Tiggers are wonderful things. Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of springs.
Ok, so I'm still a bit bouncy. I've had the feeling that I've been improving for a while, but getting external validation is really exciting. Hence yesterday's very brief posting. Here's a bit more detail.
There were 22 students, 20 women and one other man I hadn't seen before. He was wearing heavy socks rather than slippers, which I've observed is often a sign of someone who is taking class for the first time and doesn't want to invest money in slippers he may never wear again. Wrong! Once we got started it was clear he was not new to ballet. Book. Cover. Yeah.
The Beginner II class attracts an interesting variety of students. The young (20s?) woman next to me at the barre had been injured and had been facing surgery but healed without it. This was her second class since being cleared to return; coincidentally, she was also next to me in the Beginner I class last Wednesday. It was clear she had a good bit of training but was deliberately taking things cautiously to avoid re-injury. There were also a few refugees from the Beginner I class and the rest were somewhere between. I was expecting to find myself near the bottom of the class, but I think I'm pretty close to median.
So what's the difference between the Beginner I and Beginner II classes? In Beginner I the teacher will demonstrate a fairly simple sequence, then lead the class through it. In Beginner II, the sequence is longer, faster, more complex, and after demonstrating it she doesn't lead the class through it. There is more focus on proper port du bras. Since this same teacher teaches the Wednesday night Beginner I class portions of the sequences were the same, which helped tremendously. For those portions that weren't familiar, I looked for others who seemed to know what they were doing. There were a couple of steps that I hadn't heard of before but they weren't terribly complex. The center combination included a pirouette en dedans (from fourth) which I'd never tried before. My turns were kinda ragged, but I did them better than I was doing them en dehor just a couple of months ago.
Yeah, I'm excited.
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