dancefest 2008: day three

Okay, first off, if your name is Aaron or Jason or Danny, or if you just don’t want to read about me dancing, then for god’s sake, don’t read this. Go to your fancy sports blogs and read about baseball or something.

(I said to Aaron yesterday, regarding my Dancefest blog: “I don’t write those for you,” to which he replied, “Well … who do you write them for?” Smarmy bastard.)
This isn’t going to be too long because I don’t really have much to say other than I have to be the worst Pas de Deux partner ever. I feel horrible. I keep getting partnered up with Jean because she’s the closest to my height, and as nice as she is, it’s gotta be tough to be partnered with a total moron. I’m just not good at the balance thing. I know it has something to do with my shoulders and the fact that I used to slouch a lot when I was younger. Basically once I got six feet tall, I slouched. Add to that the fact that I’m on computers a lot and you have a recipe for Nerd Slouch. I’ve been spending the past two or three years trying to correct it, and I have, mostly, but I still have rounded shoulders. This, for the record, stems from a side effect of Fat Kid Syndrome — namely, the necessity to hide your man boobs. So being on the computer, being tall, and having man boobs, these all aid in the Nerd Slouch. Now I’m not so bad. I mean I’m not skinny or anything and I still have a pooch belly when I sit down but I also have a much stronger core and when I stand tall and actually present myself (as in, shoulders back, chest out), I don’t look like I have man boobs at all. I’ve always been terrified of the man boobs. I think it’s because when I was younger I had long hair a lot and one time in P.E. class in seventh grade we were running outside and some girl behind me mistaked me for a girl and it sorta stuck with me for a while there.

So … yeah, this blog is all about honesty. And self-deprecation, apparently.

I’m so tall and I had the Nerd Slouch for so long that I don’t know where my center of gravity is anymore. So whenever I do a posse or a pirouette or anything that involves knowing where your center of gravity is, I fuck it up. Obviously taking these classes helps, but it’s a little difficult for me because I feel like I need some more time to process this stuff. And there is never enough time. Pas de Deux is the same. I wish I had more time to process how to partner, but there’s no time. By the time I finally start understanding something, we’re moving on. It’s hard. It’s like taking piano lessons, practicing your scales twice, and then playing a song. It’s impossible. And I don’t think that dance instructors realize that. Plus I’m pretty sure most of them don’t have that kind of patience in the first place. I don’t blame them. They want to move and do all sorts of cool stuff, and the last thing they need is for some boob like me to ask to repeat something a million times over. Oh well.

Plus, of course, the girls are on pointe and they just had a pointe class so their toes would be broken if I took all that time.

I feel this way about most physical training, actually. Like weight lifting, I’m terrified of it because I don’t want to hurt myself and I want to do it right, but nobody tells me how to do it right, or when they do, they do it once and then I have to remember everything. I inherited my parents’ awful memory storage, so I need things repeated. A lot.

In the end though I love it, even if I’m bad at it, because it forces me out of the box and it challenges me more than anything. People compliment me all the time about the dances I choreographed for dance showcase and I never understand why. I can’t do anything impressive. All I can do is tell a story through movement. Everyone says the loved the Grass dance. Why? I didn’t do anything technically cool. No double toures or fifty million fuete turns. I just acted like a goofball for three minutes. People must like that.

Well … now I must sleep so that I may dance again tomorrow.