Category Archives: class notes
Ballet Squid Chronicles: Combination
Piqué arabesque,
Glissade,
Assemblé,
Faillé,
Assemblé,
Faille´,
Assemblé.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
When you do it right, it looks like dancing. For some reason it fell apart for everyone tonight going left (there were only three of us in class). I realize now that I kept leaving out the assemblé after the first faillé.
I’ve gotten past the thing last week where I kept getting tangled getting from piqué arabesque to glissade. That was the result of too much thinking.
Things are coming back faster now. There were a few nice pirouettes from fourth. Still a few, “Oh, crap! I’m turning the wrong way!” moments.
For some reason, instead of going en dehors, en dehors, en dehors, I found myself wanting to go en dehors, en dedans, en dehors. But the turns are coming, too.
My barre was kind of meh today — some okay bits, some not so okay bits. A couple of times, I totally lost my place — it was like my brain just opted to reboot mid-combo. On the other hand, a couple of my fondus felt beautiful. Were they? Who knows. But that’s how they felt.
I try to keep it in perspective: when I started dancing again back in March, I would’ve been delighted with today’s barre (especially the frappés, even though one of my “reboots” occurred during that combination). That’s the whole thing about ballet — you’re dissatisfied, so you work hard, and then you sort of “level up,” and you get that “Yes!” feeling.
Then you realize you can do it better; that whatever you’re doing, you can refine it.
I enjoy pursuits in which perfection is a goal, but is one that recedes forever into the distance. In ballet, in horseback riding, in cycling, in music, you can always improve. Even if you achieve technical perfection, there’s always room for more musicality, more expression, more subtlety, or more strength.
In other news, today I put on a shirt that’s been too tight for a long time — and suddenly it wasn’t too tight anymore. I might even be able to use it for ballet class.
I have trouble seeing changes in my body, but even I’m beginning to see what all this ballet is doing for me in that regard. Pretty cool stuff. Tonight I was messing around in the mirror at home after class, doing Pretty Things With My Arms, because as a squid those things are hard for me, yo. I transitioned from first-arabesque arms to élongé and caught sight of all these cool little muscles doing their thing in my shoulders and chest and went, “Wow, hey, that’s my body doing that!”
Pretty cool stuff. Denis always says I’m such a teenager when it comes to that. He’s right. I am discovering this body that, when I really was a teenager, was still this scary thing that kind of betrayed me during a time when bad stuff happened to me. I didn’t look at myself. I didn’t want to look at myself.
So now I’m discovering all of it; it’s all totally new, and it’s beautiful in a way. I still struggle to see my body as beautiful, but when I see it working; when I see it doing dancer-ly things; when I see the beautiful machine working the way it’s supposed to work — yeah, I kind of love it then.
One last bit to close. Tonight, when Tawnee arrived, she greeted us (all three of us, ha) with, “Hello, dancers!”
So there you have it. In case you were wondering: we are dancers.
And that’s pretty great.
Ballet Squid Chronicles: In Which My Ears Do Weird Things
Class today was like the weather – mostly sunny! I started off over-thinking and being tense and trying too hard, but by the end of my second class I had managed to relax enough to do some quite decent work going across the floor. I also totally hosed up the frappé combo in Class #2. Feh. On the other hand, during our adagio section, I did a couple of decent promenades. Also a couple of bad ones, but hey, that’s a better ratio than it has been!
Going across the floor, Jessica gave us a simple but rather lovely little combination: tombé-pas de bourré-fourth-pirouette, pause, repeat.
After the first run from the left corner I was convinced I was turning the wrong way (Oh noes!!!) so Jessica made me run the combo by myself. Evidently I was doing it right the whole time, so Yay! Pirouettes from fourth without all the confusion.
On the first repeat, however, I exhaled as I finished my pirouette and suddenly my left ear went all funny.
I spent the rest of class (fortunately, only about ten or fiften minutes) mostly deaf in one ear, but it didn’t really seem to affect my balance much *(I had noticed, earlier, that my promenades on the left leg were iffy). It was just really strange. Later I tried pinching my nose and exhaling to see if I could clear it out, but that just made the right ear go funny as well.
So, um, hooray for allergies, I guess? I think I’m going to take some allergy meds tonight. The time has come.
Both T and J were in class today. T is pretty darned good. If I can dance as well as he does when I’ve been back in it for a year, I’ll be pretty satisfied (I think I’ve probably said that before). J, meanwhile, is funny and lovely and humble and gives me really useful notes (for example, the one about watching my mouth, and another about being lazy with my turnout while practicing releve balances in coupé before class ;)).
After class, I took my time coming home. I was too tired to ride the whole way, so I waited for the bus, then ate lunch downtown, then slow-pedaled the remaining seven miles.
This evening, Jenna joined me for dinner at home (You guys! I made baked falafel and didn’t ruin it*!) and then we went to see University of Louisville Dance Theater at Iroquois Park Amphitheater.
Jenna is evidently my sister from another mister. I looked at this and went, “Huh, we could totally be siblings.”
The whole show was immensely enjoyable — UofL Dance Theater put together a program of varied choreography, including one very fun Bollywood-inspired pieces — but the two pieces at the end with Louisville Ballet’s Eduard Forehand were stunning. He is simply a gorgeous dancer, and the rest of the company raised their game to approach his level.
For what it’s worth, Forehand is totally the kind of guy you watch and think, “And that’s why he’s a professional.” He’s very fluid, expressive, and musical, and his technique is very good.
Also, his pas de deux work could be used to teach a partnering masterclass.
So that’s it for now. A lovely way to close out the summer, even though school has already resumed (and if it hadn’t, I’d be at Burning Man). We don’t have class on Monday, and I may or may not be going on an epic bicycle adventure instead. Depends on the likelihood of major thunderstorms. The weather has been iffy of late, and while none of us mind riding in the rain, we don’t want to get caught in a severe storm in the middle of nowhere.
Good-night, everybody. Don’t burn your falafels.
Notes
*So, the last time I made falafel, it was an unqualified disaster. I didn’t own a deep-fryer then and I don’t own one now, so baked falafel seemed like a good plan.
I have no idea what I did wrong the first time (I was still in high school, and I really had no idea how to cook anything but spaghetti, ramen noodles, hot dogs, and a really fine grilled cheese). Whatever it was, I didn’t repeat my mistake this time. I suspect that’s because in the intervening period I have learned to occasionally read all the directions. Both times, I used boxed falafel mix; this time, I got Ziyad’s mix, which has a short list of recognizable ingredients and easy-to-follow directions. I recommend it.
I’m posting this because Jenna pointed out that I’m always wearing my composed “portrait face” in photos. So there 🙂
Ballet Squid Chronicles: Who Hid The Squid?
Today started off with a bang — I miscalculated and made it out of the house with 20 minutes to make the “ballet bus,” so I hammered my poor legs off for 3.66 miles at 16.6 MPH average (which is more impressive when you consider that, for the first couple of miles, there are So. Many. Stop. Signs, which really kills your overall speed). I made it to the bus stop in 13 minutes, which is good, because the bus came early (which is unheard-of for the #29, especially on a Saturday!).
I did just Ballet Essentials because afterwards J. and I went for brunch and coffee.
Class went brilliantly — with Denis away at That Thing In The Desert…
 |
| We interrupt your regularly-scheduled Squid Pictures to bring you this image of Camp Friendzied Serenity going up in Black Rock Desert*. |
…we numbered only four students, so everyone got a lot of individual attention. I was very happy that most of the corrections I received were related to refinement and expression — not so much just re-learning how to do stuff as taking it to the next level: really using the brushing-the-floor bit in grandbattement; making nice lines when doing sauté arabesque; turning cleanly. I don’t get to not “do the arms” anymore, either 😀
I was not all that squidly today. Dare I say that, at times, my arms were even pretty? Not all the time, of course. There was a little bit of Swan Arms if by Swan Arms you mean Angry Swan In A Thunderstorm Arms.
“Siegfried, what is he doing?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea, Odette, but it surely isn’t anything I’ve ever seen.”
Shamelessly stolen here:
“Young swan pair” by Ralfie – Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Young_swan_pair.JPG#mediaviewer/File:Young_swan_pair.JPG
At least it wasn’t all Domo Arigato Mr. Robodagio? (“Domo, domo. Domo, domo**.“) There was a little bit of, “Wow, those actually look like ballet arms!” arms.
And, of course, the usual leapy goodness, including a couple of good efforts to get some actual height. Sauté arabesque looks more impressive if your supporting leg is more than one inch off the floor, and since tossing the working leg ceiling-ward isn’t too hard, I decided to concentrate on using my plié more effectively. I also got to concentrate on making prettier lines. When your instructor starts correcting you to make your dancing prettier, you feel like you’re getting somewhere! ^-^
I found myself making things happen sometimes during class today, but there were lovely moments of letting things happen as well.
I still sweated balls the whole time because it was hawt in studio 5 (FWIW, it’s just hot in Louisville in general right now, and so humid you might as well bring your scuba gear if you’re leaving the house).
After class, brunch, coffee, and walkies, I rode my bike another 17.4 miles or so (I decided to explore for a new route, and not-so-quickly discovered that there are a lot of roads that don’t connect because there’s an interstate in the way). The first 9 miles I averaged about 13 MPH (including lots of slowing and stopping and roving around in curvaceous neighborhood streets); after that, I backed off the gas and tootled home at 11 MPH moving average.
So, basically, today I used my legs a lot, and since J. and some friends and I are going dancing tonight, it would appear that I’m going to use them some more. I understand that if you use them enough they will fall off and then you grow new (and, one hopes, better) legs?
Or maybe I’m thinking of what happens if you’re skink and someone grabs your tail.
Speaking of which, our neighborhood is rife with adorable skinks right now, and it makes me super happy.
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They look just like this one from Wikimedia Commons.
Last Monday, one was hanging out under our recycling bin before I brought the bin in from the curb. The poor skink experienced a moment of great panic and confusion when suddenly its shelter rolled away and then wove around drunkenly in an effort to avoid its equally-erratic evasive maneuvers.
So. Um. I guess that’s it? I am going to go eat moar food, because feta and hummus and olives, oh my!
Notes
*After five years, our camp has evolved into an official Theme Camp with early admission for setup and everything. This is exciting.
**Denis is a huge Styx fan. I have grown rather fond of them as well over the course of our relationship.
Ballet Squid Chronicles: Monday Class, In Which I Am Less Squidly Than Usual
This evening, our friend J. came along to try Ballet Essentials. She was one of three (three!) brand new dances today, so Ms. Margie dialed the pace of the class way down. For them, this meant a good foundational class; for me, it meant an opportunity to really focus on the details and on being lyrical and expressive and Letting It Happen.
The awesome part is that I was able to identify a couple of things I’ve been doing wrong.
I should note that, because puberty came very late for me, I am dancing in a very different body than I was when last I did ballet (though not all that different from when last I did modern dance). I’m broader in the shoulders, I carry more muscle all around, and the proportions of my body are just altogether different. I’m also chubbier, but that’s the result of illness-related weight-gain, which I’m now close to finished undoing.
Cycling has also really screwed up my muscle balance — or, well, that isn’t cycling’s fault, really. It’s mine, for not running or something to counter-balance the bike-engine muscles. I kept being like, “Oh, they’re fine.” Boy, was I in denial!
Ballet is just beginning to really overcome the imbalance in question. In short, my pushing-down muscles are great, but my pulling-up muscles are weak as all heck; no matter what anyone tells you, you really can’t get that much power on the upstroke using clipless pedals. Likewise, the muscles on the fronts of my calves are hypertrophic as heck because I ankle like crazy when I climb. This is great for explosive power (so not a bad thing for big leaps), but has to be balanced for controlled relevés.
For what it’s worth, things are shaping up. My thighs look so different than they did six months ago!
This (and, I’m sure, the inevitable process of just forgetting how things are done) has resulted in a few interesting faults in my technique.
For example, I think I’ve mentioned that my frappé looks crappé. (You see what I did th— oh, you’d rather I didn’t anymore? Got it.) Today I realized that the whole problem is simple: I’m overcompensating for muscle imbalances in my legs, and thus instead of bringing my working leg to coupé, I’m kind of bringing it to coupé-and-a-half. This means that instead of hinging from the knee to strike the ground, I have to activate my thigh.
I never noticed this before because we haven’t done frappé slowly at the barre until tonight. Tonight, I stared at myself in the mirror and went, “Oh. Wow. Okay.” And then I fixed it, and voilà! Frappé the way it’s supposed to be! (I was sad that we ran out of time and didn’t get to do Mazurka tonight. I was excited about seeing how it rolls now that my frappé is fixed.)
Your arms totally look graceful, though, BalletSquidDude.
Likewise, I worked on the whole back issue. My balances were better (though we only did two-foot balances and coupé and passé on a flat foot — no one-foot demi-pointe balances). I did get a firm correction* once about my shoulders — as usual, I thought they were down, but they weren’t as down as they could be. Ms. Margie told us to take a look at our posture in the mirror so we know what it looks like when it’s right; I realized I have a whole lot of neck when my shoulders are really down 😉
I think my back will probably continue to be a bit of a challenge, but it’s getting better.
My body seems to be really into feeling its turnout this week. The whole “let it happen” thing is awesome that way (though some of it’s also that my “turnout” muscles are now sufficiently strong and active that I can feel and use them pretty effectively). I worked a lot on not gripping, just letting my turnout do its thing, and correcting whenever felt it not doing its thing.
After frappé, we did ballonné at the bar. I love the way ballonné feels, whether at the bar or otherwise, so that was fun. It looked pretty good, as well, with the turnout working. Present the foot, indeed!
During our stretch, I got very close to a full split on the left (which has always been my better side for splits). I think I actually could have gone all the way down (we’re talking a centimeter or two, here), but I hadn’t expected that and kind of freaked out! The right was pretty deep, too, but still about four centimeters or so off the ground.
I used to have hyper-splits both ways, so I expect to recover at least a full split. Also, splits are so much more comfortable when you do them turned out and don’t slide down on the bony-ass instep of your foot.
At center, we practiced port des bras, so I worked on making mine smooth, elastic, and pretty (because, seriously, I still do Port De Bro sometimes). We also did a little adagio combination, just chassé-pas de bourrée, chassé-pas de bourrée until we ran out of music, so I got lots of time to Let It Happen and make it pretty and use my arms and my head and épaulement and stuff. At times, it even looked like ballet ._.
Going across the floor, Margie tapped me to demonstrate the forward-traveling chassé, which felt pretty great.
I think J. did pretty well for her first class, though I really didn’t get to see much of her. She was behind me the whole time we were doing barre (Essentials is a small class, so we go two to a portable barre and switch sides of the barre instead of turning; this lets everybody use the mirrors all the time). When I did get a look at her (going across the floor, for example), she looked like she was getting the basic concepts, and the rest will come with time and experience.
So that’s it for tonight. I didn’t stay for the beginner/intermediate class because we had plans to do dinner with J. after class, but I did get to wave to Tawnee and Brienne as we were departing from the parking lot, at least. I’ll do Tawnee’s class on Wednesday, which will be my first Wednesday class in two weeks, since I didn’t make it last week due to the Great Bus SNAFU of 2014. I’m looking forward to it.
Good night, everybody!
Notes
*Perversely, one feels happy about firm corrections in ballet. They generally mean that your teacher knows you can do better, and knows that you know, and also knows that you can handle it.
Ballet Squid Chronicles: Saturday Class Notes – It Came From Studio 5
We went out last night, so I did this morning’s beginner class, and I did it on about 5 hours of sleep (not quite a record, but still enough to throw me off my game a wee bit).
I was not, however, the most sleep-deprived member of the class. The same guy by whom I was so immensely intimidated a few classes ago — who is, in fact, a professional dancer — came to do barre with us this morning, and he hadn’t left his other job* ’til 4 AM.
He joined me at the end of the barre nearest the door. It turns out he’s actually a rather nice person and not, in fact, at all intimidating. As such, I decided to try to learn from him, though since we were across a portable barre, this time I just listened to his breathing and tried to emulate it.
Class was a mixed bag today.
There were moments at the barre during which I was really feeling and using the music. There were other moments when I was all, “Frappé? Whaddaya think this is, a Starbucks?” or “Port de bro? Je ne comprends ce que vous dites. Je n’ai pas un frère.”
At one point, after totally leaving out a part of a combination, I mumbled after turning, “And maybe I can get the combination right this time.” Professional Dance Guy grinned and said something like, “Don’t worry about it. Just hold your head up and look like you know what you’re doing. That’s what I do.”
So I did, because, you know. When Professional Dance Guy says it works for him…
Oddly enough, it did work.
I did much better remembering the combo**. It was a tendu-degagé-degagé-pique, and I was sort of automagically doing degagé-degagé-degagé-pique.
I still hosed up all my frappés on the next combo, but my grand battement — seriously, I didn’t know I could get my leg that high yet (until a few years ago, I could still pretty much swing it up and whack myself in the face; I’m getting back there). Apparently I work well under pressure.
I think the highlight, though (besides grand battement) came in the form of 16 bars of free practice that Claire gave us to work on “whatever, as long as it’s ballet-related,” during which my entire barre decided through telepathy that we were going to swing the bejeebers out of our legs in sync. We looked like a trireme going to war or something (though, had we actually been a watercraft, we would simply have found ourselves sitting in place, since there were four of us on the barre with two facing each way).
The “everyone at my barre doing a kind of whippy attitude en cloche” moment was pretty fun, too. I think that may have evolved out of an effort to not kick the stuffing out of each-other while rowing our imaginary trireme, though. The class was packed, so even angling would’ve potentially meant kicking someone .. and nobody kicks like a dancer***.
There were moments at centre, working turns, during which I was look, “Oh, look, if I pull my core together and really focus on nailing my passé, suddenly I can do this nice, controlled pirouette en dedans.” There were other times that I was like, “Don’t look. Just … don’t. It’s better that way.” At any rate, my pique turns were good. Again, I focused on opening the knee at passé. I rediscovered my turnout a while ago; now I’m learning how to use it again. You know, to do other things than get my feet out of the way when I’m coming up the stairs or opening our pull-out freezer drawer and whatever.
Going across the floor, I messed up the first combination, then nailed it (it was very, very simple: just, “Sauté arabesque! Sauté pique!” lather, rinse, repeat — but because it was simple we were supposed to be musical and expressive and pay attention to our arms and stuff). I messed up the second one, then kinda got it, too. After that, I somehow memorized the third one (pique arabesque, faillé, pas de chat, pas de chat, tombe pas de bourée, glissade, whatever big jump you like) in the wrong sequence.
In short, I put the tombé where the faillé should have been, resulting in … well, it was just bad, okay? You can get from tombé to pas de chat, of course, but it’s harder and doesn’t look as nice.
So I ran the last combo the wrong way like four times, struggling to get from Point A to Point B, before I finally realized I was doing something completely different around the second step than everyone else, and that I should probably ask Claire to go over the combo again. Problem solved … ish. By then I was sufficiently confused (and tired) that my final two runs were sloppy and kind of awful, but at least less awful than they had been. I guess that’s something? I’ll work on that combination at home this week (no tour jeté, so I can probably clear the floor downstairs and run it without whacking my arms on the ceiling).
If all else fails, I will disassemble the coffee table and mark it in the living room. Seriously. I have been thinking about removing the coffee table anyway (I hate it; it’s made of four huge effing pillars and a giant piece of beveled plate glass, weighs about four million tons, and is a giant pain in the neck to vacuum around — and it also encourages Denis to accumulate snow-drifts of papers in the middle of the living room, AHEM).
The real low point of today’s class, tough, was the little jumps. You know — the ones I’m good at, the ones I love doing, the ones I could do all day?
Yeah, I totally hosed those up as hard as I could. I didn’t actually know that I was capable of screwing them up that badly. We were doing a jump-jump-relevé combo, and mine turned into … something else. Something … horrible.
No one could say what it was or how it came to be. All they knew…
…was that it was bad.
The ultimate problem was simply coordination. I was feeling a bit cooked, and my feet and legs just didn’t want to hear about sauté-sauté-releve. So instead it was all, sauté-sauté-bounce on releve and scare the crap out of poor Clare. By the time I got them fixed, we had moved on.
Also my adagio was rather awful. I’m not sure I even want to talk about it. It stated out beautifully, and then … I don’t know what happened. It fell apart. I fell apart. And then there was the promenade. At least one promenade was passably okay, which is enormous progress from the “Holy crap, I have completely forgotten how to do this!” moment I had when I first did Claire’s class a few months ago. My promenade still sort of resembles the flailings of a wounded moose, but, you know. Before it was even wrose, so I guess that’s progress!
So not my best class ever today — but everyone has bad days (probably even Claire and Professional Dance Guy), and I did get a really nice compliment afterwards. One of my fellow students said, “You have really beautiful feet. I wish I had feet like yours.” (I thanked her profusely, of course.)
So that about made my week. The rest of this week’s classes could suck (WHICH THEY WON’T, ahem), and I would still be able to say, “Yeah, but at least I have beautiful feet.”
This week’s imaginary t-shirt slogan?
“RELAX, DAMMIT!”
Notes
*Louisville unfortunately doesn’t really have a large enough arts-funding base to keep its professional musicians and dancers fed and housed without second jobs.
**Didn’t we just talk about this last post? Not thinking so hard? Letting it happen? Etc? Sheesh.
***True story: I used to do Muay Thai for a while. I loved it; in some ways it was very much like ballet — you know, if you were actually allowed to kick your partner in the face in ballet. One time I had been having kind of a slow day warming up at the heavy bag, but finally woke up by the time we got to partner kicking drills. I threw a high kick that whizzed past my partner’s ear. He was taller than I was. Our trainer looked and me all bug-eyed and said, “Jeez, where was that high kick on the bag?” In the end, I had the best high kick in class, and there was one reason for that: grand battement. That was some consolation, because I largely sucked at all the boxing parts of kickboxing.
Ballet Squid Chronicles: Monday Class Notes — Suddenly, We’re Dancing!
Today I did the Monday Double Header — Margie’s Ballet Essentials followed by Claire’s Beginner/Intermediate class.
Essentials was well populated, and we’ve gained couple of new students. We did a fairly low-intensity class (Margie was under the weather), so we got to focus on technique — which meant I got to focus on not focusing so darned hard!
My goal for the day was to practice the two big lessons from last week — Jim’s “Watch your mouth!” and the “Don’t make it happen, let it happen” philosophy from Ballet Talk for Dancers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this two-pronged attack on tension and over-focus works really well. “Watch your mouth” becomes shorthand for “Relax!” which leads naturally into letting it happen.
This let me move much, much more freely, though at times I still lost count during little jumps (in Margie’s class, this was because I was thinking about feet — specifically, observing how everyone’s feet looked — instead of just doing my thang; in Claire’s class, I’m guessing I was just having a tired moment and hadn’t yet caught my second wind).
Claire’s barre was lovely, and I got to share a bare with the wife of our friend Nicolas. Nicolas is one of the Saturday Ballet Essentials regulars.
Nicolas’ wife (whose name, sadly, I cannot recall just now) is a very good dancer. She does the advanced class and the daytime intermediate classes as well; this is the first time I’ve done class with her. I found myself mostly able to remember the combinations (another thing I decided to work on today — no following!), so I watched the way her back and arms worked and tried to emulate it.
I think it actually made a big difference; my barre was much prettier than usual. It was definitely more “port des bras” and less “port de bro.”
(You guys, true story: I was totally going to put a picture of men doing port des bras badly, here, but now that I want one I can’t find one.)
Better still, Claire gave me another amazing correction. I’ve been overbalancing myself when in coupé and passé en relevé and I couldn’t figure out why. It turns out I was A) still hollowing my lower back and B) my head was tipping back beyond my center line. This threw the whole column off, causing me to be tippy.
Claire’s correction worked like a miracle cure. As before, it felt weird, but holy cow, guys! It worked!
Suddenly I was on my leg, balancing on a nice high demi-pointe in passé, and just, like, there. Wow.
I think the hollow back thing is also the source of my squidly-middly problem, because my grand battement in Margie’s class was questionable, but in Claire’s class I did it pretty well at the barre and then used it in a combination, without the barre! OMG grand battement without barre and without falling over, you guys!
And I did not even die (though I was so shocked that it worked that I proceeded to totally fumble a simple little arabesque immediately thereafter)!
And then, of course, I had to demonstrate how awesome I was by picking up the wrong freaking leg while doing turns.
Wait, let me back up.
So across-the-floor went really well at first. In my new “letting it happen” mode, I wasn’t freaking out about the combinations.
Instead, I walked through them (even when nobody else was), recited them to myself, marked them, and put myself in one of the first few groups* so I didn’t have time to A) stress out, B) forget the combo whilst waiting in the “wings,” or C) confuse myself by thinking too much (cue Jaws theme: How are we getting to piqué arabesque? What comes aftertombé-pas de bouree?? Do I even remember how to tombé??? And whatdo I do with my arms again?!).
Still, it was better than last time.
So we did a couple of lovely runs on our first combination across the floor, and then we did … um … something with pirouettes from fourth en dedans.
And on the first pass, I did fine.
And then, on the second pass, Heaven help me, I did some horrible thing where I somehow picked up the wrong leg entirely and still attempted to turn en de dans. Claire called out, “The other leg!” and I said, “Oh, right!”
And then I did it wrong.
AGAIN.
I have only two questions: Why me? Why now???
But at least my piqué turns were okay, I guess?
I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one who was DOIN’ IT RONG, though, because then we all got to practice pirouettes from fourth en dedans. Of course, it wasn’t until I got home that I mentally ran the audio description of the combo that I’d hosed up and realized that was exactly what it called for (so why did I do it right the first time and wrong the second time?!).
But, anyway, after that, we did some leapy stuff, and that was good.
Claire suggested that we end a run with either jete or saut de chat and I only heard the “…de chat” part, and while mentally sorting it out I said, “Oh, saut de chat, not pas de chat,” and then Claire said, “You can do pas de chat if you want.” So I did it that way once, then with grand jeté a couple of times.
The pas de chat version turned out to be fun. Especially since last week I couldn’t seem to wrap my brain and body around glissade, pas de chat, but this week, I let it happen, and there it was.
A couple of my classmates also tossed in pas de chat, which made me feel kind of great ^-^
In other news, Jim only had to call me out on making faces once! I did it a lot more than that one time, of course, but a lot less than I was before last week. So there we go. I am at least working on becoming a Smiling Squid instead of a squid who sucks his lips into his mouth and bites them while doing leaps. Because that just looks dumb, and it also makes you really tense.
So there it is. I discovered a couple of good ideas, and suddenly instead of struggling through the choreography at the end of class, I’m freaking well dancing! And looking decent enough at it that I no longer hope I won’t catch sight of myself in the mirror.
Okay, this is long enough, and I still have a couple other odds and ends to clear up before I can stuff some Triscuits in my face and go to bed (in that order). So, you know the drill. Sunny side up, leather side down.
Good night, everybody!
Notes
*Class was huge today, y’all. We used all the barres. We were also packed into the small studio. The group was so big that even though we angled ourselves at the barre, I still collided (lightly and briefly) with another dancer while doing grand battement. It was so big that someone who came in just after me paused and said, “Is this company class?”
…And, of course, even though I was pretty sure she was joking, the really nerdy part deep inside me went, “Yaaaaaay! We look like company class!”
Ballet Squid Chronicles: Saturday Class Notes
I feel that I was, well, very squidly in the middly today — like there were no bones between my pelvis and my shoulders.
Last night, I went running. Or, well, it started out as running. The goal was to run to the RedBox at ValuMarket, retrieve two movies, and run home — only I discovered that, after about six months back in the ballet studio, my feet have reshaped themselves enough to change how my running shoes fit.
The Minouras are still comfortable, don’t get me wrong — but I can no longer wear them without socks! I gave myself a bunch of blisters — not the biggest ones I’ve ever had, and not the worst ones I’ve ever had, but there were a lot of them, and dancing on burst blisters is no fun. Walking home kept them from bursting and peeling, which made class much, much more comfortable this morning than it might have been.
 |
| There are actually four on my left foot; you can only see two at this angle. Also, look — I have ankles now! |
Anyway, I ran the outbound leg of my trip and walked back, then stuck fancy bandages all over my feet while we watched two movies (Grand Budapest Hotel, which was very lovely, and The Lego Movie, which was actually better than I expected it to be).
I arrived home at 8:25 PM. Needless to say, we stayed up later than we should have.
Staying up late meant taking my sleep aid even later, and I was still feeling it this morning during class. I felt a touch groggy, a bit slow, and like I was having a hard time keeping everything pulled together*.
That said, I think that working through the fog is a good lesson in and of itself. Say I actually get a chance to perform some day: there are going to be days that rehearsals happen when I’m feeling groggy and not entirely with it. Likewise, if I work in Dance/Movement Therapy, there are going to be days that I’ll need to be in the studio and “on” even though I haven’t slept well or whatever.
As dancers, we have to learn how to work through grogginess and harness every scrap of focus we can find.
Going across the floor, I felt like all that focus-retrieving effort paid off: while I didn’t feel like my sautés and leaps were exactly spectacular, I was able to get my arms in sync. This was an improvement over the beginning of barre, during which I couldn’t seem to remember what my arms were supposed to do at all.
I also managed one or two decent pirouettes (which we did before clearing the bars). Margie gave me a couple of excellent corrections that amounted to: pay attention to when and where the working knee arrives in passé and let your shoulders carry your head (or, don’t lead with your neck!)**.
Denis said I looked really good going across the floor, which was nice. I tend to focus hard on my faults and I don’t always appreciate what I do well. Instead of seeing a grand jeté that looks pretty nice, I see one that doesn’t look perfect. C’est la vie.
Probably the highlight of today’s class, though, was really feeling and using the music — bizarrely enough, this happened during our barre stretch. I feel like I’ve got the basics back in my body enough to start working on musicality and interpretation more, especially during our Essentials class. In the advanced beginner and beginner/intermediate classes, I still feel like I’m focusing on getting the steps back into my body.
The really cool thing is that every now and then I have a moment — like Monday’s tour jetés, Wednesday’s one really good pas de chat, a lovely glissade I tossed off randomly at home today — in which something suddenly clicks and my long-unused muscle memory wakes up and says, “Hey, I know this!”
I hope I’ll be able to keep the glissades turned on. The glissade-assemblé mental block still surfaces from time to time, so I practice glissade-assemblé at home all the time now in an effort to correct it.
For what it’s worth: different teachers and different dancers have different feelings about practicing at home. I find it works well for me. I’ve very much a kinaesthetic learner, though: my body leads my mind, rather than vice-versa (in short, I don’t think too well when I’m sitting still!). As such, I rely on a process of successive approximations followed by increasing refinement … which is to say, I learn faster if I repeat things a lot.
If I leave the studio feeling like I don’t have the first layer of approximation solidly modeled (a good mental 3D “video” coupled to a basic kinesthetic understanding), I won’t generally practice a given movement outside of class. Once I have that first layer down, though, I am pretty good at building upon it without adding errors. This usually means that I’ll give something at least a couple of classes before I start working on it at home.
There are some steps I can’t practice at home (no room for tour jeté in the house — upstairs, there’s too much furniture; downstairs, I’d smack my arms on the ceiling; outside, our yard is way, way too un-level), but I seem to be good at improving the steps I can practice.
I will say that two classes per week plus some practice at home doesn’t work as well as three plus some practice at home. I’m sure four or five classes per week would be awesome, but it’s not in the budget right now.
I don’t think everyone necessarily should practice at home (and I might not bother if I was taking class five or six days per week). I think it’s up to each of us to determine for ourselves (ideally with the guidance of our teachers) whether solo practice is a help or a hindrance.
For me, a bit of practice at home seems to work, as long as I’m conscious about it.
This is getting long so one more random bit: during Wednesday’s class, Brienne ran all the across-the-floor stuff quite beautifully, and I found that really helpful (not that I managed to get my crap together during class). She has a very graceful, athletic, bounding style, and it’s been handy to be able to picture how she performed our choreography so that I can use it as a model. Pretty cool stuff.
Oh, one really last random bit: I managed to actually watch my mouth (thanks, Jim!) a bit during this class. I did catch myself making faces from time to time. Whenever that happened, I made myself smile***, which has the rather magical effect of loosening everything else up along with my face. Good to know.
Notes
*I re-learned, yet again, about the importance of being solid and connected from the ground up. I’m guessing that the large muscles in the thighs that do a lot of that work were still recovering from the run, as well, which probably didn’t help.
**I was sort of hyper-spotting; snapping my neck around in advance of my turn. This throws everything off and makes for a messy finish.
***Because you have to do something. Denis and I routinely debate the whole, “Smile, you’re performing!” idea — he thinks dancers should basically smile all the time; I think they should smile when it’s appropriate to the music they’re interpreting.
For me at this juncture, though, attempting a beatific smile is better than just trying not to make faces!
Ballet Squid Chronicles: Attack of the Pros!
Tonight I took Tawnee’s beginner class for the first time.
Her teaching approach is closer to Margie’s — slower-paced, with a lot of focus on precision and clean technique (and occasional hands-on assistance — at one point, she grabbed my leg mid-extension, turned it out a bit further and simply lifted it painlessly into a much higher extension: she then said something like, “There’s your turnout,” to which I mentally replied, “Wow?” — because, seriously, I had no idea that A) I could get my leg that high in an extension à la seconde and B) it wouldn’t hurt at all*).
Bizarrely, I was the most advanced regular student in class for once … though I did not acquit myself accordingly once we left the barre (I promptly forgot how to count and how to remember combinations, and I probably made faces as well).
Then the Pros showed up.
Brienne (my teacher! In class with me! OMG!) and a fellow who I’m fairly certain is at very least quite an advanced student came to do class as well (he said off-hand as he entered, “I was going to do company class but…” and I missed the rest).
So our little band of four became a band of six, and I found myself alternately standing behind, then in front of, a really well put-together guy whose technique was pretty solid. (Also, his arms were beautiful. Just sayin’.)
So. Um. Apparently, I can be intimidated**.
Obviously, it wasn’t too scary standing behind him (if anything, it was edifying). What was intimidating was standing in front of him.
If you dance, you know these feels.
Needless to say, I suddenly found myself very, very focused on remembering the combinations and executing them with the best technique I could manage.
Which, of course, led to thinking. Which occasionally led to screwing up, because thinking + dancing = bad dancing. Sort of. Sometimes.
Also, I apparently respond to intimidation by forgetting to pull up my knees, then pulling them up like my life depends on it. This was an informative insight, as the mid-section jelly phenomenon I’ve previously described seems to pretty much stem from loose knees (who knew? — loose lips knees sink ships dancers!). Once the knees pull up, everything else is like, “Oh, better get in line.”
Else, jelly.
I guess this shouldn’t be some kind of ground-breaking discovery, but there you have it. Each of us comes to understand the whys of ballet in his or her own time.
Anyway, while I executed one totally lovely pas de chat (if I do say so myself — and I do), I was largely of useless at centre (I kept losing track of my legs, and my arms, and the combos, and probably everything else).
I think I might actually have overdone it with the caffeine, which might have contributed to flighty-brain syndrome.
Perhaps I should cut back***?
Surprisingly, the roughly 20 fast miles on the bike didn’t really seem to phase me. So there’s that.
Anyway, even though I feel like I was a mess during enormous swathes of this class, I actually don’t think it was that horrible. Compared to the first few classes when I was just starting back, I’ve come a long way in a short time.
So that’s it for tonight. No stunning insights other than, “Oh, if I tighten my knees, things work better,” which I think I’ve covered before.
Pull these muscles up. Then pull them up some more. Then a little more. Then unlock your knees, and you’re good to go.
So, um, sunny side up, leather side down; head in the air, wheels on the ground (yeah, I know it’s “feminine rhyme,” but whaddaya want?).
More to come.
Notes
*Actually, I should have known this — I think it was one of the times that either Margie or Jessica taught the Saturday beginner/intermediate class that we did basically the same thing while stretching — manually turned our legs out a bit further and discovered that, ohai, we could tuck them behind our ears while standing. At least, I could.
**Also, blubbery. I am way leaner than I was a couple years ago — lean enough to look pretty good on the bike these days — but seriously, ballet kit hides nothing. And ballet is one of the areas where Other People Can Be Fat And Look Fine But I Can’t because of my stupid brain and its stupid double standards.
***Yes, I should cut back. Caffeine and bipolar go together like horseshoes and hand-grenades, as we like to say around here.
Monday Class Notes: Attack of the Ballet Squid II — The Return!
I got the best compliment-cum-correction ever today. After a set of tour jetes the best of which garnered a, “Yes! Yes, sir!” Claire said:
“The only thing – your legs look great, but your arms are all over the place.”
She then demonstrated what they were doing (which was actually kind of hilarious)…
“You do FOSSE! FOSSE! FOSSE! .. but you keep it all inside!”
and what they should be doing (which does not in any way resemble the illustration above).
Classmate Jim also offered a useful note: “Watch your mouth!” Not that I’m cursing in class (though sometimes I want to!), but I hold a lot of tension in my mouth and jaw. He also said I was “really good,” so I’m full up on validation right now ^.^
Jim was a touch shy about offering a note to a classmate, but I’m glad he mentioned it, because it’s something I’ve been trying to work on and I do need reminders. Maybe I will have a mirror-printed shirt made that reads, “David Hallberg does not make faces!”
Because I am pretty sure this is true*.
So that’s it for Monday class notes this week. I’m still a little iffy on connecting steps sometimes, and I still somehow wind up on the wrong leg sometimes, but it’s all starting to come together now.
I also have to admit that, while getting out was really, really hard today**, a hard and fast 45 minutes or so on the bike coupled with a high-effort ballet class has done a heck of a lot for my mood.
It will be interesting to see if it carries over to tomorrow — a good-mood day would certainly help me get some additional cleaning done. Today was slow and painful, a lot of struggling to finish small tasks (though I did do kitchen and finish a lot of laundry).
I am thinking that I really need to hit up class at least twice a week — both so I can really progress in ballet and so I can keep my mood a bit sunnier. My only concern is that it’s really easy for me to tip myself over into the manic side of the spectrum, so learning how to keep it all in balance is going to be a challenge.
The upside is that right now, managing my mood feels like a challenge, not like some impossible unicorn pipe dream. At today’s low point, leaving the house seemed like an impossible unicorn pipe dream, so this is progress.
That’s it for now. Keep the sunny side up, the leather side down, and the rubber on the road (or, you know, dirt). And if you see any rampaging ballet squids making faces, don’t be afraid to give them a note.
Notes
*At least, not while he’s dancing, from what I’ve seen. I do not presume to prognosticate about what the inimitable Mr. Hallberg does with his face when he’s not on stage. He does not, however, seem like the face-making type.
**Because OMG THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT THERE and they might, I don’t know, eat me or something? When I am in Paranoid Hermit mode, my brain doesn’t take the logic that far. It’s just, “There are people out there, and we do not want to be around people.” I can’t even describe what I feel as fear — it’s just that I intensely dislike the idea of encountering other human beings when my brain gets the way it has been lately.
On Ballet! — Monday Class Notes. About Danged Time.
We missed class on Saturday, because I was woozy as heck (trazodone!) and Denis was out picking up our truck from our mechanic, whose wife is one of his oldest friends, and stopped to chat with the wife. An hour and change after I figured he’d be back, I called to make sure he was alive. By then it was too late to make it to class, so needless to say: no ballet.
As such, we high-tailed it to Margie’s class tonight after I wrestled with the incredibly delicious smoked duck our friend Kelly prepared for us (it did not want to reheat).
There were only four of us tonight, and we had a brand new dancer (who did, I think, a lovely job; I hope she’ll be back soon), so it was a slow and easy class — which is good, because slow-and-easy means you get to really focus on your technique.
Which meant my tendus looked kind of awesome, I found the connection between my leg and my back again (that probably only makes sense to you if you dance?), and I kept everything strung together so my grand battement wasn’t wiggly. At least, not on the right. The left was a little wiggly at first.
I also worked on making my arms do graceful things while doing adagio, and so forth. We honed our glissades (both with and without a change of foot). I got distracted and playful towards the end. That might actually be a good thing: I realized during the first bit of barre that I am often screwed down so tight at the beginning of class that I couldn’t dance* if you tossed me onto a hot skillet.
I’m still not sure if I’m really “back” yet. I won’t be doing Wednesday class because we’re taking our nephew to the opera. I’m considering hitting up the Wednesday morning Intermediate class, even though it would be a reach in terms of my abilities right now. But, hey, your reach should exceed your grasp, right?
I just don’t want to be the obnoxious, under-skilled interloper who screws up everyone else’s class. So we’ll see.
No awesome carefully rendered ballet graphics this time. I blew my creative energies this morning working up a poster for a totally imaginary movie for no good reason and I just can’t think of anything funny to present.
Besides, I was pretty much mostly not a spaz in class today, except for the part when Margie told us, “Don’t do this thing,” and I did it A) to demonstrate and B) because I was curious about what would happen. Apparently, I’m still that kid. You know. Every class has one.
So, anyway. More ballet soon. ‘Til then, keep it together. Sunny side up, rubber side down, etc.
Notes
*Doing Ballet Stuff is not necessarily the same as Dancing. You can execute a perfect pirouette, but if it has no musicality and no soul it’s not dancing.
danseur ignoble 
