Monday, July 28, 2014

(Re)Learning to turn

We had a substitute instructor yesterday. She normally teaches at The Washington Ballet school, but is covering for our regular instructor who has personal obligations this week. She's really good, but unfortunately doesn't appear to teach adult evening classes.

One of the sequences in center included two pirouettes en dehor. The humidity level was lower, and floor didn't feel so sticky. While we were marking the sequence I found that my turns in one direction felt far more stable than usual, with less of a tendency to fall out of it at the end. I concentrated on repeating that success, and by the time we moved on most of my turns in both directions ended with the feeling of being balanced. If I can do that consistently I'll be much happier.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

That's dancing

Has it really been over a month since my last post? Wow. I suspect it's because my usual time for blogging is while eating after class, and recently I've spent that time being social. Cuz it's not because I haven't been going to class.

Tuesday evening the instructor was apparently feeling inspired, having recently returned from a reunion of sorts with her dance academy classmates. This resulted in the center work being rather lyrical with a lot of emphasis on making the steps flow together. Thus the comment she made to the effect of, "It's not a series of separate steps; they blend together. That's dancing!"

Despite getting to two classes a week (Tue & Sun) on a regular basis, I've been feeling quite tight. Yeah, yeah, not enough stretching between classes. Somehow, during barre, I managed to overstretch something in the outside of my left heel. Not a "pop" but just a little ache. This is the tendon that supports a lot of the weight when on demi-pointe, and the ache got a bit worse as class progressed. I ended up skipping most of the jumps at the end of class as a result. I limped a bit after class as it tightened up, and I'm still walking a bit stiffly. I'm going to give it more warm-up time before class Sunday.