Category Archives: class notes
Ballet Lessons: Get Out Of Your Own Way
Little by little, piece by piece, Ms. B of Hard Mode Ballet Class is making a dancer out of me.
Not just a guy who knows how to execute a bunch of ballet steps, but a dancer — someone who executes a bunch of ballet steps with élan; who uses his head and his eyes and his port de bras; who relates to the music intelligently and expressively; who doesn’t grip with his neck, for frack’s sake.
In order to do that, one must learn one’s own body in depth: how to feel the minute muscles in the hip socket; how to knit the ribs together without collapsing; how to open the collarbones without throwing the shoulders back behind the hips.
One must also learn how to get out of one’s own way.
There’s a magical thing that happens when you learn how to get out of your own way: suddenly, things get easier.
In order to execute a high, smooth grand rond-de-jambe, you must know where to place your pelvis so you don’t block either your extension or your turnout. The first time you find that balance (perhaps after having had it and then lost it), it’s like magic.
Curiously, some dancers naturally find it early in their training only to lose it again as they begin to work more consciously on turnout, placement, and extension.
That’s pretty much what happened to me: I started really thinking about pelvic placement about a year ago — and at first I over-corrected, as is my wont. As I began to work into more advanced classes and to work towards higher extensions, I found myself inexplicably blocked at times: and then Ms. B got around to sorting my pelvis, and it turned out that I was basically getting in my own way.
Once I let my pelvis find its own neutral spot and stopped thinking so hard — once I got out of my own way — my extensions got better, my turnout got better, and I could start really thinking about other stuff.
Ironically, the whole source of the problem with extensions and turnout resulted from a conscious effort to place my pelvis so I could … like … better access turnout and alignment.
I think this makes a good allegory.
Often, in life, we get so concerned about being correct that, in fact, we over-correct. We try really hard to do things just right, and we find ourselves stumbling into unexpected road-blocks; tangled in the intricacies of the details.
In short, we get in our own way.
Sometimes, the best answer is to stop thinking, stop concentrating so hard on being correct, and get out of our own way. (This is, I am almost certain, a corollary to the rule, “Don’t make it happen — let it happen.”)
So there you have it. If you’re having difficulty in your dancing or in your life, maybe try loosening the reins and getting out of your own way. It might just help!
So that’s my Ballet Lesson for today.
In other news, I apologize for my recent absence. I’ve had a sinus infection, and the first really noticeable symptom (besides, randomly, pain in my teeth) was a wicked fatigue that seemed to come from nowhere. I haven’t been posting because, in short, I’ve had nothing to post. I’ve basically been asleep, for the most part, for the past week.
I did do part of class (and part of juggling class) on Saturday, but I was actually too tired to write about it afterwards, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. If I’m too tired to write, I’m probably too darn tired to do just about anything.
Oh. Duh.
This morning, Ms. B’s barre was fantastic: really good and really challenging (as often happens, we had a handful of professional dancers in class; even they found the barre challenging!). I got some excellent guidance on my penché — the result was one of those, “Oh, it’s the floor! Hi, floor!” moments.
Apparently, my port de bras was also beautiful, and a quick adjustment I made early in the class (totally cribbing off my friend B.) made for some amaaaaazing balances. w00t!
In between combinations, I kept catching sight of myself in the mirror and thinking, “Is that really what I look like?”
Like, when did I turn into this surprisingly broad-shouldered person?
After class, B. took me out to lunch, and we got around to discussing various First World Ballet Problems (as is our wont), and it suddenly hit me: of course I’m having trouble with turns.
My body is surprisingly different than it was just a few weeks ago.
Though, really, that shouldn’t be surprising. I’ve been spending 10 – 15 hours each week on cirque training. I seem to have sprouted, like, arms and stuff.
So, basically, all of that is going to impact my center of balance, and of course it’s going to make my turns a hair wonky until I sort it out again.
Thus, for the time being, I’m going to go back to Channeling Baryshnikov — preparing for turns as if they were some kind of Zen exercise, which maybe they should be, instead of sproinging into them with All The Power whilst simultaneously throwing myself off my axis.
This also explains a previously-inexplicable new problem with my balance during tour lent, promenade, and penché. So, basically, I need to adjust for the fact that I’ve added muscle upstairs. Eep.
Since it’s my birthday, I got to choose a step to work on, so I chose saut de basque (and we got to do Grand Allegro, finally — it’s been a while). We did a fabulous combination that I’ll try to record later, if I can remember, but for now we need to jet off to conditioning and Trapeze.
Everything Crammed Into One Post
The past several days have been busy-in-excess-of-my-usual-policy, so here’s a quick recap:
Thursday, I took the road test for a driver’s license, passed it with flying colors, went home for a couple hours, went to bell choir practice, then went to another awesome session of Acro-Balancing in which we all more or less failed to actually nail a five-person fan, but had a great time trying.
Friday, I drove out and picked up my friend Robert, who is staying with us as part of his relocating-to-Louisville process. We did some kind of class on Friday evening, but I can’t honestly remember what it was 😛
Saturday, Advanced Class went reasonably well, though my turns weren’t great for reasons I don’t quite comprehend (probably, though, I was just tired). Juggling class also went well, as did … um … whatever we did after that, which might have been one or another form of conditioning?
Sunday, I didn’t get to do any cirque stuff because I played bells, and that was excellent. We did really well, and we played Holst’s Thaxted and two other pieces, including a really cool modern arrangement for choir, organ, and bells of a 15th-century piece. I love the music of that period, so that was a blast.
Monday morning, I continued to suck at turns because I continued to be tired. Barre was excellent, though. Monday evening, we did Fitness & Flexibility and Silks 1, during which Denis and I both shot a little bit of video with my phone.
Once my phone stops being a jerk and refusing to upload, I’ll post said video here. Mine is extremely short, unfortunately, and I didn’t think to ask Denis to shoot the lovely roll-ups that I did. I have less than a minute of spinning mermaid-into-tuck, and it’s rather nice (though, being me, I get hung up on the fact that my side plank was a wee bit saggy).
To top things off, I executed an absolutely beautiful pirouette while talking with my silks teacher about why a certain roll-up move we were doing felt so natural and intuitive to me. Why couldn’t I have had beautiful turns in ballet class???!!!!!
It’s really interesting how some things on silks are intuitive for dancers and some aren’t. The arabesque on silks is, in fact, counter-intuitive from a ballet perspective — you use an entirely different bodily process to achieve the same end result, so it’s the thing I struggle with the most (which makes everyone else in class feel better, since some of the things that are hard for everyone else are really easy for me).
So that’s where I’ve been the past few days. Moving Robert in has involved the usual array of setup, shopping, and so forth, which has eaten up a fair bit of time.
Things are more or less back to normal now, though.
Tomorrow is my birthday, so I think I’m going to drop by our local dancewear store and treat myself to some new shoes, complete with a proper fitting. It would be awesome to have a nice pair of shoes that don’t roll off the backs of my feet at the worst possible moment (currently, my super cheap eBay shoes don’t roll off, but they’re also not going to hold up forever).
Video to follow!
Wednesday Class: Musicality Day
En manège:
Temps levée arabesque
Balancé turn
Temps levée arabesque
Balancé turn
Pique turn
Pique turn
Temps levée arabesque
Balancé turn
Temps levée arabesque
Balancé turn
Chaînes x4
Temps levée arabesque
Balancé turn
Temps levée arabesque
Balancé turn
Those coupé half-turns whose name escapes me
Temps levée arabesque
Run away so second group can go, but make sure you’re spaced so you can re-enter on the next pass
Petit Allegro:
Glissade (no change)
Jeté
Glissade (no change)
Jeté
Glissade (no change)
Jeté
Pas de bourré
Entrechat quatre
Other side
Other Petit Allegro:
Sissone simple avant
Sissone simple arrière
Tombe
Coupe
Glissade
Assemblé (battu if you like)
Other side
I didn’t do as well with choreography today as I expected to — I attribute this to Denis’ nightbear.
Yes, that’s -bear rather than -mare. He dreamed a giant bear was hovering inches from his face and woke with a loud shout. That cost me two hours of sleep, and I was slow getting started this morning and didn’t eat or drink enough before class. The end result was weak petit allegro (edit: because I ran out of steam; and I should say “weaker-than-usual;” my petit allegro has only recently started being reliable in Wednesday and Saturday class again).
On the other hand, Ms. B gave me a ton of really good direction at barre — she’s really working on making an expressive dancer out of me, and it’s working far better than I had expected.
Addendum: there was this really awesome moment during one of the exercises when she was correcting my port de bras and epaulement and said something like, “Open that chest — really show that you’re strong — proud!” and I responded by channeling the frack out of my inner Ballet Prince, to which she said, “Yes!”
In ballet class, “Yes!” can mean so, so much.
She also gave me a modification on our centre adagio – my knee wasn’t hurting, but I didn’t want to push it, so she suggested that I substitute a penché in place of a promenade on that side.
Because I was the only guy in class and standing in the center of the group, I think it looked rather cool; rather intentional.
The challenges are timing my penché so I arrived back at the vertex just as the ladies completed their promenade and keeping the penché fluid and lyrical (which is harder when you’re tired, evidently!). It was cool; I enjoyed having the opportunity to think about timing and musicality that way.
I think my penché was a tad stiff on the first run, but it came together beautifully on the second.
This week I’m working on keeping my core together while maintaining a fluid, expressive relaxation in my upper body. These are the details that I both enjoy immensely and find quite challenging.
Anyway, I’ve almost reached the grocery store, so I’d better close. We have something at Suspend tonight, but I didn’t recall precisely what.
À bientôt, mes amis!
Monday Class: We Got The Beats (Again)
Here’s a little petit allegro combination:
A
[Brush (back foot) to coté
Sous-sus
Brush plié second
Entrachat trois]
Repeat A two more times
Sisson simple
Chassé
Assemblée
Other side.
This was the final combination today— we didn’t do grand allegro because we ran out of time.
For some reason, I had difficulty getting the changes on this (I kept changing the back foot instead of the front), but once attained it was really nice. Very dance-y.
Prior to that we did royales; like a zillion of them, to make them very clean.
Across-the-floor went:
Pique fouetté
Balancé
Pique fouetté
Balancé turn
Pas de bourré-fifth
Chassé fourth
Double turn
Detourné
Plié fourth
Attitude turn to arabesque
Run away*!
*The studio isn’t big enough to do this twice through with any conviction.
I loved this one, once I stopped thinking and just danced.
Pirouette combinations involved a Vaganova thing with turns from second and a brute-force thing with eight repetitions of [plié, turn from fifth].
I managed to do half the turns the wrong way because for some reason I was convinced they were supposed to be en dedans. My brain loves en dedans.
Barre was strange (in a good way), interesting, and full of brain-teasers. Mr. Beastie was very much on form today (in the sense that his combinations were excellent; physically, he’s recovering from a wee hernia).
Both my turnout and my core are holding together better, which makes for better extensions, though my legs were tight today.
I would like to say that I’ll continue to write down the combinations like this, but I can’t always recall them this well.
So that was class. An excellent Monday. I hate my arms less and less each week; little by little, I look less like a big ropy cephalopod and more like a danseur.
I. DID. A. TRIPLE.
OMG OMG OMG.
You guys!.
It wasn’t the world’s best triple, but it…
was…
a triple!
Yasssssss!
If nothing else had gone right in class today (which, btw, almost everything went very well), I could still basically die happy right now.
Also, JP taught, and we got to do brisées, of which I did some correctly.
That’s all for now.
À bientôt.
Hard, But Not So Hard
This describes both class and life, today.
After the second or third class in a row thinking, “Ms. B. didn’t work us too hard today,” I’ve realized it’s not her — it’s me. The extra work at Suspend, the extra challenge of Advanced Class: these things are paying off. I no longer want to die halfway through barre, and I was even together enough to catch the medium and grand allegro combinations today. In the past, I’ve often not really been firing on all 3.5 cylinders by the last combination or two.
That said, my knee objected stridently to frappés (apparently, I lock my hyperextensions during frappé: oops). It also haaaaaaated promenade and did not love the slow attitude turn, but I endeavoured to execute our adage with all the aplomb I possess all the same. It was too nice not to.
The knee also still wasn’t so happy about some fast-traveling turns (right-working-leg en dedans from fourth, especially), which I find distracting enough that I hosed up the pirouette combination going left and made myself do it over. Twice.
Medium allegro was a brain-teaser:
Part A
little Sissone to coupé avant right
little tombe back to fifth, plié
coupé temps levée arrière left
assemblé-glissade-assemblé, maybe? (I don’t remember what exactly happened here, though I succeeded in doing it right at the time.)
…And then Part B:
sauté to first
plié
sauté in first
plié
sauté
sauté
sauté
plié
échappé
plié
sauté in second
changement
changement
changement
plié
soubresaut
plié
soubresaut
plié
soubresaut x3
…and then repeat Side A on the opposite leg.
Or, well, something very much like that. No difficult steps (at least, not now that my legs have remembered how to Sissone yet again), but a test of dexterity. The weight shifts constantly; the bit in the middle (and again at the
end) feels delightfully simple, but you must pay attention to your changes of foot, lest you start the second pass through Part A on the wrong leg. The tempo’s too fast for that, and next week, when we do it again, it will be twice as fast.
We didn’t do beaten jumps, but that’s fine. I did better beaten jumps on Monday than I’ve done in years: quick, crisp, and articulate.
Our grand allegro started out simply, but included a transitional mind-screw of epic proportions.
It went:
Temps levée arabesque
Temps levée passé
temps levée arabesque
Failli
Glissade
Assemblé
PAS DE CHAT FROM THE FRONT FOOT OMG!
directional change via pas de bourée
temps levée arabesque, etc.
First, my body really wanted to insert an extra temps levée passe.
Second, none of us — NONE! — could convince our legs while marking that it was okay to pas de chat from the front, even though that happens sometimes even in Real Ballet. If you do it from the back leg in this combination, you have to adjust a bunch of stuff on the fly. Some of us did succeed in nailing it on the first run, but by then least one of us (I mean, of course, your humble Danseur Ignoble) had discovered a creative way to screw things up anyway.
You see, I apparently blinked or was pouring water into my mouth or something and missed the part of the demo that made it perfectly clear to everyone else that the PDB was the directional change. Instead, I must have decided it was supposed to be Bizarro-World PDB (front-side-back) or something like that, since we were already doing Bizarro-World PDC.
I don’t know what I did while marking; I may have just left it out because how can you screw up pas de bourré, right?
But screw it up, I did: having decided that the directional change came after the PDB, I passed the cat (ha), then despaired over what to do with my legs and sort of faked my way into the next part. I can’t, at this point, really fathom what I must have been thinking, because once I realized my mistake it was so obvious.
I got it down on the second run, though my brain stubbornly tried to insert an extra temps levée passé on the left side, so once again I made myself do an extra repeat.
On the upside, my old difficulty in getting from temps levée arabesque through failli to glissade did not resurface, so there’s that, and once I had all the parts in place, the combination was buoyant and pretty and fun.
I wound up walking a lot after class, and by the time I got home I was cooked and my knee was sore, so I opted out of class at Suspend. Tomorrow, it’s once more unto the breach, etc., but tonight, the knee has earned a break*. I went straight to bed with an ice pack, a book (on my tablet), and my cat, who is now applying his vibrating massage feature to said knee.
*NOT THAT KIND OF BREAK, Knee, so don’t go getting any ideas!
There was more I wanted to write, but it turns out that I’m exhausted. I still haven’t been sleeping well: I got 13 hours on Monday night, but probably fewer than 5 hours last night. I kept waking up and lying there in that suspended-but-not-asleep state in which Bad Thoughts have me at their mercy. It’s not quite sleep paralysis, but it’s close; I can operate my body after a fashion, but can’t steer my brain at all. This morning, I never got back to sleep after Denis’ first alarm, and thus missed an hour of sleep that I could really have used by then.
Thus, I’m going to read for a bit longer, and maybe then I’ll sleep again (thanks to the power of Twilight, which makes reading on my tablet less wakefulness-inducing than reading a regular book by my bedside lamp).
I think I am going to survive this week. I think maybe I am learning to talk to people, though still not yet apparently before I find myself in a crisis. I’ll work on that next week, I guess.
À bientôt, mes amis.
Cold, Comfort
This morning, we were alllllll cold.
Mr. B. gave us a slow, full-body warm-up, which made a world of difference, and class as a whole was pretty good. I fell apart disastrously going across the floor, but it was my own fault: somehow, I put myself in the second group and found myself in Advanced Class mode — which is to say that I came in on the second phrase of the music, and my intrepid partner jumped right in with me, and we promptly became incredibly confused because Mr. B. was calling out the combination to the first group.
Today I Learned that it’s actually quite hard to complete the first phrase of the combination while someone is shouting the second phrase at the top of his lungs. Go figure.
I eventually reined it back in, but for a while there it was hilariously bad.
At least there were double turns today?
Anyway, you know it’s cold when the whole class starts out wearing warm-up trousers and leg warmers and hoodies and three shirts and everything else. Today, it never got warm enough for any of us to strip all the way down to tights and leos only. We debated closing the studio door towards the end of barre, but opted against, because it gets so, so hot in there with the door closed; like, people passing out on the floor hot.
B. drove me home and we worked on Super Secret Plan B, which is now fairly concrete. It may or may not pan out, but at least it’s a plan! 😀
After, I crawled into the tub and read for a long time. These days, I spend a lot of time re-heating my body when it’s cold, because even though I was once a hardy, northern-bred boy, I am now a complete hothouse flower because ballet*.
*To whit: the human body doesn’t really do all that much to adapt to cold, but it adapts to heat like crazy. When you spend oceans of time sweating your butt off in a very warm dance studio, you tend to develop excellent adaptations for heat, but when you walk out the door at it’s -5 C and your body has lovingly prepared itself for Miami in July, you freeze your huevos off.
Better winter clothes would help, but we don’t get that many days that are really, really cold.
This evening, Denis and I tried the Fitness & Flexibility class, which combined challenging conditioning exercises (try hanging upside-down with your legs pointing straight up, then touch your toes as many times as you can in a minute**) with stretches that were adaptable even to ridiculous noodle people like myself.
With the supervision of a qualified instructor, of course.
I actually managed to get my butt off the lyra while doing “baby pull-ups” (ha!), so I’m definitely making progress***.
***Sadly, this means I will lose the Very Best Excuse Ever: “Sorry, I have basically no upper body strength, I can’t help move that fridge/bath tub/sofa.”
Last week I just, like, engaged all the muscles and … nothing. I just sat there straining and contemplating my place in the universe (which, at the time, seemed to be, “Right here, with my butt on this lyra.”). This week, I managed to do 11 “baby pull-ps” on the first round and 13 on the second round (F&F, like Conditioning, uses a circuit-based approach).
I noticed that staying warm in F&F was more challenging than in ballet — in part, because it’s colder in the aerials studio than in the ballet studio (except maybe in Studio 5, which gets COLD), but there were also a couple of other factors.
First, the aerial apparati…es? really work better when you’re not wearing a bunch of warm-ups.
Second, ballet simply generates more heat — though possibly not more than the stuff the more advanced aerialists are doing, which involves more constant motion.
I get really hot in the ballet studio in part because the muscles in my legs are fairly enormous. They’re constantly in use and they generate a lot of heat, so I get really warm.
So, anyway, there you have it. This week is all about figuring out how to stay comfortable in the cold while being an admitted hothouse flower (or tomato, as B. put it this afternoon).
More to come.
À bientôt, mes amis!
PS: We have some good new pictures of Denis from Sunday, but he didn’t take any of me.
Wednesday Class: Less Tired This Time
Barre today was challenging: Brienne stepped things up a notch, bringing in changes of body direction in long combinations. I got many, but not all, of them.
I continue to try to focus on using my inner thighs, though it’s a greater challenge while also trying to remember the direction changes and whether to go en croix and trying not to kick the taller of the two new guys, who stood beside me today.
I’m really glad they came back to class. I feel like their presence enriches the class; they’re both good dancers who work hard. Taller Guy* has impressive splits!
*For the record, they’re both taller than I am, maybe even just plain tall — but I’m right on the borderline between average and miniature. Still, I don’t know their names, so for now they’re going to be Taller Guy and Smaller Guy.
At center, we did a pretty, but hard, adagio with … erm, fondu devisé? Something devisé, (edit: turns out it’s divisé — divisé en quarts) short for anyway (edit: also, I have no idea what I was trying to type here; autocorrupt was cray this afternoon). My phone is being weird, so I’ll have to look it up when I get home.
Turns were better. I had doubles from fourth, though not as consistently as I’d like.
Our grand allegro combination was fun — Glissade, jeté, glissade, jeté, step-grand jeté, step-grand jeté.
I did it well enough at first, but as I got tired my legs kept wanting to put extra glissades in after the second jeté.
Still, I was less tired today than I was last Wednesday — much less tired, in fact – and I felt stronger last night in aerials class. My tuck dismount on trapeze and silks is no longer just an uncontrolled unfurling 🙂
I think I will be able to adapt to this training schedule, and since I wasn’t sure, I feel good about that.
There are more days in my life now on which I look at myself as I undress at the end of the day and I think this part or that part of my body is beautiful. Rarely, I even think the whole thing is pretty decent.
This is a huge step forward: I never used to have any of those days. I used to pretty much hate my body all the time.
Ballet and aerials are changing that in a way I never expected. I used to hate it — and, honestly, I often still do – when people would respond to my feelings about my body, which were the irrational result of deep-seated dysphoria, with so much pablum about how much my body could do.
I don’t think being reminded of that on a rational level helps any more than does telling someone with depression to buck up because at least they don’t live in a Siberian prison camp. That’s not, as it were, how any of this works.
But doing amazing things with this body, and discovering it to be strong and graceful and capable, has really helped — as has exposure to the wild array of beautiful male dancers’ bodies, into which my own body increasingly fits.
In short, ballet and aerials have altered the scope of my inner sense of how my body should look (a concept that’s more complicated and less rational than it sounds). Constant exposure to my own reflection, meanwhile, has adjusted my sense of how my body does look.
I suspect that I still often literally see a distorted version of myself, but the maybe the distortion isn’t as bad as it once was.
So that’s it, today. I’m going to go home, take a hot bath (in which I will read La Dame aux Camélias in the original, maybe), foam-roll my legs until they fall off, and then do some work stuff.
I used to think that my body dysphoria and anorexic thought patterns would never, ever, ever change. Now I’m not so sure, and that feels like a good thing.
À bientôt, mes amis!
Edit: PS, my ear behaved itself today. Woot!
The Show Goes On
Last night, I wrote about how sometimes living with bipolar feels like walking a tightrope; how the only way to survive is to keep your eyes up and keep moving forward.
Ballet is the thing that makes me able to do that.
This morning, getting up was a complicated, but I did get up, and I made it to class.
..And I’m glad we did, as we had four new dancers (new to class, not new to ballet), all of whom were quite good, and two of whom were guys.
Barre went well except for the double-rond-de-jambe-and-frappe combination, which went badly at first because I apparently brain-dumped it right at the start. I remembered it before we started the second side, though.
I also miraculously remembered how to sissone (though my turns … oy vey … my turns) and did the assemblé-sissone-chassé-jeté combination fairly well (after the first time, during which I failed to put my working foot down between the sissone and the chassé and turned it into some kind of awkward saut de chat).
In case you’re wondering, by the way, I think the entirety of that combination went:
assemblé (à droit, R foot back, no change)
sissone (avant)
chassé
jeté
assemblé (à gauche, L foot back, no change)
sissone (avant)
chassé
jeté
assemblé (à droit)
jeté
jeté
jeté
assemblé (à gauche)
jeté
jeté
jeté
…though I may be combining it with the other petit allegro combination we did (glissade-assemblé-jeté-hold; glissade-assemblé-jeté-hold; etc) come to think of it. Regardless, it was something very much like that.
In short: not difficult, but a mild brain teaser, since you have to get the directions of your feet right and there’s a little change of direction entailed in the sissone. It was also a nice-looking combination, and one of the new girls did lovely little battus on all the jetés on our first run.
It no longer feels weird to start a combination with assemblé
There is definitely a part of me that likes to show off or something in the presence of other male dancers (particularly when they are not so much better at dancing than I am as to make me look patently ridiculous). Today, it worked — my dancing was better overall than it was at any point last week, and although my turns were a tad wild and sloppy, they weren’t as horrible as they might have been.
It’s weird (if unsurprising) how much what’s going on in your head can influence your dancing. Saturday, even before the disaster with my ear, I was tired and achy and didn’t feel like I was going to acquit myself respectably, so I didn’t.
Today, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. Instead, it was like I had a little Japanese grade-school kid from some monster-battle anime series in my head saying, “Let’s do our best!” (“Jeté battu, I choose you!”)
Bizarrely, that worked. And we got to do saut de basques, which I lurve. And my assemblé looked good — high and suspended and not afflicted with horrible kraken arms or an unnecessarily curvilinear torso. So, huzzah. I suppose once I’ve had that nailed down for a couple of weeks, I should tried to put a beat back into it.
Because we do oceans of beats in advanced class, I’m really focused on using my inner thighs during barre, closing every tendu, degagé, and jeté by pulling the inner thigh muscles together instead of pushing in with the quadriceps (as if I was pedaling a bike or something).
When one uses the inner-thigh muscles, one tends to automatically engage both, maintaining alignment and placement; likewise, getting to a solid fifth between jumps is much easier.
Think: glissade to fifth, giant plié, brush out from plié, grand assemblé, for example. The working leg is carried by the momentum of the initiating brush, then the quadriceps (and some other muscles) in the supporting leg provide the spring; both legs are collected inward by the engagement of the inner thighs; the plié tension-loads the spring again; then a second brush (from the bottom of the plié) carries the working leg out and up, the quads (and related muscles) in the supporting leg push through to activate the spring; and the inner thigh brings the second leg up to meet the working leg.
Without the collecting movement from the inner thighs, a solid fifth position is unlikely; without a solid fifth, the grand assemblé is unlikely to be as … well … grand.
When one uses the quads, the body tends to shift towards the working leg, which pulls the balance away from the ball of the supporting foot. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” &c.
As in cycling, the quads should be used mostly for pushing down; you need them to give you explosive power during jumps. When you pull in, you use the inner thighs; when you lift into passé, the impulsion comes from under the thigh and buttock. Incidentally, this also prevents that thing where your leg grips itself into a horrible spasm as you développé.
All this actually makes it much easier both to keep my knees straight and to maintain my turnout. It also makes maintaining balance and placement easier. I did the first set of fast degagés sans barre (7 each way x2; then pliés to relevé), though I did take the barre for the second set, which was really, really fast.
I guess I also need to get back to focusing on carrying my upper body directly atop my hips. This really imparts a surprising amount of lightness. I found myself doing this today as a function of not trying to look like a dork in front of the new dancers, and as a result, my work at center and going across the floor looked pretty good.
Aerials should help with that, as part of the problem is an imbalance between my back muscles (those “arabesque muscles” again) which are ridiculously strong (because I have spent a ridiculous amount of time cultivating a beautiful arabesque and a lovely, controlled penché), and my core muscles, which are not as strong (because I am lazy).
In short, this is what happens when we focus more on our strengths than our weaknesses … the weaknesses get weaker. Because I’m flexible and can get into a really nice arabesque as a result, I seize every single opportunity to use my arabesque.
Need a teacup on a high shelf? Arabesque. Need to hand something to Denis when he’s standing a half-meter or so away? Arabesque. Collecting Denis’ empty glass when he’s sitting on the sofa? Arabesque penché.
But do I work my core muscles anywhere near as much?
Hahaha. No.
Aerials are all about the core, though, so that will get fixed.
In other news, on the way home from class, I learned that David Bowie had died.
It was startling, in a way, because I was just listening to some of his stuff from Blackstar last night and thinking about how cool it is that he’s still creating and innovating in his late 60s.
Bowie contributed a great deal to the cultivation of popular music, and it says a great deal about his work that he will be sorely missed across several generations.
I don’t have much more to say about that right now, though. What do you say when an icon falls?
Someone I know on facebook said it best: Imagine the ticket lines in Heaven for the Bowie-Mercury reunion show!
danseur ignoble 