Lunatics and Princesses

FYI, neither I nor anyone I know is dead or taken hostage.

It's weird though cause this whole thing is going down like two miles away from my house... I'm watching Binger on CNN. That is so. strange.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/03/binghamton.shooting/index.html

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Well, midterms are (mostly) over. I still have to do the written part of the ballet exam. Sheeeeeeeee-it. Who ever heard of a three day long midterm? The first two days the prof videotaped us dancing- two sections of barre work, and two of center. I think my barre work was stronger than center; I only fucked it up once. Or maybe twice, but all I remember offhand was thinking that the grand battement sequence was finished and stopping in the middle of it. Whoops.

The center work was... well, center work. I totally fucked up the end of my waltz/balance combination. Also possibly jumps. One of my main problems (and one that I think stems from skating) is that I can only do things one way. I can do balances and pas de bourres fine to the right, but when I try to go left I can't do it at all. Now you put all that in a combination and it's instant disaster. *headbarre*

All things to work on. We get to watch the tapes tomorrow and critique ourselves- she's actually grading us on our critiquing, not on the dancing, but god knows how she's going to get in depth critiques from almost thirty people crowding around one TV trying to watch themselves. We'll see. Must resist urge to write "I'M IN DESPAIR! MY SUCKY DANCING HAS LEFT ME IN DESPAIR!!! I WILL JUMP OFF BARTLE!" in huge letters across the whole page and nothing else.

Also, no dancing tomorrow. Just writing stuff. Sad face.

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In other news. Did Biryani Night with Yos yesterday. Biryani= awesome, spicy Pakistani food. We almost botched the recipe but the end result turned out awesome, and Yos sent me home with some leftovers, yay! We also watched Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and Sleeping Beauty. If you haven't seen the former, I highly recommend it.

Now I'm going to finish cleaning my room. Debating whether or not to wash my blankets. I probably should. Then more CA costuming work and Latin. And Arabic. And reading for O&E. Bleh. I wish it was winter vacation already.

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I haven't been blogging about the stuff that I do here at Binger much. I'm either too tired, or too scatterbrained, or whatever. I don't know if I've talked about dance that much. Long story short, one of the doctoral students is also a dancer and dance teacher, and we wound up putting a small informal class together last semester to do ballet (Jesse, bless him, never bought into the jazz bullshit, which is the problem I always had when it took classes anywhere else- if it was in my price range, it was three plies at the barre and then 45 mintues of jazz crap.)

So it was Jesse, me, Kerry, Melissa, Hannah, and Cat. Now it's us plus Narjess and Yosra on weekends (I teach them! Whee!) Jesse told us about the company he wanted to start, taking dance to the ignorant masses. We were down with this.

Now we're legit company members!!!

I'm a professional dancer. Omg omg omg.*

Also I have a formal role in the company: the Repetetrice. I rehearse people and lead warm ups, stuff like that. I get a big stick to bang on the floor as well. I've turned into Mme. Giry, lol.

This is soooooo much fun. We've got a workshop on Sunday morning for ballet and then we're hosting one on the 5th. Exciting!

Here's the site if you want to go check it out. There's not much up yet, but there it is.

http://jessekaten.com/company.html

Yay!

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*except not really. It's funny cause I can put it on my resume, but couldn't audition for NYCB or anything.

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