On the upside, the meds are working (still no voice, but overall I’m starting to feel less like the sort of gross wad of chewing gum that one encounters on the pavements in various places), my DanceTeam girls worked hard today today even though they couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t demonstrate anything, and I should be able to do Thursday class with BW tomorrow night,or barre at any rate.
Category Archives: balllet
Saturday Class: I Got Nothin’
I made it to class this this morning, and the beginning of barre was reasonable, and the end was a fiery swath of pain. Basically, I didn’t have the resources for the fondu — which is to say, my glycogen stores were hosed, I was getting no air through my nose, my mouth was the Sahara, and my legs screamed NONONONONO basically the whole time. My Arabesque on the second side was laughable, and the penché basically didn’t happen.
Called it a day after have battement, which frankly felt like a piece of cake after the flaming hell of fondu, even though my brain refused to remember the combination correctly, and kept putting its elements in the same wrong order. So instead I tried to focus on GBing to my second instead of behind my shoulder when going à la seconde.
After that I went home. That was my whole day so far.
If I’m still utterly unable to breathe through my nose while exercising on Monday, I’ll check in with my doctor’s office. I mean, it never works well for me, but this is ridiculous.
w00t, WP app is sorted
I haz blorgs again. Just a few more tweaking of things pieces to do and I’ll be up to date.
I’m having trouble getting started on things that involve standing up. For some reason, I couldn’t get back to sleep after Denis got up at 4 AM, and I didn’t really get to sleep ’til after 11, so I’m a little bushwhacked.
My legs hurt less than expected, but if I don’t get off my booty they’re gonna hurt tomorrow for sure.
URL update, finally
For a long time , I debated whether or not to change the URL of this blog to reflect its title, “danseur ignoble.”
Finally pulled the trigger today. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for the title of the blog and the URL to be so different.
Now I just need to sort the Android app, which suddenly thinks I have an account , but not a blog. 
Thursday Class: The Accidental Private
One last responsibility before I can throw myself into the Sea of Sleep (which I hope will receive me more readily than it did last night!) — class notes!
It was good good to get back to class tonight; to the thing in my life that’s my Normal.
Also good and terrifying to be not just the Onliest Boy (totes normal) but the Onliest Student (first time ever.
I’ve done a ton of accidental semi-privates with BB, but have literally never, ever taken a private dance class before (oy, vey — here comes the thing in my head that warps lyrics to effect up Tina’s classic). Fortunately, I am apparently all out of panic at this point (had a good bit harrowing therapy session today), and just sort of calmly accepted the fact that it was All Me, All the Time with the dude who is my local Ballet Crush (in the sense that he’s the dancer I want to be when I “grow up”).
Anyway, we put in an hour at barre, some of which was super hard — I finished fondu (which was not terribly hard or long) puffing like a steam train and sweating like a race horse. My body is definitely enforcing its right to use its resources for and. Woooow.Normally, the fondu that BW gave me would have been somewhat challenging; tonight, it was flat out hard. Oh — and the frappé that ended with an 8-count long fondu à la seconde. Eight slow counts long, that is.
Not gonna lie —I was not strong enough tonight to support that without the barre.
BW has a lovely way of shaping things — tonight he said, “You know, your passé is lovely, but I think you could get it even higher and a little more open and it would really show off your turnout.” (Because evidently your humble Danseur Ignoble be turnt.)
I tried it — basically, continuing to fold and lift and rotate the working leg until (avant) the toe rests just above the adductor tubercule or (arriére) just behind the same point, but crossed in a little more —and it worked. I did literally the best-looking passé in the history of my life as a dancer tonight The best part, though, is that this forces my turnouts to remain kicked on and do their freaking job, which makes the passé balance both more stable and less effortful.
Often in long passé balances, I feel like I’m fighting to keep the turnouts of my supporting leg from taking their coffee break. BW’s adjustment solved that problem for me. My supporting leg leg kind leg kind of *has* to stay on the clock at that point, so it does. Go figure.
Anyway, I also identified the source of my ongoing issue with waltz turns — I sometimes fail to execute the initiating movement as a sort of tombé simultaneous with a brush of the opposite foot. Instead, they become separate movements, turning a 3-beat step into a 4-beat step and tangling your feets.
Come to think of it, the fact that we did a center tendu (to work on body facings, my current white whale) that involved a tombé-brush going both forward and backward probably helped. Priming ftw!
Anyway, I managed to make it through to the end of class even though my brain kept failing to retain combinations. Doxycycline tends to make make me foggy, so whilst I’m recovering at a nice clip, my brain is still like, “Wait, whaaaaaa? Howza go again? Izzat a turn or a wut?”
I also learned that double turns with an ear infection are possible but, um, weird. Like, the first revolution and spot feels fine, but in the second one, the inner-ear disruption catches up, and it starts to geek like your small craft has just hit heavy seas.
This is especially true of the combination ends with tombé, pas de bourré to fourth, turn; tombé, pas de bourré to fourth, turn. Oh, and the music had time for quads, at very least, so I was doing slow doubles, which left plenty of time for the invisible ocean to try to capsize me.
…
One more bit of awesome news. Today a very dear person who I love so very much reconnected with me, and that made my heart so very happy. PapaBear, if you’re reading this, you know who you are. I’m so glad glad you’re back in my life. This was just just the right ray of light and hope at just the right time (and helped me be brave enough to talk with my therapist about the very dark and scary stuff that is finally time to start working on).
So thanks to PB and Robert and to the Great I Am for that.
In spite of everything, for me, today has turned out (ha ._.) to be a good day.
Oh My Fucking God.
I have no idea what to say about the American presidential election right now, so I’m reblogging Captain Awkward instead.
I, too, try to keep politics (mostly) out of my blog, but I feel like I can’t just skip over this.
A lot of us are pretty freaked out right now. The Cap does a good job explaining why.
If you follow my Twitter at all, you know. Y’all know.
I try to keep the blog itself largely free of electoral politics and I’ll try to keep doing that for us. But I’m not really feeling the “We can still all eat Thanksgiving together as one great country and focus on what unites us!” talk today.
I feel anger, and despair, and a profound sickness and alienation. On top of the existential dread, I have asthma and severe bronchitis so for the last two weeks I’ve also been slowly drowning inside my own body waiting for the cocktail of expensive meds to kick in, knowing that Obamacare and the ability to get insurance despite irregular income and pre-existing conditions is literally keeping me alive right now. I knew this could happen, I knew that it was never funny or a joke or a spectacle. I knew that without…
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Not Really Complaining
… Or, okay, yes, but really only whinging a bit 😉
I saw the nurse-practitioner (you guys, autocorrupt suggested MURDER practitioner! W… T … Actual … F?! o_O’) at my doc’s practice today.
She confirmed that I have a sinus infection and also a wee ear infection, which explains why it sometimes feels like the spirit level in my head is borked.
I’ve been handling this thing very conservatively — actually resting basically all the time, staying clear of strenuous activities (except for the part when I decided to be helpful and uninstall two of the three window aircons in the house by myself, which I did successfully, but which knocked me onto my backside). On the balance, I think it has paid off. In the past, my sinus infections have often progressed into bronchial infections by the end of a week and change, so the fact that this one had constrained itself to the confines of my head is comforting.
I’ll be taking doxycycline for a week and I’ve got a script for plain 12-hour psuedoephedrine for a while, so that should get me sorted and back to the studio.
I may attempt Killer B’s barre tomorrow, but I may not. It really depends on my balance and energy level. Today I am definitely listing to port (and not just politically speaking, though I did go and vote), so that’s a huge if. I might also hit up Trap 3 tomorrow night as a semi-spectator, but I don’t want to pull out all the stops right away. I have figured out that easing back into things is part of the deal for me.
On the upside, my blood pressure was stellar (110/56) and my heart rate was fine (75, which is lower than it often is in doctors’ offices, because I am still mildly stressy about being in them, which can be weird and hard and awkward if you’re an intersex person).
So things look doable.
Now I’m going to lie around and watch stupid movies and otherwise bury my head in the sand until the US General Election is over, at which point my friends will tell me whether it’s safe to come out or I should start burrowing a tunnel to Canada. Except by then I’ll probably be asleep.
In other news, I’ve been reading horse blogs, which reminds me how much I miss having horses in my life, which is why I avoid horse-related content.
Also, yes, I’m apparently a sucker for bright orange animals (though I’m not particular about the color of a horse; it’s what’s on the inside that matters).
Saturday Class: Grand Faillegro
It started out so well!
Barre was fine today, with the exception of one strangely derpy RdJ en l’air (which may have been the result result of trying to listen to a general correction and RdJ en l’air at the same time). Adagio, once I sorted out the part of the combination in which my imagination had inserted something completely different, was also fine(1).
- Regarding which: you guys, I used to hate adage so very much. I have come to love it. Ballet is weird. Sometimes you fight so hard with a thing that, eventually, the clutch of battle turns into an embrace.
Turns and terre-a-terre were mediocre. We did each combination twice, and in both I was a complete wreck on the first run, but managed to pull myself together eventually. This was particularly rewarding on the terre-a-terre, which involved an attitude turn followed immediately by a turn in arabesque. Just put the heel down, plié the supporting leg, and go whilst simultaneously transitioning from attitude to arabesque. No big… o.O
I’m working on not attacking my turns as if my goal was not only to murder them, but to retroactively stamp their ancestors from the face of the earth. That made the attitude-to-arabesque bit extra challenging, as the surrounding choreography meant both that one had almost no force going into the first turn but still had to manage to make it all the way around in the second. I didn’t account for that at first and backed my attack down so far that I had to do the Hop Of Shame just to get the attitude turn all the way around.
On the repeat I thought, instead, about keeping my core connected (which was JP’s general correction to the whole flailing lot of us) and actually managed to do the whole thing.
This did not, however, prevent the rest of class from becoming progressively more and more unhinged. In petit allegro, I didn’t mark the combination of even apparently take take it in very well because I was examining my knee, so that was awkward. During grand allegro, I completely blanked on the beginning of an extremely simple combination(2) and failed to go the first time; the second time, I started thinking and thus danced with the consummate grace of a drunken penguin attempting to negotiate a stairwell. As I finished, I said to no one in particular, “I’m a disaster today.”
- Edit: I feel the need to explain how how very very simple this was. Seriously, the combination was: tombé, pas de bourée, glissade, saut de chat, contretemps, same thing back forth across the floor until you run out of room.
To cap things off, JP then gave us one job: do fouettés or turns à la seconde if you’re a dude (translation: if you’re me; other dude had gone on to prepare to teach a different class or something).
Disastrously, I started out trying turns à la seconde, then decided halfway through the first one that I was doing fouettés instead.
Suffice it to say say that it went downhill from there and ended in shameful stuckness and a momentary feeling that I had no business being in Advanced class in the first place.
.___.
So, yes, those days still happen.
Next week will will be better. Unless it’s worse. But I suspect that it’ll be better, since I’ve figured out what’s irritating my knee.
Thursday Class: On the Spot
We were back to BW’s Thursday class tonight after a two week break (one week for Swan Lake, one week while I was watching Pilobolus).
It was a good class. Just BB and me, so we got to do a fairly complex (and long!) barre. I tried to remember to relax my upper body, since I realized on Wednesday that when my upper body is tense, I tend to lose the ability to really control my deep rotators.
Sometimes that’s a losing battle, the upper-body-relaxing bit. Tonight, it went fairly well. Sometimes a little too well, at which point my hands when from Don Quixote! to Dead Birds 😦
…Unless, of course, you are actually in “Don Quixote,” or dancing a character role that calls for Emphatic Flamenco Matador Hands. But there is no place in ballet for Dead Birds, unless they’re the Dying Swan, and even she doesn’t get to have Dead Bird Hands because, I mean, like … birds don’t even have hands, man.
Anyway, at barre, BW corrected my grand battement à côte, which I was allowing to drift too far backwards (and, like everyone else this week, got on me about my working knee not being straight in arabesque; for some reason, it has decided to choose this week to give me … ahem … attitude :V).
Curiously, I think this is a new-ish development. I’ve started doing them mostly with the arm in 3rd, because it forces me to keep my shoulders down and, frankly, just gets the danged arm out of the way. Before I adopted that approach, I used my arm as a handy-dandy guide: as long as I shot my leg to the front of my arm, I was fine. Now I need to, like, actually feel where it’s supposed to go.
Speaking of attitude, he also sorted my attitude balance-to-allongé. For some reason, I kept doing it to second arabesque. Have I always done that? Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t think that I have. That said, I have no idea when I started doing it or why. For all I know, I’ve been doing it like that for a year and it originated as a way to get my arm out of the way without cracking the back of my hand on the wall or the mirror.
We also did a kajillion turns. BW noticed something weird about my spot: I was, in essence, spotting twice — like, getting stuck briefly in the mirror on the way to the actual spot. Apparently, this problem is contagious, because BB was doing it, too.
I very much get how this came about: I’m attempting to watch my turns in the mirror.
Specifically, my wonky proprioception makes it really hard for me to feel whether or not I’m actually snapping my leg to a proper open passé (or retiré, as is sometimes required), and I’ve developed the habit of attempting to catch a glimpse on the fly.
Apparently, that plays havoc with your spot, even though the hesitation it produces is minuscule.
The really annoying part of all this is that it really probably isn’t necessary. Snapping to a proper, open passé/retiré is one of the things I do naturally. There is absolutely no reason for me to be checking that in the mirror when I’m doing turns.
Keeping my foot attached at the knee until I really finish my turn, on the other hand… Eerrrrm, yeahhhhh. Sometimes I start stepping out of my turns a little early. It’s a thing.
That said, I mostly managed to stay attached tonight. Maybe the mini-spot in the middle was the problem?
Anyway, with regard to your working leg in turns, it’s fairly easy to tell whether you’re staying placed: if you can finish in a clean fifth when you do turns to fifth, you’re probably keeping your foot attached. For me, this works for turns from fifth, fourth, or second(1).
- Are turns from third even a thing?
On the other hand, if you find yourself finishing everything in a sort of sloppy 4.5th position, your foot is probably wandering. Or, at least, that’s how it works for me.
So here’s the rundown:
- Allongé from attitude: it is not the same thing as an extended second arabesque.
- Grand battement à côte: don’t let your leg drift behind you, and if you have trouble feeling where it is, do it in the mirror a whole bunch of times and figure out how to feel it.
- Turns: don’t get stuck in the mirror; the extra mini-spot just screws it all up.
Oh, and one more bonus: when you’re doing a simple combination of piqué turn – piqué turn – soutenu turn – soutenu turn – piqué turn – piqué turn – step-over turn – step-over turn, don’t get so into it that you nearly crash into the wall at the opposite corner.
Pro Tip: crashing into the corner is not how you ballet (though IIRC Nureyev totally launched himself off a stage once, in front of like all the people).
Wild Wednesday: Missing the Moment
But first, Killer Class.
This morning, I took a shower for once (to clarify: it’s not that I don’t wash myself; I just don’t usually shower in the morning). While showering, I found myself thinking, “Gee, we haven’t done saut de basque in a while. It would be really cool to do saut de basque.”
Apparently, the Divine Killer B read my mind, because we not only did SO MUCH PETIT ALLEGRO (which I managed mostly to do right), but we did an awesome grand allegro combination with sauts de basque and cabrioles.
So, basically, it was an awesome day. I also learned, by the by, that I’ve been over-crossing my arabesques, which makes my penché glitchy. Killer B came over at one point and was like, “Try not to overcross,” and moved my foot over, and then it was like, “OHAI, FLOOR!” So that was awesome, too.
On the other hand, I really missed the bus on what could’ve been a meaningful thing at DanceTeam practice.
One of the girls, who is actually a really awesome dancer when she gets out of her own way (with which, being middle-schoolers, they all struggle), randomly said while I was drilling some choreography with her and her friend in a breakout group, “I feel so fat.”
Aaaaaaand, I totally dropped the ball.
There are so, so many meaningful things I could’ve said — and while it’s true that probably none of them would’ve taken hold immediately, it’s important to hear those messages.
I could’ve said, “Don’t worry, there’s no one right body for dance,” or “The right body for dance is whatever body you’ve got” (though that one can sound a touch judgmental) or “All kinds of bodies are beautiful” (though, honestly, that might be a bridge too far for someone who’s in seventh grade and wrestle with all the stuff that people wrestle at that age). I could’ve pointed her to some amazing dancers that are shaped like she is, if I wasn’t so terrible at remembering names (1)
- Honestly, I am stunnnnnned that I’m actually remembering the names of ALL my DanceTeam girls; it’s a bleeding miracle.
Instead, I sort of choked and said, “You look fine!” and then, over the course of the conversation, reiterated the things that I think are great about her dancing — she has attitude for days and she’s really expressive, which means she has awesome stage presence; that she’s naturally a great mover for the kind of dance we’re working on.
Maybe I should’ve just asked, “What makes you say that?” and tried to listen, but on the other hand, we were trying to get a lot of choreography tightened up in not very much time.
On the other hand, it’s cool that some of the kids feel like they can say stuff like that around me, given that they really haven’t known me very long. It makes me feel like, against all odds, I’m doing okay making connections and putting them at ease (2).
- Probably the smartest thing I’ve done so far was to admit that I don’t know from Hip-Hop; that they get to teach me there.
Anyway, I’m going to have to think about this: how not to be caught off my guard the next time something like that comes up, and what to say that will be both concise and, in the long run, helpful. I’ll also check in with AS about that, since she (as an actual middle-school teacher) might have some insight.
So that’s it for now. I have to run off and suffer … erm, I mean, go back to Trapeze 3 after a not-really-intentional two-week break. Eeeeeeeek.
danseur ignoble 