Category Archives: balllet
A Few Dance Pix
I needed a new headshot, so I asked my friend Christina, who’s a photographer, to shoot some for me. She agreed and asked if I wanted some action shots as well, and I thought that sounded awesome. Anyway, we went out on a grey afternoon with temperatures in the 50s (fahrenheit) and worked for about an hour.
Even though it was hard to get sufficiently warmed up, Christina managed to snag some great shots … and a couple that I asked her to keep because, frankly, they’re kind of hilarious. So here are a few: one funny one, one that’s a great picture of something that’s not very good ballet (but might be pretty good action-movie Kung Faux!), and one that’s just plain beautiful.
So here they are:
Hilarity Ensues. (c) Christina Noel Photography, 2018.
You know that effort face I keep talking about? Well, THIS IS IT. This is the face that I CONSTANTLY MAKE during petit allegro and also, apparently, whilst attempting to do grand allegro outside in the cold with my shoulders swallowing my neck.
Also, just noticed I have developed a terrible case of Starfish Hand in this one.
TEACHERS: TALK TO YOUR DANCERS ABOUT STARFISH HAND BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
One more thing: I learned in this process that even if you know you’re going to destroy your shoes by wearing them to a damp outdoor dance shoot in the middle of a drizzly Kentucky winter, you should STILL WEAR SHOES THAT FIT.
First, dancing outside in the cold is hard enough without worrying that you’re going to slide out of your shoes when you launch or when you land.
Second, if you actually do get ’round to pointing your toes, oversized shoes make your beautiful dolphin feet look like bricks anyway.
Mad props to Christina for making this shot look beautiful even though I did my best to make everything look ridiculous 🙂
Pas de Fu! (c) Christina Noel Photography, 2018
Nobody ever posts their Pas De Don’t moments: you know, those times when only one leg is turned out, only one foot is trying to be pointed (to be fair, the bottom one hasn’t had time to get there yet in this shot), you’re making A+ For Effort Face, and the jump you’re doing is great if it’s either modern dance or Kung Faux, but not so great if it’s supposed to be Pas de Chat Italien and actually ballet.
For the good of humankind, then, here’s another of mine.
My épaulement is janky as heck in this shot—and while that makes for some heckin’ awkward ballet, it makes for some really cool Kung Faux, so I’ll take it. Besides, you never know when you might need exactly the right photo to go with your audition application for an international spy thriller ballet.
Christina spotted this one in the mix and kept it for exactly this reason—it totally looks like an action-movie still (presumably from some weird action movie about a random ballet boy just trying to get home from class after all of his street clothes were stolen by ninjas or something). I kind of love it, to be honest.
Dem Legs, Tho. (c) Christina Noel Photography, 2018.
Y’all. Can I just say that I freaking love this?
The pose is from the piece BG is setting on us right now, only we use parallel fifth instead of parallel fourth. Between the surface and the wind, parallel fourth was hard enough to manage; parallel fifth was … umm, yeah. But we both liked the parallel fourth version better anyway.
Never mind the fact that I’m still working off my, ahem, “winter coat.” (That is, the extra coating of insulation that you get when you go visit your parents house and there is no class and your Mom keeps stuffing food down your gullet and you were already still getting back in shape from your last break … oy.)
Never mind the fact that it’s cold and I’m tired as all heck in this picture. I look like I know what I’m about. And I kinda think I look pretty good. Like, if this was a FumblR picture or whatevs, I’d swipe right.
Or … you know, whichever way you’re supposed to swipe if you think someone looks good.
There’s also a color version of this pose shot against the backdrop of the same facade[1] as the first two…
- …All that remains of an historical house whose name escapes me at the moment; I’ll fix that some time when I’m not trying to get to bed.
…that I like quite a lot, so I’m going to slap that down here, as well, even though I was only going to post three shots.
Et Voila. (c) Christina Noel Photography, 2018.
There’s a version of this in which I’m not staring directly into the camera, but I like this one better, so here you go. If you know me well enough you can tell by my eyebrow that I’m basically about to dissolve into a fit of laughter. I almost pulled off the Imperious Gaze, but was borderline slap-happy by this point.
Also, I really need to learn to do this port de bras without hyperextending my fingers, because that looks kinda weird. Though it may not actually be entirely possible for me to do that: my third (ring) finger on both hands only seems to offer “bent” and “hyperextended” as options. Oh, well.
But most importantly, my feet look pretty bangin’ here, even with the oversized shoes.
I think I’m probably going to badger Christina to do a shoot of the same basic jumps and poses and so forth in about three months, when the weather is awesome and I’m in peak shape.
So, brief recap. Here’s what I learned doing this photo shoot:
- If it’s cold, bring something warm to wrap around yourself between shots. Also probably a thermos full of something hot and possibly alcoholic, unless you have to drive or are underage in your region or whatevs, in which case skip that alcoholic thing.
- WEAR SHOES THAT FIT
- WEAR SHOES THAT FIT
- FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WEAR SHOES THAT FIT (you can thank me later)
- You will look weird giving yourself a barre and so forth in the middle of the street in the middle of the afternoon. Do it anyway, even if it means getting there early. I didn’t because I was actually really fracking depressed the morning of the shoot and didn’t get there early enough (or at all), and I regretted it for the entire shoot, but especially when I was doing the eleventy-ninth pas de chat from a standstill 😛
The Piece Evolves; I Also Evolve
We added a new segment tonight. It’s got a really cool bit of partnering-by-eyeball. Hard to explain it: my partner and I don’t touch here, so the connection is all in the eyes. It’s super cool when it works! (Which it did, beautifully, once the pieces were in place).
We have another boy, though he’s tentative about being in the Piece. He’s a ballroom dancer, though, so I think he’ll be fine. It’s very tango-influenced, and BG is really good at fitting his choreography to the strengths of his dancers.
In other news, I’ve now registered for a couple of auditions, and I’m looking into a third. The third is for a ballet SI, so it’ll depend on timing and cost. My schedule is about to go plaid through the middle of June, more or less, when I’ll catch my breath for a week or so before summer things really get started.
I’m really rather floored, now and then, by the knowledge that somewhere along the line I somehow became someone who dances professionally. I mean, that was always a goal, but honestly one that seemed distant and possibly unattainable and maybe a little pie-in-the-sky.
And then, boom, I’m confronted with the evidence: people pay me actual money to dance; I audition for dance things more or less as a matter of course, more and more often without asking whether I’m really good enough to be thinking about it. I find myself having to consult my planner thingy to figure out whether I can commit to a dance thing because I might be committed to some other dance thing.
I simultaneously do and don’t understand how this all happened. This I grok: I had good early training; I continue to train with excellent teachers; I have devoted myself to the study of dance; I have been given a body that is suitable for the discipline. That it has all come together like this still seems strange and dreamlike (merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…).
Perhaps most importantly, though, I feel more and more capable as a dancer. There’s a kind of joy that I first tasted as a wee little kid that comes with trusting your body. When I dance, I feel whole and strong and capable for minutes at a time, but in a way that’s un-self conscious. To dance, sometimes, is to enter the stream of being a little more fully.
I feel perplexed and grateful about all this, which I suppose is as good a way as any to feel.
In Which We Do Ourselves A Heckin’ Bamboozle
Tonight literally half the class (including me!) promenaded the wrong way in the adage at the same time. Like, the entire stage-left half. And once we’d started, we realized our error, and looked around at each-other in horror, but couldn’t actually stop or reverse.
I’m pretty sure this is a sign of the impending apocalypse. It might even have been some kind of (shameful) world record.
Also, T momentarily forgot how to glissade, and I kept turning a pas de bourré at barre into something more like a pas de burrito or something (to be fair, it was counter-intuitive in a number of spots—like an en dehors turn when you’re expecting an en dedans) and adding extra steps at centre.
Other than an outbreak of mass hysteria in the form of a complete inability to retain combinations accurately (everyone screwed up constantly), though, class wasn’t bad. I did two completely random entrechsts six more or less as a joke while marking the petit allegro (also fit one in once running the combo, which I ran like six times because evidently I’m insane). And when I wasn’t completely doing the wrong thing, I occasionally managed to look like I was dancing.
Threw back a beer with the Beastie Clan after. I think we all earned it!
Such is life. Next class will be better. Sometimes, you just have to be wrong together and laugh about it.
First Class with L’Ancien; A Few Words About Grieving
First, my apologies for being way behind in on blorg in general and on my Leibster post specifically. This week has been less hectic than last week, but still pretty hectic, and when I’ve been home, I’ve been burying myself in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods[1], Two Dots, and Dots & Co[2]. Some of this has been a function of trying to wrap my head around the fact that an old friend of mine died recently. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but we kept in touch, and it’s a weird thing.
- …Another book I waited way too long to read because soooo many people were like YOU HAVE TO READ THIS! which always makes me go nooooooooooo lalalala I can’t hearrrrrr you until finally I read whatever THIS! is and it turns out that I’ve been an idiot about it for ten years or what have you.
- Addictive phone games.
Then, grief is always weird. I have done enough of it that I’ve learned to expect it to be different every time, which is about the only thing you can expect, except for the basic elements of grieving (which will show up entirely on their own schedule).
Too often we’re taught to think of the “stages of grief” as a process of passing through discrete checkpoints on a one-way path. Anyone who has ever experienced actual grief (which, in time, will ultimately be everyone) will be comforted to know that Ross and Kessler never intended their “stages of grief” framework to be understood this way. They’re not unidirectional; heck, they’re not even necessarily discrete: rather than a one-way train track with stops at Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, they’re more like a transdimensional TARDIS trip in which one might simultaneously visit, for example, Denial and Anger whilst shuttling back and forth between bargaining and depression, or what have you.
In short, it’s bigger on the inside; also, confusing and muddled. On the upside, if you miss your stop at Anger and don’t get your ticket stamped, you don’t have to ride back to the contrôle in the fog at four AM with a stiff rear derailleur and … I have now completely jumped ship into randonneuring analogies. Then, anyone who has ever logged so much as a single populaire understands that cycling can, at times, be remarkably like grief. Only you burn off all the extra food you shove in your mouth rather faster.
I suppose the same can be said for ballet: in fact, the learning of ballet involves the same sort of transdimensional weirdness, wherein you might simultaneously be good and horrible at ronds de jambe[3].
-
- …Which, as L’Ancien confirmed this morning, much to my smug satisfaction, are the most important thing we do at the barre. Probably, though, it’s not just because I like them the most[4].
- This is relatively new. It used to be that grand battement was my favorite part of barre—not because it’s last, but because you get to show off how well you can kick yourself in the face, and I’m strong, flexible, and a giant show-off by nature.
Class this morning was much like that: at one point, I was thinking so hard about what I was doing with my hands, eyes, arms, and weight that I forgot to change my facing … which was the first step in the exercise o_______o (The worst part is that I did this on both sides.)
But, ultimately, it was so profoundly good-bad because L’Ancien, as he shall heretofore be known, is a phenomenal teacher (you guys, he might even be a better teacher than BW o.o’).
He is, in fact, not terrifying, even when he’s horribly disappointed, because he approaches his moments of disappointment with humor.
Also, he doesn’t let us get away with all of the bad habits we normally engage in just because We’re Grown Folk Now, like noodling (even if it’s in an effort to better understand a correction) or not being already prepared on the and or not actually finishing the exercise with the music (WE HAD A REAL PIANIST, YOU GUYS!).
In fact, at one point, L’Ancien asked our pianist, J, to play the final chord again and just sit on the pedal and made us get back into a lovely fifth, stand, and wait ’til J took the pedal off.
That was instructive. I’ve realized, lately, that I have rather a bad habit of “clocking out” at the end of an exercise: I hit a nice fifth (or first, depending), hold it for a heartbeat or two, and then let everything fall apart. That doesn’t fly, does it? You’re supposed to let the music tell you when you’re done, not just go, “Meh, I’m good,” and break for coffee.
So I concentrated on not doing that, until I got too busy concentrating on other things. I hope I didn’t revert to clocking out, but who knows? I had hands and eyes and fingers and a neck to worry about, and that’s just the beginning. Except, of course, the goal really was to not worry about things—more to find the way to do them without thinking about them.
Which is, of course, how it ought to be done.
L’Ancien also called me out on my habit of starting class with my eyeline somewhere around, oh, my navel. I don’t know when or why I developed this habit, but at the beginning of class, especially when facing the barre, I tend to look at my feet.
As the song says, “Your feet are going to be on the ground.” You don’t really need to look at them to figure out what they’re doing (though sometimes I have trouble feeling what’s going on in my hips, since my body is crazy). If you do look at your feet, it will make your whole body sort of curl up like you’re a salad shrimp, and you’re basically gonna have a bad day (or your teacher is going to come over and physically grab hold of your head and fix it).
This is really more a bar exercise than a barre exercise, tbh. (Via Pexels.)
So, L’Ancien is very into the physical corrections, which is great by me, as I find them extremely memorable. He fixed both my foot and my head on the first side of the very first exercise, and we continued from there.
We also had a lovely chat after class when I stopped to thank him for teaching; this one specifically about my head and how I might fix it. Among other points, he mentioned (justly) that he thinks it’s a question largely of where I rest my eyes—something I’ve noticed in my quest to improve my balances.
He also pointed out that I have very square shoulders, which is interesting. Like, it’s something I’m aware of, but I don’t think I’ve literally ever thought about it in a ballet context before. Rather, I’ve thought about not letting my shoulders creep into my ears, or collapse in on themselves, or do that weird thing where they get behind my body in bizarre ways—but never, really, “I have very square shoulders; what does this mean for me as a ballet dancer?”
But, obviously, this is not something you think about in the studio. Rather, it’s something to know about yourself, when you sort of visualize your body, so that you can use your body to its best advantage.
Anyway, this is long enough, and I have to dash off to a trapeze class.
The Weather Grants A Stay Of Execution
(Adorable, chubby baby tiger is unrelated, but adorable.)
We’re having a kind of ice-snow storm thingy, so the Powers That Be have prudently cancelled morning classes tomorrow to give the road crews time to work their magic.
This means I don’t have to face class with Le Directeur Ancien until next week.
My chicken-flavored heart is partly glad and partly horrified that I’ll have ANOTHER WHOLE WEEK in which to anticipate everything that could possibly go wrong (though also another week in which to get into somewhat better shape).
Possibly it will turn out that I have nothing to fear. The worst he could do is regard me through eyes brimming with the Disappointment of the four hundred years of ballet teachers who came before hi…
Oh, G-d help me.
Choreography
We got the first 30 or 40 seconds of our dance last night.
I like it—it’s completely different in feel from last year’s, very Tango-influenced, rather than neoclassical. Both TS and I are videoing everything from different vantage points, so I was able to see that I dumped my shoulders and core on this wee en dedans turn with the working foot just brushing the ground. It’ll be better next week!
On the whole, though, rehearsal was good. There are 13 of us thus far, and I’m still the Onliest Boy.
I also had a good night in class. Beginner 1 is right before rehearsal, so we arrive in masse and take B1, which means some of us might be a wee bit intimidating to some of the B1 regulars. Still, I enjoy B1, because I don’t have to think about any of the steps at all ever, so I can concentrate on dancing beautifully instead.
Today I hooked up with my friend CP, who is a photographer, to get some headshots and dance photos done. We shot outside, which was interesting: the temperature was okay, but the ground was damp, uneven in places, and (of course) hard, so adjusting was challenging at times.
I got to see the on-camera previews of a few shots (CP shoots on a DSLR), and some were really cool.
One of my favorites, though, is a mostly-beautiful pas de chat Italien with ridiculously effort face. It’s hilarious and honestly pretty cute. (In related news, TIL that executing pas de chats from a standstill often evokes effort face!)
I’m looking forward to seeing the finished pix. They should be pretty cool.
I also snagged a few pix to update my Topless Boys Live! series (even though I don’t go back to Modern ’til next week).
So, here:
This looks like something you’d see on Grindr … Hmm
Please try not look at my kitchen, which lies in ruin.
As you can see, the scars are quite a bit paler now.
More grindr fodder, if I was on grindr, which I’m not.
So, there you have it.
I’m at that phase, fitness-wise, in which one says to non-dancers, “I’m still pretty out of shape right now,” and they give you this look:
-______-
But dancers will understand, probably.
Technical Notes: Biiiiig Bada Beats
Tonight JMH gave us a really useful note about beats, especially the ones that don’t change the legs:
Beat on the way up, not on the way down.
This reminded me instantly of the weird sissone-thing at the beginning of Albrecht’s variation, in which you essentially launch as if you’re going to soubresaut yourself into orbit, then open in mid-air (I’ll see if I can find video of this in the morning; there are other versions that use a sissone failli or something battu or whatevs—men’s variations are really, erm, variable).
Anyway, running the combination, this made all the beats (which were legion) feel so, so much better*.
*When I was doing the right combination, anyway. We did one that went, echappé 4th, jump – beat; echappé 2nd jump – beat, and so on all the way round, and I kept reverting to a combination BW gave us this summer that went echappé 4th, jump – beat – 2nd; jump – beat – 4th; etc all the way round, which was both wrong and harder than what we were supposed to do. I also “opted” to put fecking extra entrechats and royales into an exercise designed to leave room to rest.
WTF, brain?
Regardless, this will also help with cabrioles—you want to beat the bottom leg against the top and throw the top leg higher, which is easier if you’re beating on the way up in the the first place. Also helps prevented bad landings.
In other news, I hate royales, and today we were required to do them A LOT, and I eventually found myself doing what one might call “velociroyales,” with my arms in full-on Jurassic Park mode.
To my defense, I was having a rough time in the breathing department, and pretty much had a choice between using my arms and using my legs—so what begin as a acceptable first position collapsed into despair.
And this is what happens when your asthma acts up during class, but you hit that inhaler and keep going anyway. Specifically, you get through class, but sometimes you look really dumb for entire combinations at a time.
I also ruined my really nice grand allegro by making Effort Face the whole time 😛 In my case, this seems to involve leaving my mouth open, then tucking my lips behind my teeth. In case you’re wondering, it looks exactly as balletic as it sounds >—<
I didn’t do going left (that I know of…), but only the entrelacé and the last leap (I chose pas de chat Italien going left, of course; on the right, I threw a beautiful, lofty regular pas de chat with my face like this: :||) were anything to write home about on that run.
The combination in question, by the way way, went:
sauté arabesque, failli, assemblé, sissone failli, assemblé, sissone failli, assemblé
piqué arabesque, chassé, jeté entrelacé, tombé, pas de bourré, glissade, leap of your choice
…So not hard at all, but lovely, unless you ruin it by making Broken Robot Face.
Assaulted By The Muse (ZOMG!)
I dreamed that I had decided to do a tap number for my PlayThink piece, regardless of the fact that A) there’s not really a stage at the venue suitable for taps and B) I haven’t tapped since I was, like, ten.
But, much as in real life, I wasn’t about to let a little thing like a complete lack of appropriate facilities and the required skill set get in my way 😛
In fact, I’m doing no such thing. Rather, I’m choreographing a rather syncretic piece to Queen’s “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy.” Admittedly, that would make a sound platform for a tap dance, if I knew how to tap dance, but I don’t particularly and I don’t plan to spend the next five months doing Emergency Tap Class.
As it stands, “…Lover Boy” has a very Vaudeville feel that calls for jazz-infused choreography, which falls outside my comfort zone (which, basically, comprises “ballet and trapeze”), but not so far out that it feels unreasonable.
I had intended to use something a bit less up-tempo; something similar in tone to Trenet’s “La Mer”—but sometimes one’s Muse cracks one upside the head and says, “You’re gonna do this and you’re gonna like it.”
Muses can be jerks sometimes.
Anyway, after being assaulted by the Muse (which sounds, to be honest, like a title you’d find in the Romance section of the Kindle Unlimited catalog), I spent a little time last night putting together some ideas. I think it’s going to work, and I have until July to make it work. I have also imagined some ways to incorporate Denis that will be possible even though he won’t be able to really use his right arm yet, but we’ll see if I can talk him into it.
I’ve also got kind of a choreography workshop thingy coming up that should be cool. I don’t think I’m going to workshop this specific piece, though: rather, I’m going to see if I can find a partner for Barber’s “Adagio” or start working on either “Bolero,” one of the the pieces for Peace, or the opening piece for Dancers Watching Dance, which is (of course) the Four Little Swans.
I’m leaning away from DWD, though, because as much as I love the idea, it’s explicitly comedic ballet, and I feel like “…Lover Boy” is borderline-comedic and could stand to be balanced with work on a serious piece. “Bolero,” as a standalone piece, falls somewhere in the middle: Simon Crane is a reasonably serious ballet (which is to say that in the great tradition of ballet, we suspend our mirth at the idea of people madly in love with birds and vice-versa), but “Bolero” is very much a kind of production number that could be played for laughs.
It’s really interesting how quickly I click back into Ballet Boy mode. I’ve spend my break consumed by self-doubt, and several times thought about throwing Simon Crane out the window and never trying to choreograph a full-scale story ballet at all … and yet here I am, thinking very seriously about choreography again.
One last bit. I’m kicking around a plan for a wee choreography or improv retreat weekend some time this summer (or late spring). I’m basically the worst planner ever, so this is a terrible idea, but I really want to try to make it happen, and I think I have some good ideas. Having a camper that sleeps four in dedicated beds and up to seven if you convert all the things helps: we can snag a site with a picnic pavilion at a state park or whatevs and people don’t have to necessarily tent-camp. I think that if I start planning now, it might actually happen.
AaaaAaaAAaaAaaaa…
So! Our AD emeritus, who once gave me an extremely memorable correction about my supporting leg, will be teaching Advanced Class going forward o.O’
I don’t know why I find him intimidating (possibly because he’s been dancing longer than I’ve been alive?), but I do. As such, I’ll be working on relaxing and keeping my head together. Which I’m working on anyway: I don’t get nervous on stage, but I do get very charged up, and sometimes that translates to doing things faster than I should. Learning to dial things back will help in either situation.
Anyway, Le Directeur Ancien takes over next Saturday.
I’m hoping he’ll take us to task on port de bras. Yesterday, I finally remembered to ask Señor BeastMode for input on this year’s ballet goals, and his answer was, “Get the whole body working together—that coordination will take you to the next level. You’ve got the legs and the feet.”
That’s strikingly similar to BW’s input. Also a pretty nice vote of confidence from the BG (AKA Señor BeastMode).
I haven’t checked in with Killer B and J yet, but I’ll try to do that this week. I should see both of them tonight at J’s Monday night class.
Saturday class this week was edifying, except for the moment in this very simple balancé x2 — soutenu — balancé combination when I was thinking so hard about refining my balancé that I forgot to soutenu. Erm. Oops?
It didn’t really screw anything up, though, since that was the option for newer students anyway. There were 15 of us all jammed into the tiny studio, so BG came up with a waltz combination we could all do at center without killing each-other (we also did a nice terre-a-terre waltz). The only time I’ve ever seen more people in Studio 5 was the time Paul Taylor Company showed up en masse.
My piece for the show on the 28th is essentially done and dusted. I ran it about 10 times today with Denis reading for me (the whole show is set to poetry), then I took a break and danced with my scarf (which is definitely going to become a thing in my flow repertoire).
I also got to chat with my actual reader, L, about prosody. Next Saturday, we’ll run the piece together a couple of times, and I think we’ll be set. The show is the final weekend of January. It’ll be a nice way to launch this year in terms of performing.
Tonight I’m finalizing my application to perform at PlayThink, even though I really have no idea what I’m going to do, since I don’t have an acro partner. Basically, I need to decide whether to choreograph a solo piece or recruit a partner. I’d really like to work with a partner, but I’ll have to poke around and see who’s going.
I’m really excited about the beginning of rep class and our upcoming piece for Spring Collection. It’s looking like we’ll have more of us than I expected, which is nice (though it would’ve been cool in its own way if there were only three of us).
This week we have two Cirque workshops as well as the normal array of classes and so forth. It should be an awesome week, but also heckin’ busy—as will be the rest of the first half of the year.
So that’s it for now.
Stupid Brain Chemistry
We’re back in class this week. I’m three classes in and hating, hating, hating everything about myself (except for the fact that I’m no longer dancing with moobs) in class and out.
I recognize that it’s deeply irrational, but that doesn’t seem to make me stop hating myself.
Maybe it’s time to break out the Stare-Into-The-Sun therapy lamp. Maybe it’s time to accept that it’s winter and this always happens to me in the winter.
I’ve found myself on a kind of unintentional and intermittent social media fast, and I think that’s okay. None of my social media streams are terribly stressful, I’m just running on zero alone time, since D is home recuperating from rotator cuff surgery.
Regardless, this is where the ritual of class means the most. I get up; I go to class; I put my hand to the barre and don’t look back (looking back at barre is a good way to fall over and need your own rotators cuffed).
On the upside, I finally installed the heated mattress pad, which probably wasn’t invented to coddle winter-weary dancers but does a reasonable job of it nonetheless.
Next month I’ve got an endocrinology appointment. I’m going to give hormone replacement therapy a try, since my tanking endogenous sex hormone levels are almost certainly not helping. Also going to get my thyroid levels checked, since hypothyroidism runs in both sides of my family and can contribute to depression (and feeling cold and tired all the time).
Even in the midst of this, I’m forced to admit that my petit allegro is improving. When I relax into it, it no longer feels (or looks) like a bunch of ham-fisted hopping.
I keep saying I need to get serious about conditioning, but thus far I haven’t. I’m as afraid of training the wrong things as I am of being unfit. It’s a legacy of childhood gymnastics training—the idea that we must never, never so much as glance at the gym unless a qualified trainer was present to help us not feck up our bodies has lingered long past its expiry date.
BG is a personal trainer in his spare time, so I might do a few sessions with him to get a sense of what I can do without overdeveloping my quads (among other things).
So that’s it. No advanced class today; it’s open house, though, so I’m taking 1:00 class, which is free (though we now have an unlimited tuition plan that has halved my monthly ballet expenses).
Edit: PS—Killer Class is back to being nominally intermediate. It’s still Killer Class.
danseur ignoble 