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.

I finally figured out what my glissade-assemblé problem is.

For some strange reason, I sometimes throw a change of feet into the middle of my glissade where one is not needed. Then the assemblé assembles in the wrong direction.

This is basically the same thing as putting the right foot in when you should be putting the right foot in in the Hokey-Pokey.

No disassemblé!

I’m not sure why I do this. When I don’t (and when I can prevent my brain from immediately going, “Did I do it right?!”) it links up to the assemblé rather nicely.

Funny How That Works.

So, yeah. I guess I’ve got the glissade-assemblé sorted.

For now.

So during barre last night, in the midst of a complicated combination involving fondus and developpés and arabesques and various other things and also counting, I heard a distant voice saying, “Stretch that left knee! Stretch that left knee!”

We were working the left leg in back, so my face happened to be turned to the right, and thus towards the wall. I was listening intently to the music, focusing intently on not losing my place, and I thought I was stretching my knees, so I kept doing what I was doing.

…And then I felt a tap on the back of my left knee (which was extended behind me in midair), and heard the same voice — Brienne’s of course — saying, “Asher, stretch that knee!”

The tap made me realize that my knee was, in fact, not all the way stretched. It made me instantly aware: oh, hey, there is still slack in those muscles and tendons and so forth!

I had a moment of epiphany: what felt stretched and straight wasn’t.

Reflexively, I said, “Oh!” then obliged immediately and was rewarded with a, “Much better!”

What a difference a degree makes.

So that’s an interesting development (which, for the record, is different than an “interesting developpé” — of which I’m sure I did a few last night, particularly during our adagio). I know I have lazy knees*. They’re also mildly hyperextended, which is to say that if I stand with my knees together, like in a really tight first position, my heels will be a couple inches or so apart.

It never occurred to me, however, that what feels like straight might not be straight, where my knees are concerned.

That’s the interesting thing about ballet (and maybe “concert dance” in general). It makes you pay attention to your body in ways you really otherwise wouldn’t. You build habits little by little that might feel wholly unnatural at the outset.

Beyond the knee issues, class was a mixed bag last night. Some things went really well. Occasionally, I went, “Ohai! Pirouette from fourth! I own this!” And sometimes I was like, “Oh, soutenu turn? Is that the one where you nearly fall on your face and somehow wind up on the wrong leg?”

For what it’s worth, getting the combo at center has not been my strong suit the past two classes. Actually, come to think of it, I haven’t been super on the ball at the barre, either. Last night, this “tendu, tendu, pique, tendu” thing kept turning into “pique, pique, tendu, panic,” and the more I thought about it, the worse it got. I have made enough progress to know that the best thing I can do to get through a fast combination is stop thinking, but I’m not yet at the point where I can stop thinking on command.

It will come… ._.

Bike-wise, evidently it is possible to ride after Brienne’s class (though probably not after two of them). I was so busy thinking about ballet (okay, and ice cream) that I got on the wrong bus last night and went downtown instead of cross-town. That was no big deal, as home is only 7 miles from downtown, and I banged it out in about half an hour, including a stop to check out a cat some kids were worried about (turns out it was two cats, in fact, and they were having a mild territorial dispute, which was soon resolved when one of them scurried off and the other said the feline equivalent of, “And good riddance!”).

14 MPH may not be the fastest pace ever, but it’s nice to be able to ride it effortlessly after an hour and a quarter of Brienne’s super-athletic class.

It probably also helps that I remembered to stretch after class this time.

One more class this week, then it’s off to PlayThink for the weekend. Woohoo!

Notes
*Denis says this is true of everybody: we spend so much time learning not to lock our knees that fully straightening them feels a wee bit unnatural.

I was back in class today after a hiatus (broken only for Brienne’s Monday class) that I will discuss more fully at a later point, once I get clearance (no worries, dear readers: it was a family emergency thing, but nothing horrible, and it all turned out well in the end).

We had a substitute; the fabulous Jessica, whose teaching style I quite like. I ran through both Essentials and Beginner/Intermediate class today; essentials, because of a timing SNAFU, was all barre, all the time, with the exception of a little adagio at the end, while the beginner/intermediate class was, in Jessica’s words, “Just like the advanced class that I taught this morning, with small modifications.”

I wasn’t exactly on form after what amounted to nearly two weeks with only one class in the middle. I wasn’t exactly awful, either, at least not until the end of the second class, when my Glissade-Assemblé mental block reared its ugly head again (seriously, what the frappé). Oh, and also I almost totally failed to spot my pique turns, because, heck, why not?

This is what happens when I start to feel overconfident. I was like, “Oh, pique turns, I got this!” And then I’m like, “Why is the world still spinning?”

Anyhoo.

So, nerdery.

During my Ballet Hiatus, I got quite cranky and so forth. It turns out that ballet is the best mood stabilizer I have ever tried, ever, hands down (or, really, heels down, shoulders down, hands can float to the top if you’re on your balance…).

This is something I’d really like to pursue as a topic of research: like, we know that Dance-Movement Therapy is a thing (and it’s a thing I’m hoping, some day, to do for a living), and we know that exercise (and especially flow-state producing exercise) as a mood stabilizer is a thing. So what about ballet as a therapeutic device?

I would really, some day, like to be able to look at the neuroscientific underpinnings of all this dance-y goodness — because, frankly, there is so much going for dance as a therapeutic modality (It’s cheap! It’s social! It’s great for you physically as well!), but the research isn’t all there yet to back it up.

The first step (perhaps more of a chassé) in that journey, for me, will be to complete a DMT master’s program. If I really want to do the neuroscience part, probably a doctorate will have to follow.

In other news, I am about 3/4s of the way through choreographing an original story ballet in my head. Now I need a repetiteur with better technique than mine who’s good at translating “Now you do that one thing with the turn-and-the-whatever that goes like this!” to make it all come together.

This could take a while.

That said, I’m planning on using the opening solo bit, which is pure adagio, for an audition piece for various DMT programs.

So yeay. Life moves forward.

In other, other news, I had a really nice ride on the bike after class today. It turns out that you can, in fact, ride home after a couple hours of ballet class (though probably not if they’re both Brienne’s class; I have no legs left after Brienne’s class, ever).

The “Ballet Lessons” series will resume on Friday, barring any further crises, disasters, or calendrical SNAFUs.

Until then, adieu, and keep the up side up 🙂