The Payoff

As far as the body is concerned, change happens excruciatingly slowly. The flexibility and strength you possess now are the product of the entirety of your physical history; the only efforts that bear fruit are sustained ones. In other words, commitment to training the body means integrating these processes, these exercises into a lifestyle. Sure, you may take weeks, sometimes even months off from dancing and stretching intensively, but it's almost impossible to stop your awareness of the alignment of shoulders, pelvis, and spine as you walk, to give up the sensation of warmed joints and tantalizingly extended muscles, distractedly plie-ing as you brush your teeth. Like any other process, it builds and develops over time - your mind creates an image of the body, your body enacts this image to the best of its ability, creating sensations of weight, rhythm, and space, along with unexpected physical surprises. You learn to pay close attention to these sensations, which you then use to revise and extend your mind's image of the body's potential. And it's exciting as you get an idea of exactly how much is possible, how much this vessel which takes us everywhere we go, which IS us, is a playground for the imagination and a tool for fulfilling, meditative, and creative focus. For me it all adds up to giving the body a voice, becoming aware of connections that exist between our immediate physical state and everything that passes through our heads. Kind of like a physical actualization of the mind, making present, in all its kinaesthetic glory, the daily drama of being alive.

And on that note, I must to bed. Can't be enacting dramas of sleepiness as I deepen my connection to my body.

The Grind

Wake up at quarter of seven, make breakfast, cook lunch or pack sandwiches. Depart for school at quarter to eight, a half hour walk to help wake the body.

First, three one hour forty-five minute classes beginning at 8:30 and separated by fifteen minute breaks. Warm-up, usually gyrokinesis, then ballet and contemporary. 1:30 - 2:15 for lunch, which includes the time you need to warm-down from your last class. The afternoons vary. Composition, repertory rehearsal, or musikpraktikum until 5:15. Stay for another half an hour to stretch, or stay for rehearsals for independent projects, or to do work on your piece for composition class. Shower and leave, usually a little after six. Grocery stores in Austria close at 7, so hurry out to buy the missing essentials for dinner or tomorrow's lunch. Walk home, fix something to eat. Languish in physical exhaustion, visit friends, clean, read, or worry. Tend to your body.

Introduction

This blog was born as I lay flat on the floor, well into the second hour of a guided exploration of my breathing apparatus. Strange things happen to the mind when you toy with your oxygen intake for extreme lengths of time...

The absurdity of my situation collided with how purely sensible it is.

I follow the path of least resistance while maintaining the integrity of my overriding delight in dance, and I find myself turning pirouettes and rolling around on the floor in Austria, stone broke but with a smile on my face. Miles away from sense and stability, stuck in a community of maybe fifty dancers, ranging in age from 16 to 30 and in nationality from Colombian to Polish to Hungarian to French. Spinningly disoriented.

I never was so great with spotting.