I am a lump

Day 333 of practice.

Today I gave into the urge to be a lump. I had a more lousy day and felt so bad mentally that I made myself feel bad physically, too. Even before today turned out to be worse than yesterday, I was feeling bad about my current state as a dancer. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like I really have not improved noticeably at anything at all lately. I don't think I'm practicing often enough or hard enough, and I've reached the point where I'm not getting better just from being in class.

Jolie's classes have been both good and bad for me -- I love the material and I'm learning a lot of new stuff, but I'm also a perfectionist so it frustrates me when I can't do something. I'm feeling pretty down on myself because I'm not doing as well in her classes as I would like. For that matter, I also haven't been feeling too awesome in my various ITS classes. Lot of issues with not feeling graceful, being off the beat, etc etc.

I want to be awesome and amazing and right now I feel strongly mediocre. And hooray, I asked for the opportunity to perform a solo in just over 2 weeks. I'd better find some self esteem fast.

Oh, and today's practice? Working on said solo. It's the one that Jolie helped me get started on during our private lesson and I feel like I am not capable of achieving the awesome ideas we had for it (both when working together, and then the separate ideas I came up with after another listen), and like I am basically doing the same stupid moves over and over again with no real emotional investment. On top of that I drilled layers over tic-toc shimmies, because that should be simple but I suck at it. And I stretched, because stretching is good.

I'm on TV!

Day 292 of practice.

Well, not REALLY on TV. Fonda brought a television to class tonight so we could watch the video of Sunday's performance and critique ourselves. I've watched myself on phones and computers before but that was my first time seeing myself dance on a television and it was a little weird!

I noticed a LOT of stuff that I need to work on, so that was good. I already knew that my performance face is horrible. Even when I think I'm smiling I look like I'm snarling. Not pretty, and not inviting to the audience, that's for sure. Plenty of technical dance issues to work on, too. I took notes so I'll know what to fix.

After that we spent some time working on formations. Yay, formations!