Since Ms B got married and there are no longer two BWs among my ballet teachers, I shall henceforth refer to Company B simply as BW (because I’m lazy and it’s easier).
Anyway, class with BW was, as always, good. I didn’t dance as well as I usually do, but everyone has those days. Only three of us again, so once again there was much drilling down deep in the technique. There was also more than the usual array of conversation; we were all tired and disorganized (I arrived earliest, only 5 minutes before class time; BW arrived just after, and everyone else was late).
My turnout took a while to turn on — back to Trap 3 last night meant back to Single Knee Hangs (with ronds-de-jambe), and those make the turnouts tight. (I’m going to have to contemplate that, as I plan to use SNH w/ RDJ to open a trap performance on Saturday.) Not that it was non-existent; it just wasn’t up to the standard of Wednesday’s class.
On the other hand, my grand rond got its stuff together after a fashion. Coming from behind, I was rotating the turnouts later than necessary and thus losing much of the quality of the movement. BW laid on hands and fixed me: he proved to me that I can rotate my hip much further in arabesque than even I thought possible, which made for one high extension coming à la seconde. Like, BW even commented on it to B: “See how high that is?”
I appreciate the fact that my teachers aren’t afraid I’m the least to touch me.
Going terre-à-terre, though, my brain was absolutely determined to leave our the waltz turns. This kept making me end up facing the wrong corner. This may have been fatigue (I’m sleeping better, but still not really well, as you might gather from the fact that I’m posting at 2 AM), or it may have been a lack of Adderall. I forgot my second dose until it was legitimately too late to take take it. Ironically, I was so busy cleaning… Anyway.
I discovered that I haven’t lost my attitude balance, and that I can pretty reliably élevé into it now. After class, BW worked on my arms, which are slowly becoming graceful. Minor miracle, there, all things considered.
So that’s about it.
Trap performance on Saturday should be interesting. I’m resetting some existing choreography to Billy Joel’s “You’re The Only One Who Knows.” Here’s hoping I get through without bursting into tears. Seriously, that’s why I’m not even thinking about using “Leningrad.”
Also, a picture from Burning Man, below the fold since it’s mildly NSFW:
So these things happened in Acro 2 yesterday (both photos by Starr Peters, I think? … at least, I know the first one is).
I can only describe the first one as a four-way fold. Basically, you pretend you’re sitting in a chair, and then you grab hands in the middle and lean back into each other’s laps, and it’s like, “By our powers combined, we are Captain Awkward-As-Hell-But-Looks-Pretty-Cool!”
Also, if you have only one person in the fold who feels comfortable sort of exploding up from this position, everyone else winds up falling over.
Ask me how I know, heh.
The other one is what we’ve nicknamed the “Scented Candlestick” (as in, “Trick or treat, smell my feet…”), though it has another name in Yoga.
Because I’m a medium-sized person, I base and fly everything and everyone, and Katie (who I’m basing in this picture) is one of the best flyers I’ve had the privilege of strangling with my feet 😀
In other news, today was my first day back in Trap 3 since I went to the Burn. I was expecting to suffer, but it was a review day, and I pretty much nailed everything … okay, except for that one thing where I forgot that my flexibility means I can dump myself right out of the trapeze, but fortunately I was on the moderate-low trap and could easily catch myself in a handstand.
And then I got back up and nailed that thing, too. I failed to catch the name of it, but it was kind of a bird’s-nest variant that you enter by dropping from a front balance and catching yourself with the backs of your legs on the ropes. The downside of being really flexible is that you can slide right off the bar; the upside is that you can get into a super-cool hang with your knees folded over the ropes and your hands on your ankles (or calves, or knees). I’ll have to get a picture of that next time I’m in Open Fly.
Edit: I also nailed pike beat to tuck-through and full ankle beats during the warm-up. I meant to try long-arm beat to front balance, but forgot. Still, I’ve never even tried to tuck through from a pike beat before, and I think I’ve done ankle beats all of once. All of that, though, owes to the rather extreme flexibility of my back. It makes doing almost any kind of beats much easier, because you can get a better release and therefore more momentum.
We ended class by playing what I’m going to call Improv Telephone: everyone lines up, then the first person mounts the trapeze and does something, the second one does the mount and the first move and adds something, and so on. The cool part is that, being the second-most advanced class on offer, we’re allowed to do whatever feels right, even if it’s not officially A Thing.
The result (in addition to a fun little piece of choreography) was the invention of a possibly-new skill that we’re calling the Mer-Horse (I say “possibly new” because basically everything under the sun has probably been done at one point or another by someone, somewhere, but this one definitely isn’t in our existing syllabus, and our trainers are pretty well-trained).
Also, I discovered that I do remember how to do dragonfly on the trapeze, even though I always get confused about it on lyra.
Ballet today was alllll about the turnouts … and it was a good class. There was so much fondu that we could’ve opened a restaurant.
It was also timely, because I’ve been working on maintaining all the turnout — like, alllllll of it, in both legs. It’s a workout, but it’s paying off. It’s much easier now to step into and maintain a 180 degree first or a legit toe-to-heel fifth (regarding which: when I started letting my supporting leg drift, Ms B. came over and grabbed me by my hipbones 😀 Hooray for physical corrections!).
Anyway, the biggest challenge right now is to keep the upper body light and easy while working the turnouts like the fate of the world depends on it. This ties into what BW kept shouting at me last week: “Use your lats!”
So I’ll be thinking about turnouts and lats in class tomorrow, heh. And about not letting the barre-side shoulder creep up.
And also about everything else, because ballet.
Also, petit allegro is finally improving, which feels like a minor miracle. I thought I was having a mental block about Sissones, but it turned out that it was a physical block: my épaulement was interfering with liftoff. Ms. B gave us a useful note about that: there’s that little side cambre in the port de bras for Sissones changée a côte, and if you start to cambre before you start to jump, you kind of wind up crippling the jump itself.
Ms. B complimented me on my turns, which is huge. I applied Modern T’s note about using my chin to spot, and it really seems to have helped. Ms. B said she’s going to steal it for another one of her students who spots with her forehead like I was … so a big Well Done to Modern T for that catch and the note to fix it!
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 […]
Yeah, I’m not usually up making posts at this time of night, but this’ll be quick.
A friend of ours, EP, who is well over 6 feet tall came to acro tonight, and I got to stand on his shoulders.
I’m forced to admit that this was, in fact, a little bit scary — but also amazing! This has been one exhausting day, and I almost begged off on acro … So glad I didn’t!
In an effort to keep myself from sitting at home and obsessing about today’s audition, I decided to haul my hiney out of bed and go to acro class.
And this goofiness happened 😀
It started out as graceful half-highs with port de bras, then turned into the Creation of Adam, then turned into two guys going PULL MY FINGER!!!
Top, L-R: Jesse, Me
Bottom, L-R: Starr, Denis
Totally worth it. Hanging out with my acro peeps always puts me in a great frame of mind.
Now I only have an hour to obsess before I can go check in and warm up. Maybe I should take myself out for lunch…
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.
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
I’m an idiot, and didn’t keep the packaging for the WearMoi belt that I picked up on Wednesday. That’s a shame, because it makes it hard to conclusively recommend the right model (it’s definitely a thong-back in the unfortunately-named “nude” colorway with a 3″ waistband).
I can at least say it’s one of the newer-style models, that it really kinda blows my old Capezio warhorses out of the water*, and that it’s a close contender with the Body Wrappers models.
*While it will keep one’s eggs unscrambled, however, I am sadly forced to admit that it will not keep one’s metaphors unmixed. So if you want metaphors as clear as a wide blue window and pure as driven angels’ kisses, perhaps I am not the ideal source.
In design, the WM belt most closely resembles the BodyWrappers M006/M007: pouch affixed below a solid elastic waistband. The pouch is better on the BW models, but the waistband on the WM is … well, plush. It has that sort of fuzzy interior surface like the waistbands on some kinds of underpants.
The WM belts available at Ye Olde Local Dance Shoppe all have 3″ waistbands, but WM’s website allows for customization of the width (perhaps only if you live in Europe or the UK, though: Hi, Yorksranter!), offering 1″, 2″, and 3″ options (Will dance belts ever go metric? Who knows?).
However, after a few hours, the real test of a dance belt’s comfort isn’t so much whether you can handle the waistband, but whether or not the thong is actively sawing you in half.
This is where the WM, like the BW M006 and M007, excels.
One of the chief problems with Capezio’s N5930 is that, when you take a break and sit down for a minute, you quickly realize that the thong is basically a steel** cable wrapped in cotton, soaked in brine, and crammed right up against your tailbone.
**Okay, so it’s not really steel, but it certainly feels like it at times.
That’s about as comfortable as it sounds, and frequently leads to adjustments, which give way to more adjustments when you have to get back in the studio.
Let me tell you from experience: there is nothing as fun as realizing too late that you need to adjust your dance belt and desperately trying to figure out how to do it on the down-low in front of like 40 girls. (Good times, good times.)
The WM and the two BW models share a feature that prevents this particular cascade of humiliation: a wide, flat fabric thong with bound edges.
The BW models have a slight edge in this regard, as far as I’m concerned: the bindings are super-smooth, and the fabric wicks sweat a little better and dries a little faster than the WM’s (however, the BW pouch dries more slowly). I’ve also had one experience of the WM’s thong rolling itself into a cable as I got dressed, but that A) may be because my WM dance belt is slightly bigger than it could be and B) was easily fixed.
Most importantly, neither of them is uncomfortable during breaks: both hold up well to ridiculous schedules like mine that basically involve wearing your dance belt all freaking day because there’s no point in taking it off for like two hours in the middle.
The BW pouch is absolutely the best in terms of modesty and, in my opinion, comfort (it appears to be made from pillows and the happy dreams of adorable kittens or something), so that’s a point in BW’s favor.
That said, the BW pouch also takes foreeeeeeeevar to air-dry when you hand-wash it and a comparably long time to dry when you’ve been sweating your brains out in it for three hours or what have you.
WM’s pouch isn’t quite as modesty-enhanced or silky-sleek, but it does dry more quickly, so point to side WM there. It’s also quite comfortable; the fabric has a nice hand, and the center seam (presumably there more for support than for anything) doesn’t turn into a tourniquet halfway through class.
One last bit on design: WM’s pouch is slightly narrower than BW’s. For me, this is great; I’m not very wide between the hipbones, nor am I, um, (ab.so.freaking.lutely NSFW AT ALL EVER) Rudolf Nureyev (/ab.so.freaking.lutely NSFW AT ALL EVER) or a ridonculous pr0n star, so to speak. However, BW’s pouch might be a better option for some.
Here’s the part where I make with the measurements, which I guess I should have actually done before I ordered all my new dance kit yesterday, because holy hairballs, I have shrunk (as you do).
Here’s my current stats (conversions are rounded to the nearest whole unit for simplicity’s sake, except pounds to stone, because the difference is too big):
Waist: 28″/71cm***
Biggest part of my tuchas (right around the gluteus medius): 37″/94cm***
Inseam: 32″/81cm
Height: 68″(5’8″)/173cm
Weight: 149 pounds/68kg/10.6 stone
***This ratio is why it is so freaking hard for me to find trousers that fit right.
I purchased a Large.
It turns out that I split the difference between Large and Medium in BW’s sizes. My waist measurement falls squarely into the Medium camp and my hip/tuchas measurement falls squarely into the Large camp because I am, in short, a “Dually.”
You know what to do with that big, fat butt. (Source) (PS: Big butts are frequently an, ahem, asset in aerials, not to mention being apparently prized among male ballet dancers, for whom the ideal butt shape is apparently “square.” Regarding which: huh.)
This is consistent with the way the elastic fits: the top is rather looser than it should be, but the bottom is snug enough to do its job really, really well.
Sizing, then, is more comparable to Capezio’s dance belts, in which I would probably wear a Medium (even though their size chart thinks I’m a Small) if I were to buy another one, than to BodyWrappers, in which I am still a large, but a pretty comfortable large.
Fortunately, my magnificent glutei medii (and also my iliac crests, which are like freaking knives these days, y’all) give sufficient purchase to the bottom 1.5″ or so of elastic.
I mention this for two reasons.
This guy is SO not a dancer. (Circle added for clarity. Source: Illustration by Henry Vandyke Carter from Gray’s Anatomy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
So the fit, I think, skews very close to true, with a small caveat for those of us who are pretty freaking lean and yet possessed of ridiculous butt muscles.
It’s probably worth noting that the rise is a bit lower than the BW’s rise. That works just fine for me because of the way I’m put together, but if you have a really long torso (or if you’re just plain tall), the BW belts might be a better fit. For me, though — a smallish person with a moderate torso — the rise is about perfect.
As for the pouch: it’s probably adequate for all but the most ridonculous of pr0n stars.
Holy cats, Batman, this thing FREAKING WORKS.
For a long time, I seriously thought my Capezios were fine. Sure, occasional adjustments were required (note: this may well be a sizing issue; I am more than 4″ smaller waist-wise than I was when I started dancing again) — but, on the whole, I felt like things were, you know, staying put well enough.
Then I got my BW M006, which was revelatory. When it was sitting where it wanted to, NOTHING MOVED. Nothing could move. Which is, in fact, the whole idea: “set it and forget it.”
The only problem was that the M006’s rise meant that it sat at a spot that wasn’t (at the time) terribly comfortable, so I kept adjusting it downward, which compromised its effectiveness. Curiously, losing another inch or so off my waist seems to have made the height of the rise matter a whole heck of a lot less, so go figure.
Enter the WM dance belt: the rise is perfect, and the fit is secure — so secure that “set it and forget it” works just as well in lyra class (IMO, the ultimate test of a dance belt) as it does in ballet (okay, so all those freaking échappés are a close second … no pun intended, but I’ll take credit if it’s on offer).
So, basically, if there’s any wiggle room, the lyra will find it and will adjust your junk for you and your better half will sit there laughing maniacally and saying, “You’re not supposed to use that to hang on to the hoop!”
Or, you know, you’ll just pinch your junk or something, which is at least as unpleasant.
Oh, and then you’ll have to (ONCE AGAIN) adjust yourself in front of 40 girls, even if there are only like 16 people in the studio at that moment and three of them are guys.
WM’s dance belt puts an end to that particular scenario (as long as you remember to sort of shimmy around the family jewels, as one does in such situations — there’s a reason that there are fewer guys than girls in lyra).
Meanwhile, in ballet class, WM’s dance belt eliminates all need for mid-class adjustments. There’s no jeté-ing out the studio door at the end of a grand allegro phrase; no OMFG moments in the middle of warm-up jumps.
Obviously, I can’t speak to durability yet, but at around $25 US, WearMoi’s dance belt doesn’t have to last until you retire to be worth the cost of admission.
TL;DR:
8/10: Very Highly Recommended. (Compare 5/10 for Capezio N5930; ~8.5/10 for BW’s M006/M007)
Dually Image:
By user:JD – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6883513
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).
~
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.
~
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?
~
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Anyway, I should’ve been in bed a billion years ago, so that’s it for tonight.
On Sunday, I banged out what turned out to be a kind of very rough first draft of the choreography for an upcoming Lyra performance that opens with a bunch of ballet.
I video-ed the initial draft choreography and discovered that, at least for me, video is a really useful tool for the choreographic process. It let me analyze my own dance from an audience perspective (only one: the person sitting at the corner of audience R, heh), which in turn helped me figure out what worked and what needed to change.
Today, I worked the ballet part again, and I think I’ve resolved some of the problems I ran into with the first draft — particularly the excessive repetition and the fact that I’d boringly choreographed everything down the same diagonal and back.
I didn’t record video today, but instead wrote the choreo down by hand. This is progress; I used to have trouble doing that because I couldn’t always figure out what to call intermediate things.
Now I just write “step through in coupé” (or short-hand “step thru coupé) or whatever best describes the action if it doesn’t have a really discrete name.
Also, I no longer get my Eighty-Seven Cardinal Directions of Ballet confused (thanks to Company B), which makes it soooooo much easier to write out the instructions.
I just realized, though, that for some reason I dropped one of my favorite sequences (your traditional:
pique arabesque – chassée – tour jeté – something else
…So maybe I’ll put it back in on the next iteration, with or without the interesting little pivot that kept appending itself to the landing of the tour jeté.
That said, I also added a tombé – pas de bourrée – glissade – Pas de Chat Italien into a balance à la seconde.
~
This iterative process feels very comfortable, which surprises me.
As a choreographer, I’m apparently quite happy to just bang out a very rough initial draft.
By contrast, as a writer, my initial drafts tend to feel pretty finished because I work into the diction and sound and feeling and imagery of the writing so much.
This means that my initial drafts as a writer take foreeeeeeeeevar, while an initial choreographic draft can be accomplished in a few minutes for a short piece (obviously, you’re not going to choreograph a 3-act ballet in 10 minutes, unless each act is like one minute long).
I think we have another Open Fly session tonight, so I might shoot some video of the second draft of my choreography, and possibly also the lyra choreography, if I’m feeling up to it.
Maybe this time I’ll remember to bring an external speaker so I can have video and sound AT THE SAME TIME!!! O.O
I think I will, in time, post my various iterative videos here. I haven’t ported the first two (both first-draft videos, but recorded in two separate phrases) over to the YouTubes yet, though.
~
In other news, yesterday’s rest day went well, and I learned that one of my favorite dancers and instructors is also an incredibly good cook. Like, somehow, in the midst of teaching and rehearsing and generally being amazing, he also found time to make two really good pie crusts from scratch and fill them with amazing savory pies also from scratch.
I already knew that he was a really lovely human being … only, now I’m not so sure that’s accurate.
Specifically I am not entirely sure he’s actually a human being; he might really be a unicorn in elaborate biped drag.
In fact, I was exactly as tired as I look, here.
This picture happened because none of us thought to bring a single hand mirror to our Road Show performance on Tuesday.
Pros (or kinda-sorta-quasi pros) we may be. Organized? Um. Wellllllll….
I thought my eye makeup was uneven (it was); wound up with a highly consternated selfie by accident. Ultimately decided to keep it because I enjoy the look of blank desperation on my face (Is it uneven? I think it is. I’m not sure. I can’t go on like this! My kingdom for a mirror…)
Also, I forgot to take the sunglasses off my head — but don’t worry, the first inversion on the trapeze got that job done!
YouTube: BOSU Balance Series
danseur ignoble 