Ballet

I'm heading out to ballet class in a bit, and so I thought it would be a good time to talk about it with you.

You can't tell because no one else is in the picture,
but my feet are totally backwards here.

Last summer when we had out little family reunion at Lake Tahoe, one morning I had Loo teach me some of her sweet ballet moves. At the time, she'd been taking ballet for something like 6 months or maybe even a whole school year and she was in love with it. I just wanted to spend some quality bonding time with the kid sis by having her share something she loved with me.

This picture clearly shows my typical "ballet face."
It's super awesome.

She taught me to plie and I think we did some tendus and holy cow, I LOVED it. I could really feel how the movements were engaging all of my core and leg muscles and it was great. Later, I was talking to Ames about it and she mentioned she had gone to a 'toning barre' class that was basically focused on using ballet movement to build tone. And I though that would be perfect for what I wanted out of ballet and determined that I would look for a similar class once I got settled in Virginia

I'm totally making this demi-grand rond de jambe look easy.

Several (okay two) months later when I was finally settled in Virginia, I started really looking into ballet-style toning classes. But as I thought about what I really wanted to get out of ballet, I decided that I would be better off looking for an adult beginning ballet class. I wanted to learn how to move my body differently, and to really 'live' in it. I know that sounds weird, but I'd always kind of had an 'inner me/outer me' disconnect and I decided that I didn't love that, and I had this theory that taking ballet classes would help me get over that.

Posture could have been better, but I didn't fall over.
And that's something.

I was right. One thing that I have learned to really love about ballet is the way that it focuses your mental energy on your physical movements -- to do it right you have to find that mind-body connect, that inner me/outer me union. When ballet is working it's you, your body, and the music and I love that. It's different from running, where you can set your body almost on autopilot. I like running for that reason, actually, it's physically hard, but it leaves your brain mostly stimulus free and I find running a really good time to contemplate life, the universe and everything.

Soutenu turns are my favorite.

Ballet for me is the opposite. It doesn't (yet) require the same level of intense physical exertion that running does (mostly because I'm still beginning), but it does require a kind of single-minded focus on the moment, the movement, that drives out all other mental considerations.

I'm totally in this moment, and enjoying it.

A couple weeks ago, as part of national dance week, the studio that I go to had an adult showcase for their adult dance classes. One of the other girls in the class and I decided to participate and our instructor put together an adagio routine and a little waltz. Mostly I did it to please some friends who'd been wanting to see me dance, and it was really fun to perform actually. Never mind that I started in backwards fifth and that obviously neither of us was at "we've been dancing since we were three" level of ballet awesomeness.

We were no corp de ballet in perfect synch.

And it was obviously not as pretty and graceful on us as it was on our instructor who had been dancing since three.

This looked AMAZING when Rachel did it.

But I looked through the pictures that Annie took of the recital and was pleasantly surprised at how well I'm wearing ballet these days.

Just like a real ballerina, right?

Ruminations on the Circus

A few weeks ago, I went to the circus with RickReed&Brian.

Rick was very proud of the fact that he had gotten us $65 seats for $15 from work. Rick is very frugal and loves good deals.

Anyway, what I realized as soon as the circus started is that I'm not good at going to the circus. For one thing, there was always so much going on all the time that it was hard to decide what to watch ever.

For another thing, people in the circus do really intense tricks, like ride standing up on the backs of horses, which I was okay enough to take a picture of:

Or riding upside-down UNDER THE HORSE which is running really fast and would easily CRUSH THEIR HEADS if something went wrong and was way too stressful for me to watch, much less take a picture of.

It didn't help that one of the lions in the Big Cats act was really grumpy, but the lion tamer made her do tricks anyway:

And at one point she decided to let him know just about much she did not want to be doing tricks right now, thank you very much, and chased after him. (It looked like real lion crankiness, but I will grant the possibility that it was a trick intended to heighten the drama of the show. But I'm pretty sure she just wasn't feeling like doing tricks.)

Pretty much the whole first half of the show my entire body was tense from watching people throw themselve under animals, play with cats that really shouldn't be played with, suspend themselves on the points of spears, and do tricks while suspended BY THEIR HAIR!

Ugh! That just looks painful! Oddly, I was much more okay with tricks that were reliant on human skill and didn't involve suspending yourself on painful things. For example, I was pretty okay with this guy throwing himself through a sword-laden ring of fire

Well, at least more okay with that than I was about the two dudes who bent a steel bar by each putting and end of it on their sternum. And the acrobatic acts didn't phase me terribly either

And I liked the elephants

What most struck me about the circus, though, was how very circus-like it was. Like, every movie cliche you've seen about the circus was in the circus, and it got me pondering the lack of innovation in circusry and made me wonder about the history of the circus and how it got locked in its current form. (If anyone knows a good book about the history of the circus, I'd love a recommendation.) I feel like I probably never need to go to the circus again, because I've seen a circus and it was exactly like I expected a circus to be, but the traveling circus used to be like The Event that people waited for year after year. Which I guess meant that it had to maintain a certain level of familiarity, but I imagine that there also had to be quite a bit of innovation going on to keep people coming back to see what would be there this year. So what crushed circus innovation? And, is there a way to revive it?

I also spent a great deal of time wondering how one ends up as a circus performer these days? Like, for real, how does one become the girls dancing in plastic bubbles suspended from the ceiling, and are they passionate about it?

So, aside from the fact that I'm pretty sure I left fingertip shaped bruises on Reed's knees and that I had to spend the rest of the night shaking it out to get rid of built up stress, it was a fun night at the circus! And if you are interested, you can go see more pictures of the show over on SmugMug.