So, I’m home alone, sitting ummm, sprawled across my couch, procrastinating on starting my homework or beginning to fix dinner or doing something productive, listening to one of my classical music mixes from youtube on my ipod (hooked up to little speakers, not headphones), and suddenly, I just felt like dancing.
So I did. Nothing fancy, just some nice port de bras, some tendus, temps lie, rond de jambe, developpe, arabesque, releve balances with pretty arms, etc. type of stuff. Just bits and pieces of different basic-beginner-level center combinations, really. But I was feeling the music, so I’m going to go with it was dancing.
Ever since I started ballet I’ve been obsessed with dancing (duh), but I mean to my own creations. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve know existing ballet choreographies are beautiful and all that (and I mean no disrespect whatsoever to all the amazing choreographers out there), but sometimes I’ll hear a song and I just want to dance to it. But, like, ballet-dance, as I am a horrible non-ballet dancer. And some of these songs are not even traditional ballet music, necessarily, but I’ll just get the little video playing in my head and I’m like ‘I want to make that dance exist! (And then probably put it on youtube, as I know my chances of performing and it being my own choreography are probably slim-to-none (and I’ll definitely take performing someone else’s choreography.))’
So, yeah, dancing.
It felt incredible, unbelievable almost. Two years ago, even one year ago, I couldn’t do that. Sure, by last year I knew enough to attempt it, but now I can almost believe that it’s dancing instead of just going through the motions. Like, it’s starting to look like I know what I’m doing, like I didn’t just forget my arm and leave it hanging out the side or something or forget to point my feet. And I’m beginning to take not tipping over while on two feet flat for granted (even weight shifts), though this time last year it was still hit or miss. By now, even my one foot flat balances are pretty reliable – even including all those little adjustments the feet make to find the balance (it’s like my feet are now alive!) Sometimes when I see the lines of the muscle definition on my legs I think ‘Yeah, they’re definitely becoming dancer’s legs…’
Anyway, the point of all this is I was excited about it and wanted to share…
(Oh, and for the record, I probably would not have attempted this if my body hadn’t already been at least a little warmed up. One time I was trying to show a friend my passe releve and I hadn’t done ballet all day that day and when I went up it just felt Not Good (thankfully it felt better by the next day). I learned my lesson about always warming up before doing anything more complicated than some plies.)
balletandorbust 
Welcome to the world of ballet, where doing random choreography in the living room, jeté in the passage (especially if it’s a long one) and barre exercises at the kitchen counter are de rigueur. Watch out… soon you’ll be doing it in supermarket aisles (not that I’ve ever done that… ahem…). Dit voel net so lekker! (That’s Afrikaans for “It just feels so good!”)
I’ve been known to chaines down an aisle or two at Costco…oh, and random little releves when I get excited/hyper/bored/etc.
It really does feel so good 🙂