Saturday, April 15, 2006

The traumas of learning to dance

So on Tuesday I was working on a recital dance with one of my classes and teaching them a new jump for the piece (a tour en liar), when one little girl, Emmy Kate (who happens to be extremely opinionated and always has to tell me exactly what she thinks about everything, from my choreography to my music to the leotard I'm wearing) raises her hand and says, "Excuse me, but this jump seems to be very dangerous. If you did it wrong you could really hurt yourself". To which I responded, "Well, yes, but there are lots of things in dance that could be very dangerous if not done correctly. That's why it's so important to make sure that you learn how to do each step properly." So I broke down the mechanics of the jump for her and we went over and over it. Then the last thing I said was, "...when you're first learning a jump like this you can do it smaller and not as high until you develop muscle memory and are more comfortable and then you can do it really high and really big." At which point I proceeded to demonstrate what the jump looks like when done really high and really big. But as I pushed off the ground there was a loud POP and I collapsed to the ground with my ankle throbbing. As I'm instantly surrounded by 10 eight year-olds, I look up to see Emmy Kate, whose eyes are as big as dinner plates, and she says, "That's what I was afraid of". So, after all the time spent on it, I have to take that jump out of their dance because the poor child is so traumatized that I'll be lucky if I can get her to do any kind of jump within the next 10 years.

***For anyone concerned, my ankle is swollen and a little stiff and sore, but after some ice, ibrupropen and elevation I don't think there's any permanent damage.***

3 Comments:

Blogger SMAshley said...

well it's good to hear you didn't hurt yourself. and though i am sorry for the horrible timing of fate in that lesson, congratulations on some prime funny. at least you didn't hurt yourself before the cirque video. that makes me happy. P.S. I'm so sorry for being so retardedly busy this last week. i'd really like to see how your video turned out. i hope everything went well. :)

4/16/2006 8:30 PM  
Blogger Bex5x5 said...

No problem. Give me a call later this week if you want to hang out or something (now that the freakin' video is done and gone I have much more time...time that for the next month will be mostly spent anxiously waiting for a response). And as a weird addition to the story, I actually hurt my ankle 2 days before i finished the video, but it didn't get really swollen until the day after I got done with it.

4/16/2006 8:57 PM  
Blogger Tavius said...

now thats funny stuff

4/17/2006 1:47 AM  

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