So, technically, Modern Monday has been rolling along without me for the past few weeks, but I haven’t managed to make make it ’til today.
Anyway, in the intervening period, I haven’t completely forgotten how to modern, but it did take a little re-acclimating today. There were quite a few moments in which my body kind of went, “Ohhhhhh, that thing! Riiiiiiiight!”
I was really afraid I would be a disaster, because I’m still struggling at night but opted not to take take a sleeping pill last night because sometimes they exacerbate my depressions. Last night, I did manage to get something like five hours of sleep, though, which is a step in the right direction.
It turned out that I was acceptably able to remember combinations and coordinate most of my movements. I did struggle with an exercise on the floor in which Graham contractions and releases and flat-back were supposed to coordinate with flexing and pointing the feet.
My feet were like, “What is this flexed crap? Are we doing frappé? No! So what the snap?” I had had to think about the feet, which was simultaneously surprisingly hard and actually pretty funny, because they were seriously not into that.
I also struggled with Part B of our petit allegro combination, which seemed simple but wasn’t, because it needed precision, which evidently I didn’t have.
Basically, it went:
Walk, walk, walk, walk,
Jump, spot, jump, spot, jump, spot, jump, spot <= with quarter turns
I struggled to coordinate this and then, when I did coordinate it, I kept turning off-center.
It turns out that I was spotting forehead-first, tilting my head and neck off the vertical axis, causing my whole body to veer off track.
Modern T suggested that I think about leading the spot with my chin. This sounds immensely counter-intuitive, but in my case, it works. It keeps my head and neck on the vertical, which makes the turn stay upright.
Anyway, this explains why my turns and my tours sometimes (okay, often) teeter off their axes — so, one again, modern is benefiting ballet in unexpected ways.
So, anyway, more little details to tune up. I think this is good. The more I dance and watch dance, the more I believe that the bodies of dancers are educated bodies in a very real way. I feel like I should be able to explain what I mean, there, but I’m having trouble with words today, so I’ll have to reflect on that and come back to it.
So, basically, I have a PhD in controlling my legs, but my arms are still in kindergarten. In this position, I felt like my arms were straight out to the sides. Oy, vey.
Along the way, my loosely-connected hips have developed some pretty rocking turnout.
Along the way, I have also noticed that, as I progress through barre exercises (or exercises at centre, or … you know, basically everything else), my turnout tends to creep from awesome to average. It’s never terrible, but there’s sort of no excuse for that … especially since hanging onto the turnout is what makes sooooooo many other things happen without so much sturm und drang (tour lent, I’m looking at you, here).
This became a theme of today’s second class, with Ms J at the helm and only three of us at the oars.
While I frequently take class with Ms J, I rarely get to take class from Ms J … which is a shame, because she is an amazing teacher, and has a laser-focused eye for detail and absolutely no misgivings about using it to its full potential (which is why we love her).
Today, she pointed out to me that I’m being lazy with my turnout in pliés and in relevé balances, particularly those on two feet.
In both, I look fine getting there (and maybe I even am fine; I actually do tend to work my turnouts on the way there), but on the way back, it’s like I just throw my bike down on the front lawn or something. In short, I have been letting my rotators get away with going, “Meh, that’s good enough.”
Basically, as you rise from a plié, you should continue using all those rotators that make your turnout happen … you know, then ones that you’re supposed to keep fiercely engaged all the way down, but maybe you don’t because your turnout is naturally pretty great and you can kinda fake it?
But if you don’t want your turnout to just drift into the Zone of Mediocrity, you have to use them all the way. All the way down (because otherwise you’re gonna have a bad time cranking them back on when you come back up, and you’re also going to fall right over the very second your instructor calls you to center and says, “And we start with grand plié…”) and then all the way up.
All the way.
Which means that as you rise, you’re not just thinking about getting your knees back, but also about rotating your heels forward … and you’re not just thinking about it until your heels are on the ground (which, historically, is where I’ve just kind of dropped the reins and let the horses … by which I mean my legs … run for the barn).
You have to keep thinking about it, and doing it, until you are once again standing in your greatest possible turnout.
If you’ve been in the habit of being lazy about it, as I have, this is HARD.
By which I mean it’s physically demanding (because you suddenly realize, “Ohai, my turnouts aren’t quite as strengthy as I thought!”) and it makes you think and it’s horrible to have to think during a plié combination, because then the likelihood that you’ll hose up the entire combination approaches the singularity, or … wait, I think I’m perhaps drifting into hyperbole as well as mediocrity, here.
Anyway, you have to consciously make even that last degree, that last second, of rotation happen … or at least you do until your body gets used to it or at least just gives up and does it right because it realizes you’re not going to stop making it and sometimes it just has to choose its battles(•).
Moreover, the same thing (that is, the rotators being like, “Meh, good enough,” not the body finally accepting that your are going to keep making it do this crazy stuff) happens when you’re coming down from relevé or from elevé — in fact, for me, this is when it is most likely to happen.
And, presumably for my entire balletic existence, I have been allowing it to happen. At least, I have until today, when Ms J took me to task on it. (I realize that this is a key component of what Company B was also trying to impart on Thursday.)
She kept me on top of it throughout the entire class, even when I was standing still.
So that is today’s lesson: if you think you’re done working your rotators, you almost certainly aren’t. Unless you’re in modern class, in which you might legitimately be done working your rotators for the moment, because maybe you’re going to get a reprieve and do something in parallel.
WRONG. The correct answer is E: NEVER. NOT EVEN WHEN HE’S DEAD.
For what it’s worth, working on this instantly improved my fourth position (also known as “we would’ve called it fifth but then you would’ve expected it to be the hardest one and you wouldn’t have been willing to try it”). Specifically, my ability to use temps-lie through fourth and to execute grand pliés in fourth without recovering with only two-thirds of the turnout I had when I started.
(Edit: I feel like I’ve said this before, which makes me wonder exactly how distressingly bad my fourth position was when I started dancing again back in 2014.)
Of course, none of this was of any help by the time we got around to doing turns. By then, sleep deprivation had caught up with me, and I managed to execute exactly one halfway decent turn. The rest were horrible, rubbishy disasters.
Petit allegro, too, was awash in fresh horror, as I kept letting my trailing leg just sort of drift home in my glissades and then falling over sideways doing tours (I mean, not all the way over). At least I remembered the combination, eventually?
But I’m pretty sure all that owes to the fact that things were catching up with me by then. Sleep deprivation hits you right in the coordination and equilibrium. In related news, as I learned in today’s first class, sleep-deprived chainés are no joke. Or, well, at least not to the person attempting them. They can be pretty hilarious to everyone else, TBH.
On the other hand, in the second class, I somehow miraculously nailed down the Bournonville (grand) jeté (which, in still photos, has an unfortunate tendency to look like the official “Heeeeeeeeey!” entrance of ballet — in real life, these are really beautiful when executed well).
In case you’re wondering, here’s one ganked straight from the source.
I learned the Bournonville jeté a while back, but then promptly gave myself a mental block the next time we used it and haven’t produced a decent one since until today. I mean, seriously, most of mine look like I’ve basically tripped over something whilst running at full tilt, or possibly like there’s something wrong with the leg that’s in back.
(Edit: I suspect I may have not actually been jumping off the back leg at all, but just sort of launching from the front and kinda letting it trail along. I am distressingly capable of exactly that kind of thing.)
Today, I did about nine of them. A few were even actually solid all the way up, since Ms J noted that I was jumping through my arms and letting them trail behind me instead of carrying them(•) and fixed that, too.
I figured out how to carry my arms and shocked the living daylights out of myself by launching a string of beautiful Bournonville jetés into near-earth orbit on the next pass.
Of course, I then failed to plan anything to do with the arms in question on a subsequent saut de chat, with the inevitable result being a kind of Lovecraftian half-breed, or possibly a rough approximation of a T-Rex attempting to pop and lock.
Oh, T-Rex. If only you’d just stop trying. No, wait: YOU DO YOU, T-REX!
And my tour-jetés, today, on the other hand?
Ummmm, yeah. Let’s not even open that can of extremely-confused and possibly drunken worms.
~
PS: today’s first class, Advanced Class, was actually pretty decent all the way through. Even the chainés weren’t that bad. So there’s that.
I have, once again, rather fallen into the habit of perkily reporting on my ballet is adventures whilst staunchly neglecting one of the other legs of this ostensibly-tripedal blog: the bipolar part.
That said, I suspect that I often do this when I’m struggling. Keeping a stiff upper lip (which, no joke, autocorrupt wanted to parse as “soft, upset lip”) was a central tenet of my upbringing. I am a Yankee of the old school by birth and breeding; we’re supposed to be stoic and taciturn and to solve our problems by regarding them severely from beneath or beetling brows, or what have you.
I think part of me still believes that As Long As I Don’t Say It’s Happening, It’s NOT Happening.
…Which is almost hilariously untrue.
I’ve noticed that I do this to Denis: often he doesn’t hear that I’ve hit a rough patch until either A) I’m on the third or fourth consecutive night with less than six hours of sleep, B) I’m curled up in a ball.on the kitchen floor literally trying to hold myself together when he arrives home from work, C) I’m curled up as in B whilst freaking out about A, or D) I melt down completely, hit full-on fight/flight mode, and proceed to get in a fight with with the oven or the cupboard door or some other highly-threatening inanimate object.
I suppose, dear readers, that I do this to you as well. And that I have been.
As a whole Burning Man was great this year — but there was also a thing that happened which cut too close to old wounds and very much re-awakened the part of of me that is aggressively hypervigilant. This has made coping with the transition back to my normal routine immensely difficult.
Couple that with a couple of extremely-stressful situations at home, add a shot of hormonal chaos and the inevitable weirdness that crops up as the seasons change, and everything has gone right to Helena Handbasket (she’s a busy lady, that one).
So I haven’t really slept in several days, and now I’m debating whether I should try to go to 9:00 class or try to sleep. It probably says a great deal about the situation that I’m not so much worried about whether or not I can dance — in my current state, I’ve noticed, I always get a miraculous little hit of energy as I belly up to the barre — but whether or not I can drive.
Part of me considers it surprising that I can lie here and write about this lightly and humorously. It feels like hell. I’m getting through it a few minutes at a time, an hour at a time, by mindfulness: that is, by the practice of reeling my monkey mind in when it starts to go “OH G-D OH G-D I CAN’T LIVE LIKE THIS I JUST CAN’T I AM NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO SLEEP AGAIN ETC” with the knowledge that I don’t and can’t know the future, but I’m here now, and this is, in the famous words of Avenue Q, “…only for now.”
I remind myself that I might still feel feel like this in ten minutes or I might not, but that right here, right now, I can sit with this — with fury or despair or anger or terror or sorrow or wrath — and just experience it without either judging the experience or buying into the idea that it will never never end.
It will and it won’t.
The stream of arising phenomena is unending, and so it shall be until the universe cools or torches itself or we all reach Nirvana or Messiah comes (“… I apologize that I took so long…”)
In the calmer moments, like now, when I’m not actively frothing at the mouth, this is a comforting thing to think about. In the other moments, it’s at least something that lets me hang on until.
Meanwhile, I know that getting back to class on a regular basis will help, which right now feels like a Catch-22 (How can I get to class if I don’t start sleeping? How can I sleep of I don’t make all all my classes*?), but I remind myself: that’s only right now. It will come.
Anyway, I’m finally feeling feeling like I might actually be able to sleep a little. Maybe I’ll make class, maybe I won’t. That’s in the future ,and i can’t live there, but I can live here.
Anyway, there’s always noon class.
Bonne nuit, et bonne chance.
Tonight was my first class back with Company B.
There were only 3 of us, the more advanced members of the class, so he taught to a fairly high standard. (I should say, he always teaches to a high standard, but in this case he also gave us fairly advanced material).
At the beginning of barre, I was worried I wouldn’t be up to hanging with the cool kids, since I’m still fresh back from my Off Season, but once we got into it, I felt fine. My body woke up and remembered that dancing is what it does, and after that everything went fairly smoothly.
I got my left split back today. That’s a huge improvement. I’d been having trouble recovering it after yoinking something in my hip at the July intensive, but a month off seems to have un-yoinked said something. Now the only thing making life difficult is a tight spot in the top of my right quadriceps, but it’s not preventing me from getting that split all the way down, just making it slower getting there. It’ll come.
So that’s another keen reminder of how sometimes it’s good to take some time off, let the body just recover.
In other news, I had developed a weird hait of fouette-ing out of my renverse, and I got that sorted tonight a well. I was, it turns out (har, har) turning (ha!) my renverse into a turn, which, as M. BeastMode reminds us whenever we do renverse in his classes, it patently isn’t. It’s just a fancy way to change the direction of your body, really.
Anyway, if you turn your renverse into a full turn, you wind up doing a crazy kind of fouette thing to face yourself back into the correct direction. That sort of defeats the whole point of the renverse, and while it looks cool, it almost certainly isn’t valid technique.
On the other hand, being able to float through a full rotation in renverse means you have the balance working, so there’s that?
So basically, renverse is a fancy pivot that takes you only halfway around your imaginary box (generally from one corner to its diagonal opposite) and not a turn. And it looks awesome.
We also drilled down on pas de bourree en tournant, which is one of those steps that, at this level, many of us have just been faking forever with varying degrees of success. CB pointed out that it’s helpful to think of the en tournant part as quarter-half-half, and mentioned that even our resident Russian-trained-in-actual-Russia ballerina (and, yes, I’m using that term in the technical sense) says you often wind up having to fudge it a little. So you might go quarter-half-half and then sort of pivot subtly in sus-sous, or whatevs.
Anyway, excepting one instance of my prodigious ability to do the should-be-impossibly-wrong turn, my turns were good today, as were most other things once my body woke up. So that was good.
I love Company B’s class, because he tends to give a slightly slower class (possibly because he legitimately has a full 90 minutes, whereas my other classes are nominally 75 minutes long, but generally run closer to 90 anyway), which allows more time to absorb the finicky little details.
Which is good, because finicky little details are, to some extent, the heart and soul of ballet, though of course they mean nothing if the technique underpinning them isn’t there. They are, however, what puts the finish on.
So that was class tonight.
I apologize for my lack of diacritical marks, by the way.I’m trying out a new Bluetooth keyboard and am too tired this evening to go back and add them after the fact. I suppose I could’ve just used HTML mode on this editor, but I didn’t think of it ’til just now.
Choreography Study Group tomorrow, Advanced Class on Saturdau, teaching on Sunday, back to Modern on Monday now that my car is back from its maintenance visit.
Also, I really quite love this little keyboard, even if I keep mistyping “keyboard” in various creative ways.
First, I’d like to point out that while “Look at noun go!” is idiomatic, it still sounds hella awkward to my ear in this context. I really want to say, “Watch those goalposts go!” but that doesn’t have the same cultural sense. Maybe I should’ve written: “Those goalposts — look at ’em go!” Or … well. Whatevs.
Anyway, today marked my first Killer Class since before I departed for Burning Man, and while it was predictably a slog because, while well-rested, I am also not quite on form(1), it was also objectively a pretty good class.
(1) I should probably note that I’m really talking about a difference in fitness similar to that in cycling, in which “Fit” and “Racing Fit” are very discrete states.
That being said, I felt like I got through pretty well. Well enough, in fact, that I finished class aware that, once again, the goalposts are on the move.
I took it easy and, for the most part, kept my extensions relatively low today — but I also realized that no longer means working at 45 degrees. 90 degrees is sufficiently comfortable avant and à la seconde to qualify; arrière it’s pretty much the default. It didn’t feel like any trouble to work an from an extension avant or arrière through fondu coupé through développée à la seconde just above 90.
A little of this is a question of strength, but mostly it’s a question of knowing how to use my body in a way that, not too long ago, I didn’t. That, in turn, I owe to really good instruction.
A year ago, I was fighting my own body for higher extensions, and it was largely a question of not knowing how to get there. I knew I was supposed to keep my hips level and that the working leg should be lifted from behind by the same muscles responsible for turnout; I just didn’t actually know how to use my body so those things would happen reliably. Thus, I tended to devolve upon using my quads to lift my working leg.
Anyway, using the right set of muscles has become, essentially, automatic. I no longer battle physics and physiology every single time I work in extension. Pretty cool stuff.
Likewise, even though I was feeling a bit draggy by the time we got there, petit allegro was better than it had any business being. We did:
Echappée, changement, changement, soubresaut,
Echappée, changement, changement, soubresaut,
Glissade avant, glissade arriére, glissade a côte changée, glissade a côte changée,
Echapée, echapée, entrechat quatre, entrechat quatre.
And:
Glissade, jeté, temps levée, temps levée
Glissade, jeté, temps levée, temps levée
Balloté, balloté, balloté, fouetté(2)
Cut under to sous-sous,
Tombé, pas de bourrée,
Glissade, assemblée.
(2)Technically, this was sauté fouetté.
These aren’t difficult combinations (though maybe Me From One Year Ago might disagree?), but both offer ample opportunity for leg-tangling (also know as pas de bébé girafe, a subset of the extensive group known collectively as pas de problème … yes, that’s a pun).
In neither case did I fumble into Baby Giraffe Mode (even though I kept forgetting that the ballotés were coming and doing that thing where you think, “Oh, yeah!” and then do the first too one fast to make up for lost time.
This all compares favorably to where I was a year ago, or six months ago, or probably even one month ago. I just tend to forget, when I’m in class basically every day, that I’m actually making progress.
That said, this habit of checking in with myself and making progress-based comparisons also made it abundantly clear that I’ll need to get my core back together again, since I spent way too much time working swaybacked.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I’m pretty much back in the swing of things, ballet-wise, though still decompressing otherwise.
Sep 13
This gallery contains 9 photos.
I’m not afraid of heights per se, but standing high above the ground on an unstable surface can certainly be a workout for the adrenal system. Especially when you’re standing on a surface made from steel punched with little cut-outs that lead to a kind of flexing beneath your feet as the wind blows up […]
I realized this morning that the Acro 2/Killer Class turnaround is going to be tough.
I was definitely pretty stiff this morning at the start of barre — the kind of stiff you feel when you’ve spent the previous day helping a friend rearrange some furniture or something.
My Achilles’ tendons took longer to loosen up than my hip flexors — my calves in general felt like bricks through almost the whole barre. They did finally loosen up for fondu, heh.
My analysis? Moar stretching after Acro 2! And moar warm-up time before Killer Class. I ran way late this morning; squeaked in under the wire — 3 minutes left before the start of class. Definitely did not get a chance to get get the blood flowing! (FWIW, my usual routine, currently, it’s it’s just passé-par-terre followed by attitude swings and, if time allows, a light stretch for the calves.If I’m really, really early, I tend to pace around the studio, looking like I’m ready to go for a jog in mid-December.
Anyway, things were mixed today: you know that thing where you scare the crap out of of yourself by actually doing good turns, and then panic on the second side? That was me all all the way.
I’ll take that, though, because adagio was good and our choose-your-own-adventure grand allegro started out a little rough but then magically clicked on the second run.
Every now and then, I forget to panic when doing saut-de-chat, and then I actually do them well. That happened today: first run, I did:
Zig: tombé, pas de bourré, glissade, pas de chat;
Zag: tombé, pas de bourré, glissade, pas de chat Italien
… And the landing on the Gatto was a bit abrupt.
The second time, I didn’t even think about it; I was just focused on getting more travel in my glissade — and for some reason I finished with a saut de chat that felt light, quick, and free.
Looking back, I think it was at this same time last year that I despaired of ever achieving lightness (except in my pas de chat, which, oddly, has always been light) and quickness. Now they happen sometimes as of by magic in completely unexpected places.
All of the trip prep is now done. If we’ve missed anything, we’ll either have to live without it or pick up a replacement in Nevada.
In five hours we’ll be off and running.
By nature, I’m a pusher. I come back from illness or injury and push myself to jump right back in where I was when I left off.
That’s not always the best strategy, and I’m learning to listen to my body a little more; let it tell me when I should back off a bit.
Today was one of those days: we’ve entered that time of year in which the late-summer/early-autumn molds and pollens start kicking my butt, and the simple act of breathing becomes depressingly complicated.
I also woke up feeling yesterday’s lyra work a little — my mount involves using my adductors and hamstrings under pretty heavy load, and it just never really lets up after that.
Because the posterior chain is just that — a chain — the lyra work basically just left my legs tight from the bottom to the top (or, ahem, from the bottom to my bottom? I just can’t even today…). Seriously; even my Achilles’ tendons have essentially no give today, and my Achilles’ tendons are surprisingly awesome most of the time (at least, it surprises me: it’s counter-intuitive, since they’re SO FREAKING WIDE).
As a result, I took my time working into my turnout, working into my plié. I tried to keep my movements small and soft and let the legs warm up on their own schedule.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this worked pretty darned well. By the time we got to the warm-up jumps, I had quite a lot of sproing happening: powerful lift-off working through the feet; soft, quiet landings rolling back down into a cushy plié.
Prior to that, we did some really nice work through balloné more or less à terre — the same motion as the usual, but with the toe of the working leg brushing across the ground — and in pique-fouetté (proud to say that if we had been a band of hunter-gatherers, we would have feasted on mammoths!*) and arabesque turns (from fourth and fifth, one after the other).
*How I envision this actually going down IRL:
Step 1: Mammoth be napping in the fancy grass. Via my imagination and Microsoft Paint.
Step 2: Time for grand allegro! (Paul Jamin, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)
So, anyway, working into my body poco a poco worked really well today.
This is something I’ll have to keep in mind.
The next three days will be a flurry of packing, dancing, and cleaning, so I may or may not do much writing here. As such, fear not, because…
From Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, via teh G00gelz, obvs.
My Sunday class is making amazing strides — their tendus, dégages, and even ronds de jambe looked so great this week.
I also experienced one of those great moments in which I grabbed a student’s leg and demonstrated how rotation and placement could help her A) keep her RdJs smooth and B) balance her arabesque, and then got to see that amazing thing where the light-bulb inside just clicks on.
And then she did it again, completely on her own, without my meddlesome, grabby hands 😀
That was the best part, and really the highlight of the day. Such a cool moment!
I also guided her into a first arabesque (really, I just offered her my hand so she’d extend her arm to the right spot) so she could feel how the working leg and opposite arm connect through the back and counter-balance each-other, and she totally got it.
(Also, her arabesque looked awesome! Her back is really strong and flexible, which really helps — thanks, aerials! Likewise, because she wasn’t fighting to try to get a super-high extension, she was rock-solid.)
Something I’ve learned through my own experiences returning to ballet and teaching:
New dancers don’t just find it hard to locate the center-line of their bodies when the working leg is to the rear.
They also (and perhaps more importantly) often find that working to the center-line seems a little weird, unnatural, and sometimes even scary … until they try it and it clicks!
For me, that light-bulb moment came when I realized that I could keep my turnout more easily and effectively in RdJs if I really got the working leg all the way back to the center-line, and then that the same applied to tendus. This happened more recently than it should have, if I were better at A) listening and B) applying corrections 
Prior to that moment, I guess I kind of felt like I’d lose my turnout that way. Sometimes, ballet can be pretty counter-intuitive.
If you’re engaging all the (right) things, though, drawing the arc of the RdJ or the line of the tendu right freaking back from the tailbone lets you stay turned-out without lifting (or dropping) a hip.
(That, by the way, is the other part that’s hard for people: they feel like they need to lift that hip even when they don’t. Which, if they’re using correct technique and working within the ever-evolving limits of their own bodies, they shouldn’t at this level, or almost ever.)
This is still one of the best ways I know to gauge my own placement: if my working leg is taking too much weight in a tendu to the rear, or I’m hiking a hip in a RdJ en dedans, usually the problem is that I’m not getting my working leg behind myself.
Exception: if my pelvis is jammed — which happens with ridiculous frequency at the moment because Bodies Are Weird™ — I can’t RdJ without lifting the hip on the jammed side (very nearly always the right).
Instead, my working leg is usually kind of camping out in … I don’t know, 2.5-ième position? Working back to the center line by rotating and reaching generally resolves the related problems.
In some ways, and as much as part of me really hates to admit it (in part because I feel weird in third because I use it so rarely), I feel like this is a really good reason to teach adult beginners to work in third position before introducing fifth.
Then, when they come to tendu derrière or RdJ derrière, they have to think about moving the working leg in towards the center line (by rotating the heel forward and adducting, of course, rather than just by unraveling the working hip, letting the knee point to the floor, and shoving the toes over), which creates the opportunity to feel the difference that it makes when that happens.
Working from fifth, new dancers often tend to let their legs turn in when they extend back (see above re: unraveling, etc.).
Likewise, they often finish an RdJ or point a tendu a little to the side when working from fifth with the working foot closed in back — possibly because early on that seems like the only logical way to get your foot out there.
Later, of course, we get better at pulling up through the pelvic floor and lower core (also known as “pulling up through the hips” :D) and placing our weight to keep the working foot free when it’s in back — but early on, really subtle core cues and weight shifts are anything but intuitive.
With a little hands-on guidance, the sensation of bringing the leg back to the center line through (for example) a rond, on the other hand, can become a powerful physical illustration.
I doubt my student, C, will soon forget what it felt like to “get it” any more than I’ve forgotten.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that she’ll be perfect all the time — but it does mean she’ll be more perfect a lot more of the time, because now she has a memory that connects body and brain through the awesome feeling of an “Ah-hah!” moment.
In other news, the class as a whole is coming on like a house on fire.
Today we worked piqué balances at retiré going across the floor, and so many of them were bang on. It’s really cool to see a group of new dancers experience the thrill of springing on to the supporting leg and being able to just hover there, perfectly balanced, then come down.
We gave them a simple combination: piqué balances at retiré along the diagonal, to the count of:
Brush up – stay – stay – stay – down up – stay – stay – stay – down up – stay – stay – stay
(..etc. The number of piqué balances varied based both on the length of any individual dancer’s legs and how willing she was to really step out beyond herself.)
On the first run, we let them try it on their own. A few really nailed it, but several were shaky because, as is often the case, they felt unsure and tried to bring the supporting leg under themselves instead of launching themselves onto the supporting leg.
(Really, it’s kind of like throwing a BBQ skewer into the lawn — I’m not old enough to have experienced proper lawn darts, so I can’t say that’s exactly spot-on. Either way, that’s the image I should give them: your leg is a lance, and you’re spearing a reclining mammoth … or maybe something flatter, like a giant crocodile.)
What could possibly go wrong? (1)
On the second run, we simply rolled out the very-most-basic partnering, offering them a hand on which to steady themselves. Most of them literally put no weight on the hand in question, but knowing it was there made them feel safe, and the piqued more boldly.
So, lesson of the day for me: hesitant piqué balances might be the result of a little bit of fear. With new dancers, a little hand-holding (or, well, hand-offering) can really help.
(With more experienced dancers, though, yelling works just fine :D)
Anyway, that’s it for now. Sadly, I won’t be checking in with my students next week, as I’ll be off in the desert, doing tendus in the pool (and then building a freaking enormous theme camp at Burning Man).
~
Edit: fixed a thing. I don’t know why I was thinking these piqué balances were at coupé. They were at retiré. We’re planning on teaching these guys piqué turns sometime soon.
Further edit: just so you don’t think my Sunday class is really, really perfect, we still have to remind them about thinking of plié as a continuous movement. Today I explained this as:
Don’t drop and pop — melt and … um … smelt. Yeah, we’ll go with “smelt.”
Thank dog that Aerial A backed me up on that mnemonic 😀
Further, further edit: They have definitely turned into a dance class. Before class today, several them were attempting to figure out pirouettes (and kinda-sorta succeeding: they were upright, weren’t falling over, and were getting around, but they weren’t turned out or spotting).
Kinda warms my heart a little 😀
~
YouTube: BOSU Balance Series
danseur ignoble 