Change is coming. I hate change.

Road trip buddies for life! Me, Jolie, Lecia and Brandye in my car.

I got hit with a bit of a bombshell on Wednesday. My teacher/mentor/troupe director/road trip buddy for life Jolie is moving away. We have a little over a month of classes and troupe practices left before she has to start transitioning into her new life. She'll eventually be landing in San Francisco.

I've mentioned that I hate change, right? I especially hate when my friends move away, although living in AZ I've had to get used to that (AZ: Great Schools, Lousy Job Market. How's that for a catchy state slogan?). I spent Wednesday night in a morass of "everything sucks, what am I going to do, waaaaaaa" but luckily I already had a private lesson scheduled with Jolie on Thursday and she helped me get my head back on straight (see, this is why I need her around).

Really, I can't stay too upset because when Jolie first moved here, she said she was only going to be around for 6 months. I got about 1.5 more years with her than I planned, and I've become a better dancer and even a better person for it. Plus I am really happy for her, she has some great things happening in her life and I think she'll be a lot happier in SF than here. AND I'll get to see her at Tribal Fest, and SF is a place I could feasibly go for a vacation. And we live in the future, so I can get video dance lessons when I feel the need for some brain-breaking layers. So it's not like she's completely vanishing from my life, I just won't get those 3x a week dance classes and fun drives to Phoenix for dance events.

Tomorrow I'll get into what this means for my personal dance journey, but today I'd like to reassure any local friends/fans that the current plan is for SFOF/F&G to continue to perform together (we already have some shows planned for 2014!), and we WILL still be hosting Open Stage at Sky Bar because we all love it and there are at least 3 of us ready and able to run it. We have a lot of work and love put into our troupe and we want to keep it together.

So over all, I'm a bit concerned about this change, but I'm confident that everything is going to be great in the end, I just have to get through this awkward transition period without embarrassing myself by clinging to Jolie's leg and crying "DON'T LEAVE US!" (although if I could convince everyone else in SFOF/F&G to join me, it would make a great photo opp).

Oh, zee drama

Another great pic from Pedro Romano, taken at Temple of Eden. I am being all dramatic, oooooh.

Ok, here's the thing... I'm not good at talking about feelings. Every now and then I'll sit down at this blog and write a deep post about issues in the community, or my struggles with dancer's block, but in general I approach things with a thick veneer of sarcasm, self-depreciation, and downright smart-assery. I am not good at letting my guard down and letting people in, so I am especially not good at really showing my true emotions on stage.

That said, I can really connect with a song, and I can really show my passion for dancing. People react pretty strongly to the solo that the above picture is from because I just feel that song so damn hard that it shows. It's very emotional, but it's mostly positive emotions.

So this brings us to next week's Open Stage and my special challenge for it. I have to dance out some of my feelings. I am still struggling a bit with the loss of my friend Marilee. It's weird, because I've never struggled with a loss this much, but I've also never lost someone that I talked to almost every day, and who had given me lots of little things (beads and books, mostly) that I see around my house all the time. I think this sadness is one of the issues that has really kept me from being inspired to dance lately. I was talking to Jolie about it, as part of a gripe about how little I've been dancing at home lately, and she suggested that I work on something for Open Stage that would express those feelings. The funny thing is that I almost did so for the last Open Stage, but it felt too raw.

I have a song tentatively picked out, a song that has a small connection to my friend -- it's a song I like, but also a song that was used as the theme for a TV show she told me about, one she really enjoyed and which I would watch too, when I got a chance. And it's a beautiful song, a song that feels like floating, flying out, reaching towards a goal and never quite reaching it.

But I am scared to do it. I'm really scared of stepping out onto the dance floor and baring my soul to a bar full of people, people who range from my fellow dancers to my gaming friends to random people just out for a drink. I mean, what if I start crying? I feel like crying on stage would be the most awful and awkward thing ever.

For most of my dance career, I've focused on dance as entertainment -- either as a way to entertain myself, or an audience. And over the past year I have stepped out of my comfort zone a little bit, trying moody and sad music, but not music that actually made me sad. Not music that had any real deep meaning to me. To take that leap from entertainment to performance art, to try to make people really think and feel, it's a little scary. There's more chance of failure, more vulnerability. And I just don't do vulnerable well.

We'll see how this turns out. It may be beautiful and therapeutic or I may end up crying in a bar bathroom.

Hard to stay sad

My husband often jokes that our little corgis, Daisy and Maggie, are the best investment he ever made because I can never stay upset with them around. This is an old picture, but this is pretty much the exact faces they were making at me when I came home from class today.

It's also hard to stay sad with so many good friends in my life. I hesitated to post last night because I didn't want to seem like a drama ball, rolling around and soaking up the drama and needing attention from my friends -- but I kind of did need it. Maybe not the ego boosts (which ARE nice), but I really, really needed to hear other dancers and artistic types saying that they have gone through the same thing. I needed to know that this is something that I need to push through, instead of letting it keep me down. I needed to know that I am not just being a drama llama, but that this is part of the normal growth of a dancer.

Anyway, I am still feeling down, but getting better. I danced this morning. I mean. really. f*cking. danced. (forgive my asterisked language, but it was that intense) I danced so hard that I was honest-to-gosh crying, and that doesn't really happen to me. I danced so hard that I'm amazed I didn't hurt myself. Most importantly, I danced so hard that I remembered why the hell I do this -- I do it because I love it. I do it because the music moves me, physically and emotionally, and while I still need to work on technique, I can dance up a storm and I can let everything I'm feeling come out, and share that with the audience (in this case, an audience of corgis).

And then I did some spot turns and some chaine turns. And they still sucked. But I am going to do them until they don't.

A big thank you to everyone who put up with my drama, and took the time to reassure me, or give me a pep talk, or tell me to just get through it. I love you all.

Sad Times

I'm in a bad head space right now. If there was any ice cream in my fridge, I'd be eating Ben & Jerry's and crying, but instead I am blogging.

I like to say that I'm a perfectionist, but I don't know if that's quite the right word for how I am. It's not like I deconstruct my jewelry because of tiny imaginary flaws. It's more like I expect myself to be more wonderful and amazing than I am.

As much as I love reading, I think books are to blame... specifically, the sort of books that I read growing up. I liked those little girl escapist books where a girl with a heart of gold finds an abused horse and nurses it to health and the horse ends up being amazing, and so does the girl, and they go on to win a race or a show or something. Or the humble young child in the fantasy world turns out to be the Chosen One who saves the world from the Big Bad Evil, despite being a nobody. Add that to the fact that I was relatively smart as a kid, and relatively tall, and I built this idea in my head that I was going to grow up to be tall and beautiful and a genius and really good at something. I just knew that I would find something that I would be amazing at, and it would make up for being socially awkward and wearing glasses and having buck teeth and spending all of my time reading books.

You may not know this about me, but I am 30 years old, I do not have a high school diploma, I still have buck teeth, and I have not done one amazing thing in my life. I have made a lot of jewelry that is nice, and I have written some stories that are nice, and I have done some dances that are nice. I am not amazing at any of those things, but as I have done each of those things, I've always had this stupid expectation that I would be amazing, and someone would notice, and I would finally have found my calling in life.

Real life, of course, does not work like the stupid books you read when you're a kid. In real life, most people are just good at things. I am just good at writing, making jewelry, and dancing. All of these things that I do make people happy, and they make me happy, but I am not the best at them and it DRIVES ME CRAZY.

I'm at a bad place right now where I am just not. getting. better at dancing. I am still having trouble with the same things I have been having trouble with. My chaine turns are sloppy. I can't spot. Sometimes I am on the wrong foot. I don't count naturally, though I am training myself. Everything is something that just sucks until it doesn't. There's not one thing where I can say "Oh, I'm not there yet but I can see that I'm getting better." And I'm tired of it. I just want to cry. I want to give up. I want to go back to safe, easy ITS where I already knew how to do everything and could be the superstar instead of the person who almost crashed into another dancer again doing chaines across the floor.

Part of it is that I have not been practicing enough lately. I'm still not feeling 100% after my laryngitis/throat virus/chronic cough that comes to visit every damn time I get sick, and I've been using that as an excuse to be lazy at home. No more. Tomorrow I am going to practice until I can't practice anymore, because I am sick of not being amazing. I've set myself the goal of being a professional dancer, and I've foolishly decided not to let my late start, or my overbite, or my lack of natural amazingness stand in my way.

Working hard

It was another cold night (despite being the first day of Spring!), but I actually got warm because we did burpees and squats! Woohoo! I am feeling worked out tonight. I feel pretty good with how I did, both with the working out and the dancing.

Once again I did some practice before class. Two songs of emoting. The first was an old Drain STH (dark girl metal), so I did a kind of distant, detached thing, and the second was Abney Park, from the album where they were transitioning from Goth to steampunk, so the music is pretty melancholy and I think I did a good job of dancing said. I started to feel sad, so hopefully I looked sad. I tried to channel some of that into practicing my Wandering Star solo, too. It's a pretty sad song, but when I performed it at The Luxor I started smiling because I was having FUN! I'll have to work on balancing that. I also did a quick run of the Fire & Gold choreo, but I messed up the count somewhere. Oh well, I at least remembered everything, I think I just did a couple of things as a 4 count instead of 8, which threw me off. I'll try again tomorrow, and every day after until it's PERFECT!

Sadness

Day 318 of practice.

No, I'm not really sad. But tonight's class was about emotion and gesture, so we spent most of the night working on choreography to a very sad song. It was an interesting exercise for me, as most of my performances have a happy, impish feeling to them. I did experiment with being aloof and withdrawn for my veil solo at the PJ Sessoms benefit, because the song had that kind of feeling and I was an evil water faerie, after all... But I'm still a newbie when it comes to exploring emotion and characters and being vulnerable on stage.

Class was also challenging for me because we did a lot of non-bellydance moves, and other than some square dance as a pre-teen, belly dance is the only dance I've ever done. I don't know modern or ballet and I can't waltz. So I spent a lot of time stumbling around, but it's good to challenge my brain and body with new things. I want to be a more well-rounded dancer. But hopefully not all of my dance challenges will involve stubbing my toes along the way.