Category Archives: class notes
Ballets Tropicanos de Louiscarlo
First up, finally back in class … again. I’m going to Chicago this week, so I’ll be doing Wednesday Class at home, then classes at the Joffrey on Friday, Sunday, and Monday (and possibly Saturday, depending on plans).
Today we used contretemps (which is a fun little transitional step) for directional changes in a zigzaggy combination. I got the contretemps down beforehand, but didn’t nail it in the combination (I was, predictably, overthinking it).
I worked it out in the grocery store after. The lady who was stocking the drinks aisle probably thinks I’m crazy, but, you know: priorities.
In other news, we wore our tutu outfits for Hallowe’en, because why not? We also wore them around to the Hallowe’en parties at the various day centers where Denis sees his clients and brought much joy to all and sundry 🙂
One of Denis’ friends from work finally got a decent full-length shot of us, as well, so here you go:
Our tribute to the Trocks!
I’ve dubbed us “Ballets Tropicanos de Louiscarlo.”
Please forgive my deplorable fifth 🙂
I feel like I should’ve gone all-out and done my makeup as well, but I didn’t know I was going til the last possible second, so I skipped it to save time.
In other news, I need a haircut, y’all. And Denis needs to get his shoulders down.
PS: The bodice, bolero, and tutu were all hand-made by Denis’ mom, Phyllis, and his aunt, Beverly.
They said that if anyone ever asks of they’d be willing to make another set, we should “tell them those ladies are dead.”
So mad props to all you costumery types out there who make (and maintain and repair) these for a living, because evidently tutus are a giant PITA.
Grand Allegr… Oh.
Today, we had a sub whose name I didn’t catch, but I really enjoyed her class.
Especially the part where she asked us if we wanted to repeat the adagio, and I said, “Yes, because adagio is what I’m worst at.”
… And then did the adagio pretty well, actually, but totally hosed up half of the grand allegro (because I discovered, as we began, that I’d completely blanked on the first two steps of the combination).
Oops.
Oh, well.
I did, in fact, enjoy the class immensely, though.
We did jeté battu, which I did right once or twice and wrong, um, once or twice. Totally had one of those moments in which upon finishing the combination I turned around to trot over to my water bottle and the girl behind me caught my eye and we both kind of made faces and laughed at ourselves. I am going to have to work on jeté battu. It’s really not hard, you just have to convince your “supporting leg” (which is, of course, in the air at the time) to stay still. Only the working leg beats. This is not brisé volé.
This was the first class in a while that I’ve done without Adderall (forgot to take it, because ADHD + depression), and it was really interesting. My mind wanders a lot more without Adderall, which makes it harder to catch combinations when the person giving them talks slowly. Likewise, my language processing seems more likely to take a backseat, which probably doesn’t help.
The final combination joined Sissones and grand allegro, and I was able to remember that there were two “vanilla” Sissones fermées followed by a Sissone changé (AKA the coolest Sissone) to attitude, then tombé, pas de bouree, glissade, pas de chat; then a directional change into tombé, pas de bourée, glissade, saut de chat, but couldn’t for the life of me remember whether it began with Sissone avant or arrière, and I still don’t know. I just flailed my way through, as per SOP.
All of my pas de chats looked good, though, because evidently I am the king of pas de chat.
Also, we all managed to be together on every. single. pas de chat. Which, if you ask me, looks impressive. To be fair, by this time, we were down to three dancers, so not quite as impressive as if we’d still had eight pas-de-chat-ing in perfect synchrony.
But impressive enough. More so because we were also all on the music (my flailings notwithstanding), so we all launched and landed exactly together.
Magic, people — magic!
(Today’s lesson: if you must flail, try to flail on the music, so when you get to the bit you remember, you’ll be ready.)
My turns, on the other hand, were mediocre, including one highly mediocre double (but a double nonetheless). I basically left all my thoughts about Balanchine technique at home.
Incremental gains, I guess.
Dancing always does a great deal to improve my mood, and so it was today. I’m feeling a lot better than I did yesterday.
Also got a new shirt for class, and it’s perfect. w00t.
So that’s it for now.
Keep dancing, dancers.
Turn, Turn, Turn
While usually I’m all about the jumps, today I managed to stay on top of the turns, but lost it in the traveling jumps.
We did another complex adagio combination with promenades en dehors that ended with a tricky one — promenade écarté devant en dehors into first arabesque, which is one of those things that seems really difficult until you do it right, and then it’s like magic (the promenade, especially). The cool part is that it’s easier to balance during the promenade if you bring your working leg higher (provided that you’re using your upper body correctly), so it automatically looks kind of amazing.
For once, I didn’t do any turns the wrong way. Going across, we did balancé, balancé, tombe pas de bourée thrice, with the final phrase ending in pique arabesque, failli, turn from fifth en dehors. It went rather nicely both ways. Staying on the music required using a different attack on the last phrase — it had to be sharper and faster than the first two phrases, which were very fluid and mellow. I liked that.
We followed (after the one zillion little bouncy jumps, which I do well as a matter of course) with a sort of medium allegro combination that should, by all rights, have been right up my alley — just sauté arabesque, failli, glissade, assemblé en menage … except my brain got going about port de bras and instead I bollixed it up rather completely.
I could not both think and reliably get from failli to glissade to assemblé. I’m sure at least two repetitions ended with glissade, pas de chat, while still others turned into Sissons and even cabrioles devants as I realized, too late, that I was Doing It Wrong and attempted to correct myself mid-leap. FFS. The worst part is the I think my assemblé generally looks pretty rad, but missed it almost every time.
Inexplicably, at one point, the whole thing turned into sauté arabesque, failli, precipité, saut de chat, complete with an utterly appropriate port de bras which, nonetheless, had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual port de bras we were supposed to use. Oy vey.
It was a nice saut de chat, at least? It was totally one of those moments when you just have to completely own your alternate version and be like, “Bishes, pls— I’m the soloist, here, my combo is different.”
(Yeah … apparently mine was the turkey combo?)
And then, to cap things off, something weird happened in my ear going left (which is to say, I suddenly quite deaf in my left ear unless you count the fact that it was ringing), and instead of continuing as I normally would, I sort of froze for what felt like forever.
Right in front of Brian.
Literally.
You have not lived until you’ve stood, frozen on one leg, confused panic writ large in your every fiber, blinking desperately, nose-to-dance belt with your teacher (he happened to be sitting down at that moment).
Oh, the humanity.
Gah.
The saving grace was that I wanted to work on spacing, so I opted not to go first. Had I been in front, a tragic and disastrous nine-dancer pileup would certainly have ensued.
Instead, there was only one dancer behind me, and he’s still new to this class, so he was working slowly and carefully (he’s more the “drill it ’til ya kill it” kind than the “fake it til ya make it” kind, I think). There was a loooot of space between us, so I managed to come unstuck and do the right combination, like, twice.
At the end, we just did that weird thing whose name I can’t remember in which you basically run across the floor in attitude (usually with your arms in second). I’m really bizarrely good at it, so that was nice.
If ever they ask me to rename a ballet step, though, I’m going to take that one and rename it “pas berger des chats,” or perhaps “pas troupeau des chats,” because it looks exactly like what I do when I’m trying to herd cats through a door (which, curiously, I also do fairly well, all things considered).
Today’s reverence was also strange, but nice — sort of contemporary yoga ballet reverence.
Soooooooo … yeah. That was Saturday class this week.
For what it’s worth, it was a good class overall.
But I need to remember my own First Rule:
There’s No Thinking In Ballet.
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: 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: Gotta Get Myself Connected
Things are very much coming together in class, but at the same time, there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Saturday’s class is usually easier (sometimes much easier) than the weekday morning classes, and today was no exception. Barre felt very solid. I had no trouble remembering the combinations, so instead I spent a lot of time focused on working through my feet, maintaining turnout when tendu-ing and so forth arriere, making my port de bras more graceful, and being awesome at doing the fondu-into-grand-rond-de-jambe bit. That has been a mess for the past few weeks, coming back into the intermediate classes.
Going across the floor, I had the combinations, but wasn’t really dancing with control (which was ridiculous, since I tossed off a really, really nice turn like it was nothing while we were learning a combination). I was kind of all over the place, particularly in my turns.
I need to keep my head together in class, buckle down, and really focus on honing my technique. (The music didn’t help today. Brian had a new CD that turned out to be really kind of terrible, and we all found it rather hilarious.)
My turns should not be sloppy ever at this juncture … at least not singles. My jumps should be tighter (to be fair, my little jumps sans beats look quite good, and my glissade is finally more or less back in shape; likewise, my assembles always look great, though I need to work on doing smaller ones when the music is quick).
My entrechats should just plain be better: I only did a couple today, and they started out well, and then for some reason, I stopped pointing my feet halfway through the beats. What’s that about*?
At least my port de bras is generally less wacky now. Every once in a while, when I’m jumping, it gets a bit over-enthusiastic. Rarely I get it backwards during adagio. On the whole, though, it’s pretty good.
Likewise, I am no longer getting tangled making it from sauté arabesque to glissade, and not just because I’m faking it better. I realized I’ve been slipping in a pas couru kind of thing after my faille instead of collecting myself for the jump (I guess it helps when I think of ballet in horse terms?)
I think this is an issue I had fixed before and then it, like, broke again. Like my freaking shower handles (well, I don’t fix those; Denis does — the best I can manage is to fiddle with them ’til they’re more or less operable).
The hardest combo today was deceptively simple:
Fondu
Extend
Soutenu turn
Fifth
Tendu back (to 4th)
Passe balance
Close to fifth
Repeat
Plie
Extend
Soutenu turn
Fifth
Tendu back (to 4th)
Passe balance
Fifth
Plie
Double turn (en dehors)
…And then repeat the whole combination until you run out of music or room.
This was challenging for me because I tend to want to really spring into my soutenu turns, but the music was slow, so that wasn’t an option. It was necessary to really step into them with control and stay on your leg. I was not all about being in control and staying on my leg today; I was kind of all over the place. I also think I kind of let my core go. You really can’t dance without core muscles.
So, in other words, this really shouldn’t have been a challenging combination, but it was, because I was a mess (if Ms. Margie was teaching, she would have said, “Use your technique, don’t lose your technique!”).
I’m going to chalk some of today’s chaos up to sleep deprivation, but a lot of it is simply that I need to focus better in class. Like, stop thinking, breathe more, try not to get distracted by shiny moving things in the mirror (SQUIRREL!).
Right now, I feel like that little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead — you know: when I’m good, I’m very, very good; but when I am bad, I am horrid.
Oh! I also totally ganked the barre-stretch leg-strengthening exercise that Kit over at Ballet And/Or Bust described, and I think it’s exactly what the doctor ordered for getting my developpes higher. Right now, they’re back to progressing reasonably well, but it’s still definitely a question of strength and muscle balance.
My thighs remain pretty unbalanced as a result of years of turning the cranks on the bike, which is pretty much the opposite of what you’re doing when you developpe properly. The “eight lifts, then float the leg off the barre” sequence should really help. I’m better on the left side, right now, but that might just be because something had made my right hip (which is usually the tighter one anyway) super, super tight a few weeks ago. It’s almost back to normalish, now, though not yet back to full-splits-on-both-sides normal. I do have a full split back on the left, though.
One last bit.
Do you guys out there in Adult Ballet Bloggerland do that thing where you see a picture of yourself ballet-ing, immediately think, “Wow, I look awesome!” and then start picking apart all of your faults?
Because I am totally doing that with my pictures now 😛
To be fair, I was aware of most of the faults in question at the time (especially the fact that I wasn’t all that turned-out), but unable to really correct them because gravel footing is apparently just as scary when you’re trying to arabesque as when you’re on the bike, descending at 35 MPH. I’m less annoyed by the fact that my passé is kind of low and not super-level because I wasn’t really trying for a perfect passé.
Regardless, I’m still pretty pleased with myself. I had to hoooooold that arabesque and the passé in the other two pictures, and it was tough, what with the shifting gravel and so forth.
My balances are really improving now, though.
Today, in addition to a bunch of very respectable coupé balances, there was one that worked so well that I just, like, hung out there for what felt like ages. I didn’t even do that thing where you go OMGOMG I’M BALANCING! and immediately lose it. My passé balances weren’t quite as solid, but they were still pretty good.
If I can replicate that and improve on it going forward, that will be a really good thing.
Danseur Ignoble: We Got The Beats
Mostly good class this morning; the usual blend of hard work and good cheer.
I didn’t hose up any combinations too badly except the ones that everyone hosed up because the music was faster* than we expected o.O’ Also, got off a bunch of double turns, some of which were nice (and some of which were a bit wild).
My frappés were literally better than they have every been, but my grand battements were weird and wild. I realized at the last split-second that I needed to turn because I was in a corner where I was likely to battement the crap out of the barre behind me and got off my balance and off the music. We détourné-ed right into the next side, so my efforts to get fixed were a tad frantic (though the second side was better?).
Wheeee! First world ballet problems, I guess?
Did the first set of little jumps with reasonable facility, then the second set of little jumps with beats, though I started to feel it in my toe and sort of petered out at the end.
For fun, after class, a few of us did leaps; I threw in a couple tour jetés just for the halibut (insert lame joke here: fishes love tour jetés).
I read an article not long ago about how ballet dancers are not masochists. I’m not sure I agree at all: when your ballet teacher goes, “This is mean, and it’s going to hurt, and I’m sorry,” and the whole class sort of giggles maniacally, it suggests at least a little masochism on the part of the dancers.
Someday I will create a ballet about ballet class. It will be called “The Rented Mules,” or maybe “The Merry Mules.” It will not be as good as Paul Taylor’s ballet about ballet class, but maybe it will be funny.
To Remember:
1. Keep that back together in pique arabesque.
2. Practice adagio turns to développé. These look really cool, but right now mine are kind of a mess: I need to down-rate my force in order to arrive in plié in the right direction on one leg while already extending the working leg (through fondue).
Brienne points out that to do this, you think of it as “just a spot” (presumably instead of going ESCAPE VELOCITY GO!!!, which is how all my turns begin except when I remind myself to channel Baryshnikov and Find A Still Place first).
3. Go to the dance store and get fitted for shoes after Burning Man. All my shoes are officially pissing me off for various reasons except the little El Cheapo shoes from eBay, which are going to the desert, where they will, without a doubt, be summarily destroyed by the Alkaline Dust of Doom.
In other news, you should come to Summer Intensive with me next year in Lexington! 🙂
Addendum:
Progress in ballet, like progress in life, seems to take place stepwise.
Step 1: Thinking, “What the heck is — how do you even do that?”
Step 2: Giving it a try by broadly approximating whatever you’re trying to do.
Step 3: Feeling fairly confident about your broad approximation even though you still have to kind of remind yourself what frappé or soutenu or pas de basque is.
Step 4: No longer having to remind yourself as often, but realizing that your broad approximation leaves a great deal of room for improvement.
Step 5: Beginning to improve by making the large, visible adjustments.
Step 5: No longer having to remind yourself almost ever.
Step 6: Continuing to improve via medium adjustments.
Step 6: Transitioning from “improving” to “refining,” because you no longer have to remind yourself what a step is or about the improvements you’ve made thus far and you’re now making quite small adjustments.
Step 7: Getting the steps “into your body,” so they begin to feel instinctual and to link instinctually to other steps (this is so cool; sometimes you can predict a significant part of a combo before it’s given to you).
Steps 8 — ???: Further iterations of the refinement-and development-of instinct process.
Step approximately 1,000,000: Mastery (not perfection, which may not exist even in Ballet Paradise, since dancers like to have something to work on).
For what it’s worth, the development of a kind of “ballet sense,” a (still highly-limited) ability to predict what will make up part of a combination based on the music and the preceding steps, has greatly aided my ability to remember combinations.
Notes
*When in doubt, mark it out! … Even at barre.
Danseur Ignoble: Night School
I set my alarm wrong, so did night class today.
It went brilliantly, except for two parts — first, the part where I misunderstimated my travel during petit allegro and nearly ran the dude next to me into the piano twice … TWICE!!!; second, the part where I hosed up the final combo because I didn’t quite grasp what was supposed to come between the flying pas de basque (not to be confused with saut de basque) and the saute arabesque/cabriole.
I’mma have to practice that flying pas de basque thing. It’s fun, but my legs go a little Baby Giraffe Mode getting from that to other steps.
Brian taught tonight. His teaching style is playful and energetic, so his classes are fun.
Seriously; while this is probably not something that he would really do, there’s something in his personality that makes me think he’s going to come around and tickle us: that makes you stand up REALLY FREAKING TALL, by the way. Some atavistic part of my brain that is stuck in pre-school pre-ballet is like PULL UP TALL SO THE TICKLE MONSTER CAN’T SEE YOU!!!
Pro Tip: If you pull up tall, the Tickle Monster can’t see you.
The best general bit of advice (not really a correction, because we hadn’t broken out the passés yet) tonight? In passé and retiré, imagine a meat hook grabbing and lifting the muscle at the top inside of your thigh. Yeah, kind of a gristly image, but it works brilliantly for me. It makes me stop thinking ROTATE ROTATE ROTATE and, predictably, going CLENCH CLENCH CLENCH.
Clenching makes balances, like, 1,000,000% harder, you guys.
Oh, and I did all three bazillion little jumps and only screwed up the petit allegro a little**. Yasssssss! Getting that back has been surprisingly difficult, so it’s good that it finally felt like dancing.
Also, the little jumps looked good. So there’s that.
Now! Other business!
I heard back from Lexington Ballet, and their adult SI was a resounding success this year, so they areplanning on doing it again, and they would very much welcome out of town dancers. I’ll keep an ear to the wind for updates on that.
I’m going to see if I can get a group of LBS students together to go (Field Trip! … Er, Week-Long Field Trip!). If not, I’ll still go by myself; it doesn’t conflict with any of the Sun King weeks that sound interesting.)
Our Tutu Tuesday costumes are complete (mine is packed, even!) and look fabulous. I am not allowed to post pix until our camp-mates have seen them, though, so the whole internet is just going to have to sit on its hands until then (because I know nobody has anything more important to do that wait for pictures of our tutus).
I am totally miffed about this, really, because I now have the most adorable picture ever of Mr. Merkah playing in Denis’ tutu*** and I can’t post it until we get back.
That’s it for now. I really need to think about finding something to eat and then going to bed. Between mowing the lawn, riding the bike, and dancing, I have Burned All The Calories today and am Way, Way Tired.
Danseur Ignoble: Insert Joke About Having A Lot Of Class
I got my hair cut, hung out in the world (mostly riding around on the bike), then did tonight’s open house class with Ms. E.
It was, in a word, awesome. Barre was solid, adagio was solid, we did cool waltzy things across the floor (fairly nailed the first; didn’t quite catch the combo on the second so I basically faked it: nothing like faking it in the first group :P).
I like Ms. E’s teaching style — she’s fun, but still precise, and really encourages us to dance.
We did two fun little petit allegro combos, the second of which I really enjoyed (glissade, assemblé, glissade assemblé, glissade, jete [to coupe], relève, relève).
I feel like I’m gaining a better sense for where my body is in space now: I can feel it when my arabesques are on sideways, when my feet are really working, and so forth without everything else falling apart.
Likewise, a year ago I would never have guessed that I’d be picking up combinations as quickly as I am now. It’s still not perfect, but I’m much, much quicker than I was. I figured that would be the hardest part for me. It might still be, but I feel pretty confident about it now.
Part of it is not really having to think about the individual steps; part is, I think, just practice making … well, not perfect, but better.
My toe is a little sore, but not too bad, so tonight it will get a much-deserved rest. Tomorrow, since Denis graciously gave me a whole day for ballet, I will Do All The Chores.
I expect to sleep like a baby tonight. I’m quite tired — though not exhausted like I was on Saturday.
I would, however, commit vile acts of inhuman depravity for a really good slice of pizza right now 😉
That’s it for today. Ballet feels very exciting right now. I’m looking forward to coming months.
Good night, and keep the leather side down.
Danseur Ignoble: That Moment When You Get It
Today’s class was good.
Not “I did absolutely everything right” good (because, come on, it’s ballet; the very instant you get something really right, they give you something harder to do), but “things are starting to crystallize” good.
I once described this feeling as “leveling up.” This time, it’s not so much leveling up as refining the level I’m on: like going back to collect all the hidden coins in a video game, or whatever.
Brienne gave me a zillion corrections today, which felt awesome (given my history with ballet, horsemanship, and academics, it shouldn’t sound weird to say, “Yay, criticism!” but it rather does, actually). She also said it’s fun to pick on me 🙂 That, too, is high praise coming from one’s ballet teacher.
Barre was quite good, with the exception of a super-weird moment in a grand rond de jambe from soutenu derrière (Brienne described it as “the worst thing in classical ballet, but we have to do it”), which was … well, it could have been worse, but it wasn’t good.
The highlight, meanwhile, occurred during barre adagio: Brienne gave me a handful of corrections as I did a different grand rond de jambe from derrière (this one did not begin with soutenu), and my working leg did this magical thing wherein suddenly it was fully pointed, straight, awesomely turned out, and weightlessly* hovering at what seemed like a ridiculously high extension. It startled3 me so much that I said, “Oh! Hey!”
And then my working leg basically owned the rest of that rond de jambe with essentially no effort from me. If only all of class could be like that, all the time!
Now, if I can ever do that again, particularly when someone is ready with a camera, I can probably die happy. I won’t even ever have to perform if someone just gets video me executing of a single perfect grand rond de jambe with that kind of ridiculous extension.
At center, adagio was … meh, could’ve been worse, but would’ve been better if I’d understood the first combination right the first time and then didn’t spend the remaining repetitions freaking out about getting it wrong.
On the upside? Double turns! On demand! WTF, when did I stop sucking at turns (again)?
Brienne gave us a useful talk about identifying one’s own natural spotting speed so one can modulate one’s turning speed according to the music. I think I am actually kind of a slow-turner, but I’m not entirely certain.
I also sucked it up and did the little jumps, since my toe felt okay, and was surprised how much faster they’re getting. It used to be that I could either jump really slowly with beautiful point and straight legs or schlub my way through quick jumps. Now I’m starting to hit really nice quick jumps about half the time.
Brienne has been making me focus on really working through my feet, and holy cow, is it ever helping!
We ran out of time before we got to do grand allegro, alas.
I’m thinking I will do class tonight. A) it’s giant ballet party open house night, and B) Ms. E is teaching, and I don’t think I’ve done class with her yet. Perhaps we’ll allegro!
Anyway. That’s it for now. There is nothing like the feeling of making progress!
danseur ignoble 