeutic device?
I would really, some day, like to be able to look at the neuroscientific underpinnings of all this dance-y goodness — because, frankly, there is so much going for dance as a therapeutic modality (It’s cheap! It’s social! It’s great for you physically as well!), but the research isn’t all there yet to back it up.
The first step (perhaps more of a chassé) in that journey, for me, will be to complete a DMT master’s program. If I really want to do the neuroscience part, probably a doctorate will have to follow.
In other news, I am about 3/4s of the way through choreographing an original story ballet in my head. Now I need a repetiteur with better technique than mine who’s good at translating “Now you do that one thing with the turn-and-the-whatever that goes like this!” to make it all come together.
This could take a while.
That said, I’m planning on using the opening solo bit, which is pure adagio, for an audition piece for various DMT programs.
So yeay. Life moves forward.
In other, other news, I had a really nice ride on the bike after class today. It turns out that you can, in fact, ride home after a couple hours of ballet class (though probably not if they’re both Brienne’s class; I have no legs left after Brienne’s class, ever).
The “Ballet Lessons” series will resume on Friday, barring any further crises, disasters, or calendrical SNAFUs.
Until then, adieu, and keep the up side up 🙂
Toast, Eggs, Milk, and Juice
By the way guys, sorry about the double post this morning!
Does that sound like a pretty complete breakfast to you?
It does to me (though I’d rather see “fruit” in place of “juice”) – and here’s the funny thing. It seemed that way to me as a kid, too.
I remember seeing breakfast cereal commercials when I was six years old or so that trumpeted about how some or another sugary cereal was “part of this complete breakfast with toast, eggs, juice, and milk” and thinking, “Toast, eggs, milk, and juice? That sounds pretty complete by itself. What’s the cereal for?”
This wasn’t because I was some kind of super – genius (though I’ll halt take that accolade if it’s on offer! :D). It was because my parents had taken time to instill a healthy skepticism about commercial advertisements (and nobody does skepticism like six-year-olds, who are just discovering that how things are and how things seem can be very different). It was because we talked about nutrition at home, in school, and even at church.
Perhaps most importantly, though, it was because I had recently eaten a breakfast of toast, milk, eggs, and juice, and by the end of it, I was stuffed. Where, I reasoned with the irrefutable logic of the very young, was the cereal supposed to fit – literally?
So, in short, I discovered a valuable piece of insight mostly because I loved poached eggs on toast and someone (either Mom or Grammy) made them for me as a treat that morning. I realized that in the “part of this complete breakfast” equation, the cereal was basically extra. The breakfast was fine without it.
I’m not sure, dear reader, what I hope you’ll take away from this post (which is neither about bicycles nor about ballet, though it is about food, which quite literally fuels both of those passions). I don’t mean it as a criticism of individual choices. I suspect you’re probably already the kind of person who makes that kind of connection.
If anything, I see it as the opposite of that – I happened to be privy at a useful moment to a bunch of information that led me to a sort of breakfast – related epiphany: that cereal was the dessert part of a complete breakfast. I was able to apply this idea because my family ate desert maybe once a week or so, not with every meal. I had a context that allowed me to just the information at hand in my own best interests.
It sort of worries me that, as a country, we largely seem to lack that skill (critical reasoning deficits are disturbingly common at school, too – and I’m a university student). It seems a little baffling.
I don’t have any prescriptive advice, here, or anything. I’m sort of just thinking out loud. I’m also wondering how we reached this pass (and I find it interesting that people in the political arena seem to reflexively blame the folks on whichever side of the aisle is opposite their own). Like, I don’t think we’d have stuck around this long as a nation if we weren’t, in years past, pretty good at critical thinking about practical matters (and creative thinking).
I will resume my normal bikes-and-ballet related blathering shortly. For now, this is what’s on my mind, via some experiences I’ll discuss at a later date.
Til then, keep the bottom side down 🙂
On Ballet! — Or, Well, Off Ballet!
…But, don’t worry, not for long.
I woke up this morning feeling kind of generally grumpy, congested, and terrible and by about 2 PM was debating whether going to ballet class was a good idea. Turned out I was running a fever, which is generally a good reason to assume you’re contagious, so I decided to take one for the team and not go rather than infecting everyone in class with whatever kind of schmutz I’ve contracted.
This appears to be some variant of the dreaded Itchy Throat Disease. I do not know yet whether it’s an Itchy Throat Virus or an Itchy Throat Bacterium. I’m hoping for the virus, because those usually go away on their own.
I’m also hoping someone invents a back scratcher for throats, like, soon, because I really need one.
In other news, we have our shiny stuff for PlayThink Movement and Flow Arts Festival pretty much together.
My costuming decisions (note: costumes are not by any means required for this festival; we just like costumes) have been driven by finding a pair of foil leopard-print tights at a ridiculously good price … so somehow, between needing to be a leopard because my tights say so and needing to have wings because we are all going to have wings (my sis-in-law is making Isis-ish wings for all of us!), I have become a winged leopard creature.
A bit out there, perhaps, but hey! It’s an excuse to wear a costume!
In public!
Or, well, semi-public, since it’s not like the festival is in the middle of Louisville or something.
So, anyway, being excited about that gives me something to do while I’m moping about being too sick for ballet class today.
I hope to be back in class on Saturday, and to do a double class, since we didn’t have class Monday, either (OMG, NO BALLET FOR LIKE A WEEK, you guys, I AM GOING TO DIE).
And that being said, I am now going to toddle off to bed, take some Knock-You-On-Your-Keister Night-Time Cold Medicine and, with a little luck, beat this thing in my sleep.
Because sometimes it’s best to take illness lying down.
Really Brief Notes and Only Partially About Ballet!
First, I did Margie’s Essentials class this morning, which was cool because we had a new girl and Margie asked me to take point on the barre so she’d have someone to follow. Then I got confused when we were doing an attitute-and-arabesque thing (I was all, “Arabesque all the way!” instead of “Just with the legs!”, so maybe I wasn’t such a great leader after all. But it was nice 😀
Second, I didn’t do the class after Essentials (which I think is officially Beginner/Intermediate ballet?) because we had Epic Shopping to do for the upcoming festival. OMG, you guys, like six hours of shopping with my Bro-In-Law, Nick! It was stellar. We are prepping for a cool festival which I’ll post about when I’m not about to jet off to bed.
Third, plans were made to storm The Hike, Bike, ‘n’ Paddle Skedaddle on Tandems! We will be riding with Dave and Diane and maybe another tandemaniac couple we know. So, yeahhhhh! Tandemonium on Monday! WOOOOOOOO!
Of course we are going to wear our ridiculously adorable matchy-matchy Kokopelli kit, and I will try to get pictures. I’m seriously hoping that we can get all three tandem teams into at least one picture.
Today in class I thought I looked very lean and dancer-y, which was a huge improvement over Wednesday, on which day I was retaining like three pounds of water for some reason and looked like a post-binge drinking dancer, complete with lingering coordination issues during parts of the adagio (but only parts). However, for some reason, I was only marginally able to balance in passé, so it wasn’t all, “O Look How Awesome I Am, With My Dancery-Looking Tights And Legs And All That.”
Ballet Lessons: Don’t Think So Much
I’ve noticed something in ballet class: when I stop thinking so darned much, I dance better — sometimes much better.
I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Zen teachers have been harping on about this for ages now: quiet the monkey mind. Be Here Now.
Proponents of other meditative paths, from Catholic mysticism to just plain ol’ secular meditation, say the same thing. Your mind has to be quiet if you’re going to hear that still, small voice, and so forth.
As people living in the modern world, we’re raised to trust our minds above all else. Wisdom, we think, resides in those billions of neurons; in the chemical sparks jumping the gaps between them. We can best solve problems, we imagine, by thinking about them.
Yet, sometimes, we do our best thinking when we’re not thinking at all.
And I know that I, for one, do my best dancing when I’m not thinking at all.
Not to say there’s anything wrong with thinking — far from it. After all, when we imagine, impart, or learn choreography, that’s thinking. And when we analyze our strengths and weaknesses, that’s thinking, too — but maybe it’s thinking that’s best done after class, after the performance, after we take off our shoes.
During class or on stage, sometimes we do best when we leave the thinking behind — when we make space in ourselves for the still, small voice to move out into the world (where sometimes it becomes sort of a big, loud voice).
Thinking is great. Without thought, we wouldn’t have made it very far as a species.
Sometimes, though, the best thing we can do is stop thinking and let our minds get out of the way.
Sometimes, when we do that, we can really surprise ourselves.
Five Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad* Places You Should Never, Ever In A Million Years Visit In Chicago
I never think to write this kind of post, even though we travel a fair bit. We’ll be traveling more than usual this year (Weddings! Workshops! Vacations! Oh, my!), so I think I’ll try to make a point of writing all about the worst things in every place I go that you should never, ever even think about doing.
Everyone’s always writing these namby-pamby lists of places you just have to visit. Well, let me tell you, in every city, town, and remote seaside rock, there are places that you should simply avoid. Really. It’s for the best.
So, without further ado, here are five horrible places in Chicago that you should never, ever visit**!
#5: Tiztal Café
Tiztal Cafe is the kind of place that serves up epic portions of Latino-influenced breakfast stuff packed with the flavors of chorizo, exotic spices, and ranchero sauce alongside creative takes on standard midwest breakfast fare and oatmeal milkshakes. Seriously, oatmeal milkshakes! Who takes a perfectly bad-for-you treat like a milkshake and healths it up with oatmeal? And chorizo in the eggs? Come on. Everyone knows that breakfast is supposed to be boring. It’s A Rule.
Chorizo: It’s what’s for breakfast, thanks to these yahoos. (Image courtesy of CycloneBill on Wikimedia Commons.)
Wow. What a bunch of jerks. Seriously. Readers: you should never set foot in this place.
#4: Bon Appétit at the Art Institute of Chicago
First off, seriously, who even sets foot in boring old art museums these days? Please. That’s why we have the internet. Nobody goes to see stunning, world-class exhibits by artists ancient and modern in person anymore. And the food? I mean, come on. If I want to eat really good food, served cafeteria-style, in an art museum, I need to pay exorbitant prices for it, okay? That’s part of the whole art museum experience. Bon Appétit is simply way, way too cheap.
And the portion sizes! Huge! What, are you trying to kill your patrons so you can get to their wills faster, or what, AIC? Seriously, people could rupture.
#3: O’Shaughnessy’s Public House
Come on, O’Shaughnessy’s. First off, all that ambience. Really? It’s so quaint I could puke. And also, everyone knows that fried fish is bad for you. Especially unlimited fried fish on Fridays. So what the heck are you guys doing making it so good that basically nobody can possibly resist, except maybe really dedicated vegans? Yet another Chicago dining establishment that’s trying to kill us all.
Oh, and that spot-on Irish-style salmon plate on your appetizer menu***? Yeah, the one with the capers and cream cheese and pickled onions and that chewy bread? I’m on to you, guys. I know it’s just there to provide a health halo and lure would-be health nuts in so they can get sucked into plate after plate of heavenly deadly fish-and-chips.
#4: The Brown Elephant Resale Shops
Like we need another precious, zany, unique thrift store selling stuff we’ll just have to schlep home on the Megabus. Do I even need to say anything else?
And the shoes. You guys have a lot of nerve, Brown Elephant Resale Shops.
#5: The Joffrey Ballet Academy
What kind of ballet school makes its Ballet Basics class one and a half hours long and provides a real, live pianist? First off, it’s Ballet Basics, for super-newbies. People could die from an 1.5-hour long class. Second, that live pianist? You’re going to give people ideas, Joffrey Ballet Academy, and they are going to go home to their regular ballet schools and try to talk their ever-patient husband into playing for the classes he isn’t taking. Ahem.
And, seriously, dancers don’t need views like this when they’re trying to tendu. That’s just not fair. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
Oh, and your instructors? Entirely too inspiring. What, are you trying to start some kind of ballet revolution?
I thought so. I’m watching you, Joffrey Ballet.
-.-
So that’s it. Five terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad places you should never, ever in a million years visit the next time you’re in Chicago.
But, you know, if you do, and you happen to see me there … mum’s the word.
Notes
*By which I mean, these places are so awesome that I don’t want anyone else to know about them, because then they will be totally crammed with people the next time I want to go!
**Seriously, stay away! These places are MINE!
***And you should absolutely NEVER have this as your entree, because if you do, next time I’m in Chicago, they might be out of salmon, and then I will have to cry great tears of woe. And you don’t want that, do you? Remember: There’s no crying in ballet class!
danseur ignoble 