30 Days of Dance Photo Challenge

I'm kicking off the year with this #30DaysofDance photo challenge started by Faizeh! It ties in nicely with my goal of branching out into more social networks. You can now follow me on Instagram for these pictures and more! Don't mind all of the Cthulhu pictures, I used to only use Instagram to document the adventures of my beaded Cthulhu plush. I'll still post him from time to time but it's going to mostly be dance stuff.

So far my year of dance is off to a good start. I didn't end up having time to dance yesterday (other than some hip work while I was cleaning), but my family had our gift exchange and I received two types of poi which will help me with my goal of mastering my prop collection. These new poi are much softer than the practice set I made for myself, which often resulted in strange bruises. And as for today, I've already put in a few hours working on Open Stage and my social media stuff, I'm about to do a little practice and then it will be time to put on my face and head over to Sky Bar. This will easily be an 8 hour day of dance-related work. Awesome!

Doing New Things!

I'm sure I've mentioned it here before, but I don't like doing new things. It's always a struggle for me to get motivated to try a new class, or do a different style of dance, or be vulnerable on stage, or hang out with new people. I very much like to have my routine, and my usual people and my usual things (with SOME variety, of course. I'm not one of those people who has burgers on Tuesday and pizza on Friday, and always eats at the same restaurant). Falling in love with dance has forced me to do a lot of new things, but I still fight against them.

So, recently I did two new things. The first was I started interning for Skirt Full of Fire. You'd think this wouldn't even really count as a new thing because I already help unofficially with stuff all the time and have assisted at events, but as I was leaving the house to go to the meeting to get everything set up, I started trying to sabotage myself. My brain went "Wait! What if I'm not good at it? What if I screw something up and then Jolie doesn't like me anymore and I'll have to find a new teacher..." etc etc. As you can see, my brain gets pretty over-dramatic sometimes. When I got to the meeting I found that most of my duties were already things I knew how to do. No big deal.

By the way, one of my jobs is writing monthly guest posts for the official SFOF blog. If you'd like to see my first one, here it is: The Only Rule is Work.

The second new thing was that last night I started taking a poi class. This is doubly scary because not only is it a NEW THING but I'd previously said I never wanted to learn poi because I knew I'd hit myself in the face. And you know what? I was right. I did hit myself in the face. And the back of the head. And the chest, legs, stomach, groin, back and arms. None of which left so much of a bruise.

Aside from hitting myself, I had a good time. Both of my parents are also taking the class, the teacher is a friend of the family, the other classmates range in skill from newbies like me to performers, and I actually caught on more quickly than I expected. Plus it's always nice to be in a class just for fun. Sure, I'm taking this class because some poi moves can be translated to fire fans and fan veils, but it's not integral to my dance career. It's more of an extra perk.

So here's to being brave, and trying new things. The worst that will happen is that you'll get hit in the face.