Category Archives: adventures
A Few Dance Pix
I needed a new headshot, so I asked my friend Christina, who’s a photographer, to shoot some for me. She agreed and asked if I wanted some action shots as well, and I thought that sounded awesome. Anyway, we went out on a grey afternoon with temperatures in the 50s (fahrenheit) and worked for about an hour.
Even though it was hard to get sufficiently warmed up, Christina managed to snag some great shots … and a couple that I asked her to keep because, frankly, they’re kind of hilarious. So here are a few: one funny one, one that’s a great picture of something that’s not very good ballet (but might be pretty good action-movie Kung Faux!), and one that’s just plain beautiful.
So here they are:
Hilarity Ensues. (c) Christina Noel Photography, 2018.
You know that effort face I keep talking about? Well, THIS IS IT. This is the face that I CONSTANTLY MAKE during petit allegro and also, apparently, whilst attempting to do grand allegro outside in the cold with my shoulders swallowing my neck.
Also, just noticed I have developed a terrible case of Starfish Hand in this one.
TEACHERS: TALK TO YOUR DANCERS ABOUT STARFISH HAND BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
One more thing: I learned in this process that even if you know you’re going to destroy your shoes by wearing them to a damp outdoor dance shoot in the middle of a drizzly Kentucky winter, you should STILL WEAR SHOES THAT FIT.
First, dancing outside in the cold is hard enough without worrying that you’re going to slide out of your shoes when you launch or when you land.
Second, if you actually do get ’round to pointing your toes, oversized shoes make your beautiful dolphin feet look like bricks anyway.
Mad props to Christina for making this shot look beautiful even though I did my best to make everything look ridiculous 🙂
Pas de Fu! (c) Christina Noel Photography, 2018
Nobody ever posts their Pas De Don’t moments: you know, those times when only one leg is turned out, only one foot is trying to be pointed (to be fair, the bottom one hasn’t had time to get there yet in this shot), you’re making A+ For Effort Face, and the jump you’re doing is great if it’s either modern dance or Kung Faux, but not so great if it’s supposed to be Pas de Chat Italien and actually ballet.
For the good of humankind, then, here’s another of mine.
My épaulement is janky as heck in this shot—and while that makes for some heckin’ awkward ballet, it makes for some really cool Kung Faux, so I’ll take it. Besides, you never know when you might need exactly the right photo to go with your audition application for an international spy thriller ballet.
Christina spotted this one in the mix and kept it for exactly this reason—it totally looks like an action-movie still (presumably from some weird action movie about a random ballet boy just trying to get home from class after all of his street clothes were stolen by ninjas or something). I kind of love it, to be honest.
Dem Legs, Tho. (c) Christina Noel Photography, 2018.
Y’all. Can I just say that I freaking love this?
The pose is from the piece BG is setting on us right now, only we use parallel fifth instead of parallel fourth. Between the surface and the wind, parallel fourth was hard enough to manage; parallel fifth was … umm, yeah. But we both liked the parallel fourth version better anyway.
Never mind the fact that I’m still working off my, ahem, “winter coat.” (That is, the extra coating of insulation that you get when you go visit your parents house and there is no class and your Mom keeps stuffing food down your gullet and you were already still getting back in shape from your last break … oy.)
Never mind the fact that it’s cold and I’m tired as all heck in this picture. I look like I know what I’m about. And I kinda think I look pretty good. Like, if this was a FumblR picture or whatevs, I’d swipe right.
Or … you know, whichever way you’re supposed to swipe if you think someone looks good.
There’s also a color version of this pose shot against the backdrop of the same facade[1] as the first two…
- …All that remains of an historical house whose name escapes me at the moment; I’ll fix that some time when I’m not trying to get to bed.
…that I like quite a lot, so I’m going to slap that down here, as well, even though I was only going to post three shots.
Et Voila. (c) Christina Noel Photography, 2018.
There’s a version of this in which I’m not staring directly into the camera, but I like this one better, so here you go. If you know me well enough you can tell by my eyebrow that I’m basically about to dissolve into a fit of laughter. I almost pulled off the Imperious Gaze, but was borderline slap-happy by this point.
Also, I really need to learn to do this port de bras without hyperextending my fingers, because that looks kinda weird. Though it may not actually be entirely possible for me to do that: my third (ring) finger on both hands only seems to offer “bent” and “hyperextended” as options. Oh, well.
But most importantly, my feet look pretty bangin’ here, even with the oversized shoes.
I think I’m probably going to badger Christina to do a shoot of the same basic jumps and poses and so forth in about three months, when the weather is awesome and I’m in peak shape.
So, brief recap. Here’s what I learned doing this photo shoot:
- If it’s cold, bring something warm to wrap around yourself between shots. Also probably a thermos full of something hot and possibly alcoholic, unless you have to drive or are underage in your region or whatevs, in which case skip that alcoholic thing.
- WEAR SHOES THAT FIT
- WEAR SHOES THAT FIT
- FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WEAR SHOES THAT FIT (you can thank me later)
- You will look weird giving yourself a barre and so forth in the middle of the street in the middle of the afternoon. Do it anyway, even if it means getting there early. I didn’t because I was actually really fracking depressed the morning of the shoot and didn’t get there early enough (or at all), and I regretted it for the entire shoot, but especially when I was doing the eleventy-ninth pas de chat from a standstill 😛
The Weather Grants A Stay Of Execution
(Adorable, chubby baby tiger is unrelated, but adorable.)
We’re having a kind of ice-snow storm thingy, so the Powers That Be have prudently cancelled morning classes tomorrow to give the road crews time to work their magic.
This means I don’t have to face class with Le Directeur Ancien until next week.
My chicken-flavored heart is partly glad and partly horrified that I’ll have ANOTHER WHOLE WEEK in which to anticipate everything that could possibly go wrong (though also another week in which to get into somewhat better shape).
Possibly it will turn out that I have nothing to fear. The worst he could do is regard me through eyes brimming with the Disappointment of the four hundred years of ballet teachers who came before hi…
Oh, G-d help me.
Choreography
We got the first 30 or 40 seconds of our dance last night.
I like it—it’s completely different in feel from last year’s, very Tango-influenced, rather than neoclassical. Both TS and I are videoing everything from different vantage points, so I was able to see that I dumped my shoulders and core on this wee en dedans turn with the working foot just brushing the ground. It’ll be better next week!
On the whole, though, rehearsal was good. There are 13 of us thus far, and I’m still the Onliest Boy.
I also had a good night in class. Beginner 1 is right before rehearsal, so we arrive in masse and take B1, which means some of us might be a wee bit intimidating to some of the B1 regulars. Still, I enjoy B1, because I don’t have to think about any of the steps at all ever, so I can concentrate on dancing beautifully instead.
Today I hooked up with my friend CP, who is a photographer, to get some headshots and dance photos done. We shot outside, which was interesting: the temperature was okay, but the ground was damp, uneven in places, and (of course) hard, so adjusting was challenging at times.
I got to see the on-camera previews of a few shots (CP shoots on a DSLR), and some were really cool.
One of my favorites, though, is a mostly-beautiful pas de chat Italien with ridiculously effort face. It’s hilarious and honestly pretty cute. (In related news, TIL that executing pas de chats from a standstill often evokes effort face!)
I’m looking forward to seeing the finished pix. They should be pretty cool.
I also snagged a few pix to update my Topless Boys Live! series (even though I don’t go back to Modern ’til next week).
So, here:
This looks like something you’d see on Grindr … Hmm
Please try not look at my kitchen, which lies in ruin.
As you can see, the scars are quite a bit paler now.
More grindr fodder, if I was on grindr, which I’m not.
So, there you have it.
I’m at that phase, fitness-wise, in which one says to non-dancers, “I’m still pretty out of shape right now,” and they give you this look:
-______-
But dancers will understand, probably.
Lest I Miss The New Year Entirely…
We had a lovely jaunt to my parents’ house over the holidays, returned in time to take a breath and then enjoy a circus party with some old friends of D’s, got almost no sleep, and arrived at our healthcare network’s day surgery center at 5 AM on the 28th to get D’s rotator cuff fixed.
Home, being aggressively picturesque.
These quails seem suspicious of my motives.
Since then, I’ve gone to two parties (one unofficial, one official), done a ton of cooking and cleaning, and tried to recoup my lost sleep whilst waking up at 4:30 to issue medications to poor D, who currently can’t really do feck all with his right (and dominant) hand.
Is that two balloons on your head, or are you happy to see me?
None of this has kept me from nearly losing my marbles due to a combination of my brief ballet break, sleep deprivation, and stress—so it’s with great anticipation that I look forward to returning to class tomorrow.
Me *definitely not* showing off my lithe, danseurly physique like the extra basic b*tch that we all know I am 😉
At the primary studio, there have been some changes in the interval.
First, they’ve instituted an unlimited monthly tuition rate that literally cuts my old tuition rate back by half. Given that I normally hit twenty classes per month, it saves me $70 even over the professional rate. I jumped right on that bandwagon, of course.
Second, Killer Class is now an advanced class in name as well as in fact. I’m not sure that will actually have any bearing on what we do in Killer Class, since most of the time it’s an advanced class in terms of both pacing and technique anyway, but I do think it gives potential students a better sense of what to expect.
Third, we’ll begin work on our piece for Spring Collection next week. I’m quite looking forward to what Señor BeastMode has in store for us, even though a couple of my best girls might not be joining us this time.
In other news, my Trapeze class has moved to Wednesday … which is excellent, since it means I can get my butt back to Tuesday’s modern class (which is in the evening now). I guess that’s technically a Circus School change, and not a Ballet School change, but still.
I have one show this month (a volunteer gig) and two next month this far. D’s surgery means I’ll be limiting myself to local-ish auditions for the moment, since he needs me around to do stuff like driving and, you know, zipping up his trousers. And stuff.
That’s assuming we don’t murder each-other as result of overexposure in the next two weeks. I love D, but he’s as underfoot as a cat when I’m trying to clean 😉
Regardless, there’s a modern jazz company running an audition next week, and I might go even though I’m not even sure what modern jazz actually is. Guess I’ll find out? But first I’ll have to get someone to shoot a new headshot, maybe.
In other news, the hourly rate of pay for my last paid gig blew my mind. It worked out to more than three times as much per hour as I used to make in my (woefully underpaid, to be fair) banking-industry tech job. Also increased my dance-related income for the year by a margin of 1/3 of the overall total (which was still less than USD 2000, but every little bit counts).
There’s definitely a degree of “I can’t believe they pay me for this” going on over here, but it was also a timely reminder that they (whoever “they”may be) pay me—and pay me startlingly well—because I’ve worked pretty hard to develop a set of skills for which demand (when it exists) outstrips supply.
I try to remind myself that the fact that I enjoy working on this particular skill-set doesn’t mean it’s not work. Nor does the relative ease with which I adapt to the work mean it’s easy—just that I’m well-suited to it.
Either way, it was a nice vote of confidence at a time when I needed one. Not that I’d stop dancing if I never made another dime doing it—but if have to seriously contemplate my current career decisions.
Field Trip; But First: Phases of My Butt
A couple years back I noticed that my tuchas has developed an oddly triangular profile.
Recently, I noticed that it has once again returned to a triangular shape.
Today I realized that it’s a function of conditioning: as I progress from (relatively) out of shape to stage-fit, my butt progresses from “round” through “triangular” and finally to “square.”
Huh. You learn something new every day.
~
In other news, we left at the crack o’ dawn yesterday for Atlanta, checked into our hotel at 3 PM, established a CirqueLouis outpost, then proceeded to regroup with the crew before dinner and Cirque du Soleil’s Luzia.
And speaking of Luzia—you guys, it knocked my socks off.
Luzia is a beautiful show—funny and tender and full of love for a place and for the people k and cacti) who make that place shine, not to mention packed with the high-calibre circus performances that give Cirque du Soleil its stellar reputation.
B on the straps was, for me, the pinnacle—he’s beautiful and performs with ardor and pathos. I don’t really have language to describe his act. It was breathtaking.
We also got to roam around on the stage—which is fecking amazing, you guys; the technology!—and backstage, where the CduS cast trains and gets physical therapy and does everything else and where the giant amazing puppets live.
After we chatted with the cast about circus stuff (and other stuff) over drinks, which was awesome. I tried to do a lot of listening. You learn a lot that way.
There’s much to be said for a life in which a business trip means watching a phenomenal performance and talking shop with phenomenal performers, then conducting a 5-hour long mobile meeting—part post-mortem on their show, part post-mortem on ours, and part spitball session for the next show—on the drive home the next day.
Little by little I feel like I’m starting to understand circus as an art form of its own, discrete from ballet and modern dance and so forth. I really owe that Jordan, our AD, who has been in love with circus all his life, who has built his life around circus, and who is teaching me (the company’s resident ballet boy) to really love circus in its own right.
~
Depression-wise, I’m making it back now, I think. The edges are still raw, and I need to respect that and not push myself off a ledge by diving back into too much at once. This is going to mean very consciously taking rest days, especially as I reset and shift back to a different rest-day schedule.
We’re halfway through November, somehow: I have roughly six weeks til it’s time to start hitting auditions.
When I headed to Florida back in September, January seemed unimaginably far away. Now it’s right around the corner.
BG, Killer B, and BW are rebuilding me as a dancer. Jordan is refining me as a performer. I’m not yet back to the place in which I feel like, Yes, I should go audition for ballet things, but I’m at least in a place where auditioning for cirque things and ballet-adjacent things feels like it makes sense.
I want to say, “Let’s see where I am in six weeks,” but I kind of think that’s giving myself too much room to weasel out.
Anyway. That’s it for now. I’m exhausted and ready to turn my brain off for the night.
Trust
The piece I’m performing on the sling begins with a pike pullover to a needle (effectively, a handstand on the fabric), which in turn all depends on being able to crochet my wrists–that is, to swim them under, then over, the fabric, taking my grip on the outside–so I can work against tension.
In order for this to work, the bottom of the sling needs to fall anywhere from mid-chest height (too low for other parts of the piece) to just above where my wrists are when my arms are extended straight up if I’m standing flat-footed (I can make up the difference with shoulder mobility).
Last night, somehow, my sling was set too high: I had to stand on my very highest demi-pointe and hyperextend my shoulders to reach it at all, and even then I had to mount by gripping the bottom of the sling with my un-crocheted hands.
This in turn meant that I couldn’t do the pike pullover, but instead had to tuck as hard as I could and pray that I had enough strength to make it, since I couldn’t borrow momentum by springing through my feet or brushing or a leg and kicking up. If I could have crocheted my wrists, it still would have worked–but since I could only reach the very, very bottom of the sling, my hands were too close together for proper biomechanical leverage. My shoulders were hyperextended and closed, making it impossible to engage them back and down until I was already approaching vertical.
It meant that that the needle–which depends on core strength and physics and should be a straight vertical with the hands shoulder-width apart and the legs sealed against one-another, not touching the fabric at all–became more of a fork, ankles on the fabric, since my hands were squashed together in the very bottom of the sling and I’d had to engage my core in a different pattern coming up from the tuck than I would from the pike.
It meant that the move that follows the needle–a graceful fold back into a pike that lands my hips in the bottom of the sling–was awkward. My hands were in the way, and I had to shimmy them out to the sides, which left my body off its axis, which made the next transition awkward as well.
The most difficult part, though, was the moment at the very start, when I realized that my sling was too high and then briefly wondered if it was even locked off correctly. I had to make a judgment call: take a dangerous mount on a potentially-unstable apparatus over a hard stage, or hold up a show that people paid to see over what was probably nothing?
I chose to mount.
That decision came down entirely to a question of trust.
Did I trust the riggers? Yes, even though my sling was too high–scheduling conflicts meant we’d done only one tech run, and the window in which the sling height is acceptable for this piece is very, very small. I trade off halfway through with a girl whose part of the act involves a drop that is too dangerous to do if the sling falls lower than a certain point. She’s my height but longer in the torso. The difference between too low for her drop, just right for both of us, and too high for my mount is the difference in locking off the sling ahead of, right on, or behind a tape mark. Better to lock it off too high for my mount: yes, it makes my part of the piece less elegant by a significant margin, but it doesn’t endanger anyone.
Did I trust the rig? Not entirely. No aerialist can do their job if they don’t trust the equipment–but no aerialist worth their salt believes there’s a 0% chance of mechanical failure. For better or worse, I hadn’t had enough time on this rig to trust it as much as I trust mine or the rigging points at our rehearsal space or at Suspend.
But I trusted it enough, combined with one more factor: myself.
I would be, upon mounting the sling, about seven feet up, suspended head first over a hard, wooden floor. Did I trust myself–my brain and body, the reflexes that I began honing as a baby gymnast at 3 years old–to literally save my own neck if everything went tits up?
Yes, it turns out: I ran a mental calculation and accepted the sliver of risk. If something was wrong with the rigging, I had good evidence–a lifetime of experience–in favor of being able to successfully tuck and roll. It’s as automatic as pointing my feet.
A tuck-and-roll wouldn’t prevent all possible injuries–in fact, I knew that I was accepting the risk of bone breaks–but at the height in question it would keep me from breaking my neck or my back.
I made my decision and put it aside and went forward. I struggled to make things as smooth as they should be, but no one got hurt. My dismount, at least, worked beautifully: I drop into a single-knee hang, reach for the ground, and execute a back walkover out of the sling. I was able to just manage it by letting the leg in the sling slide into a heel-hang at the last possible second.
In the end, no one got hurt. Things were scary for a second, then difficult. I got through by making an active, informed decision to trust and then continuing to breathe and move forward.
It’s funny how apt a metaphor this becomes for relationships and for life.
We choose actively to trust: how deeply and how far depends on our experiences.
We choose actively to trust: but we do so knowing that it means accepting a sliver of risk.
We choose actively to trust–or not to trust–ourselves.
In the end, I’m glad I chose as I did. Every time we choose to be brave, we make ourselves stronger.
It’s true that my work in the sling came off less gracefully than it might have done–but it came off, nonetheless. That, as they say, is showbiz. You screw up, or things screw up, and you play it off like everything’s going to plan.
When your sling is set too high, you use your best demi-point and you pray.
You keep your face on. Roll forward.
You push through the hips.
Countdown
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that nothing is ever final until the curtain rises on opening night–and even then, it’s still not final.
This is a comforting thought, since circumstances have conspired to make tomorrow’s tech run the first time that the tandem hammock trio gets to actually be a tandem hammock trio! We’ve worked separately and in various pairings up to this point, but not all together because–honestly, I’m not sure why.
This morning, I worked out the drop sequence I’m doing–a variation from the one the girls are doing, since they didn’t get a chance to teach it to me and we didn’t have video I could work from, but if I don’t completely hose it up, the audience is unlikely to notice 😛
Tonight’s a literal walk-through rehearsal: the apparatuses are in the theater, but we won’t be because life in the arts is, shall we say, a little chaotic sometimes. I’m honestly okay with that: we got up at 4 this morning for a 3.5-hour newscast gig, and even though I managed to reclaim most of my lost sleep this afternoon (and, in my dreams, revisit pets of yore and rehearse in a really bizarre space), I’m still a little tired and totallu okay with not dangling from dangerous objects tonight 😉
^^That’s my kind of news crew 😀
Last night, instead of staying home and hiding from trick-or-treaters, I went to Handstands class and Acro 2. Both went remarkably well. I got to play on hand-balancing blocks, which I’ve been wanting to do forever, and a pair of those hand-balancing frames that look a little like pommel-horse grips sans pommel-horse. I’m finally regaining a really solid handstand, so that’s awesome. I definitely want to incorporate hand-balancing into my skill-set.
Anyway, tomorrow we’re finally in the theater for real (I got a preview as a function of doing the morning show!), and Friday we open. Saturday is just about sold out, which is awesome.
Oh, andI also know how to find my way out of the theater now, which is surprisingly complicated 😛
Cue Predictable Spasm Of Self-Doubt
Every time I’m forced to take a break of more than a couple of weeks from class, the re-entry period is an exercise in grinding self-doubt.
First, taking a break almost inevitably involves gaining a couple of pounds–generally a sum that the average person would barely notice, but which is all too visible when you return to the studio and are constantly surrounded once again by people with less than 10% body fat.
I may be all about body positivity, but I’m not very good at applying it to myself. I’m also entirely aware that I have somehow stumbled into working in a field in which the folks who decide who gets hired and who doesn’t tend to lean strongly towards lean bodies. Toss in the fact that, given my build, a little more size in the thighs interferes with my fifth position, and you’ve got a recipe for Dancer Meltdown in 3 … 2 … 1…
Worse, it always takes a few weeks to re-awaken and rebuild the muscles responsible for correct execution of classical technique–and even as people who don’t dance continue to harp on about my “natural” grace, I wind up feeling like a half-grown stirk in a dressage ring until things start working together again.
This week has been all about finding my core, not dancing like a swaybacked wildebeest, and remembering how the hell to do turns[1].
- Though, bizarrely, whilst I was not dancing, my chaînés improved dramatically–regarding which, WTactualF?
Predictably, the resultant emotional fallout has been a constant stream of thoughts like WHY DID I THINK I WAS GOOD ENOUGH TO AUDITION FOR THINGS?! and I’LL NEVER BE READY!
So that’s where I am right now. Off to my last week of sandbagging in Saturday beginner class, which I hope will leave me feeling like I can actually dance, and then Jack O’Lantern Spectacular,in which I’ll attempt not to dance like a swaybacked wildebeest before a captive audience of so freaking many.
Nine More Days
Yes, I’ve resorted to counting down the days until I’m cleared for all the things.
The problem is that I really want to do handstands for some reason. Like, right now.
Normally, when I want to do handstands, like, right now, I just do them. (Often, when this happens, it’s because I’m trying to think my way through a sticking point in my technique and my nonverbal mind thinks it’s on to something. Sometimes, though, it’s just for fun.)
I dream in grand allegro.
I may have done a few wee petit allegro jumps in my kitchen (which is far too small even for medium allegro) last night. It might have felt good.
I decided I was ready to get back to barre when I found myself doing turns in my kitchen. I don’t think I can justify doing allegro of any kind (excepting the occasional step in my kitchen) until I’m 100% cleared.
So, needless to say, I’m antsy.
But it’s only mine more days.
What I’m really antsy about, though, is being able to take a proper, fully-submerged bath. I haven’t taken any baths at all because I’m afraid I’ll just submerge everything without even thinking about it—but on the other hand I do find baths really helpful on cold mornings (and, as you may recall, we have already established that my standard for labeling a morning “cold” is fairly pathetic).
Maybe I’ll try taking a bath and mindfully not submerging myself. And, of course, if I get really antsy, I can always use one of those medical-grade wound-protector things that they make for exactly that purpose.
In other news, I’m really tempted to wear this thing:
Bondage onesie?
…to class tomorrow, just to make BW and TS giggle. I think if I do, I’ll be forced to shoot some video for posterity.
Today’s Preview
We worked in the sphere a bit more today, first at about knee height, then at a more respectable height of 1.25 meters or so.
My bit of the brief duo is essentially nailed down; my partner is adjusting hers since we’re using a span-set rigging that allows her to work atop the sphere.
Got a little video and some decent still shots from there. This is one of my favorites:
danseur ignoble 