Wherein I Complain a Lot

So. How's the ol' dance world going? Over here I've just been overwhelmed and stressed out for a few solid months, but my part in the recital preparation is complete, so I feel a little lighter emotionally. Of course... now the people I have turned it over to are doing strange things like sewing hot pink trim on to my carefully constructed flame orange dress and trimming meticulously created white skirts in wrinkly grey ribbons... but you just have to learn to let it go. I guess.
I can damn near see the whole floor in my sewing room, now! So many bedraggled old tutus have finally left my presence. It's sublime.
While struggling through this year's miasma of sewing, design, and actual dancing, I stopped attending my regular pointe classes. It was just too much to deal with all at once. I have decided, I think, that I just can't do two and a half solid hours of intense cardio. It's exhausting, and not in a good way. There are not enough spoons in my proverbial drawer. There is a problem, though. I mean aside from the feeling of defeat at not being able to do this incredible thing I busted my ass to achieve. I know I am the first person in the entire history of the world to say this but... I am pretty sure my poor feet would feel 100% less awful right now if I was taking pointe again. Isn't that ridiculous? But it's true! My arches aren't getting stretched the right way, my muscles aren't as strong so they don't support me as well. The whole thing is infuriating, to be honest. I WANT to do pointe. I ENJOY it (for some reason?). But it also makes me feel better. Dancing, in general, helps my pain levels and joint mobility so much. I never notice how much until I don't do it for a while.

In other dance related news: I have just discovered these crazy floating Russian dalek dancers, and while they are the least exciting dance troupe you have ever seen they are mesmerizing and amazing and put one in mind of beautifully creepy automata like the Schloss Hellbrunn mechanical theater. I imagine there are lots of interesting steampunk possibilities, here. Also, I want to know how they do that, because I totes want to pull off that little party trick:

skip ahead to about 1:30 to check that madness at the door.

 

I can't so I will

I don't often feel compelled to post about something that is just going to go viral in 12 hours, anyway (I mean, I was tempted to complain about how saggy Misty Copeland's Odette tutu was, but I controlled myself), but this hit me right in the feels:

Here's where I found it (linky linky)

the felicities of rapid motion

"It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;--but when a beginning is made--when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt--it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more."

-from "Emma" by Jane Austen

ze Queen and ze firebird

How is the "no ballet in opera" scene from Amadeus not on Youtube? How am I supposed to make this post even vaguely related to ballet without a visual aid of the most ballet-related thing going on in my life right now? GEEZE, PEOPLE!
My husband has been gone to visit family for the past few days and I have spent my alone time eating entire pints of sherbet straight from the tub and watching movies set in the 18th century for fabulous rococo costuming inspiration (so depressing, all these movies! All of them! Why are there no happy movies with panniers and giant hair?) and because I am reading a biography about Marie Antoinette.
Did you know Marie Antoinette was a dancer? Ballet was different, naturally, than it is now, but she loved to dance. Here she is performing a ballet with her brother at a state wedding:

Last week my teacher gave me a copy of all the videos from last Summer's recital. All my costumes! Eeeee! The Firebird looked so cool! I wish I had stills to share with you guys, or that the videos weren't in such a shitty low resolution that I could take screen caps that weren't awful. It looked really nice moving around, with all the flamey bits swishing about. Sigh...

I would blur out faces but the resolution on these is so dreadful that I am pretty sure they count as anonymous.
PS: I am not responsible for the weird little poky-outy feathers at the edges.
Someone just did that. I had no control.

An Ode to Vintage Ballet Photography

Modern dance photography is all about captured movement. Graceful arabesques, dramatic leaps, and that fraction of a second when a dancer is perched just so on the front edge of her pointe shoe platform. Photography meant to inspire and thrill. To make you feel like you have seen a dance, not a photo. Dare I say it? This sort of fabulousness is ... well. Not really all that attainable for most of us.

from Gene Schiavone Photography

But Oh! for the days of classic ballet photography! Where a dancer could simply stand in her gloriously ornate costume and still cause a stirring in your heart:

Ornate and GIGANTIC. Did I mention gigantic?

How many modern dancers have even 

worn a costume big enough that you can't

get through the door?

I ask you.

Or better yet: lean subtly against the wall. Cuz mama don't need to be supporting her own weight for this whooooole dang long exposure. Walls were invented for a reason, right? Use 'em.

Look, if Margot Fonteyn can lean subtly against a wall then so can I.

Or. You know. Not so subtly:

Inspiration and Defeatism

Honestly, I had a really awful ballet week. I suppose there are just stretches of time in which you feel overwhelmed, unprepared, incompetent, and just plain lost. There are times like that in any pursuit, I suppose. Even in real life. I know there are days when I feel like I have no idea why I am considered so great at my job (brag brag) when holy crap, I have struggled all damn day to do something ridiculously easy. Eventually the feeling passes. Eventually you bang out a string of perfect buttonholes or land a double pirouette. But while you are feeling the slump there is very little you can say to yourself that sounds positive.   My teacher has been stepping up the complexity of our center work to the point that I now feel like I am utterly floundering and starting to question how I have spent the past year + in level three classes and still can't dance my way out of a sack...

Anyway. So that is how I have been feeling this week. Yesterday I ran across this post on a tumblr blog called Brilliant Broad. It was inspiring and I asked if I could share it with you guys, and she graciously agreed. I am going to let her post speak for itself:

Anyway, it reminded me of the good things about dancing and I needed that. Way to go, Brilliant Broad. Way to go all of us adult beginners and awkward/unlikely dancers. Long may we ronde de jambe.

Back en Pointe and it Feels So... uhm...

This has been my first full week of honest-to-goodness classes since my foot bruise incident. I even did a full two and a half hours of class last night, including an hour en pointe. It wasn't as bad as I had feared! The bruise feels fine, astoundingly. The end of my big toe is still sore the next day, and I can still feel my calves, that's for sure. But I think I owned it pretty hard, all things considered. I was just exhausted by the end of the day.
My teacher was amazed I made it through, and I have to admit that I am pretty amazed, as well.

Several times now my nearest and dearest friends and relations have grumped at me pensively "I've never even seen you dance!" as if for some reason they would actually like to witness such a thing. I was reminded of these comments last night. While attempting a ridiculous (everything is ridiculous in pointe shoes. It's like wearing cinder blocks on your feet) waltz turn combination across the floor, my teacher announced that she was giving us tougher combinations because she wanted to get us to actually dance. And I thought "Pssh! Woman! If I wanted to dance I wouldn't be in ballet class!" 

Small House of Uncle Thomas

The theater where I work recently (like a week ago) staged the King and I. I think I saw the movie once when I was 17 and staying at someone's house to watch their cat while they were out of town. That was back when I was terribly industrious and used to get house sitting jobs to earn extra cash. At night I would sit around with the cat and watch my employer's video collection (remember when we all watched videos?) or read their books (Memoirs of a Geisha SUCKED, by the way) . Anyway. So, I saw it ages ago and aside from "Shall We Dance" (buh-dum-dum-dum) and the king dropping dead at the end the only part I really remembered was the ballet version of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the middle. Because it is SO freakin' weird, yo.
So. I went to see the dress rehearsal and found to my surprise that the crazy ballet is actually the best part of the entire show. Maybe I just have a greater appreciation for the dancers and details now, or maybe the antiquated /romanticized/borderline racisty stuff is just more glaring at 32 than it was at 17.
There is a bit when Eliza and the angel are walking across the frozen lake that involves all these little scootchy foot movements across the stage. As I watched all I could think was "I bet people think that is easy, but that shit looks HARDCORE to me". I totally had to try it when I got home. It TOTALLY IS hard! Dang!

This isn't us, but it's the best production I could find on Youtube. The scootchy feet are about halfway through.

PS: am I the only one who really only knows the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin through this movie? Sure, we talked about it in history classes when I was in school, but it's not like people actually READ the darn thing these days.

The Shoes Heard Round The World. Or Something.

Many years ago...
I took a belly dancing class once a week, along with my mom and sister and a family friend. It was probably terribly good for us. Anyway...
As I was practicing turns in the living room one day I caught my toe on the carpet, thereby folding it under my foot. And quicker than you could blink I stepped on it, breaking my toe. It was pretty dreadful. This risky barefoot tradition (with the attendant way your feet get all grubby on the floor during class) remained in my mind as the peril of belly dancing.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago. I had recently quit my retail job and I was stoked to start expanding my online store. I had been tossing around the idea of dying shoes for a while so I was on the prowl for cotton canvas shoe blanks that could be experimented with. I remembered my previous experiences with belly dancing class and decided that some canvas ballet slippers would probably be the perfect medium, with the added bonus of having an obvious market. Breaking toes is just so outré.
So I went online and bought some canvas slippers from Discount Dance Supply...
Which reminded me of all the pretty ballet shoes there are in the world...
Which reminded me of how much I wanted to dance again...
And the rest is history.

PS: I did dye those slippers! But then I discovered that the dye makes the leather soles go all crunchy and cardboardy... and I really hate lumpy soles anyway, so...
Yeah, I never actually put any of them in my shop.
But here they are, anyway, the shoes that started this whole crazy thing:

FLASHY.

Not a real blog post

Just a video. Because I was compelled to watch it three times in a row yesterday...

Shins: an Update

I think that what my shin splints really needed was for me to take a week off from class. Probably two or three weeks, really, but fuck if I'm doing that unless I have to, right? In any case I felt good enough tonight to do petite allegro (you know, not well or anything, but I certainly won't blame that on shin splints) AND sauté  arabesques. I skipped changements, though. I figure if I am only recovered enough to do half of the stuff, then it's going to be the stuff that doesn't suck.
We also started a new thing: pas de basque. Which is a silly little rock side to side and is a lot of fun. I think character roles are probably way more fun than classical roles. I know, I know. The mere thought is some sort of heresy. But you know? I just like to dance. It doesn't really matter what type of dancing it is. I had a great time when I used to take belly dance lessons. When we were young and hip enough to know all the bands and go out to clubs every weekend I thought drunken swirling around was pretty fun. Heck, I even enjoyed the dreaded square dancing in elementary school.
*shrug*

Oh, and I know I've been having some sort of ballet-related dreams lately, but I get all distracted by other stuff and forget all about it. You know, stuff like... being on a space station and flying rapidly toward the window, knowing that I'm going to break through it and implode in a vacuum. Or being at some symposium on historical reenactment and idly fooling around with the claymore (the sword not the land mine. ALTHOUGH...) of the audience member sitting in front of me and then realizing it's my ex boyfriend. Yeah. Like that doesn't mean anything...

Ballet History Lesson

A quick share for your afternoon, while I work lazily and conserve my spoons for ballet class tonight:

And you'd better believe I've been attempting to walk around the house like this all morning.

Looks Familiar:

 

swiped from the Ornamented Being

Classy Print Job, USPS!

I can't be certain but I think this post mark might be dance related:

Maybe.

Skullhead Bonyhands

Since we were discussing unusual source material for ballets recently...
Did you know that there is an Edward Scissorhands ballet?
Did you want to know?
I am torn between thinking "awesome!" and thinking "god, really?"

To tell you true I have only ever seen the movie once, when I was in 8th grade, and I have never seen the ending. Does he die? Does someone die? I don't even know. Maybe they all live happily ever after. It's not that I wouldn't be down with seeing it, it's that no one really wants to see it with me and I always forget about it when I am alone with netflix.
That blonde hair on Winona Ryder kinda drives me nuts, though!

Anyway. Edward Scissorhands. Now you know. 

*This Post May Contain Nuts

I was watching my classmates rehearse for the recital on Monday night. It was great fun to watch! I think choreography just makes my brain short circuit. The only choreographed dance I ever had to attempt was as a 16 year old drama nerd. Myself and two equally silly young things had to perform a weird little song and dance number smack in the middle of a play. And, to make it all even better? We were dressed as mermaids so we couldn't move our feet! Which subtracts a HUGE part of dancing, y'know? And therefore remembering your moves is a whole lot easier. Anyhow. In a way I am glad to not be attempting any of that crazy choreography business right now, but in another way... ooh! Pretty dresses! And twirly twirly twirling! Ooooh!
Siiigh...
In class recently I manged to hold a balance for ages. Demi-pointe on the left foot and the right off the floor in coupé. It was a total fluke, but it impressed the heck out of my teacher (I then totally failed to be able to do anything similar at all for the rest of the evening). I heard her saying something a bit later, about needing to advance some of the students in to the next level of class. I find myself desperately hoping she didn't mean me.

Oh, and PS:
In case you thought I was joking about the mermaid suits...

 I refuse to say which one I am.

Also, my 30-year-old self only keeps this photograph 

as a desensitization tool in case someone

tries to blackmail me later.

Oh Dear, I Discovered Another Thing to do With Polyvore...

Princess Grace: flower fairy by iwillfly

You may as well just hook me up to an IV, because I don't think I am ever going to get up from in front of the computer again...

The Perfect Outfit For Those Future Pointe Photos?

Oh yes, I think so.

Hey, guess who's competent?

That's right! Me! Tonight my teacher was all "hey, Rheumatic Princess, why didn't you sign up for the recital?" And I was like "dude I am shy" and she said aww, that was too bad because I was totally competent.
THAT'S RIGHT, I AM MOTHER F*CKING COMPETENT!
WOO!
In related news I have been able to go in for extra classes on a fairly regular basis lately and I am feeling a lot more confident in the "harder" class. In truth, due to the way the classes are set up to "graduate" students in to the more advanced classes as they reach a level of (dare I say it?) competence, I think that it is quite possible that they are just doing less advanced stuff now. But, anyway, I will TAKE IT. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, girl.
Anyway, we are still learning new and interesting stuff! It's always exciting when something new comes up. Tonight we were doing combinations of bourées with a graceful turn and some fancy swooshing port de bras, and it was darn near dancing, though obviously painfully slow. We hadn't done bourée before, and it's one of those things that the internet assures you will feel like flying across the stage someday when you are wearing slippery satin shoes. What it fails to mention is that OW that is some serious calf exercise. It was stupidly fun and exciting, though, and so I will probably be bourée-ing across my kitchen floor in fuzzy socks for the next few days.
ALSO, are you a person who likes to know where our silly dance terms come from? I am. So that is what the internet is for. And a bourrée, an actual bourée, is a French folk dance. Here are some people rockin' it. I am sure I have witnessed this at a rennaisance faire or something of the sort (yes, yes, I do that, too. It's all about making up excuses to wear pretty dresses) and it has very little to do with bourrée and pas de bourrée as we do them in ballet, but I guess it all had to come from somewhere, right?:

It looks fun! I might go so far as to say "hella" fun. 

That's right, I just said "hella" like it ain't no thang!

Bam!

Famous People Who Were Dancers, Yo

Moira Shearer is kind of a no-brainer. She was

an actual ballerina with the Royal Ballet. But

you already knew that.

Audrey Hepburn. I mean, we all love Audrey anyway,

but isn't that a cool thing to know? I guess she was

in a movie that required dancing at one point, called

The Secret People. Blonde hair in that movie, though. Ick.

Leslie Caron. Known best for An American in Paris,

which I have to admit I have never seen and had only

heard of in a vague way. She co-stars in one of my

favorite movies of all time, though, Father Goose with Cary Grant.

You should watch it.

Brigitte Bardot. I love this photo. She's rockin' some 

serious eye makeup and straight bustin' out a cig in the studio.

For reals, girl, that shit will not help your dancing.

James Dean. Whuuuut? I know, right? Also, forget James for a seond

and check out the dude that is third in the row. What are you doing,

dude? I can see that the teacher has crammed herself in front of him to correct the 

person ahead of him, but that is really no excuse for whatever the

heck this guy is doing.

BONUS MODERN PERSON:

Summer Glau. Which should not surprise you at all if

you have seen Firefly. She straight kicks it with some peasants while

wearing big old boots in one episode. I assumed that was why

she got the job in the first place.