Wednesday Class this morning was, as ever, a challenge: a greater challenge, in fact, than is entirely usual.
In short, I was extra tired this morning, possibly due to the extra aerial technique class yesterday. Oh, well — to this I say (addressing myself, of course), “Suck it up, Buttercup.” My brain and legs were apparently not on speaking terms. Even when my body had a given combination right, my brain would occasionally butt in to say, “Wait, are you sure that’s right? Because it could have been—“ and finish with some different version that, no, it couldn’t have been. Ugh.
I was comforted by the fact that various company dancers and one of the former pre-pro girls, back on spring break and freshly accepted to IU’s excellent dance program, were also struggling at times. This is why we all love Mme.B’s class: she stretches us, and then when we think we’ve been stretched to the breaking point, she shows us that, no, we’ve got a little more.
I was, nonetheless, sufficiently awake by the end of barre to deport myself quite respectably during adagio, which was a beautiful combination carried over from last week. My tours lent, in particular, we’re accomplished without flailing in both directions.
Turns, too, were acceptable, as was the terre à terre or whatever the correct name is for that bit.
But not petit allegro. We did last week’s combination again, there, and while it went well last time, neither my legs nor my brain were having any of it today.
As for grand allegro … Eh. It began with temps de flèche, which I kept screwing up by starting on the wrong foot. But the last two thirds (from a direction change to entrelacé through another direction change and a bunch of other stuff), I had. There was a really cool part with a giant pas de chat that became part of a directional change. I’ll have to try to describe it better when I’m, like, awake.
I asked M. B. for guidance on temps de flèche after class, and I think I’m on top of it now.
The day ended with an excellent conditioning class followed by an awesome trapeze class. I heart trapeze so much at the end of a day of fumbling through Killer Ballet class (“Hard Mode” just doesn’t always catch it). We did, among other things, pike beats, which I looooove.
That’s it for now. Chores, Web work, bells, and acro tomorrow.
À bientôt, mes amis.
*Teaching dance, that is.
Today we did acro balancing, during which we built three-high tabletop stacks, played around on the silks in Open Fly – I finally got my dancer’s foot-lock down! — and then buckled down for Dance for Aerials, which is a very cool class, it turns out.
Weird. I had captioned this, but WP ate my caption. Anyway, I’m not in this stack, because the pictures of the stacks I was in have readily-identifiable pictures of younger kids, and I don’t feel right posting them here without parental permission. But you get the idea!
I’m apprentice-teaching this one, and that was awesome. I get to poke people and fix their placement and so forth, and the class as a whole is very receptive and engaged. Eventually I’ll be putting together some combinations for the choreographic bits of the class.
I was really impressed with the students’ natural placement of the torso — for the most part, everyone hit the shoulders-over-hips sweet spot without coaching (unlike me!). Likewise, I didn’t see a single dancer forcing turnout.
The challenge for everyone will be carrying the arms from the back and learning to place the shoulders, arms, elbows, wrists, and hands to maintain a graceful line, but that’s the same challenge everyone works on forever and ever in ballet and Western dance in general.
Fortunately, I’ve had plenty of time to think about that, excellent instruction, and great models, so explaining that part to new dancers is very doable. I got good results, and Ms. A said I did a good job.
I have a bunch of books to read that I’m really looking forward to getting into, and I’m really excited about next week’s class.
Ha. Forgot to post this the other day. Derp. So, here it is, a few (okay, four) days late.
A fine class today: except for a touch of wheeziness, barre was good; at center, I threw off a beautiful turn from 2nd, then got cocky and kept putting too much power into the rest of the turns in that combination. I backed it off when traveling across the floor in the next combination and things improved vastly.
I have discovered that I get excited about things like renversé and sometimes kind of lose my head. I worked on keeping it together, though my failure to take my Adderall this morning made that a bit more challenging than it might have been.
Our final combination, however, was not challenging, just:
Sissone
Pas de Bourée
…Eight times. The cool part is that you’re constantly switching the direction of your hips and shoulders through each pas de bourré. It’s easy to do, but looks really cool,especially if you can get high Sissones and clear épaulement.
I managed both, and felt quite good about myself, thank you very much.
After class, I took a few minutes to practice entrelacés/tour-jetés, because it would be a travesty not to leap on Leap Day.
Thanks to a second-hand note via Yorksranter (thanks, Yorksranter!), Mr. B, who was chatting with someone but still utilizing the Ballet Master’s All-Seeing Eye called out, “Good! Again!” then gave me another note that resulted in a series of, “Good! Again!” séquences.
So that was Monday’s class. Wednesday’s class was also quite good, though I was still not back at “full power,” so to speak. Nonetheless, there were some good moments, and I didn’t hose up absolutely everything.
I made it all the way through, as well, even though it was a billion degrees in the studio and I was already somewhat dehydrated at the start.
My promenades are improving again. For what it’s worth, I love promenades (and turns) in attitude. They just look cool. My turns are also coming back together.
Also, a quick shout-out to the amazing Kathryn Morgan, whose excellent video on Renverse has greatly improved mine. A few weeks ago, we had class with J.P., and he mentioned the part about renverse beginning as RDJ (grand/en l’air, of course); Ms. Morgan takes it a step further, pointing out that you want to make it all the way to arabesque before you think about getting to attitude.
Otherwise you just do crazy, dumb things with your legs and lose your turnout and stuff. Um, but she puts it much more eloquently than that.
Anyway, go watch her video; it will help you immensely with your renverse (or, if you’re already a master of the renverse, it will help you explain it to other people).
Also, pelvic placement (the Theme of The Month, apparently) really helps, but indirectly: forget your heart — if your pelvis is in the right place, you’ll have an easier time with turnout and extensions, both of which are necessary to RDJ, which is necessary to renverse.
Aerials this week have been a mixed bag. I didn’t expect to be awesomely strong after sitting on my tuchas for a week and a half, and as such was not terribly disappointed in myself, though at times I was frustrated.
That said, Trapeze on Wednesday rocked. I kind of feel like trap is my “thing,” aerials-wise — I love being up there and I find it fairly easy to do things well. It probably helps that I find heights thrilling, rather than frightening, since a lot of trapeze work involves either standing on your toes on a skinny little bar or dangling from ropes above one or your knees below one.
It also helps to have freakishly strong legs and abs, which apparently I do? I haz the knee beats, y’all. CL is teaching now and has a fantastic gift for conveying subtle technical details.
Thursday I had some weird and alarming stuff going on that led us to go see my doc today. She doesn’t think I’m going to keel over dead or anything, but did order some bloodwork to check on various things, including my thyroid function.
On the upside, my vital stats are still stellar, with blood pressure of 107/63 and a heart-rate (including the uptick for Adderall and caffeine) of 71. w00t.
Anyway, that’s it. Advanced class tomorrow, then various Suspend-y things.
Feb 28
This gallery contains 9 photos.
One of the nice things about Suspend is Open Fly. Most of us don’t have aerial apparatus (or qualified instructors) hanging around our homes, so being able to head down to the gym and play is a great way to keep skills sharp (or, at any rate, less dull). In case you’re wondering, the open […]
If you’re planning to visit a new studio (say, in another city, like Chicago) and you want to be sure you can identify appropriate classes at a glance, here’s a quick visual guide:
Brought to you by Wednesday class (nominally intermediate, but it’s wink-wink-nudge-nudge intermediate) and Saturday class. Also, if you’re crammed together this tightly on the barre, that might be a problem.
You’re welcome.
In other news, I am about to be inundated with PLX website updatery, so here are all my “before” pictures for our Back Flexibility Challenge at Suspend. Sure, I could put them in a separate post, but this was the lazier more efficient way!
You guys, I am not going to win this one, I promise. It isn’t about how flexible you are, it’s about how much improvement you make, which is exactly as it should be. There are several people who are less flexible than I am by nature, but who have a lot more ground to gain than I do.
Also, my camel and king pigeon look terrible because I had no idea how to do them 😛 On the other hand, that gives me a goal, amirite?
*Not really. Please seek qualified instruction before attempting this yourself.
Or, of course, firefighters of your preferred gender.
Advanced class was pretty good this morning, once we all thawed. I remembered to eat and to take my Adderall, so it was easier to focus when Ms. T was giving the combinations.
Cirque classes were meh — I burned the palm of my hand the other day while retrieving a pizza from the oven and the blister tore and peeled off, so we struggled to find a way to compensate for that. Juggling wasn’t too bad, but Vertical Variety was a challenge. I wore Denis’ work gloves, which kept the wound from getting any worse, but made doing things awkward. I’m not normally prone to any degree of fear on aerial apparatus, but kept feeling alarmed because I couldn’t grip the dance pole. Weird.
My blood sugar tanked by the end of the second class. When I got home, I tried to make a sandwich, burned it, and completely flipped out. Afterwards, Denis made me feel better. I can’t express how much that means to me. I have come to understand the value of comfort; the importance of a warm pair of arms to hold you together when you feel like you’re flying apart from the inside of.
I’ve decided to talk to my GP about possible ways of dealing with my hormonal fluctuations, which are exacerbating my bipolar symptoms. That’s one thing I can do without disastrous side-effects, and hormonal therapy did help in the past.
I may see if I can switch to a controlled-release ADHD medication for a bit, because I’m having trouble remembering to take my pills.
In other news, I heard back on my Columbia application today. Not good news, but it’s not the end of the world (yes, to some extent, this is me keeping a stiff upper lip). I need to finish my other applications; if I don’t get accepted into a program, though, I have other irons in the fire.
Regardless, a rejection letter from any other program wouldn’t sting as much: in short, I’ve never received one before. The first is the hardest.
So that’s that. I’m going to go cook myself in the tub now.
For my birthday, I got a new pair of Sansha Pro1cs. Our local dancewear store doesn’t carry Capezio’s Romeo shoes, so I got fitted, and I’m going to try these and then maybe order some Romeos down the line if the fit is right, since the ballet-shoe experts at the shop can figure out the size equivalents.
I also got a new dance belt — a second copy of the black one I already had, but I think Capezio has updated the design with different elastic, and as a result it’s about 1,000 times more comfortable than the old one was on Day 1. I wore it to Trapeze and Conditioning classes tonight.
My Mom sent me a copy of Shunryu Suzuki’s Branching Streams Flow In The Darkness. I’m very much looking forward to reading it.
It’s nice to get useful things (okay, so I totally picked them out myself [update: not the book; that was all Mom], but still), and getting to visit the dance-stuff store with B. and Denis was a great deal of fun. Especially since the lady at the dance-stuff store said of B. and me (while chatting about having to warn younger kids about not toppling the portable barre), “…but you guys are seasoned professionals.”
Between that and the million times I heard the word “Beautiful!” during Trapeze 1, I am amazed that my ego actually fit through the door tonight 🙂
This clip is really short; I’ll ask Denis to try to get a longer one next time!
Also, check out my crazy dismount o.O For some reason, I over-rotated and then had to manually untie my foot 😀
Here’s Denis, who looks so unhappy, but was actually having a blast:
The past several days have been busy-in-excess-of-my-usual-policy, so here’s a quick recap:
Thursday, I took the road test for a driver’s license, passed it with flying colors, went home for a couple hours, went to bell choir practice, then went to another awesome session of Acro-Balancing in which we all more or less failed to actually nail a five-person fan, but had a great time trying.
Friday, I drove out and picked up my friend Robert, who is staying with us as part of his relocating-to-Louisville process. We did some kind of class on Friday evening, but I can’t honestly remember what it was 😛
Saturday, Advanced Class went reasonably well, though my turns weren’t great for reasons I don’t quite comprehend (probably, though, I was just tired). Juggling class also went well, as did … um … whatever we did after that, which might have been one or another form of conditioning?
Sunday, I didn’t get to do any cirque stuff because I played bells, and that was excellent. We did really well, and we played Holst’s Thaxted and two other pieces, including a really cool modern arrangement for choir, organ, and bells of a 15th-century piece. I love the music of that period, so that was a blast.
Monday morning, I continued to suck at turns because I continued to be tired. Barre was excellent, though. Monday evening, we did Fitness & Flexibility and Silks 1, during which Denis and I both shot a little bit of video with my phone.
Once my phone stops being a jerk and refusing to upload, I’ll post said video here. Mine is extremely short, unfortunately, and I didn’t think to ask Denis to shoot the lovely roll-ups that I did. I have less than a minute of spinning mermaid-into-tuck, and it’s rather nice (though, being me, I get hung up on the fact that my side plank was a wee bit saggy).
To top things off, I executed an absolutely beautiful pirouette while talking with my silks teacher about why a certain roll-up move we were doing felt so natural and intuitive to me. Why couldn’t I have had beautiful turns in ballet class???!!!!!
It’s really interesting how some things on silks are intuitive for dancers and some aren’t. The arabesque on silks is, in fact, counter-intuitive from a ballet perspective — you use an entirely different bodily process to achieve the same end result, so it’s the thing I struggle with the most (which makes everyone else in class feel better, since some of the things that are hard for everyone else are really easy for me).
So that’s where I’ve been the past few days. Moving Robert in has involved the usual array of setup, shopping, and so forth, which has eaten up a fair bit of time.
Things are more or less back to normal now, though.
Tomorrow is my birthday, so I think I’m going to drop by our local dancewear store and treat myself to some new shoes, complete with a proper fitting. It would be awesome to have a nice pair of shoes that don’t roll off the backs of my feet at the worst possible moment (currently, my super cheap eBay shoes don’t roll off, but they’re also not going to hold up forever).
Video to follow!
YouTube: BOSU Balance Series
danseur ignoble 