Category Archives: choreography

It’s Taimz for Crazy Taimz

It’s Taimz for Crazy Taimz

Jan 9

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As of today, my schedule officially begins its trek through the land of:

This means rehearsals that end at 10:30 on Monday nights, a whole lotta class(1), extra conditioning for an upcoming audition, Dance Team, preparation for our annual Meeting With The Accountant, and work on the next iteration of the website for D’s business*. 

  1. This is different than a Whole Latte class, in which baristas would presumably learn the art of making ethically-sourced organic coffee drinks, or perhaps simply how to make an entire latte and not just part of one(2).
  2. If you forget the milk, for example, it’s just coffee! 

In the interest of retaining some shred of sanity, I’m keeping Modern Mondays off the calendar until March, at least. My primary studio just added modern on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though, so I’ll be doing at least one of those, depending. 

I’m trying to keep Tuesday unscheduled, but since tomorrow is the first class, I’m going to go.

For the time being, on Mondays, it makes more sense to take an evening ballet class instead of a morning modern class. That keeps my mornings free for goofing off on the Innertubes  household stuff and groups all the dance things into a nice block from 2:45 — 10:30. (There’s a dinner break in there, don’t worry.)

This is one of the things I’m trying to do differently this year. Instead of saying, “Oh, cool, I only have three things on the schedule for Mondays!”,  I’m accounting for things like transit time and the fact that I don’t change gears well, so it’s foolish to assume I’ll get even one task done if I have a couple of hours between engagements. 

Thus, while I seem to have once again stacked a lot onto my plate, I’m trying to be sensible about how I approach it. 

The thing I’ve learned about pursuing dance seriously is that you’re either up to your eyeballs in alligators—wait, let’s call them crocodiles because it will be funnier later—or you’re on break. The challenge is learning to Arrange Your Crocodiles  In A Linear Array. Which is to say:

Get your crocs in a row! (Shamelessly ganked from Chris Booth over at Expatior)

Arranging my waterfauna is really not my forté, but I’m learning. Sort of.

The frenzy of class and rehearsal is worth it to have the chance to make art and do the thing that it feels like I was made to do(3).

  1. The cat disagrees. He believes I was made to serve as a cat bed and play-bot. 

I fully expect to arrive home exhausted at 11 PM tonight. Needless to say, I’m glad Tuesday isn’t Killer Class day.

If it was, I’d make it work. It would be worth it.

Right now I feel weirdly like my dreams are rushing towards me at terminal velocity.

All things considered, that’s a pretty cool feeling.

Though, really—ask me again in March how I feel about my schedule 😉

Here’s a detailed explanation of how my current schedule happened:

Posted in adulting, adventures, balllet, choreography, it is a silly place, life, life management, modern, work

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Work Song: Shift on the Fly 

Dec 24

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Turns out I won’t be able to use GM after all. I think I’m going to reset for three dancers, even though it means shaking up the dynamics of the piece. 

I originally conceived it as a piece for like 8 male dancers (8 female or neutrois or whatever would work, too), then reset for two men and two women. The basic idea was to avoid traditional male-female partnering, because there’s too much cultural freight attached to it. I guess I hadn’t yet stepped away from the idea of working in even numbers, though 😛

Using two girls and one boy will make it more challenging to shake off that baggage—but, on the other hand, as an artist, I can use that.

All this is good. It’s forcing me to get out of my own head and take risks I might not otherwise have taken. I’m not always great at rolling with the changes, but, honestly that’s part of working in dance. 

I’m also trying hard not to cling to my own ideas about how audiences are likely to understand things.  If anything, though, I can use those expectations; if I reset the opening to work within them, then use the part to step out of them, that would work, too.

I need to remember that part of art is going where you’re led, even when you don’t want to.

Truth be told, it’s a little funny that I’ve gotten so hung up in this. The long ballet I’m working on, Simon Crane, is arranged in such a way that both the principal roles (Simon Crane and The Naturalist) could conceivably be played by dancers of whatever gender you’ve got on hand. 

On the other hand, Simon Crane is a love story (albeit a strange and complicated one, but is there any other kind in ballet?) whereas “Work Song” is basically the antithesis of that: it’s not about any kind of romantic entanglement, period.

I’ll work with AM and AS on communicating the intent of the piece as clearly as I can. In the long run, one of the best (and most dangerous) things about art is that as soon as you put it out into the world, you no longer get to control what it means. 

The audience that watches this piece, ultimately, will take away whatever meaning they see, and that’s okay. 

I’m beginning to realize that that’s one of the hardest things for me, as an artist. Once I create a thing and it’s out in the world, I can no longer control what happens to it. That feels scary, but I’m glad that I’ve figured out that’s what I’m feeling. 

Honestly, though, more than anything I’m immensely excited about being given this chance to show my work to the world both as a choreographer and as a dancer.

Also, the fewer people in the cast, the easier scheduling becomes 😀  

So there’s that. 

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Work Song: Adjustments 

Dec 23

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So, I’m writing this at 3 AM, but scheduling it for Actual Morning. 

We’ve had a late casting change for Work Song. My other boy wound up with a bounty of work projects, and he’s swamped. I’m fine with that; in the gig economy that feeds so many artists, you have to strike while the iron is hot. I love his work, so I’m excited about seeing more of it down the line, even though it means losing him for this piece. 

Last night I asked GM, a fellow aerialist, if he’d like to try jumping in. His formal training in dance is pretty minimal, but he’s a very good mover. I think he’ll be able to roll with it. AM, AS, and I will be able to coach him on technique.

Interestingly, bringing in a less-experienced dancer has helped me to streamline my choreography a bit. I had about five different ideas for the third phrase, and only one of them is something I’d feel confident handing to someone with limited dance vocabulary.

It’s good to work with limitations. They make decision-making easier and help to shape the finished work. Just as the stone tells the sculptor what figure lies within, sometimes the dancers shape the vision of the choreographer. 

We should be able to start rehearsing next week or the first week of January.

 Ultimately, this piece is only about 3.5 minutes long. The rehearsal process will be less about learning the choreography, which shouldn’t be too hard, and more about making it really sing. There’s a lot of partnering in this piece, though it’s largely not of the classical-ballet bent. GM takes acro with me, so I suspect he can handle it. Timing and musicality are the open questions, one everyone learns the choreography. 

I guess, really, this is my first professional project as a choreographer-director. I’m learning on the fly how to cast dancers, schedule rehearsals, teach choreography to four busy performers with very different backgrounds, make costuming decisions, and so on and so forth.

Having done it once,  I feel like doing it again won’t be so difficult. The biggest ongoing challenge will be finding rehearsal spaces on a budget of $Zip.ZilchNada. The nice part in this case  is that rehearsal space is built in. I teach with AS, and this performance is part of the Instructors’ Showcase, so we will be rehearsing at the studio.

Finding dancers isn’t incredibly difficult. I’ve managed to connect with a decent handful of adult ballet students who want to perform, including a fairly advanced core group. My aerials family is made up mostly of very game performers, a few of whom have reasonable dance training.

I might have to learn how to do fundraising stuff. The internets should make that easier.

I’m pretty excited about all of this. The only thing I’m not looking forward to is the cat-herding involved in scheduling rehearsals 😛 

That might not be as bad as it could be, though, because we’re all attached to the aerials studio, and we all spend a lot of time there. 

More to come. It’s weird how far 2016 (the Year of the Dumpster Fire) has taken me as a dancer. No matter what I’ve said, one year ago I wouldn’t have predicted that I’d be staging a piece (for four dancers!) with so much confidence.

Gives me something to look forward to in 2017 (which, hilariously, is the Year of the Cock).

Posted in adulting, adventures, balllet, choreography, cirque, work

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Problem-Solving Dreams 

Apparently it’s pretty common for people to solve creative problems (and even scientific problems!) in their dreams. 

This happened to me the other night. I was iffy about the opening of Adagio Cantabile/”The Pest”. There’s a double turn programmed right out of the gate, but I wasn’t sure I liked the way I had implemented it. 

The other night, I dreamed I was performing that piece and opened with:

B+
Sweep through
Demi-rond to 2nd
Turn from second
Turn à la seconde

It felt awesome, scanned perfectly, and allowed for a smooth, strong transition to the next phrase, in which the first real step is a sauté 4th arabesque. 

The only problem? 

My turn from second is reliable, but I wasn’t at all sure about about the turn à la seconde in real life, even though I did it when learning Albrecht’s variation back in June. 

Anyway, tried it tonight after Trap 3 and found that, in fact, I can do this thing (thanks in no small part to a bit of advice that BW gave me last Thursday).

So that was pretty cool. 

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Break (Almost) Week; Reflections on Renversés and Choreography as a Process

Break (Almost) Week; Reflections on Renversés and Choreography as a Process

Nov 21

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Saturday, I spent four hours teaching, several more hours scraping paint, and two hours composing choreography before we went to a party that was actually very fun. Sunday, after acro and Acro Brunch, I spent an hour running choreography, then another hour teaching, and then untold æons (with, so really an hour and change, maybe two) standing on a ladder and painting the house while my hands froze in a chill wind in spite of my gloves(1).

  1. Note to self: wear winter cycling gloves next time. They’re wind-resistant.

As such, I opted to stay in this morning, do housework, and take evening class instead) even though I should really get back to doing Modern Mondays). 

The piece I was working on Saturday evening and a Sunday is essentially a 5-minute long comedic story ballet set to the 2nd movement (adagio cantabile) of Beethoven’s Pathétique. I programmed in a few renversés, and I realized while I worked the piece that not so long ago I wouldn’t have even thought of them. They just wouldn’t have occurred to me. 

BW and JP have really tuned up our renversés this semester, and as such they seem perfectly natural now. I put them in more or less by instinct where the music calls for them and the movement leads to them.

This is, in fact, true of a lot of movements in the classical vocabulary. Many things feel perfectly natural now that wouldn’t have a year ago. 

I think I’ve discussed my tendency to get get to the studio and instantly forget every step I’ve ever learned, then devolve upon programming a bunch of piqué turns and ronds-de-jambe (sometimes while thinking, “How do I get to the jumps?! Ack!”).  I also used to open every adagio piece with essentially the same sequence of développés and adagio turns that open Simon Crane.

Somewhere along the line, that seems to have changed.

This surprised me. Ballet is funny like that. It creeps up on you, and one day you discover that you are far more fluent in its language than you thought.

As a caveat, I must admit that I don’t know if it works this way for people who are genuinely new to dance. I think it might take a little longer in the situation, possibly. For me, the vocabulary was there but largely dormant; I could picture a dance, but when I tried to essentially run dance.exe to execute the dance, it was as if I couldn’t access the necessary files and code.

Taking class again for the better part of three years has apparently done a great deal of hard disk repair, kicking out the bad sectors and improving the connections between the good ones. The dynamic link libraries are once again accessible; the modules of code that create renversés  and cabrioles are no longer in the land of File Not Found (double cabs continue to elude me: goal one for 2017, I guess; double tours are probably goal two). 

When I go to create a piece that’s floating around in my head, I rarely lose the piece anymore. The vision and the finished dance usually match pretty well. I still mostly work phrase by phrase — visualizing, iterating, visualizing, iterating, then moving to the next phrase when the current one one seems solid, then eventually stringing them together into parts and finally stringing the parts together into a dance — but that may simply be my work style.

It also really helps to be able to remember the names of things. Makes writing them down much easier. The downside, though, is that I can now stay up till 1:30 AM listening to music and writing out choreography, knowing that in the morning it will still make sense. Or maybe that’s another upside, because it’s not like choreography didn’t keep me awake before. It just rarely turned out to be particularly intelligible in the cold light of day(2).

  1. Seriously, while working with BB, I have actually said things like: Why did I just write “effacé” there?! Éffacé what?! How? What does that mean? …Did I even mean éffacé? … Wait, I don’t think I meant éffacé.

So I’m pleased to say that this current piece, which I’ll be performing on 9th December if I can convince a couple of people to join me (there’s a second, far less technical dancing part and one brief non-dancing part), is not just a sequence of RDJs and random turns (it has arabesques, penchés, faillis, renversés, double turns, sautés arabesques, tours lent, and some other stuff, not to mention a grand allegro chase scene in the middle). Progress!

In other news, this week will largely be a break week, which means I’ll have time to catch up on household minutiae and start rehearsing “Work Song,” possibly, if everyone is available. After tonight, both dance team and ballet are off until next week. This will be a good week for reconditioning. You guys, I am weak. Between vacation and being sick, I have lost a lot of strength and stamina. 

So it’s back to eating for performance (with, of course, occasional digressions into the realm of pure pleasure) and training for … Erm,  also for performance.

And housework, because adulting never ends. 
Edit: PS – Señor BeastMode would probably like me to remind you that:

Renversé is not a turn.

Posted in balllet, choreography, fitness, work

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Finally, A Thing 

Oct 23

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So DanceTeam is going well (though I am still convinced that at any moment our dancers are going to realize that I have no idea what I’m doing and revolt/go rogue/possibly eat me). 

Ballet and modern were less than awesome last week, but the Pilobolus workshop made up for a lot of that, especially the part when one of the instructors tracked me down afterwards and told me I was a beautiful mover with a lot of presence. Definitely one of those “I can die happy now”  moments.

Likewise, today’s Open Fly, during which I started formally building a dance to Hozier’s “Work Song” that’s actually going to happen (Finally!), felt like a leap forward.
Including myself, I have four dancers lined up. Aerial A, who went to the Pilobolus workshop with me, is also in, as are my DanceTeam partner-in-crime and a fellow I know from acro (upon whose very high shoulders I have literally stood). We’ve got a tentative performance date early next year (the performance is a definite; it’s just the date that’s undecided). Aerial A happened along while I was working on choreography this afternoon and we stepped through the first 41 seconds of the dance — at least, as much as we could, since there’s some partnering stuff that requires our compatriots.

Aerial A likes what I’ve got, and I think it’s going to really work.

Needless to say, the explosion of dance stuff in my life is both exciting and a bit overwhelming. I’m still in that phase during which you just kind of white-knuckle it whilst you adjust to your new schedule. Hence less posting. I’m somehow managing to scrape paint off the trim in the midst of all this, also, because miracles evidently do occur. 

This week, we’ve got a dance event on Monday evening (a sort of “live interview” with Wendy Whelan), then I think a “normal” schedule again — wait, no, DanceTeam performs on Friday! 

Anyway, here’s hoping that in class this week I won’t do dumb things like choosing too shallow a line in a bidirectional combination and almost colliding with someone in the next group.

Intensive plans for next summer are also in the works. Aerial A and I are hoping to hit at least one of Pilobolus’ week-long workshops. In addition, I’ll probably go to Cinci and Lexington again. There’s a remote chance of doing Sun King if our finances are okay, but in the current economic climate it’s really hard to predict.

No worries there, though. If I don’t get to go til 2018, I’ll be even better prepared than I will next year.

There are also a few audition-y things on the radar, but let’s file those under, “To Know, To Will, To Dare, To Keep Silent.” At least for now.

So that’s where I am at the moment. Still percolating other choreo projects, especially Simon Crane — but one of them is finally taking off. 

Posted in balllet, choreography, ID-10T errors, life, life management, performances, summer intensives, teaching, work

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5, 6, 7, 8 — Boy, Can We Procrastinate! 

Oct 18

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I am clearly confused about life right now. 

I’ve jumped into an assistant-coach gig for a middle-school dance team, which is a huge leap out of my comfort zone, what with my background being strictly ballet & modern of the kind that tends to foam at the mouth when someone mentions “dance as a sport.”

That’s not where I’m confused, though. 

While I may be something something of a knee-jerk mouth-foamer about about the concept, I’ve realized that, with the right coach, Dance Team can be a way into dance as art for kids who might otherwise never have a chance. The coach I’m working with, a friend of mine from the increasingly tiny world of dance and aerials, is that kind of coach. Likewise, she and I come from essentially opposite dance backgrounds, and know how how to work together to take advantage  of that, so we make a good team.

I’m totally drinking the Kool-aid, there. 

No — what I’m confused about is this: why am I still scraping the paint on the house when I should be firming up the piece I’m choreographing for the team? 

Or, well … Okay, I’m not really confused. I know what’s going on. I’m just confused about why I’m letting it happen. 

Basically, I’m terrified. I’m afraid I’m Doin’ It Rong; that the dances I create are stupid. 

This is also part of what keeps me from finishing my longer choreography and writing projects. Every now and and then, I experience a spasm of lack of faith in my own vision. 

I don’t, I should note, most faith in my ability as a writer (sadly, the same cannot be said for my flaming case of Impostor Syndrome about dance): I’ve had too much success not to know that I can put words together beautifully; I just fall into fits of thinking my stories are stupid. Then I freeze for an indefinite period of time, after which I return to my projects and continue work. 

Anyway, today I should be making a dance, but instead I’m busy being afraid to make a dance. (I should be making plans for auditions for next year, but I’m paralyzed about that, too.)

I’m writing this so I can see how silly this all is. Maybe someday, I’ll read this and laugh at how silly I was. 

After all, it’s not like I have to go win the Prix de Lausanne the day after tomorrow (besides, I’m over-age for that). I just have to come up with a dance for a group of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders who all seem like hard workers with good attitudes (or mostly-good, which is good enough).
Regardless, I really need to up my procrastination game. Who procrastinates by scraping paint, anyway, FFS? 

Apparently, I do.

There’s also this other thing. Maybe you can relate. When everything starts coming together and landing in my lap, which is totally happening right now, part of me (of course) feels grateful and excited … but another part starts looking around to see if the Universe is trolling me. Like, “Was that a real pat on the back, or did some divine force just stick a kick me sign on there?”

…Which is also totally happening right now (sorry, Universe).

I’m going to force myself to proceed as if there is no Kick Me sign; as of there’s no possibility of any such thing.

It just might take me a little while to really start believing it.    

Posted in adulting, balllet, choreography, ID-10T errors, it is a silly place, life, life management, Writing

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Remembering the Combinations: Don’t Freak Out

Oct 11

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I’m reading this great book, Raising the Barre: Big Dreams, False Starts, and My Midlife Quest to Dance the Nutcracker. It’s about author Lauren Kessler’s adventure into a professional production of The Nutcracker as a busy, successful, middle-aged journalist, teacher, writer, wife, and mother.

She writes about her experiences attempting to re-learn ballet after a long hiatus (she danced from age 6 to age 12) — including the challenge of trying to remember the choreography. Even at barre.

Of course, as a dancer, I could relate. Who hasn’t struggled to remember the choreo? Even, like, legit professional dancers sometimes struggle to remember the choreography.

There are days that it seems like the only reason we have higher cognitive functions is to allow us to attempt to remember the choreography (and to torture ourselves when, inevitably, we fail).

Anyway, reading about Kessler’s choreographic struggles reminded me how, back when I started dancing again — or, well, when I moved up to Beginner Class from Ballet Essentials — basically every class was like O G-D I CANNOT REMEMBER THE CHOREOGRAPHY I AM GOING TO DIE NOW.

And that made me think about how easily I nailed down completely-new combinations under a completely-new (to me) teacher last week in Florida, and how on the occasions that I find myself taking Beginner class or the Monday or Friday Intermediate classes, I almost never struggle at all anymore.

Even in Killer Class and Advanced Class, these days, I really only struggle when we’re working with steps that are new(er) and hard(er) for me.

And that, in turn, led to a revelation:

If you’re struggling to remember the choreography, don’t freak out.

It means you’re pushing the limits of your own comfort zone; challenging yourself with things that are new and hard, and that’s awesome!*

*Okay, sometimes it just means you’re having an off day.

So, basically, if you’re struggling to remember the choreo, it doesn’t mean you suck.

It just means you’re expanding your comfort zone.

Of course, fat chance I’ll remember that during my next Modern class, heh.

Posted in balllet, choreography, mistakes, modern

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Advanced Class: Don’t Leave Your Body Behind

Aug 6

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Today’s class was pretty good.

EF taught, which meant long and complicated combinations at barre, some of which were VERY fast.

After we had all sort of traded a moue of despair after flailing our way through something that I’ll call a degagé combination (with the understanding that it was SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT), he pointed out to us that we shouldn’t feel disheartened and give up mid-combo if we’re not fast enough yet.

Even if we flail through and don’t quite make it, even if the combination is so freaking fast that 75% of the advanced class can’t actually get their feet either to point fully or to relax fully, by trying, we’re developing the strength and the speed that will eventually allow us to execute these insanely-fast combinations correctly.

riddikulus

Us at barre today(1, by PhantomMoon, via Pinterest).

I was awfully glad to hear that, because that’s exactly what I keep telling myself: even if you’re just flailing away like a wind-sock, keep going, because it is through flailing that we reach transcendence.

Or something like that.

Even if you’re just flailing away like a wind-sock, keep going, because it is through flailing that we reach transcendence.

Or something like that.

(I felt like that could use some fancy formatting.)

This is how EF teachers, and one of the reasons that I lurve his classes(2). As I have probably mentioned before, he teaches to the most advanced dancer in the room (in this case: a home-town boy on a brief vacation from American freaking Ballet Theater, apparently) and allows everyone else to rise to that level.

Curiously, it generally works.

Anyway, adagio went well, once I stopped being a spaz and forgetting to actually use the muscles that make my supporting leg, like, support me (yeah, totally fumbled in a tour lent today … but I jumped right back into it and fixed it on the second side).

Turns and terre-a-terre also went well: we got music from Swan Lake today, and my insides went SQUEEE! because I ❤ Swan Lake so hard. My outside, on the other hand, went, “I’m not sure I have this! I’m still not sure I have this! Oh, wait — I’ve got this!”

 

Basically, I was having some trouble remembering where this one failli went, and also trouble remembering that my new dancing policy is supposed to be:

Look like you know what you’re doing.

…Even when you don’t.

Which, this week, has been frequently.

Anyway. Petit allegro was a moderate disaster, but only because for some reason on the first pass my brain couldn’t contain the combination, and on the second pass my body kept executing the incorrect version.

It began:

assemblé
jeté
assemblé
jeté

and then made with the glissades, but I somehow thought it began with glissade – jeté and thus kept doing it backwards and getting horribly lost.

EF tried to sort me, but my legs refused to comply until the very. last. repeat. Thus, I wound up working it alone, as everyone packed up.

EF called me over and gave me a note on my brush-jumps (the ones like jeté, assemblé, and so forth). I’ve been leaving my body behind, which has been forcing me to make extra weight-changes in petit allegro and putting me behind the count.

Evidently, my jumps aren’t actually slow anymore (EF said they’re actually quicker than a lot of my classmates’); it’s the extra weight-changes doing me in at this point.

So in addition to continuing to work on solidifying my supporting leg, this week I’ll be concentrating on bringing my body with me when I jump (something I need to think about in general, really; I do this on grand jeté and saut de chat as well).

Anyway, he spent several minutes working with me in on this, and (of course) I thanked him profusely. He takes a lot of time with me: fixing my arm at barre (which needs doing with alarming frequency; it’s better than it was, but it still likes to drift too far back and lose its shape and so forth), tweaking my jumps and turns, and so forth. I really appreciate that, as a great deal of the ground I’ve gained has been the direct result of these fine-point corrections from my instructors.

It’s also nice to know that I’m not invisible in a gigantic advanced class — there were a billion of us today (even adagio required two groups).

After, I went to juggling class, in which I managed a new-record-for-me 27 cascades, then worked my choreography a bit in Open Fly. I think I’ve solved the last of the timing problems (added a sissone to arabesque; not 100% sure it works with the music).

And now I’m at home, writing this, contemplating lunch, and preparing to undertake a cleaning binge as a way to keep myself from just obsessing about tomorrow’s audition.

Notes, References, and Asides

  1. Sadly, I can’t find a proper source for this; if it’s from etsy, I want one! OMG I FOUND IT!
  2. Sadly, after next Saturday, we won’t have him again for a while, because the regular season and so forth take off again next week, and he has So Many Responsibilities.

Posted in balllet, choreography, cirque, class notes, steps

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Moar Things

Aug 4

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  1. Decided on very subtle costuming for my ballet/lyra piece for Fall Showcase (which is in September): grey tights, white crepe/gauze/whatever-you-call-it shirt. Ordered said tights and shirt.

    Really kind of looking forward to the tights, as I’ve recently figured out that I don’t hate dancing with stuff between my shoes and my feet after all and part of me is like, “YAY, ACTUAL BALLET TIGHTS.” Definitely plan to add suspenders/braces for Lyra purposes, though now I have to figure out where to find said suspenders/braces if they don’t come with the tights (which are the kind that can be used with braces or rolled down a million times).

    ~

  2. Hit up Sansha’s New York Store website again. Decided to buy a couple of shirts that were on sale. Checked the sizing chart; nearly had a heart attack about the incredibly-diminutive weight ranges, realized I was looking at the ladies’ chart.

    Turns out I’m squarely  in the middle of the weight range they predict for guys my height, which makes me a Sansha size 6. But still.  Wow. They are definitely thinking Kirov ladies, here. If I was a girl, I’d be an XXL and wouldn’t be able to buy almost anything from Sansha’s website. Bleh.

    ~

  3. Ordered another pair of the leather Silhouettes because I think they’re discontinuing them. I haz a sad about that, because they are the BEST SHOES EVER for my particular feet.

    Also ordered a pair in white for the Showcase performance.

    Got a wild hair and added a pair of the stretch canvas shoes, because at this point I’m like, “Might as well,” and also because I was $9 or something short of the minimum order. Maybe I will love them?

    ~

  4. Got two free pairs of tights. None of them were useful for me (all ladies’ styles; insufficiently opaque for men in most applications), so I ordered a couple pair that I think might fit at least one of my friends from class. I figured, what the heck? Might as well be the Free Tights Fairy while I’m being the Buying All the Freaking Shoes In A Panic Fairy.

    ~

  5. The ballet part of the piece for Fall Showcase is much better now. I still feel like I should put the tour-jeté sequence back into the second phrase, because at the moment there are two bits that basically run flatly back and forth across the stage (stage L – stage R, then back), which still seems kind of boring.

    ~

  6. Discovered that I can do renversé, attitude turns, and the necessary balances (pique arabesque, first arabesque to penché, balance à la seconde from pas de chat Italien) on the mats and on the floor. Also that I make myself straighten up and fly-right when I’m half-assing my turns, which I was totally doing at the beginning of Open Fly tonight, because developing even worse turning habits is the last freaking thing I need to do.

Anyway, I should’ve been in bed a billion years ago, so that’s it for tonight.

Posted in aerials, balllet, choreography, performances

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