Tuesday, October 30, 2018

A Double Pirouette! And Tours!

Recently I've been having trouble with turns, which I've been blaming on the humidity making the floor sticky. Now that we've entered heating season the floors are dry and no longer sticky. Today after barre I seemed to be doing piroouettes pretty well and I decided to try a double. It worked! This is the first time in years. I'm pretty happy about that.

Last Tuesday evening we had six or seven students. Tonight we had 15 or 16, including three other men. Something about Halloween, I guess. Speaking of which, the two front desk staffers were dressed as a unicorn and a llama.

Our instructor decided for some reason that we should do tours. We've never done tours in the 5(?) years I've been in her classes. I tried these a couple of times during the Adult Weekend Workshop a few years back and every time I ended up flat on my back. And I mean that literally. This is one of the reasons I knew I was leaning back during turns and I've tried to train myself out of that. Since everyone else was going to do tours I figured I might as well try, and while they weren't pretty I didn't fall. So that's two good things tonight.

The sad news is one of my favorite classmates, one who usually takes class in pointe shoes, missed the last step of the stairs she was going down last week and sprained her foot. Nothing is broken, but even now she can barely put weight on it and still can't walk. Nothing is broken, though, and her doctor thinks it should heal just fine in time. She's understandably very unhappy about it and will be out of class for several weeks.

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Dancing ballet is like a drug addiction

Someone asked me today why I was walking slowly and rather deliberately. I explained that I'd gone back to class after a few weeks away. Like a drug addiction, staying at your usual dose is fine, and while taking too much is bad, quitting and restarting is worse.

Okay, so it's an imperfect analogy, but it's the one that came to mind.