Day 3
This morning you could tell everyone was feeling it a bit at this stage! Especially if you’ve gone from not doing much at all the last few weeks or months to suddenly intensive training for 6 hours day, it puts a lot of pressure on the body. Tonight I came home and put my feet in an ice bath, stretched and used the foam roller for about an hour or so, hopefully that will do the trick and ease the aches and pains tomorrow…Still all good fun though!
10:00-11:30 – Contemporary with Kate Mummery
This class was pretty similar as the first two days again. We started off with a bit of a massage session in partners which warmed us up and relieved a bit of tight or stiffness and woke up our bodies, followed by a mini contemporary/yoga session. We then added onto the phrases we’ve already learnt which included more floor work (more bruises) which I enjoyed as if there’s one area I’m worse at it’s definitely floor work, just making it look smooth and effortless is not at all easy for me, especially when transferring the weight into the hands in various ways. I’m sure there was something else I was going to mention about this class but it’s getting late and my brain is totally frazzled – maybe it’ll come back to me!
11:45-13:15 – Repertoire with Luke Ahmet – Terra Incognita
We started learning some new rep today with a different teacher from the company from the last couple of days. It’s completely different from the last piece we learnt that was quite balletic, fluid and elegant, the phrases from Terra Incognita are more unusual and quirky. It was fun to pick up and we learnt so much in the session! We’ve already started putting it together as a piece which we will perform as a whole group at the end of the week, and we’re going to learn some more material and clean it up tomorrow.
14:15-15:45 – Choreography with Estela Merlos
We’ve got more of a piece coming together in this session now, the phrases are being performed by different groups within our group, and the piece starts with the structures we ‘built’ yesterday, with transitions added in – so it’s like a structure has been made and then we all crumble to the ground to represent a disaster, and then we rebuild into the next huge structure where we’re all relying on each other to stay up, then we crumble again and repeat, I think it looks quite effective. We’ve added some group work into it as well including some lifts which will look good in the end. One more rehearsal tomorrow and we should have a nice little piece to show!
16:00-17:00 – Ballet with Antonette Dayrit
We were also lucky enough to have a pianist for this class as well which is much nicer than doing the exercises to a CD like I’m used to. Not having a musician for class all the time makes you appreciate the experience a lot more when you get the chance though. The class was a general level as there was lots of mixed ability in our group, a few people never having done ballet before. I was a bit sceptical as to whether I’d have the energy for ballet at the end of the day, having finished off with a nice bit of relaxation the last couple of days, but I found that the hour actually went super fast and almost didn’t seem long enough. We did quite a long barre and then moved into the centre for an adage, centre practice, pirouettes, pirouettes from the corner, a couple of petit allegro exercises and a couple of allegros travelling across the room to the finish with. Tomorrow I’m going to attempt the class in my pointe shoes and see how that goes! I haven’t done a huge amount of pointe other than the Intermediate syllabus so I really want to work on strengthening my feet in them – English Youth Ballet is going to be a killer with all those long rehearsals en pointe I think.
Dreams That Glitter xo 