I think this might not be as true in an improv setting — but working technique, I really wrestled with it.
There was a lot of, “Can I do this?”
Or, well —”Should I do this?”
Can hasn’t been the problem, generally.
So we really focused a lot of, basically, the falling down part of modern — the safety release, wherein you fall through a roll over a sickled foot and, amazingly, A) your ankle doesn’t break and B) Agrippina Vaganova does not appear in a cloud of sulphur to drag you away to the place where Bad Ballet Dancers go. Mainly because, let’s face it, she doesn’t countenance modern to begin with.
So I managed both to lay down some impressive bruises on the metatarsophalangeal joints of both my feet and to finally lay down some nice safety releases, even in the ones falling from a standing position, which make my inner Russian completely foam at the mouth.
Beyond that, I couldn’t remember a sequence to save my life today, in part because of the ever-present fear of exacerbating my injury (so confuse — very distraction — wow) and in part because, I dunno, wrong phase of the moon, or what have you.
Sadly, even Modern T eventually caught my Sequence Learning Disorder, and we all got pretty confused.
Fortunately for Modern T and my fellow student, R, however, I had to stop before we really worked the final sequence.
Ah, well.
The afternoon’s choreography session became more like a planning session with dancing, and that was fine. It is really hard to remember to turn off the turnout. On the other hand (other foot?) we percolated some cool stuff that involves one dancer in a more modern style (with strong ballet lineage) partnering another who uses a strictly classical ballet style.
It yields an effect like two people speaking two dialects of the same language, sometimes with great harmony and sometimes with miscommunication — which, in turn, really works for the production we’re hatching.
We also made some programming changes, which is fine. Little by little, we’re creating a thing that is coming to have a shape and a structure. Elements of the actual choreography are beginning to gel, so for the next few sessions I’ll be selecting a couple of pieces of music for each so we can begin to create more detailed sketches.
Some will be a challenge to implement because we have two dancers and not six (or twelve) — but we can begin to lay down paths and shapes, and that will be a good start.
I also blood to regard my current injury not as a frustrating in this process, but as the kind of limitation of uses to challenge one’s self.
I need to think, “Okay, I shouldn’t jump right now — what can I do here instead?”
Tomorrow I’m back.to the aerials studio, though with limitations and with and supervision by my charming PT/husband 🙂
I saw a quote today that read,
Dance is silent poetry.
All I could think is that whoever said that has never been to my Wednesday Class.
(Or, for that matter, encountered embodied percussion floorwork in a modern class.)
#Ballet #TheStruggleIsReal #WhereSnowflakesDanceAndSwear #EffingDeveloppe
… A little literary navel-gazing today.
I’m making some adjustments to Strangers, but also trying to figure out the answers to some writing questions.
Specifically, Toby and Phinny are co-protagonists, and it’s clear to me what Toby is after, as a character: he really wants to understand a dark, painful, and muddled period in his past so he can, like, move on with his life or something (okay, yeah, that sounds pretty vague). He also wants Phinny.
Phinny continues to be a bit of a problem child: I don’t know exactly what he wants in the story. To an extent, I suppose he wants to avoid the exact confrontation with his past (that is, his and Toby’s mutual past) that Toby wants and needs, but that avoidance thing serves Toby’s story better than it serves Phinny’s. Likewise, he is attracted and even a bit drawn to Toby, but not with the singularity of intention that draws Toby to him.
Beyond that, he is mostly a guy who has what he wants in the world: he’s spent his life preparing to become a dancer and has done so with no small success; he has grown up in a loving-if-somewhat-distracted family and maintains a good relationship with his parents and his kajillion brothers and sisters; he has good friends within his company; he likes traveling and as such enjoys the fact that I Travesti spends most of the year touring. He certainly wants love in the romantic sense, but I don’t think he feels any pressure about it — he is focused, instead, on dancing.
This doesn’t mean he’s a well-adjusted “whole person” — he absolutely isn’t, and in some ways he has constructed his entire so he never needs to deal with the trauma of his past. He never stays in any one place very long; he lives a secure, cloistered life in which he is almost never alone with his thoughts, let alone with a potential romantic partner; his relationship with Peter is at once primary, quasi-romantic, and asexual (Peter is basically the straightest man who has ever made a living by performing classical ballet in drag); he is at once aware of his own desirability and protected from its consequences by the people around him.
So getting to grips with his own past is a thing Phinny needs to do (or will, someday, need to do), but also a thing he feels no pressure to do, as he has carefully crafted a life that prevents situations in which he might feel said pressure.
Likewise, he doesn’t suffer from Toby’s central problem, which is a nagging guilt. Toby’s as driven by a need for absolution as he is by a need to understand what the frack actually happened; they are faces of the same coin. Phinny’s damage is more abstract (possibly because, ironically enough, the Bad Things in his history are more concrete — though also because he avoids it all so effectively).
So there’s that question: What is Phinny after, if he isn’t just a passive vehicle in this story? And, of course, does he reach whatever his goal is?
None of these difficulties get in the way of actual writing, of course — I’m a “Write first, ask questions later” kind of guy — but they will, sooner or later, come to bear on the novel as a whole.
Since I’m Taking A Couple of Days Off, I plan to spend a bit of time with Toby and Phinny and see what comes of it.
In other news, this injury means keeping work in turn-out to a minimum for a bit, and my inner Ballet Wonk is busy throwing a fit about that. I mean, in the long run, it’s important — the muscle I’ve managed to injure (which was secondary to the Groin Pull of Doom) is one of the major turnout muscles, and if I want to keep my turnout in the long run, I need to let it heal. But FFS, how do you ballet when you can’t turnout? Bleh.
(Yeah, I know — #FirstWorldBalletProblems)
I have also decided that I need to educate myself on how to manage minor injuries so I don’t turn them into major ones. Abnormal pain perception has its advantages, but it also has its disadvantages, and this is one. Things don’t always hurt when they should (especially once my muscles are warm), so I wind up exacerbating injuries or adding new ones.
The groin pull wouldn’t have been a terribly big deal by itself, but I wound up injuring another muscle because of the way muscles compensate for one-another, and that’s the kind of thing I need to learn to avoid.
On the upside, I managed to prevent myself from sleeping in a face-down turned-out left retiré (seriously, I sleep that way most of the time, or in the butterfly/frog position — I mentioned this to B, and she said, “No wonder your turnout is so good!”), so I at least woke up far less sore than I have been.
Anyway, onward and upward, what what.
Modern class this morning was interesting.
I was a complete space cadet, having failed to take both allergy meds and Adderall, and having also slept for a loooong time.
Nonetheless, I did a reasonable job getting combinations into my body and responding to corrections.
At least, I did up until Part B of the left side of the final combination when somehow, inexplicably, it dawned on me that I was on the wrong leg. I felt a little exclamation point appear above my head, then threw in a little changement to switch legs, and just went on. After, Modern T was like: “Asher! On the left side, use the left leg!”
We all got a laugh out of that. I sorted out on the repeat.
I missed my choreography session with B because Denis needed to go to the doctor, so I did M. BeastMode’s Monday night class.
I should seriously do this class more often. It was really good — especially the big dance-y parts at the end.
Having begun my journey back into dance as a Ballet Squid, I now find that my arms generally know what to do with themselves. This is a fine thing. It allows me to think about other details, like rocking the épaulement.
I generally bag no trouble remembering combinations tonight, though I didn’t nail the final one 100% on the left (for one, though, it was because I added something that wasn’t really there).
There was also one enormous and effortless saut-de-chat, which was awesome. SdC and grand jeté have been my nemeses this year: I’ve been working through that gap between how high they were and how high they could be and trying to get out of my own way, but it hasn’t really come together until tonight.
Anyway, it was a good class and a good night and I’m glad that I went.
Tomorrow will be cleaning and mixed apparatus day.
If things keep going this will, l’m going to write a letter requesting that we change the name of this month from “May” to “Can.”
As a physical therapist who specializes in adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities, Denis is reimbursed for his services primarily through Medicaid.
Upcoming regulatory changes both to reimbursement rates and the delivery of services mean that right now he’s considering taking a full-time staff position rather than continuing in private practice.
I started to write about the details of that decision here, and then realized that was going to be a really, really long post; it it’s a question of regulatory changes that reflect both good intentions and terrible implementation, and it really deserves a thorough treatment in its own post.
Anyway, as such, we’re keeping our belts a little tighter until we know what’s what, and both Sun King and Mam Luft’s full-day track are off the table until the dust settles.
Realistically, that might not happen until mid-June, and since Mam Luft & Co’s summer intensive takes place the first week of June, that’s obviously a spanner in the works.
Fortunately, Mam Luft & Co has an evening track which costs roughly half as much as the full-day track — and which falls well within the scope of my monthly discretionary budget.
Thus, I’ve signed up for Mam Luft & Co’s evening track. On one hand, I’m a tad disappointed, because I really wanted to do the Contemporary Ballet classes offered as part of the full-day track. Likewise, I’m kind of bummed that I won’t be able to participate in the performance at the end, since that’s specific to the full-day track.
On the other hand, I’m really excited about the partnering, improv, and music awareness classes that make up a big chunk of the evening track’s course load, and I can add the Contemporary Ballet class if I want to by adding a “Pick 3 Classes” registration (which, at $54, is a reasonable add-on; I’ll need to do something during the day, after all).
Since Contemporary Ballet is on the second day of the program, I think I probably won’t be too cooked to handle the early-ish start (evening track classes end at 10:10 PM; the Contemporary Ballet class starts at 9 AM o_O).
I didn’t check the “I want to audition for the company” box on the the application, because I’m not sure that I have anything like enough modern dance experience, but maybe I’ll write to them and ask about that. Apparently men are strongly encouraged to audition, so there’s that?
It doesn’t make sense to car-commute 2 hours each way the whole time, so I’ll find a place to stay in Cincinnati for the week (I’m hoping for some place with a swimming pool; that would make an awesome counterpart to dancing), and then I’ll have to find ways to entertain myself during the day.
Honestly, that shouldn’t be a huge problem: I’m pretty good at keeping myself entertained. I plan to do some research over the next few weeks, find fun cheap-or-free things to do by day, and bring my bike (because if all else fails, I can always amuse myself by riding the bike … probably very slowly, and only in the flattest parts of Cinci I can find, but riding the bike nonetheless).
And, of course, there’s always the magical land of IKEA.
For July, Lexington Ballet’s week-long adult summer intensive is very much on my radar. At $275, it’s also quite affordable.
LexBallet’s program is evenings only, but like Cinci, Lexington is a nice place to visit, and I’m sure I can amuse myself during the day for a week. I also know my way around pretty well, and I will definitely bring my bike, since there’s some very nice riding in Lexington. If I’m lucky, I may be able to stay with friends, or with friends-of-friends, since I still know people there.
I’ll need to register by June 15th, but that seems very much doable even if things are still up in the air, financially speaking.
So it looks like I’ll probably be doing two one-week summer programs this year, in addition to my usual ballet-and-modern schedule.
So that’s my summer planned:
June:
Suspend Spring Showcase
Mam Luft & Co Intensive (Evening Track)
PlayThink Festival
July:
Lexington Ballet Adult Intensive
August:
Burning Man!
And that’s it for now. I should go finish my various houseworky things, as we have all kinds of crazy plans all weekend.
Back to the question of dancer-identity, and that of choreographer-identity, this morning, even though half an hour ago I was standing in the kitchen sort of floating on the idea that all this wrangling for identity is a symptom and the disease is illusion; qv Everything the Buddha Ever Said, Ever, not to mention quite a bit of what other great spiritual figures have said.
Anyway.
I think a great deal of this rests upon the question of legitimacy.
Most cultures have quite a bit to say about which pursuits are and aren’t legit for adults within their purview. In the United States, ballet (and probably most or all other concert/theatrical danceforms, really) is in a weird grey zone.
It seems that it’s mostly regarded as totally legit (perhaps even intimidatingly awesome) if you’re a professional dancer or someone who otherwise makes money in the field of dance, or a university-level student or apprentice preparing to do so. Meanwhile, it’s significantly less legit but probably still within the unspoken Tolerance Specification if you’re an adult student who goes to class once a week for fun (ideally as a way to pass the time while your kid(s) is/are in their class).
However, if you’re you’re a wacko who eats, sleeps, lives, and breathes ballet (or another dance idiom) and doesn’t make money from it, you’re out there in cloud-cuckooland, far from the borders of legitimacy. In short, people generally don’t get it (and aren’t sure you actually have the right to do what you’re doing).
I think it’s that sense of perceived illigitimacy, maybe, that leads so many of us to question our right to call ourselves dancers.
After all, it’s a rare bird who questions the right of an adult amateur who likes to fish to call herself a fisherwoman or an angler; likewise, anyone who plays the piano can call himself a pianist without raising more than the occasional eyebrow. Ditto guitarists, singers, cyclists, runners, car enthusiasts, birders, gardeners, and (to a lesser extent) painters and writers (I think there’s a little more policing of these last two).
I think the difference lies in the fact that the above pursuits are Within Spec in our culture, while formal dance (excepting, possibly, ballroom*?) isn’t. If you schlep over to the town square and set up your easel, almost nobody thinks you’re out of line — even if you’re a terrible painter, really. If you break out your ballet moves in the town square, meanwhile, you’d better bring the skillz, or people will definitely tell you (in one way or another) that you shouldn’t be dancing in public**.
*You guys, why does SwiftKey think badigeon is a more likely choice here than ballroom? Seriously — or, as SwiftKey belittle helpfully suggests, serially, stylishly, or sorely.
**I just realized that there’s an identity-policing component here that’s not dissimilar from saying, “People your size shouldn’t wear leggings.” It’s that whole, “You should totally be you unless I find you unattractive, in which case you should either cover up or maybe just try being someone else” thing. Feh.
Basically, adult amateur dancers experience a strange kind of pressure from both sides: the dance world doesn’t always regard us as legit, and the broader culture thinks we’re cray.
And so legitimacy becomes immensely important to us (after all, we spend considerable amounts of time and sums of money on this thing of ours, and the broader culture really kind of demands that we justify that somehow), but we struggle to determine at which point we can legitimately call ourselves dancers in the context of the medium of concert/theatrical dance .
I am, frankly, all for the notion that if you dance, you’re a dancer.
I’m all for the idea that if you dance, and you feel a desire to or see an opportunity to create a performing group, doing so is a legitimate pursuit, and you don’t have to get permission from the Powers That Be even if you’re freaking awful at dance.
In fact, there’s probably a great deal to be said for dancing badly. When you do something badly, people think, “Huh, I could do that,” and maybe they give it a try, and maybe they discover a passion and buy season tickets to the local company that’s struggling to survive in an age that isn’t sure ballet (or whatevs) is even relevant anymore. Or maybe they just get a good chuckle.
Sure, haters gonna hate — but they’re already hating away at home, and they don’t get to tell us who to be.
Likewise gatekeepers gonna gate, but I’m pretty sure that, on the whole, innovation tends to spring from the ranks of the gate-crashers.
So go assemble your dance peeps and crash some gates.
And know that if you’re dancing, you’re a dancer***.
***Full disclosure: I know that this kind of thing is much easier for me to say and do as an educated white male from a privileged background who walks around in a body that largely matches conventional ideas of what a “dancer’s body” looks like. And I also totally get how ironic it is for me to give you permission to crash the gates, amiright? Like, here I am, unintentionally acting like a gatekeeper for gate-crashers.
This stuff is complicated, y’all.
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.
As homework for my apprentice teaching gig, I am Reading All The Books.
Conveniently, all the books Anne wants me to read were already on my Choreography, Teaching, & Technique reading list.
Anyway, on the way over to Mixed Apparatus at noon today, I found myself contemplating some of the Improvs in Blom and Chapin’s The Intimate Act of Choreography (ISBN: 0-8229-5342-0 … and, look, it’s available in electronic format!) and, simultaneously, thinking about the problem of shaping proprioception, which is a huge part of teaching dance.
As a quick illustration, one of the things we’re focusing on is making a graceful line through the arms. That’s one of the most challenging things to do for a number of reasons, but not least of all because what we think or feel our arms are doing and what they are doing are often, in short, quite different.
For example, I had no earthly idea how strongly I tended to break my wrists until I saw a picture of myself playing around on the trapeze (or was it the lyra?) the first time we went to PlayThink (I though I had it in my WP media files, but evidently I don’t, so I’m going to have to add it in later).
The difference between what I felt like I was doing and what I was doing was so stark and so shocking that it produced a powerful mental image; one I was able to use to very consciously correct the carriage of my wrists (and, over time, my port de bras in general).
Anyway, all of this led me to think of a potentially-useful little improv game that could, potentially, be useful for improving proprioception (which, like other forms of perception, is malleable through training).
I’m calling it “Snapshots,” though part of me was tempted to call it “Selfies,” since I am a spectacular selfie-junkie (actually, I love taking pictures of people in general; it just happens that I’m always there when I need a subject). The choice of names relates partly to the greater historical strength of the word “snapshots” and also to the fact that selfies are often (perforce, because one’s arms are only so long and we don’t all own selfie-sticks) taken at weird angles.
Chances are someone else has already invented this game, but that’s one of the cool things about good ideas. So, in short, if you’ve already invented this game, please know that I’m not intentionally stealing your thunder.
Here’s how it works:
Consider starting with an isolated zone or part of the body: just the arms, just the foot, just the right leg.
Ask yourself: in what ways do I “match” what I envisioned? In what ways don’t I match? What looks better than what I envisioned? What doesn’t look as good? Why? What might I need to adjust? What should I leave alone?
Edit: I left out the last step!
Over time, the second-to-last and last steps can help your mind’s eye and your proprioception (in short, the sense that tells you where you body parts are in relation to one-another) work better together. At least, they do for me.
I haven’t tried this yet with dancers other than myself, but I plan to deploy it on my dear, patient husband and anyone else who’s willing to be a test subject and see how it works for them. It works well for me, but that isn’t always a great indicator of … well, anything, really.
So that’s it for now. Today we did lyra and silks in Mixed Apparatus, but none of us took any pictures. There were only three of us in class (the lovely advantage of daytime classes — often, they’re quite small!), so there was no one waiting for an apparatus while someone else worked.
I was lucky enough to grow up in the land of Pilobilus, so I first encountered modern dance (and a pretty innovative form, at that) as a little kid.
My only real experience with Modern dance as a dancer, however, took the form of two years in high school during which I took modern as a non-major at my arts magnet. I enjoyed it, but at the time I was taking a veritable pharmacopia of drugs for bipolar, which was, to say the least, discouraging.
Since then, the first two years (have I missed my own danciversary, you guys?! OMG, I need to check…) of my return to dance have been entirely devoted to ballet.
I’ve waffled about adding modern into the mix: although I always seem to be kind of a generalist in life, some inner part of me wants to be a specialist — no, not even just a specialist, but a purist.
Sometimes, though, life shoves shoves you off the board while you’re dithering about which dive to try.
Hm. I just realized that I need to update my system for abbreviating dance teachers — there’s already a Ms. T and a Ms. B, which accounts for all of my modern teacher’s initials, and somehow I can’t bring myself to call her Ms. TB!
So we’ll call her “Modern T.”
Modern T is the founder of our local professional/semi-professional modern company, Moving Collective, a beautiful dancer, and (as I’ve discovered today) an excellent teacher. She also often takes Hard Mode Ballet class on Wednesday.
Anyway, a convergence of forces led me to try her modern class today — and I’m forced to admit that I loved it.
This may not be true for everyone, but for me, modern infuses fresh doses of freedom and expression into my dancing.
(Oh, and as several of my fellow dance bloggers have pointed out, bruises! Ha. I should have remembered that from high school ^—^ I now have a giant chain of bruises right down my spine from a somewhat-excessively-enthusiastic roll-downy thing.)
Modern uses the body differently, which is also great — an antidote, in a way, to over-expressing ballet technique (you know: that thing where you focus so hard on the placement of your shoulders that you wind up misplacing them anyway, for example — over-correction).
It’s also quite new to me, so I’m not getting hung up on being RIGHT. I’m just, like, following along, trying to do things, feeling it out. Dancing more, thinking less. It works!
I was worried I wouldn’t be able to manage this class because of my relative paucity of modern experience — it’s an intermediate/advanced class — but the ballet training translates well. Enough of the basic terminology is the same, and ultimately you’re still moving the same body.
The funny part was I’d just read an article criticising the excess of modern pieces (in Australia, anyway) that basically involve dancers rolling around on the floor … And now, having spent the first quarter of the class doing exactly that, I feel like I kind of get it a bit.
Yes, the floor is your friend, but it’s a rigid, unyielding friend — so figuring out how to work with it in that way is a challenge!
I think the criticism is still valid — if we want audiences of people who aren’t all dancers, we need to include elements in performances that you can readily appreciate without having done them (which, by the way, Moving Collective does really, really well!).
But I think that as a dancer-choreographer, it’s very much like stuffing your ballet full of promenades. To a dancer, a promenade is a display of strength, grace, control and technique. To the non-dancers in the audience, though, it often just looks weird.
So that’s something I’ll try to think about as a choreographer, even though as a dancer I really enjoyed the puzzle of figuring out how to use the floor and my body together in new and challenging ways.
Our work at center, meanwhile, is going to seriously help my ballet technique in ways that I totally didn’t expect. Modern T has an amazing gift for imparting lessons in placement.
I also really liked our final combination, which went something like:
Pas de Basque x2
Saut de Basque
Pique arabesque-y thing with circly arms in second, lower heel to plié
Stag leap
Sauté Développé front*
A kind of star-shaped tour jeté to lunge
Sweep
*On first pass, I did this with the “ballet” knob turned all the way up. It was kind of funny.
The music was really cool, and I really enjoyed playing with the feeling of it.
There were only two of us today, so I tried to both maintain spacing (instead of wandering off upstage or what have you) and evoke a feeling that meshed with what my fellow dancer, A., was performing.
If my Friday mornings continue to be free, I might take Friday class with Modern T as well. If not, I’ll definitely be making the most of Modern Mondays.
YouTube: BOSU Balance Series
danseur ignoble 