Forgiven by the Gods of Burlesque?

Dearests,
although (as usual) my vanilla life is plagued with annoyances and setbacks (I won't bore you with the details - it's not that kind of blog!), in regards to burly it seems as though the gods and godessess of the stage have (at least for the moment) forgiven me.

In all, burlesque wise, it hasn't been a bad few days. The big win was getting my money refunded for those wigs (see the previous posts for the whole story). I requested the refund, unsure what the outcome would be but in the end the seller refunded me and now the whole matter is resolved. It was a stressful and frustrating experience from start to finish but as the saying goes, 'All's well that ends well'. I would like to put that money towards an item I want for my Jackalope costume but in reality I may have to hold onto it to pay for something stressful in my vanilla life. I should know in about a week whether the money is needed for that or not. If not I can start steaming ahead with the next phase of the outfit.

At ballet last night it was a very small class (only about six of us) and this meant there was a lot more scope to go over things that were difficult. Also because three of the girls there were quite advanced dancers just taking the class to keep in practice it meant that the teacher made the lesson a little more complicated to keep them interested but she could help the less able students a little more too as there were less of us (me bringing up the rear as usual!). The class was great and I felt really stretched by the end of it. There are still one or two steps in the routine we are working on that I seem to get tangled up in, and I can't balance when performing an arabesque to save my life but I really feel like some of it is sinking in. At the end of the class the teacher even complimented me, saying she could see an improvement with my technique at the barre. I'm not sure if she was being kind and encouraging me because I am one of the weakest students in the class or if I really have improved but I do feel as though I know more what I am doing at the barre now and I get less fuddled. Either way, it felt nice to be praised and I feel like the classes are doing me some good one way or another.

On the wig styling front I am now about half way through the backcombing process. Every evening this week I have promised myself I would come home from my day job and work on it but work has been so busy that I have come home too tired to do much to it. I am hoping that I might get some done on Friday as I have the afternoon off work, but I will blog with photos (if I can figure out how to do it) just as soon as I have finished it. I still need to order some of the ornaments and trinkets that I want to dress the wig with but that will have to wait until I have some cash!

In other, more practical burlesque news, I am performing at the Ringside Review in Hull on Saturday, ran by Anna Fox and starring Billie Rae, Pinny Lace and Milan (and me!)



I am pretty excited about this gig as I have heard so many nice things about the Ringside Review. I am also excited and nervous as this will be my first proper motorway drive and I will be doing it solo! I am a bit scared about going on the motorway and about undertaking such a long drive but it will be worth it in the long run as negotiating busses, coaches and trains with my huge suitcase and box of props makes me flapped and furious! So wish me luck, and assuming I don't die in a twisted heap of metal by the side of the road I'll let you all know how it goes.

'Til next time
x
Emerald

Dancing Again...

Dearests,
Two blogs in as many days! Either I have a lot to say for myself or I am using my blog to escape from the banal reality that is my working day! Either way though, here I am!

Last night was ballet. I haven't been for two weeks as last week I had a gig (four acts in one evening!) at the Test Match in West Bridgeford; a private party for the managers of the pub chain, and the week before it was half term. My leg is still a bit painful, although this week it has not been quite as bad and although I have been practicing eleves, releves, and ronde de jambes like there is no tomorrow I felt a little rusty about the finer points of the class.

I was feeling rather tired that evening and I almost cried off in favour of a lazy evening of junk food and films but luckily for me I found the energy to get off my behind and into my dancing shoes. On arrival it turned out that the teacher who had been running the class was now on maternity leave (she had been pretty pregnant when I first started and now, I believe, only has about 9 weeks to go) and another girl who had been assisting her in the class would be teaching. The new teacher is young and pretty and very friendly and approachable and, as much as I liked our original teacher, I was pleased to have a go with her substitute.

The structure of the class was a little different than it has been so far. Instead of doing 20 minutes or so of barre work, 20 minutes of dance and a five minute warm down we did a shorter barre session (about 10 mins or so) and then spent the rest of the class working on a beautiful dance in the centre. I approached the idea of less barre and more centre work with some good humoured trepidation - while the barre work is tricky but within my reach, so far the more complicated steps of choreographed dance confuse me. I don't pick these things up easily and I find that once I fumble on one movement that has a knock on effect on the steps that follow.
So I was not expecting what happened next. I don't know if I was having a good day, if it was that I was stood in a good position to see everything or if it was something to do with the new teacher's style of dance or of explaining the movements but I felt like I picked up the movements with a lot less fuss than usual, and I retained them better than I usually do. The teacher broke the dance down into very small parts and once we had tried each part she added on the next, pausing to make sure everyone was still keeping up. I really enjoyed the dance and I felt that because I was able to pick up the movements at the same sort of rate as the rest of the class (all bar one step that was a little too complicated for me involving going up into a pirouette position twice in quick succession)I could even add some expression and emotion to the dance and really try to perform it rather than just stumbling through the motions as I have been doing so far.

Overall I feel really positive about the new format for the class although next week we are trying a faster dance so ask me in a week if I am still feeling so capable! Also, I feel like something from the classes may be starting to pay off in my burlesque work. When I have been improvising and blocking out movement for my Jackalope and another upcoming act I have in mind I have found myself using some of the body shapes and positions I have learned in class and hopefully this will make the dance elements of these acts a little more graceful and their movements more definite. I want so dearly for my Jackalope and the other acts that follow it to be of a noticably higher standard than the things I have produced before but I know I still have a long way to go before they will be anywhere near the sort of standard I would like them to be. I suppose all I can do is try!

'Til next time
x
Emerald

A pain in the leg

Dearests,

After a fairly shaky start to my endeavours at ballet I decided to put in a little practice at home (using the book I mentioned in my last missive). Boy, did that backfire! Cut to Emerald walking like the Hunchback of Notre Damme, walking around dragging one overly turned out foot because it hurt too much to turn it back in! I was fairly sure that I had been turning out wrong as the part of the leg that hurt was the front of my calf, just by the bone.

By Wednesday (the day of the class) my leg was still very painful and I was considering staying home and licking my wounds. Luckily I plucked up the courage to go to class, planning to sit out anything that hurt too much and it paid off! The stretching at the barre seemed to ease things off a little and by the end of the class my leg felt better than it did before. Not great but definitely better. I also had a quiet word with one of my more experienced classmates. She explained that I had been over ambitious with my turnout. I had started turning correctly from the hips but had then tried to force myself to turn out further from the ankle which had aggrivated the muscle in the front of my calf. Clearly I am just too keen!

The class itself however, sore leg and all, felt so much better than last week. I felt more relaxed at the barre - less focused of my own embarrassment and more in tune with the movements and my body. The floor work, which I had been dreading, felt a hundred times better that night than it had the week before. While I did not float and glide across the floor like some of the more experienced dancers seem to do I felt like I managed to keep up with what I was supposed to be doing and if I made a mistake (which I did. Repeatedly) it was more to do with using the wrong foot or just falling out of step rather than because I hadn't a clue what I was supposed to be doing.

I left the lesson beaming with confidence and exhiliration. I could have happily stayed and danced for another hour. I felt too excited to go to bed when I got home! Of course, a lot of this probably has to do with the endorphins of exercise and so on but it still felt good! I felt as though, perhaps I CAN do this after all. Obviously, I am still one of the weakest (if not THE weakest) in the class and the improvement I noticed in the lesson is more likely a fluke or the result of feeling a little less nervous but if I can do something better once (even if only by fluke), I can do it again.

I am excited for the next class and determined to do better!

'Til the next one,

Emerald
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Reading and research... and trying not to look dodgy in the process.

Dear Heart,
As well as my less than graceful first foray into ballet lessons I decided a book might help me. As my day job is in a library, I was already in the right place! Scouring the shelves for something that would help me with my practice at home, I found 'The Ballet Book - A Young Dancer's Guide' by Andrew Ptak.

Now, I am clearly not a 'young' dancer (especially by ballet's standards) but it was the only one with pictures of the different positions and techniques so I snapped it up. It did however, make me feel a little odd looking at it in public places. This highly visual tome was published in 1984, long before we, as a country, were all hysterical that even our own grandmother could be a paedophile waiting to lure sweet faced little tykes off to 'look at some puppies'. I have to say, it felt very strange to be openly looking at photo after photo of a little girl in a leotard demonstrating her flexibility. Still, it can't be as strange as some of the instructions I saw online where the model was a male dancer (perhaps in his twenties) with a tight leotard and a huge, shall we say, 'talent'.

Whether renting this book and risking my colleagues thinking I am interested in funny business with children will pay off and improve my dancing is yet to be seen but at least it means I can study the positions in my own time instead of desperately scrabbling to pick them up at class. Knowledge is power. Hopefully.

Earlier in the week I also had the pleasure of expanding my mind vis a vis burlesque by reading an enthralling MA thesis:

"The Fantasy of Real Women"
New Burlesque & The Female Spectator

by Emily Lane Fargo.

This article came to my attention through the MoB forum and a link posted by talented burlesque performer and all-round clever clogs Glorian Gray (to download a PDF of the thesis - and you should! - go here:
http://www.ministryofburlesque.com/burlesque-chat/10948-bit-burlesque-reading.html )

I was so enthralled by this paper that I flew throught the nigh-on one hundred pages in no time. It discusses burlesque in the context of gender in a totally accessible way and reading a lot of what the author's sources said about burlesque and gender identity played out through performance really struck a chord with me. I felt so validated reading this that it has actually made me consider resurrecting an idea for an act that I had previously put to one side as I thought there would not be an audience for it.
I felt this thesis pinpointed for me a few thoughts that I had kind of been on the cusp of but had not quite been able to completely access, especially with regard to the concept of the burlesque aesthetic being about obvious artifice, creating beauty while at the same time drawing attention to the fact that it is not real.

As a teen and a younger woman I always felt that there was something fundamentally different between people like me and the 'beautiful people', it never occurred to me that the difference might just be powder and paint (and photoshop, and hair extensions, and shapewear and...). Burlesque shows you something beautiful but makes it blindingly obvious that the beautiful thing is not really real - reminding us that no beautiful thing is ever really what it seems. And I think that's a good thing. It doesn't devalue beauty in the world, it just makes the process more evident and reminds people that beauty is not solely the privledge of the born-beautiful.

In short, I think this essay is a must for anyone who is interested in how burlesque has come to be what it is in terms of gender and what this means for performers and their audiences. It also has an interesting section on alt-porn giants the Suicide Girls which I found quite enlightening.

So after all this exercise of the old grey matter I am going to go and do something mind-coddling (probably work on my patchwork quilt and watch some catch up TV).

'Til next time!
x
Emerald

A Bally-Nuisance

After a year where burlesque was securely fixed on the back burner (while I tried and repeatedly failed to attain a driving licence, finally passing on my fifth attempt at the end of November) I decided that January would be the start of a more serious focus on burlesque.

I had decided some months ago that once I had my new wheels I would take the opportunity to take a class that would help me in my endeavours as a performer. In the end I was torn between taking a dressmaking class to improve my costume making skills or taking a dance class to improve my grace, poise and movement onstage. The decider for me was performing on a bill with two very talented performers, Dani California and the inimitable Beatrix von Bourbon. Seeing these two move (each in their own way) across the stage with every gesture flowing flawlessly into the next, always in perfect control of their body, with no hint of stumble or fumble I felt like a clod-hopping klutz by comparison.

Now, anyone who has seen me perform knows that my acts are not particularly dance based. I tend more often to use pantomime and facial expressions connected with 'movement' rather than dance per se, however, watching these performers so in control of their bodies, so perfectly comfortable and fluid made me realise that, for a performance that is more pleasing to the eye, and more comfortable to perform it would be really useful for me to take some dance lessons and the general consensus was that ballet would be the best choice. My sister came with me as she loves to dance and has fancied giving ballet a go for some time.

So last night was ballet class number one. I was nervous. Partly I was nervous because the class was in a village about twenty minutes drive away and this would be my longest drive unsupervised by someone with driving experience. Mainly I was nervous that I would be the worst in the class. The drive turned out to be fine, but my nerves about the class itself had some justification. Although I do not have two left feet exactly I do have really poor spatial and bodily perception and issues with left and right. I find that once I have made a movement myself I can replicate it again without any trouble but looking at someone else and trying to copy their movements and the shapes they make is tricky for me for some reason. I can see what they are doing but I find that hard to relate to my own body. It's not just movement, if I have to copy a pose from a photograph it seems to take me longer than most to translate the image to myself and make the same pose. I see the basic shapes but often confuse which arm/leg should be doing what and which direction each part should be pointing in. So this was always going to be a challenge for me.

We began with barre exercises. So far, so good. I am nowhere near as flexible as a lot of my classmates and I sometimes found I was doing the exercise with the wrong leg at the wrong time, but essentially I felt I was keeping up. The teacher and the other ladies were friendly and welcoming and it felt like a non-judgemental space where it was ok if I made a mistake. The came the proper dancing. The teacher led us through a couple of short and theoretically simple combinations. They were not simple to me! After a couple of tries it became clear I would need to abandon any attempts at the graceful, balletic arm movements and just focus on my feet for now - they needed all the help they could get! I found it so hard to find the rhythm of the steps (normally not a big problem for me) and although I could see a bent knee or a straight leg with pointed toe I found it difficult to translate even one static position from the dance to my own physical position- moving from one to the next, and in time, I found impossible. Some of the other women in the class were clearly inexperienced too but I felt that I was lagging quite obviously behind.

At the end of the class the teacher came and chatted with my sister and me for a few minutes, even complementing Sis on her turnout (she has been practicing!). Despite the fact that I was quite clearly more Mavis the Fat Fairy than Sugar Plum Fairy I felt positive about the lesson and hope that if it's hard then that means the improvement it will make to my movement on the burlesque stage will be all the more marked when I finally do master some of these techniques. I am looking forward to returning next week and Sis and I are even considering going to the Modern class they run beforehand to really make the most of the resource.

So that was my first ballet class. As my Grandad used to say when Sis and I used to twinkle our toes around the room doing make believe dances 'Ballet dancer? More like a bally-nuisance!' But hopefully with time this clunky-duckling might evolve into something a little closer to a swan.

'Til next time!
Emerald
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