The Best and Worst of Times

Today I believe that I had the best and the worst of the classes I will take while here.

It’s true that I haven’t had all of my classes yet (and I promise to write a blurb about all of them once I have), but both of them gave off such strong impressions that I’m quite sure in my assessment.

Dance Performance, which started at 9:30 this morning and went for three and a half hours, was the class I have fallen in love with. To begin, the teacher, Giorgio, is one of the sweetest and funniest people I have met. In the words of one of the other dancers, he is “a living cartoon character.” And this statement is completely true. He has an adorable mixing of Italian and broken English (“Leave your brian in the garden!” Where brian = brain) and is constantly switching from a Fred Astaire-like trickster to a sweet guy constantly cracking jokes. In his class, we seem to be mostly working on improv and relaxing/breathing techniques in order to create better breath, grace, and intention in our movements. Since these are all things that Chris and Gina strive to teach us (and he really reminded me of Gina with some of his mind bending [ie: different motions with different timings done at the same time] warm-ups) and are things that I find to be really important to both technique and body health, I am really excited by this class and the growth I expect to gain from it. And all of these things combined make the three and a half hours go surprisingly quickly.

The other class we had today was Ballet. I know that I’ve never been a huge fan of ballet (boring warm up music, it can be so rigid and emotionless at times, can mess up your body easily, etc…), but I told myself that I had to give it chance, and, that if it was bad, it would only be and hour and a half anyways. Entering the studio, not all was bad. I mean none of our classes so far had had mirrors or marley so it was exciting to see those things, but things quickly took a turn for the worse. The fast pace of the exercises, the unfamiliar barre work, two distant and harsh teachers, and the pure instrumental music left me feeling unbalanced and unsure of myself and the technique I know I have been building on in Beloit. However, this was not rock bottom. I’d been through some bad ballet classes before (and one wonderful one.  Thank you Renay!), and I knew that if I weathered though my self-doubt I would most likely benefit from this class. Then I heard an awful horrible sentence come out of one of the teachers’ mouths:

“There is lazy turn out here.”

Now I took dance kinesiology and that taught me a lot of the stupid, excuse my language, shitty things that dancers can do to their bodies and pushing for perfect 180 degree turn out is one of those things. Along with not even being a useful trick for dance (I mean some turn out is necessary for certain movement, but that extreme of a turn out does nothing to help a dancer except to give them a more box-like pose in stillness. Blah.), it can be really harmful to a body if one turns out from the knee instead of the hip. Now, to give you perspective, most of the dancers in our group, excluding me and possibly one or two other girls, had fantastic or perfect 180 degree turn out. Unfortunately, I think she was referring to the group as a whole so this comment (and some of the other exercises we did) have made me feel that, if I’m not careful, I could seriously hurt myself in this class (or pick up dangerous dance habits).

There were a few good moments in class (I was able to pick up almost all of the combinations, even though the one teacher only spoke Italian, because we both spoke the common language of French dance terminology, and I did much better in center work than I expected to do), but my worry about my dislike of the style combined with the fear of injury had me leaving class feeling awful.

However, earlier tonight, my roommate mentioned to me that she had also really disliked the class for similar reasons, and, after much discussion, we have entered a pact. We will not let this class pressure us into harming ourselves either physically or emotionally. We will instead revel in our own bodies and their abilities and will take this class as an opportunity to see how our bodies can play with the ballet style….and we’ll also come to each other whenever a kvetch fest is needed. J

So that is where I am now: excited about Dance Performance class tomorrow and feeling more prepared for whatever this ballet class will throw at me.

Ciao!