1. It comes back easier than I thought it would.

When I started dancing again, I was really worried I’d be the worst in the class. That I’d be completely hopeless, falling around with all the grace of a two year old just figuring out how to run. Luckily, it turns out that my body has remembered at least a few things pounded into it over 13 years. My feet turned out and pointed naturally, my hands remembered their positions, and my head knew where to turn, etc. The details, it turns out, stuck in my head. On the other hand -

2. There are some things I’ve forgotten, and I can’t re-learn them overnight.

Turns, mostly. I was never particularly fantastic at turns, and now they are annoyingly imperfect. I worked for quite literally years to get good at fuette turns and triple pirouettes, and not practicing for two and a half years chips away at that work. It’s not as though I can spend two hours in the studio and expect to have perfect turns at the end of it – though I do expect to get better. I expect to get at least a little bit better every time, and then I’ll get there again.

3. I forgot how much work being good takes.

When I was in high school, I was spending at least a dozen hours in a dance studio a week, unless I was in a show – then some of that dancing was done in rehearsals. Point is, I worked. I worked hard, and I worked often. I had forgotten that being good takes work – a lot of work. The problem is that now I don’t have a dozen hours to spend in a dance studio. I’ve had to prioritize in a way that I didn’t anticipate, figuring out exactly how much I love dance and how much I love, say, showering. How much do I value dance, and how much do I value a high GPA, and sleep, and friends, and other extracurricular opportunities? With a frequency that has surprised me, I have gone with the option on the side of that calculation opposite dance. I love it, but perhaps not as much as I thought I did. Or maybe part of that passion was tied to a specific place and time in my life, or maybe tied to a specific group of people. Whatever the reason, I’m putting dance into the great-hobby-that-I-spend-two-hours-or-so-a-week category, not the I-have-to-do-this-as-often-as-possible-or-I’ll-go-crazy category.

4. Complacency is the kiss of death.

An old dance teacher of mine, Mark, used to say that he wasn’t interested in teaching anyone who couldn’t go to a beginning ballet class and challenge him or herself. Whatever someone is asking of you, Mark would say, do that and five times more. Don’t rely on other people to push you – push yourself. Quite apart from being an excellent guide for life in general (along with other Mark-isms, such as, “MAKE IT WORK!”), it’s a fantastic point in dance. The second I get complacent or comfortable, the second I stop pushing, the second I stop changing, I stop growing. And that is about the worst thing I could do. I never want to stop growing. (Except in the height sense. I’m 6’ tall – that’s tall enough, thankyouverymuch.)

5. Pointe shoes hurt like hell, until you get used to them again.

My feet are permanently misshapen from years of pointe. I hadn’t done it years, and when I attempted it again the other day, they yelled at me very, very loudly. But no worries – I’m sure I’ll beat my feet into submission again.
A very happy holiday to your and yours, everybody – see you in January!

On another topic – I’m about to head home for the holidays (I’m a college student who spends most of my time at school in Missouri, but my family lives in Boston).  I am very excited – it’s been awhile since I’ve seen my high school friends and my family, and my family celebrates Christmas, so there’s that to look forward to.  My last week or so here at Mizzou has been crazy enough – finals, papers, final projects, and the odd holiday party, but when I get home, it’s actually going to get crazier.  Different branches of my extended family are having holiday parties, there’s a work party, my boyfriend’s family is having a function, I still have gifts to buy, my immediate family will have our Christmas – it’s going to be crazy.

Don’t get me wrong – I love it.  Love it love it love it. But it doesn’t leave much time for ballet (you were wondering when I was going to get around to the topic of this blog, weren’t you? ).  I’ve been trying to figure out a)how much ballet I should even try and shove in over winter break and b)when I’m going to practice.  Because I really do believe that every now and again, we need a break.  If you dance en pointe every day all day for a month, your feet will not like you very much, and they will express this displeasure by turning colors, i.e. bruising, and complaining loudly when you walk.  I don’t dance that much, certainly, but I do think the holidays can be a time for taking a time out from regular life and just enjoying yourself (unless you’re in the Nutcracker, of course).  At the same time, I don’t want to get back at the end of January and find I’ve lost my right split again and fuete turns.  No thank you.

As of right now, my plan is this – I’m going to do a little stretching, on average, every other day, but I’m not going to kill myself.  I’m just going to do enough to keep myself loose and make sure I don’t lose any flexibility. If I miss a day, I’m not going to stress about it too much.  And every night, before I go to bed, to the extent that I can, I’m going to do some balancing exercises.  With any luck, I’ll be just fine when I get back at the end of January, but I’m planning to enjoy a good holiday with my family and friends in the meantime.

I’ll check in once more before I head off to let you know how the routine thing is going!

I am a creature of habit.  Part of that is how I was taught, I think.  For years, I danced at Krupinski’s, and after warming up at the barre we did floor warm-ups to “Black Horse and a Cherry Tree“.  Since I’ve stopped dancing there, I’ve developed my own warm-up, but the other day I was walking through the mall with a friend when “Black Horse and a Cherry Tree” came on, and all of my muscles sort of freaked out.  It was totally bizarre.  I’m so used to hearing that song and going into “and now I’m doing such-and-such exercise” that it actually difficult to hear the song and not go into ballet warm-up mode.

Since I’ve started dancing again, I’ve developed my own warm up, but it is pretty uncreative.  If I had “Black Horse and a Cherry Tree” on my iPod, I’d probably listen to it, but I don’t.  So instead, after a basic barre warm-up (I use my kitchen counter – don’t tell my roommate ), I use “I’ll Cover You” from Rent, “The Bitch of Living” from Spring Awakening if I’m floor stretching, and Bittersweet Symphony.  Anyone who has seen Mark Krupinski’s ballet and jazz warm-ups, however, will note that there are, ahem, suspicious similarities.  I do practically the same thing.

I can’t figure out if this is a good thing or a bad thing.  My current routine makes sure that I practice everything I need to, I work both sides of my body equally, but would it be better for me to switch it up every now and again?

I think maybe I’ll try a little experiment and do something a little different for the next couple of days.  I’ll keep you updated!

But the thing is, I really love performing. Last dance class, my instructor brought in an audience to watch us perform a few variations, and afterwards, he commented that I seemed like a performer first and a dancer second. “Which,” he added, “is not necessarily a bad thing, because people will pay more to see a girl do a semi-difficult dance with iffy precision but expression and energy in her face than they will to see her do a dance with perfect precision blandly. But my job is to teach you to be a better dancer, and then the performance aspect will be even better.”

He’s absolutely right. When I’m performing, even for a small number of people, it’s invigorating. Performing brings on a feeling difficult to explain – it’s getting completely caught up in each moment, having a deeply focused mind, and yet at the same time feeling totally free to easily move. I feel acutely aware of the placement of every part of my body, of when and how I’m breathing. That is definitely not a feeling brought on by seemingly endless pliés and relevés and rond de jambes and frappés. Those moves feel route and boring. They’re about as far as you can get from inspiring.

My challenge, then, is to put as much effort into those little moments, and to be as focused during those endless combinations en croix at the barre as I am when performing. Forcing myself to work at those moves at the barre will, I know, hugely improve my performance. That’s a huge part of what ballet is about, after all – perfecting the technique. Performing is the easy part.

This idea, the difference between performing a routine and/or excercises in a route manner, vs. performing for an audience, is put quite well in this post at Behind Ballet by Annie Carroll, a dancer with the Australian Ballet, but she brings another aspect to it. Carroll wrote about bringing something new to an old performance, using the audience, using new emotion to bring something fresh and something alive every time you perform, thus preventing you from getting bored. I’m not in the position Carroll is – performing the same show every night – but I think what she says is useful, because it the overarching point is this: bring something new every time. Bring focus, bring energy, and you won’t be bored. That way, it’s a new and exciting performance every time.

That said, I am not a huge fan of his latest book, Outliers. However, there is one idea that he talks about that I found really interesting. Gladwell develops this idea called the “10,000 Hour Rule.” Essentially, the idea is that to get good at something, to get good at anything, you have to practice. You have to spend time on something to get good at it. A lot of time. 10,000 hours, to be specific.

It’s not a new idea. It’s a cliche, actually – practice makes perfect. But for some reason, I seem to expect myself to be good at something right away, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. We learn how to do something new – editing video in Avid, say, or html code, and so forth, and expect ourselves to be good at it right away. That’s crazy, when you think about it. Granted, learning new skills generally involves building upon old skills, so it doesn’t really take 10,000 hours, because it’s not entirely new. But it does take time.

A couple of months ago, I saw Ira Glass (of PRI’s This American Life) speak, and he talked about advice to aspiring journalists (or really, as he said, aspiring anythings): “Be prepare to suck.” Glass played a couple of his first stories at NPR, and they were truly horrible. Horrible as in he wouldn’t be able to get a B in a Broadcasting I class with them. The stories literally didn’t make logical sense or follow a coherent storyline. And now he’s an incredible editor and host. The message was clear:

Be prepared to suck. You have to practice. It takes time to get good.

I spent a lot of time getting good at dance. Years. Hours upon hours. And I haven’t lost all the skills gained during that time, or even most of them – I’ve lost just enough to be annoyed about it. Even more frustratingly, I know how to improve. I know exactly what I need to do – I need to practice; I need to put in the time.

I just don’t have the time.

My iCal is fit to burst, with law school applications and capstones and classes and journalism-ing and extracurriculars, and trying to fit in something resembling a social life. Dance, while something that I love, is just not as important as school. Getting better at triple pirouettes is something I want to do for my own personal fulfillment. But it’s not as important as getting this story done for KBIA, or finishing the lit review for capstone, or organizing a community service event for SRS I’m responsible for, or writing a paper for Philosophy of Law, or hey, blogging for J4700. Those things are really important in a way that dance is not. They’re not just about personal fulfillment. I love dance, but I love a lot of other things too, and those other things are going to come into play in my future. Hopefully I’ll be able to take a once-a-week dance class for a long time to come, but it’s not as important to me as those other things are.

So now I’m in this position where I am not putting in the necessary time to really get good at something I enjoy because I’ve decided it’s just not as important as other things. And I don’t regret that decision. I just wish I could find more hours in he day. That’s going to be my project for the next couple of weeks – trying to find more hours in the day, to figure out if I really can’t find a couple extra half hours here or there to mush together. Cross your fingers. I’ll keep you updated.

Now, back to the iCal.

When I danced at Krupinski’s, we did the variation all the time as a warm-up. It’s one of the easier variations, so it allows dancers to really work on very picky, specific things, like flowing of movements, exact angles, and so on. Last week, it was turned on at Dance Arts, and it was practically instinctual to start doing the dance. I’d done it so many times at Krupinski’s that I snapped into it, even though it’s been years. Now, I’m not as flexible as I was, so my leg didn’t go as high, and it wasn’t as good as it was, but it worked. It was nice to have that happen – to have everything just click. Muscle memory is a good thing.  I’d wondered if dancing would be at all like riding a bike – you know, they say you never forget how.  It turns out some things are – things like memory of choreography, turning out, and so on, but other things, unfortunately are not.

On the other hand, I would give quite a lot to have them remember how to do good pirouettes. Part of the problem is that pirouettes were always my weakest turns, when I was dancing all of the time. There are so many things to think about before, during, and after the turn – don’t pop your heel when you go up on relevé, snap the leg up to retiré at the same time the supporting leg goes up on relevé, spot (spotting is focusing on a spot in front of you and locking your eyes onto that spot until you absolutely must turn your head, and then whipping your head around so your eyes focus back on that spot. The idea is to keep you steady, and if you’re traveling while turning, it keeps you going in one direction, instead of going all over the place), keep your arms low (don’t want to whack your partner), don’t use your arms for momentum – and I’ve just covered about the first second of a pirouette. And if just one of those things is off, then I wobble, or my retiré doesn’t hold, my supporting foot doesn’t stay in its high relevé, the turn doesn’t work correctly.

Now, all I need is time to work on that. Time, time, time. If I could just get 36 hours in a day, I’d be golden.  And if any of you figure out how to do that, please, give me a call.

Yesterday, I was at the gym, on a treadmill, as I am generally every-other-day. Normally I start (after a quick warm up), by running a fast half-mile, and then jogging the rest of it. When I started yesterday, though, I just did not feel like running fast. So I didn’t. Then, as I was nearing the end of my run, I thought – no, no, I really do have to do it. If I don’t do it now, then the next time it’ll be easier to not do it, and then before you know I won’t be running that fast half-mile anymore. Well, I thought, I’ll just turn up the speed and get it over with really quickly.

Great idea, in theory. Only problem was that I was tired. My legs were tired. I didn’t feel like running. I wasn’t paying attention. One moment, I’m running along, and then, I feel my right foot cross in front of my left. Hm, I thought, that’s not where that foot is supposed to be. Right foot hooks around the left, and down I go, onto the treadmill.

Quite suddenly I found myself splayed at the end of the still-running treadmill, nothing injured except for my pride. That’s what I thought, at least. Not so.

Both of my legs are now a bruised and scabby mess, making it difficult for me to walk, never mind dance. I’ve now got lovely green bruises spreading underneath the red and purple burns.  I considered taking a picture, but decided against it because while I’m sure some artist somewhere would find that just lovely, I’m going to spare you all the disgusting nature of that scab/burn and bruise mix (and spare myself the embarrassment such a picture would engender). As such, I’m not going to dance tonight – I’m not sure I could hobble to the studio, never mind pull off degages when I get there.

But, because this is the first (and hopefully last, barring any H1N1 insanity) class I’ve missed, I have been to three classes, so I have made a couple of discoveries:

1. My left side is more flexible than my right side. I suppose I never realized this before because I have worked both of them pretty hard since I started dancing (when I was 5), but having not danced in quite some time (2.5 years), my body has reverted to only a slightly better version of its natural flexibility. I still have my left heel stretch (when I pull my left knee up to my chest, then take my pointed left foot in my left hand and straighten my leg so that my foot is on the same level as my head), but not my right. This seems particularly weird for me because I am right-handed, not left-handed, and generally right-handed dancers’ right sides are more naturally flexible than their left. Weird, huh?

2. My pirouettes are much worse than they were. Pirouettes are turns with the foot in passé. I used to have good, solid double (two turns) en dehors (outside turns – you lift your right foot up and turn to the right, or lift up the left foot and turn to the left) and en dedans (inside turns – pick up the right foot and turn to the left, or vice versa) turns, and an admittedly iffy triple that I could get right if the wind blew the right way. Not anymore. Now my double is wobbly, shaking all over the place. Ken – the instructor at Dance Arts – is, to his credit, incredibly patient, though I think both he and I were getting frustrated, though I was the only one who showed it. Not that I’ve completely lost all of my ability to turn, but it’s going to be quite a bit of work to get back to where I was.

3. I have no idea how to spell words I’ve been saying for more than a decade and a half. For every single ballet move I describe in this blog (with the obvious exception of a heel stretch, which doesn’t count) I had to look up the spelling. I’ve been talking about grande battements and rond de jambes and en dehors / en dedans turns since I was really young, but I had no idea how to spell any of them, only how to say them. I suppose this is the one – and probably only – situation in which my French pronunciation is pretty much dead on.

And sweating.

Sweating a lot.

The studio did not generally smell like a bed of roses when we were finished, though you never noticed the smell until you left the room and re-entered. Then it would hit you like a ton of bricks.

During five minute shoe changes, when I would pull off soft ballet shoes and buckle on tap shoes, I’d gulp water and chat with my fellow dancers, before heading back into the studio to become yet more exhausted. During peppy and/or happy songs, when we were performing, I and my twenty-odd cohorts kept smiles plastered on our faces, as though to communicate, “I am enjoying this! Really, I am!”

The funny thing?

Really. I was.

I was enjoying myself. I loved dance. And I think I was pretty good at it. True, I occasionally started on beat 1 instead of beat 8 when we did crazy syncopations in tap, and okay, my triple pirouette was dreadful. But my double was pretty good, and I was almost always clear and on my toes in tap. My heel stretch (taking my right foot in my right hand and then straightening the leg) maybe didn’t go all the way up to my head, but it was straight, and it went pretty well. Maybe my center split wasn’t there, but my right and left were.

That was May of 2007. It is now – in case you are unaware – October of 2009. Until last Monday, it had been close to two and a half years since I have set foot in a dance studio. Then I hatched a completely crazy plan that I may well come to regret – we’ll find out.

See, a few weeks ago I found my dance clothes in a bag I had unceremoniously thrown in a spare corner of my closet. I pulled out my ballet shoes, and my feet, now permanently misshapen by years of being forced into unrealistic shapes, practically jumped into them. I went into relevé, onto my toes, and grinned.

I had missed wearing these shoes, and as my feet automatically went into first position (feet pointed outward, with the heels touching) and my legs went into a grand plié (basically a deep knee bend) practically of their own accord, I resolved to find a dance studio. Now.

Stephens offers classes that Mizzou students can take for credit – I knew that much from some friends in theatre, but there weren’t any classes at a time I could make. So I did some research, poking around on the internet and asking around, and landed on a studio – Dance Arts of Columbia.

I’d start small, I decided. I don’t really have five (or really more accurately six, seven, eight) hours of time a week to devote to this, like I did in high school. Instead, I went over to the school, chatted with the woman at the front desk about my abilities and the classes, and before I knew it, I was signed up to take Ken Braso’s ballet technique class from 6:30-8:00 on Monday nights. It’s their most advanced ballet technique class, but the kind woman at the desk assured me I’d be fine, and if I wasn’t, Ken would help me out.

Right. First class was last Monday. It went…

Well, I’m going back next week, at any rate.

Here’s the plan for this blog: I’m going to talk about class, the struggles and (hopefully) successes I work through, tips about ballet, particularly interesting choreography/combinations, and so on.

Should be fun – or, at the very least, an interesting adventure. I hope you’ll join me.