Wednesday, October 30, 2013

All The Grace of a Cantaloupe (Not Antelope)

I am the clumsiest and least physically graceful person on the planet. How clumsy am I? Clumsy enough that my husband worries about and teases me for my clumsiness. He has an autistic spectrum disorder. Like, he was in special clumsy kid classes in elementary school. No, really. We joke that it's a miracle we haven't killed each other yet, and that it's only a matter of time before one of us accidentally stabs the other while cooking and goes to jail.
Ugh.
I mention my utter lack of grace to illustrate the fact that I am sort of frustrated with class these days. And my teacher is straight-up frustrated with me, as well. Last night she made me re-do tombé pas de bourrées across the floor about four times in each direction. She has been giving me special instructions when we are preparing for a combination "if you want to, RPrin, you can just do one piqué turn." while everyone else is supposed to do two. Standing directly in front of me during petite allegro and obviously getting flustered with my inability to make it look effortless. The problem is that I can do the steps, I just can't do them quickly. It doesn't help if I only do one piqué turn, you see, because by the time I am done with the preceeding waltz turn I am already half a beat late.
Just... just argh.
She often wonders at my strength en pointe and my weakness on flat, but it's not strength that I have trouble with. It's speed. When I speed things up it just becomes a mess, more akin to badly executed tap dancing than classical ballet.
Sigh... anyway. So it's all been rather disheartening lately and my motivation levels haven't been at their peak. The fact that I just smashed my head against the corner of a bookshelf is not helping.

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