At the end of week eight, I am feeling pretty good. I’m still far away from actually doing anything that we can call balletic but I think we might be getting closer. What I’ve been getting into my head this week isn’t new but it is making sense in a whole new way:

do not sacrifice the 5th

brush, push, and work the floor

don’t walk through steps, place yourself

 These three rules of the studio are not actually individual mantras. Well, okay, they can be but they can also be interconnected. We’ve all heard wonderful descriptions for having a relationship with the floor, pushing through the floor, drilling into the floor, caressing the floor, you name it and we have been directed to do it with the floor. I didn’t really get that at first. It also didn’t really make sense all this emphasis on the floor when I’m not allowed to look down at it!!! You know what though… it makes perfect sense. Once we begin this illicit relationship doing naughty with the floor, you don’t need to actually look down at it all the time. When you brush and push along the floor, you are pretty darn sure where it is all the time. It’s different if you walk through steps like a normal person, you lose contact with the floor a lot, more than you realize. The floor gets sad and misses you, eventually gets tired of the neglect and moves on. This is the way it is with relationships, I didn’t make the rules. But when you romance the floor, you know where it is, it knows where you are, you get to figure out where the uneven parts are and how to adjust your feet to miss that one obnoxious seam. When you use the floor to place your feet, you can find the 1st and the 2nd the 4th and you won’t even lose the 5th, which we all know likes to run and hide out in the corner, and you don’t even have to look down at your feet to do it!