choreography

Ghosts (of Days Gone By)

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaassssssssssssssssssssssssssssss! Of course, I recognize that everyone doesn’t have 30 minutes to watch this whole thing but you really should. The pertinent area here starts at right around 11 minutes.

As I start to feel myself more when I dance, I can’t help but think back to my first dance experiences which all revolved around choreography. I guess not all the way back to the Zoise Baer days of tap and ballet and black Little Red Riding Hood. We’ll keep it more recent than that. Not even the times in elementary school when we’d get together and put together some dance to whatever song struck our fancy at that time. Those definitely prepared me for when I got to learn more choreo.

The dance you see here between minutes 11 and 15 was one of the first dances I learned for choreography at Club Med. Granted, it was a shortened version, but it’s still a lot. I mean, at the end of the day, it Michael Jackson! We killed that shit every week in the Halloween show. Yep, we ran a Halloween show when it wasn’t even Halloween. (Oh, stomping off stage at 15:40, lol)

Sidebar: how funny that I just had this very similar conversation, unprompted, in IG messages, lol.

So yeah, I come from choreography and when I started being forced to ‘freestyle’, my go-to move was to hide or openly refuse to do it. Of course, this does not foster growth. I stuck to tricks and choreography forever. But little by little, here comes freestyling.

Part of freestyling that I didn’t really recognize was that, by doing so, I get to tell my own story. Choreography is telling someone else’s story in your voice. Freestyling is laying your soul bare for everyone to absorb. And a LOT of the time, I didn’t want anyone seeing that. It was dark and sad and choppy and broken. But guess what? That makes for pretty dance. Don’t shake your head for me. We’re all a little broken if we’re being honest with ourselves.

I think freestyling will come in stages. I’ve already broken through the ‘fuck this’ wall and I’m peeking around the corner. Next step will probably be dancing around naked with both middle fingers up yelling fuck what you think because there’s no easing into things. Throw yourself off the cliff and hope to catch some air and land softly. Is that the best plan? Probably not. Is it the plan that’s been going strong for many years? Yeahhhhhh.

The random stream-of-consciousness posts continue. Cut me some slack. It’s been a long hiatus. I’m getting my shit together. If you’re reading this, tell me if you would be interested in hearing me read you naughty stories, perhaps in lingerie, definitely for a fee.

Towards The End

 

Yep, that’s my theme song for the next 18 days. Ahhh, push it. Push into those splits! Push that food down (stupid broken hungry button), push, push, push ups. But, on the up side, I’m taking these 18 days (plus another couple) to try to start some good habits. One of these is meditation. My mind is constantly racing and I think that slowing it down could be a good thing…before I burn it out. Being still has always been a tough obstacle for me, but calming and clearing the mind is exactly what I need to focus on the tasks ahead.

Meditation, the way I’m doing/learning it anyway, is a mere ten minutes out of my day. That makes it a whole lot easier to get to than the yin yoga I’m trying to do before bed as that’s an hour. Sometimes the absolute hardest thing for me is to make time to do things. The worst part of that is that, more often than not, it’s a question of just getting up and doing it because I’m not busy at that time of the evening. I’m just lazy. But, 21 days to habit and all that jazz.

Quite some time ago, I tried to plan out how I wanted to go about this competition preparation. I gave myself about four weeks to figure out choreography and the last 2 weeks before the show to rehearse. Oddly enough, I’m slightly ahead of schedule with 18 days to go.  My choreography is done outside of some tweaks here and there. Or at least, it’s done in my head. Transferring it to my body could be an entirely different story, but one that I hope has a happy ending. Nothing super tough as I’m going for clean performance over sloppy with harder tricks. Stamina will be the most difficult part, as it always is. I have a terrible habit of performing on pure adrenaline even though it usually works out.

I have to take a moment here to wonder, where the heck did the year go?!?! Yesterday was the “unofficial” end of summer. The day before that we were out buying gear to get ready for snowboarding. Picked up a sexy jacket.

So, yeah, we’re ready for the mountains and all the snow that comes with it. Ok, maybe I’m not ready for the snowy driving because it stresses me to no end, but I’m ready to hit the slalom course already. Maybe a couple of jumps too. Maybe even some time tumbling at Progresh because I love that place and they have the most awesome dude, possibly ever, teaching their tumbling these days and I do love to think I can tumble. (I can’t, lol.)

I suppose that, most importantly, the time is nearly upon me to begin my training for some semblance of freedom. While the five year plan is to move to Mexico, I could be coerced into living in Florida, but only in the Keys, if I can manage to make the ‘work remotely from anywhere’ concept work for me. The road to freedom is long and kinda pricey, but if that there pot of gold is at the end of the road, it’ll all be worth it.

Ok, enough of the blathering for the day. Go do something!

Time Is All The Luck You Need

Let me repeat. Time is all. The luck you need.

Last night, we were chatting about playing the lottery and I said that Lovey should do it as he is more lucky than I. He said that he had probably used up all of his luck. Now I’m sitting here thinking. We’re healthy and happy with a roof over our heads and never empty bellies. We’ve had a great 8.5 years and hopefully many more ahead. This has all happened over time and will continue to happen over time. Time. Is all. The luck you need. 7M3, always powerful.

If you somehow couldn’t tell, me and music go way, way back. There are songs that remind me of certain times, places, people, or some combination of those things. Some songs make me laugh (You Be Illin’, Mesa Con Mas Aplauda), some bring a tear to right below the surface (Never Say Goodbye, You Mean The World To Me), and some are simply meant for dancing (A Lover Is Forever, Dynamite). There is simply music for almost every moment and every mood in my life. (It just hit me how much I miss group choreography and the laughs that ensued out of all of that.)

Well, a whole day has gone by between the last word in the previous paragraph and the beginning of this one. As such, tomorrow morning’s post will probably be a long one.

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