A post on dancing! Finally!

I showed Isaiah and Chaina how to do a headstand today. It was the longest and most graceful I've held a headstand yet -- I have quite a recent comfortability with being upside down, thanks to all the Pilates and core-strengthening I do. Looks like my technique is going somewhere. Looks like all I need is an audience to really execute. That, or the fact that I danced seven hours today. Takes a while to really get in your body, eh?

I realized today in class that I love Oliver. I'm not in love with Oliver, but I love the man's spirit in movement, I love that he exists and exists as a live human being who demonstrates that it is possible to reach the ecstatic in dance. That there is little way to decipher what erupts out of his body as technique at all, despite the high rond-de-jambes* and ballet vocabulary. I love that he's goofy and sensitive to his daughter's emotional rollercoasters, which, at age three (?), are frequent and sometimes inexplicable. I don't necessarily love that he gets turned on (kinetically - who knows how else) only, it seems, by 80s and early 90s hits. He's so Euro. But I think it's fun. It's satisfying to be in his class. And either I've become a super-groupie, or it's true what seems apparent to me that he is getting more "choreographic" in his final combinations.

* Non-dancey folk: rond-de-jambe is the rotation of one leg at the hip in a half-circle. It can be along the floor, or a fast circular kick in the air; torso straight or dipped in opposition the height of the foot. It is a ballet term, and classic ballet alignment would demand strict even balance in its execution, whereas in contemporary choreography the aim might be for the acting leg to pull the body off-balance, which would create momentum towards another movement. In musical theatre or more prescribed modern techniques such as Graham and Horton, there is the "fan kick". Think poofy skirts, bloomers, and cheers.

What do I mean by "choreographic" -- I mean that the combinations at the end are less intended to demonstrate the technique than to communicate an emotional or expressive meaning. I don't know if Oliver realizes he is doing this. I don't want to sound presumptuous, but with all the frustration he's had to deal with with his knee injury and his surgery next week, and whatever else is making life a little tougher these days, he's making more interesting art. He's making art. He's not just making sequences.

Funny that it's taken eight months of this blog to actually start writing about my dancing. This is why I started this blog in the first place (I think): dancer in New York, my new, though long-awaited skin. I scribble notes after every class, but usually it's a mix of text, stick-figure diagrams (w/ one triangle for the chest and one for the pelvis), and poetic inspiration. In other words, it's a horrible read. Thanks for bearing with me on this one. Detailing movement into words is quite taxing. Try it. Try describing everything that's going on in your body and everything your body is doing when you get up to brush your teeth. There -- you've just had your first composition class.