Rambling and Revelations

This is a bit rambling so skip if you don't enjoy rambling.

The miracle of theory! My theory of body (specifically the core) underwent a paradigm shift since Tuesday and I have so much to show for it! Dance is a physical thing. A physical thing is a mechanical thing. But sometimes to get the mechanical things to work, we need imagination! We need concepts. We need theories. We need imagination to make the mechanisms go.

Thank you so much to Mia Morissette. I took a several-month break from (exertive) physical activities and I forgot how to do hold my core comprehensively. You don't know how big a deal this is or how impossibly hard it makes something as simple as brushing your foot from standing out to a point. I knew I was burning out the wrong muscles but I was spot correcting the places on my spine I knew were off. I was trying to keep my ribcage from jutting, and I was working hard on keeping my ears up so my head wouldn't jut forward.

I teach putting a fireball under and behind the belly button all the time but I had my fireball too high and working hard didn't feel right. The right things were engaging. My body wasn't a concert. Everything wasn't in unison. Anyway, I LOVE this idea of the skinny red thread of desire fountaining up through the tip of my head after travelling through my entire body.

Apparently the red thread is a martial arts thing, among other things. I use it to talk about our axis of gravity for balance and rotation a lot but never as a desire center or as a fountain! Right now I am seeing how Jeremy Halementioned this in relation to our base and how he may have gotten it from modern dancers who may have gotten it from Aikido, and how Ry'el Zenzouktalks about putting our thoughts about a foot above our heads to get to the stretch- tall-storky-air-lamba-body-posture and how Jaime Arôxa & Kiri Chapman talk about movement coming from verbalizing noises as emotions from our guts, and how it's all the same conceptualizaton but a little different.

From Mia (who got it from rolfing and pilates and ballet, perhaps?) I am thinking of everything concentrated to a point down in my pelvis cavity bowl, and the thread pulling up and me growing taller. It's not my imagination but more people are smiling at me on the street after catching my eye, and daring to look me in the face. (It could also be that I am wearing a dress).

I feel like there is so much I still don't understand and I look forward to the day when I am 200 and looking at my 30s like I was a toddler then who didn't undertand my body. I am looking at these twiggy adolescents in ballet class with me now that it's summer break and they have such great understandings of their bodies, more than I did at that age with that twigginess.

I feel like I'm getting so strong but it's kind of silly because it's been literally 2 days since I was feeling like I was working hard but working wrong and not able to hold my core. So I know it's a mental shift.

It's not even that I can do "more." Not more pirouettes or something. It's that I am doing everything better. More balance. More straight. Extensions feel stronger. My ankle isn't wobbling. Frappes are more turned out. Retire and coupe are more turned out while en eleve. I don't feel like I have to place my arms as much, I feel like they are naturally floating. I don't have to try to adjust and engage when I'm trying to balance--I'm already there. It's not even that my balance is suddenly everlasting on a dime. I'm where I was before, but I feel like this is the jumping off point to be better. I'm more confident beating my jumps. Yes I guess it is literally thinking of having a stick up your butt!