Apparently some of Joyce's family found my post, and I have been told there is an error in it.
I foolishly neglected, in my account of the révérence, to mention the curtsy to the Royal Box.
I mean, how could I have overlooked such a vital part of the process? Shame on me. One must never forget one's curtsy to the royalty who are surely in attendence.
My most heartfelt apologies for the oversight. <g>
Since I mentioned fouettés, I should share the infamous Black Swan Coda from Swan Lake, probably the most well-known of all instances of the thirty-two fouettés.
( Round and round she goes . . . . )
I couldn't find a decent rendition that also included more of the pas de deux -- all the ones I went through were less than stellar, at least on the fouetté end, with the dancers traveling way too much. But that gives you the idea.
The coda's one of those virtuoso things I think every ballet student hears about. The Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty is another, only not so visually spectacular, because it's more about the endurance of your left glutes and your right foot -- more than once, but if you want to see the really famous bit, skip to the end of this video. (Embedding's disabled on that one, alas.)
If, however, that old-skool ballet isn't really doing it for you, have some Carlos Acosta!
( I saw him perform this in Dallas, and drooled. )
If they want to sell ballet to modern audiences, scantily-clad men with freakin' amazing bodies who arrive on stage by leaping eight feet into the air are a good way to do it. And his turns are equally glorious, if less obviously so to the uninitiated. (Watch not only the number of rotations he completes, but the way he has precisely enough momentum to get around. A lot of dancers ground what's left into the floor; he doesn't have to. He floats down.)
She was a prima ballerina, in her carriage and sense of the dramatic. Not to say that she was a drama queen -- she had a lovely sense of humour and a generous heart -- but everything I know about florid overdone stage bows, I learned from that woman. Révérence, the curtsy that traditionally ends a ballet class, was a grand affair with her, as you made your bows to the audience, those in the center, those stage left, those stage right, those poor souls up in the balcony who spent their hard-earned savings on tickets to see art, a gesture to the conductor, the gracious acceptance of flowers from the younger girl who ran out on stage to give them to you, breaking off a bud to present to your partner -- it could go on for minutes at a time.
Many teachers turn a blind eye or actively encourage their students in anorexic behavior, eternally pursuing the insanely thin body now considered desirable in classical ballet. When a fellow dancer my age kept talking about how she needed to lose five more pounds, Joyce and her daughter Lyndette took her aside and told her point-blank she needed to gain weight -- that she would dance better with a healthy body than a skinny one.
Joyce and Lyndette kept me in ballet for another seven years after I had left my old studio with the intention of quitting entirely.
And after I graduated from high school, after I went away to college, I would come back and attend the daytime adult class my mother had started taking. I still do. And I remember one incident particularly, that encapsulates the kind of teacher Joyce was.
I had only just mastered the fouetté before I stopped dancing regularly, but I had always loved it. After the adult class ended, when everyone else was heading for the dressing room, I would go into the center of the floor, start myself with a pirouette, and then do fouettés until I fell off my leg. Which generally took only three or four turns at best, because I was never on my center enough to stay up.
One day, after Joyce watched me do this for a few moments, she told me that I was turning my palms down when I opened my arms. "You've got to turn them up," she said.
The direction of my palms was the least of my problems; I just didn't have the glutes any more to keep my working leg high enough, not to mention I'd always been crap at spotting and now my hair was long enough that I had to keep it in a braid instead of a bun, which shot my center all to hell. But whatever.
Fifth position. Tendu, place, pirouette --
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
Oh, I fell off my leg eventually. But I was on, three hundred percent better than I'd been before she made the comment about my hands.
Lyndette's the one who broke me of the atrocious habits left by the neglect of my old studio. I owe my still-excellent feet to her. Joyce, though, had that special gift for seeing the one tiny thing you never thought had anything to do with your problems, but in truth was the key to them. Palms down took my energy into the ground; palms up centered me, straightened my spine, lifted my ribcage, and brought everything into line.
She was an inspired teacher and a wonderful woman. She fought off breast cancer twice, encephalitis, countless other health problems that would have dropped a lesser woman ten times over. I don't know how old she was when she died today -- it used to be that even her daughter did not know -- and I'm sad for the way her health and mind deteriorated after she could no longer teach even the adult class. Ballet was her life, and when it went away, so did she. But I will always tell the story of the day she turned my palms up and made it all work, and I will always remember her with love.
The playing of a Bjork song ("Human Behaviour") at the dance party tonight inspired me to come up with a genre system for music based on parts of the body. That's a thigh song, you see, where "thigh song" is defined as "a song where you plant your feet wide apart and sink down, knees bent, so your thighs will be very unhappy at you later if you don't normally do things like that or have fallen out of the habit."
Thigh songs may perhaps be subdivided into stompy songs (self-explanatory) and thigh-hip songs, which blur over into those hip songs where you're not sunk down while swinging your butt around. There are also toe songs (bouncing a lot on the tips of your toes) and feet songs, not to be confused with the former category -- feet songs involve both heel and toe, doing fun footworky things. Also arm songs, though you don't find a lot of those in what people normally think of as "dance music." (My definition of music worth dancing to is . . . idiosyncratic.)
And wow, spelling that word took way too many tries, so I'm going to bed.
Happy New Year, all.
First day of classes today; the semester has officially begun. My schedule looks sane on paper -- I'm not in class that much -- but we'll see how the workload turns out.
At least I spent the weekend properly enjoying myself. I missed the first half or so of the Week of Parties, but was there for the end. Thursday was eleven hours at the Foxpad, watching two renditions of Pride and Prejudice while working on my Concordia costume; the sad thing is, for eleven hours of work, I have very little to show for it. Mostly I just cut: first the pattern itself, then a layer of satin, then a layer of lace, then a layer of lining, then a layer of underlining . . . I was heartily sick of the bodice pattern by the fifth time I cut it out. Then martini night, as per the usual, and then a quiet Friday before the dance party that night.
I told him this before, but I'll reiterate it: Drydem can DJ every dance party I go to from now until the end of time, so far as I'm concerned. Because the theme of the party was international, we got all manner of things your average person might not consider dance music, but it sounded a lot like my CD collection (I recognized quite a few of the tunes), and I loved it. I'm finally comfortable enough around this social circle to dance without feeling too self-conscious, which is great. Got some impromptu bellydancing lessons from DCM and Prosewitch, which excercised not only physical muscles that aren't so much there anymore, but mental ones too; it's been a long time since I had to try and follow another dancer's lead like that. Expected to be grotesquely sore the next day, but it actually wasn't that bad, probably because I had the good sense to stretch after I got started.
That was the official end of Party Week 2006, but for an encore I went to Feyangel's BHSS game on Saturday, which went grotesquely long, but oh, the wonderful high school angst. It's interesting, how much fun it can be to play teenaged stupidity when you have the perspective to know just how stupid it is. My character will no doubt be a vampire snack before too much longer, but that's okay; I expect her to fill the role of "damsel in distress" on a semi-regular basis.
So that's what I've been up to during the days of radio silence when I was preparing to switch my journal setup. Settling into this new home will take a little while, I think, but I'm already pretty fond of it. Bit by bit, my website is turning into what I want it to be.