Category Archives: healing

Saturday Class: Progress is Relative

Apr 2

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I can’t say that I was at my best this morning, but I can’t say that I was at my worst, either.

Ballet is funny like that. Progress is always relative.

You have not-so-great days, and you have to remind yourself, “Six months ago, I would have thought this was a great class; I would have been really proud of my adagio and really impressed at how well I remembered the combinations.”

So by my current standard, today was, as they say, “Fair to middlin'” — mostly great Barre (though my mental block about flic-flac continues unabated); fairly good adagio (though there was a little too much “making it happen” on the first run); turns … Eh.

Here’s the combo:
Waltz turn and waltz turn
Pique arabesque
Extend
Down (plie)
PDB
Chassée
Fourth
En Dehors*
Fourth
Relève
En Dehors*
Fourth
Détourner
Chassée
Fourth
En Dedans (as many as you can, obvs)
Pliè
… Repeat until you run out of room.

*These could be singles, doubles, triples — whatevs.

Not a hard combination, but pretty, unless you for some reason keep screwing up your turns.

Little jumps would have been better if I hadn’t switched into a totally different combination halfway through and then gotten scrambled trying to get back into the right one.

This is the danger of strong kinesthetic learning abilities! Your body is all like:

“Cool! I remember this from yesterday! :)”

And your brain goes:
“No, that’s not it! :/”

And your body goes:
“But I thought…? :O”

… And so on.

We ran out of time and didn’t do grand allegro, but that’s probably okay. My lungs are still a little verklempt. Slow and steady heals the lungs.

At the end of the day, my technique is about a thousand times better

Anyway, that’s today. We’re off to the Met Live in HD.

À bientôt, mes amis.

Posted in balllet, class notes, healing, health

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Iron Cross is SRS BZNS!

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I never promised you a rose garden … but  I did promise you Iron Cross, so here it is 😉

I’m having WP issues this week. I wrote a dance-related post on Monday, but the editor kept locking up, and I got frustrated and never finished it — so I’m behind on that.

As you can see, I’m something like back in action, though not completely. I did make it all the way through Modern T’s class, which was a little less athletic than the previous two classes (probably because Modern T is also recovering from the Great Plague of 2016).

Today I made it most of the way through Ms. B’s Killer Class, though I had to bow out of medium and grand allegro, because I was too wheezy by the time I finished (or, well, sort of finished) petit allegro. C’est la vie, n’est-ce pas?

This made me sad, because our grand allegro combination was flat-out awesome — so Ms. B let me video it so we can do it at our next class after Spring Break. Yaaaay! (I don’t have permissions from my classmates to share that video, so apologies for that. Also, the camera work sucks :D)

I opted only to do trapeze tonight, and I think that was the right call.

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Progress (and a Wee Little Song)

Feb 2

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At the beginning of January, we started cirque training.

You’ve seen pictures of that progress, so I won’t bore you with réitération…

 

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Oh, okay. Just one little picture, if you insist.

 

Instead, I have a few thoughts about fitness.

Given that, physically, I am not always the best at starting healthy, I was concerned that I’d struggle with the new schedule.

The first two weeks, I found myself complaining more than usual. One day, though, I realized I was kvetching to Ms. B or Ms. T — both of whom teach five or six days per week and perform — about my two measly classes the previous day having left me a bit tired. Kvetching to someone who spends way, way, way more time busting her butt than I do (and does it on pointe).

That stopped me in my own tracks. In addition to training and working as a Dance-Movement Therapist, my long-term goals include performing, as much and as frequently as possible. I am doing as little physical activity right now as I’m likely to be doing for the next goodness knows how many years.

Anyway, I decided that I wasn’t going to whinge about it anymore*. The tiredness was part of the process of adaptation, and I knew that it would pass.

*It’s fair, of course, to give a heads-up when you come to class already cooked so your instructor can tell you to back off if you look like you’re going to hurt yourself.

The cool part — the Progress part — is that it has begun to pass.

The human body is an amazing thing.

A couple of weeks ago, I felt dead on Wednesday morning after one Intro Aerials class (or whatever it is we were doing on Tuesday evening).

Yesterday, I did a pretty zippy ballet class (sans grand allegro, admittedly, but I’m pretty sure “16 kajillion royales” is about an equivalent rate of effort) and a tough conditioning class. Today, I woke up ready to rock. Tonight, we’ve got another conditioning class (fitness & flexibility) and Open Fly, and I feel entirely confident that, while I may feel a little tired and whingy when I get up tomorrow morning, by the time I get to Ms. B’s killer class, I’ll be fine.

There’s some things worth noting here.

First, my body was never willing to step up to meet this kind of workload on the bike. I got sick a lot more when I was riding more. The weak link was always my respiratory system — the constant exposure to cold air or bad air quality wasn’t something this particular body was going to adapt to**.

**Oh no, a danging participle — someone get this sentence a dance belt!

Second, I’m still working on learning to respect injuries.

I think I mentioned whacking the medial epicondyle of my left knee — an injury which sounds like it barely bears mentioning (in its lesser forms, it does barely bear mentioning).

The thing is, I whacked it really, really hard, which led to all kinds of swelling and stuff, which can precipitate further injury if not dealt with carefully (especially in a knee joint; especially, especially in a hypermobile knee joint). I took it easy on the jumps and turns, took a couple days off, wore a brace, iced the bejeezus out of the knee … and, miraculously (ha), it’s pretty much fine at this point.

If I hadn’t respected that injury, I’d still be wrestling it — so that’s a good lesson, there.

Third, I’m learning to work a little differently when I’m tired.

Yes, pushing through fatigue is a necessary skill for any athlete or dancer — but that doesn’t mean you should do it all the time. Sometimes it’s better to back off, take the non-relevé option, work at 45 degrees, mark the grand allegro, and not get hurt.

It’s like that old song — you’ve gotta know when to tendu, know when to fondu, know when to grand jeté, know when to mark.

Or something like that.

So that, too, is progress, especially for anyone who comes from a competitive gymnastics background (in which the basic ethos about injury is, “If your body part is still attached, you can and will keep going”).

So there we have it. My fitness is progressing nicely, as evidenced by a reduction in overall tiredness.

I’ve also noticed improvements in performance, including ballet improvements that stem from cirque training: today I was doing what I’d like to describe as a “meditation on balancé,” which is to say a combination that goes:

balancé
balancé
balancé
balancé
tombé
pas de bourrée
gliassade
assemblé

…repeat on other side ad nauseam.

It turns out that all the core work is good for those balancés. They’re prettier if you don’t get all sway-backed.

Remember: we’re going for Swan Lake, not Geriatric Dairy Cow Lake. Not that Geriatric Dairy Cow Lake would be a bad show, necessarily, but I’m pretty sure that the technique involved is squarely in the purview of modern dance 😉

That’s it for now. Off to round up all the dance belts, get changed, find a food, and go kill myself at circus school some more.

À bientôt, mes amis!

…

You got to know when to tendu,
Know when to fondu,
Know when to grand jeté,
And know when to run.

You never run the combo
When you’re nursin’ a hurt tendon—
There’ll be time enough for dancin’
When the healin’s done…

…With apologies (and a tip of the imaginary hat) to Mr. Kenny Rogers, from whose ouevre someone should definitely create an epic ballet about life in the American West (but probably not me, because I have enough on my plate, what with Simon Crane and school and all that other stuff I seem to be doing all the time).

 

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Wednesday Class: Less Tired This Time

Jan 13

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Barre today was challenging: Brienne stepped things up a notch, bringing in changes of body direction in long combinations. I got many, but not all, of them.

I continue to try to focus on using my inner thighs, though it’s a greater challenge while also trying to remember the direction changes and whether to go en croix and trying not to kick the taller of the two new guys, who stood beside me today.

I’m really glad they came back to class. I feel like their presence enriches the class; they’re both good dancers who work hard. Taller Guy* has impressive splits!

*For the record, they’re both taller than I am, maybe even just plain tall — but I’m right on the borderline between average and miniature. Still, I don’t know their names, so for now they’re going to be Taller Guy and Smaller Guy.

At center, we did a pretty, but hard, adagio with … erm, fondu devisé? Something devisé, (edit: turns out it’s divisé — divisé en quarts) short for anyway (edit: also, I have no idea what I was trying to type here; autocorrupt was cray this afternoon). My phone is being weird, so I’ll have to look it up when I get home.

Turns were better. I had doubles from fourth, though not as consistently as I’d like.

Our grand allegro combination was fun — Glissade, jeté, glissade, jeté, step-grand jeté, step-grand jeté.

I did it well enough at first, but as I got tired my legs kept wanting to put extra glissades in after the second jeté.

Still, I was less tired today than I was last Wednesday — much less tired, in fact – and I felt stronger last night in aerials class. My tuck dismount on  trapeze and silks is no longer just an uncontrolled unfurling 🙂

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I think I will be able to adapt to this training schedule, and since I wasn’t sure, I feel good about that.

There are more days in my life now on which I look at myself as I undress at the end of the day and I think this part or that part of my body is beautiful. Rarely, I even think the whole thing is pretty decent.

This is a huge step forward: I never used to have any of those days. I used to pretty much hate my body all the time.

Ballet and aerials are changing that in a way I never expected. I used to hate it — and, honestly, I often still do – when people would respond to my feelings about my body, which were the irrational result of deep-seated dysphoria, with so much pablum about how much my body could do.

I don’t think being reminded of that on a rational level helps any more than does telling someone with depression to buck up because at least they don’t live in a Siberian prison camp. That’s not, as it were, how any of this works.

But doing amazing things with this body, and discovering it to be strong and graceful and capable, has really helped — as has exposure to the wild array of beautiful male dancers’ bodies, into which my own body increasingly fits.

In short, ballet and aerials have altered the scope of my inner sense of how my body should look (a concept that’s more complicated and less rational than it sounds). Constant exposure to my own reflection, meanwhile, has adjusted my sense of how my body does look.

I suspect that I still often literally see a distorted version of myself, but the maybe the distortion isn’t as bad as it once was.

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So that’s it, today. I’m going to go home, take a hot bath (in which I will read La Dame aux Camélias in the original, maybe), foam-roll my legs until they fall off, and then do some work stuff.

I used to think that my body dysphoria and anorexic thought patterns would never, ever, ever change. Now I’m not so sure, and that feels like a good thing.
À bientôt, mes amis!

Edit: PS, my ear behaved itself today. Woot!

Posted in aerials, balllet, class notes, healing, health, weight

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A Passing Thought

Jan 3

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…But first, a quick update: I am definitely feeling yesterday’s aerials class (though not excessively) in the muscles that need work. Excellent.

Now, on to a reflective post I wrote last night:

~~~

My father died when I eighteen.

We’d had a rocky time for most of my life — Dad was a rocky man, like the shore is rocky off Acadia in Maine. Difficult, sometimes frightening, often magnificent. Those last two years of his life, though, we had a pretty great relationship — also rocky, in its own way, and full of secret tides and undercurrents, but also magnificent.

I didn’t know what Dad made of me then. It didn’t really occur to me to wonder. Dad didn’t raise us to care what he thought: he wanted us, instead, to be singularly, incontrovertibly ourselves — and he wanted us to prove it.

So it surprised me, tonight, as I lie here reading, to find myself wondering what Dad would make of me now; what he’d make of the sometimes-precarious route I’ve carved out trying to figure out how to be what I am.

The answer is still, “I don’t know.”

I kind of like to think he’d like where I’m going now — launching myself from the springboard of academia into a frankly-kind-of-weird career, learning circus arts, turning myself into a dancer, tilting at windmills.

I had the kind of Dad who would have been secretly happy to see his kids run off and join the circus, even though he’d have chewed us out first, probably to ferret out and destroy any trace of cowardice or cliché. He would want us to go knowing in our hearts that we are born to join the circus, not to go because it seemed less awful than some other thing.

I realize now that was part of his rockiness: our Dad had a poet’s intolerance for falsehoods. He tolerated them. no better in himself than in anyone else. He didn’t care what you did: he cared why. And it wasn’t an affectation — it was his nature, like it’s the nature of the Maine coast to be hard and high and beautiful.

I couldn’t see all this before. I guess that’s how it works, though: as a kid, you see your parents through a different lens than you do as an adult. As an adult, some things look different; some things don’t.

I have always said that my Dad married my Mom’s family, and now I think I understand what I mean. He saw in them a kind of abiding and unselfconscious fidelity to their own natures. They were all as different as days, but they — especially Grammy, Mom’s mother — were all unshakeably themselves. Dad loved and admired all of them, regardless of the divorce.

Even Mom, in her long, unhappy years of restraint, being a Serious Woman with a Serious Job, was never untrue to herself. The painful part, I guess, must have been how half of her had to lie more or less dormant in those days, bursting out here and there and slowly accumulating momentum and force and life in the form of the beautiful garden that slowly ate first the back yard, then the front, a literal inflorescence of the soul.

I don’t know what Dad thought of me, that last year of his life. I was still casting around, searching for an exoskeleton, an identity I could step into I guess so I wouldn’t have to do the hard and lonely work of being who I was. Having felt the cutting edge of loneliness too long, I wanted to be loved. I would have said I wanted to be loved for who I was, and would’ve believed it, but I was wrong. I was still a long, long way from there.

I won’t say that I never do that anymore: identity is a nebulous thing, and I still want to be loved — but I am loved, as well and unconditionally as I believe a human being can be loved.

It’s easier to be brave, because of that.

So I still don’t know exactly what my Dad would make of me, if he were here — but I have begun to think he’d like what I’ve become, although he might not say it.

Not that he would mean any harm; not that he wasn’t brave enough. But his heart and mind were always two steps down the road, preparing to head off half-truth and hypocrisy.

I think he’d grill me about every single one of my cherished suppositions.

And I hope, were he alive to rake those coals, that I would have the courage and good sense to meet him toe-to-toe and love him for it.

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At the Opening of the Year: On Failure, Success, and Sustainable Change, Part 2

Jan 1

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Part One, if you want it.

Yesterday, I wrote about my successes, both unqualified and qualified, in 2015.

Objectively speaking, some of my so-called “qualified successes” could also have been called “failures.” I’m okay with that. Though failing is often hard when you’re doing it, it’s rarely the end of the world, and you can usually learn something from it.

I should mention that it’s not always easy to do that — there are few cultural phenomena as spectacularly annoying as the phrase, “Turn that frown upside-down!”

Frankly, sometimes you need to frown for a while. Sometimes you can’t just “turn [it] upside down.” Sometimes you need to feel what you’re feeling, get mad at yourself, or sad or hurt or whatever you feel. Sometimes you need to sit down in the middle of the pathos of human existence and weep, or howl, or scream your fury down the throat of the universe.

After, or sometimes even while you’re still there, you snatch whatever lessons you can from the jaws of defeat and move forward. In the words of Chumbawumba, “[you’ve] got no job, but [you’re] an opera fan.”

Wait, that’s not it. It’s: “[You] get knocked down, but [you] get up again.*”

*Somehow, it seems terribly appropriate that I’m citing a song about being too drunk to walk to the bogs without falling on your face. Egads, what an analogy.

Anyway! Moving right along.

Motivation and sustainable change are among my major research interests — because, while we talk a good game, we really still don’t understand them too well, and they’re enormously important in things like public health and personal growth.

Read the rest of this entry →

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Two Weeks Without Class: Life Moves

Dec 30

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First, let me state for the record, yet again, that not dancing drives me crazy.

Doubtless, the element of structure it adds to my time is critical, as is the element of physical exhaustion — but I think that, more than anything, I need the ritual and the communion. I need to check my mind at the door and do the steps. I need the order of barre and the challenge of the floor. I need to be not simply a dancer alone, working out his private salvation in turns and trembling, but a dancer among dancers. We are not solitary birds.

Second, an interesting thing has been happening in my life. The last year has made me less afraid to reveal myself — to others, but also to myself. I’ve learned to reflect on my own condition (in both the general and specific senses) in a new way. I’ve learned also to think more clearly about how my actions affect people around me, particularly those I love.

In some ways, this makes life harder. I begin to see the difficulty I present as a friend, with my abrupt flourishes of vigor and my equally abrupt retreats into solitude. I begin to see, also, the challenge I will face as long as I live; the tightrope-walk that is bipolar, with its precarious drops. I begin to see that to bolt forward without considering that in my plans is a fool’s errand.

In other ways, it makes my life better. Because something has shifted (Adderall, maybe?) in such a way that I can sometimes think about my thinking, I can begin to plan a life in which the room I must grant my illness is part of the design. Likewise, I can begin to step out on the ledge of public creativity again.

I have begun, once again, to believe in my vision and my voice.

Oddly enough, some of that has happened in the studio.

In real life, I have trouble with feelings — I can’t tell them apart very well, nor can I put them into words as readily as most people.

But I can dance them.

When I know the steps; when I no longer need to struggle to remember whether the next thing is pas de valse or balancé, I am suddenly able to summon feeling from the depths of my soul with trembling intensity. I am suddenly able to be transported; to let the music carry my heart and let my body follow it.

I used to be afraid of my own emotions (sometimes I still am: the crazy ones, in particular). Now, though, I’ve learned to manage them, like one manages a powerful horse, and I’m no longer afraid to turn and look at them.

At least, not most of the time.

It is true that I’m still afraid to look the out-of-control parts in the eye: the glittering mania ready to snatch the bit in its teeth and drag me out into the freezing void of space; the lightless depression, with its great liquid eyes, equally ready to drag me with it “down to a sunless sea.”

But the real feelings — pain and grief and fear, but also love and hope and joy — which I’ve kept at bay for so long…  Those feelings I can now entertain; examine; hold in my hands. At least sometimes, for a while.

This is the work I am doing; the most critical work — in my therapist’s office, of course, but also in the studio and also alone, in my living room, with Holst’s The Planets whispering and shivering and surging from the speakers of Denis’ stereo system.

Little by little, I’m plumbing and charting the depths of my soul, filling in spots on the map that used to read, “Here be dragons.”

Life moves, and finally I’ve started to feel as if I’m moving with it.

This is a gift, a change, born from many seeds — but not least ballet, and the obedience of this body, which at last has begun to learn to belong to this soul.

Posted in balllet, bipolar, healing, life, video

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