Back to Court

Today I taught class. Normally class on Saturday is taght by Claire Torre, but she asked me if i could switch days with her. Company class is taught everyday the company is in season. I only teach once a week. My classes tend to be the least popular of those taught by the teaching staff. This is because my own body used to take a long time to warm up, so I give very long barres. Additionally, there are two schools of thought about class. One is that it should be used as a warm up. The other that it is for strengthening. I am of the second school of thought. Dancers should come into class 10 minutes early and do whatever idiosyncratic warm ups their own body needs. When I was dancing I would need to stretch for about half an hour before I took class. Another thing about my classes is that I don't need to use them ass an outlet for my creativity. I am going to have the dancers in rehearsal for 3 hours after class. So I spend my class time on perfecting technique. A teacher who is not in my position will probably give "dancier" combinations because class is part of their creative outlet.

So anyway, after class more review and more remounting of SONNETS. Today we actually remounted the pas de deux I was blogging about yesterday.

So back to SONNETS... Chelsy and Chris are now joined by the 4 couples who had danced with them earlier. They all dance a bouncy yet romantic quintet. This dance pretty much just bookends the first court dance. So we end up with your basic concerto form. Fast piece-slow-piece-fast piece. These three dances could be lifted out of the ballet and performed on their own as a mini ballet. Aside from the narration that accopanied the very first dance Rachel and Askar performed, so far we have not had SONNETS accompanied by poetry, only music.



This picture is here just to give you a insight as to why I enjoy rehearsal so much. Abby and Ari are dancing in the section I just spoke of. Things are going along fairly well. Abby is in a sort of gestural "I Love you... you are MINE!!!" pose and Ari is being appropriately attentive. But... either they are slightly off balance or Ari has gotten lost in the reverie of attentiveness land because, as you see...



A moment later, Abby is giving a quite obvious "THAT WAY!" direction. When a piece like this is being learned, you basically have this going on with all 5 couples simultaneously. they are all learning how to dance with each other within the parameters of the new choreography. Since we are not all robots, something is always going to happen with some couple. That is part of the fun of choreographing. watching the discovery happen between two people. As a choreographer you need to alow yourself to be open to also discovering things along with them, because you can find things that you didn't know were there.

So this section finishes and then we come to a very special section of SONNETS, where we shift gears 180 degrees.

Hasta Manana.