OK, so I'll say it really quietly, with really small font - I don't want to frighten it away, but... I think spring is coming!!!
At least, the snow has finally almost entirely melted. I haven't been inspired to take many pictures of it, though. The spring thaw in Moscow is not a pretty sight. Just picture to yourself: the snow is melting and flowing away, and as the snow melts, the layers of cigarettes, dirt, salt, dog doo, and everything else that has been thrown into/on top of the snow throughout the winter is growing more and more concentrated... So, yeah, don't expect too many pictures. You're welcome.
The last few weeks have been crazy-busy. (I know, I think I say that with every post!) What can I say? Life in the big city. No, but seriously, I have noticed it about myself, and I think it's true to some extent for everyone, that after a certain point I get so exhausted that I stop really living and just start existing. So I go to work, go to dance, come home every night, eat something, go to bed, and get up the next day to do some variation on that all over again. I stop noticing the beauty of a clear blue sky, the sound of the rushing water as the snow melts (the one beautiful thing about the thaw here - the sight and sound of flowing water, which soothes the soul in a way entirely different than does a snow-covered, frozen landscape), the giggling of my younger students when they realize that yes, their teacher is going to draw a dinosaur on the board in the middle of the town and ask them, "Is it BEHIND the shops? NEXT TO the shops? Is it eating Sasha?" etc. I register that those things are happening, but my soul lacks the energy to respond. In one sense, it's a good faith-builder, because whenever a day seems to long to get to the finish, I break it down into small tasks, and then tell myself for each task that, if God wants me to do it, He will give me the strength to accomplish it. Which is an effective way to get through the day, but not the most joyous way to go about it.
Side note here: Multi-tasking is not always the most effective way to get things done. AKA, I've burnt the pizza crust because I was in here typing this blog. That explains the little note at the bottom of my mom's recipe card: "Watch while cooking so that the crust doesn't burn." Ha. Who reads footnotes anyway? Also, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Hence, I'm back in here typing this blog again just after sticking the second pizza crust in the oven.
Anyway, probably as a result of exhaustion, the past couple of days I've been laid up with a nasty cold. Usually, this would be a bad thing, but I have a feeling this might actually turn out to be good, because it's forced me to rest up a bit right before our dance ensemble's performance tomorrow. God really is amazing, because when I first saw the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall on film a few years before, I thought about it the way a ten-year-old kid on his school soccer team thinks about the fields where the Olympic games are played - "Wow, that's such a cool stage! Wonder what it would be like to dance there?" The dream came a bit closer to reality when I came to Russia, but only in the sense that if the same ten-year-old, a few years later, went on a trip, he might pass through the same town where that Olympic field is located and think again about how awesome it would be to play a game there. And yet, here I am - about to dance on that very stage I've dreamed of dancing on for at least the past five years. This is not to say that it will be my best dancing, unfortunately. In fact, I'm almost glad Moscow is so far away from the States - I'm not entirely sure what the calibre of my performance will be tomorrow, given that a) I'm not in my best form technically, b) I'm coming off of a bad cold, and c) I've been quite exhausted lately - so maybe it's a good thing that my friends from home aren't coming to see! No, hopefully it won't be THAT bad...
It's a funny coincidence, but today happens to be the day that my little sister has her ballet performance with my old dance studio - just one day before I perform here. It's been almost exactly a year since I last performed, and last year I was performing with that very studio on that very stage. I can picture in my head exactly how it was...I had performed there so many times that I had my own routine worked out. I would always arrive an hour before we were supposed to get there, and I would go ahead and put all my costumes where they were supposed to go for quick changes and such, and tape my toes, and put on as many layers of loose, warm clothing as I could, put on my soft slippers, and take my pointe shoes and towel up with me to the stage for our warmup class. I would always try to stretch and warm up as much as I could before class started, but inevitably it felt like I had wooden legs instead of real ones - a combination of the unusual hour for dance class and the fact that I'd usually been in the theatre late rehearsing the night before. Despite the fact that everything felt put on backwards, I'd usually make it through the class somehow, and then there usually was just enough time to get my makeup done and get into my first costume before the show began. It wasn't a large theatre, and I was familiar with all the nooks and crannies. The dressing rooms were underneath the theatre, and these consisted of a long hallway of rooms linked to the stage by a set of stairs at either end. The stairs had grey metal railings that were perfect as barres, and so the hall served as the perfect spot to warm up just one more time before it was time to go onstage - plus there was a speaker linked to the stage, so I could hear from the music what part of the performance was going on and judge how long I had before I had to go up. It was also fun because I could see everyone who was going or coming to the stage and wish them luck or ask them how it went. My mom, who was helping out backstage last night at dress rehearsal, told me that one of the girls was mentioning how she missed seeing me in the stairwell - I'd apparently become a fixture! It's nice to be missed... Of course, things change, and for me one of the most important parts of that theatre experience every year was my dance teacher - she always got us warmed up, made sure everyone was ready, and she was always in the wings with a word of correction or encouragement during the show. If she said she approved, then you knew you had done well. And she's not at my old studio anymore, so now it must be very different there from how I remember. Tomorrow will be different for me as well. At the old theatre, I knew all the ropes, so I was never one of the girls who was rushing around worrying about where to go, or where something was, or what time she was supposed to go on - usually I knew at least some of the answers! Tomorrow, however, will be quite different - if there is anyone rushing around wondering what she is doing, which way to go, or when she has to go on, it will quite probably be that confused American girl! But thankfully I have some very sweet friends there, so if I get entirely lost at the very least there will be someone to grab me by the elbow and drag me where I'm supposed to go.
I was quite excited the other day because I bought a plane ticket to come home. After watching for the past two months, I figured the prices were about as low as they would get, so it's good old Finnair, Moscow to Helsinki, Helsinki to New York, and New York to RDU - all in the space of 16 hours and 40 minutes. I leave Helsinki at 12:50 and arrive in New York a bare three hours later...if you don't factor in the eight hour time difference! I'm going to be one jet-lagged little Moskvitchka. But as excited as I am about going home, even after tomorrow I won't be ready to leave Russia just yet - in May I'm taking a three-day trip to St. Petersburg!!! This is so exciting for me - I stayed in St. Petersburg for six weeks two years ago on a study-abroad trip, and that city captured my heart in six weeks in a way that Moscow hasn't done in all the time I've been here. And when I say the city, I mean just that - I was alone for much of the time in St. Petersburg, whereas I've made some good friends here, but there is a beauty to the Venice of the North, particularly during the White Nights, that makes it well-nigh unforgettable. I'm so excited just to wander the streets again, and to see some of the nooks and crannies I didn't see before - as well as perhaps return to some familiar ones - I would love to catch the Mariinsky Ballet while I'm there.
Speaking of ballet, (which, yes, I've been doing for most of this blog), I'm beginning to feel more and more that I might be dancing when I come back to the States. Of course, this is just a feeling - no concrete facts looming on the horizon as of yet - but, though I've enjoyed character dance a great deal here, I sorely miss the elegance and thoroughness and beauty of ballet. I had an interesting experience lately - in Russian there is an expression "видеть себя со стороны", which literally means "to see oneself from the side". It's like getting an outsider's perspective on yourself. Before, I'd always had the firm conviction that there was no way on earth I could do any form of ballet as a career - when I looked in the mirror with every class, almost all I ever saw was the fact that I don't have the ideal body for a dancer - my muscles and bones are simply not sculpted along a dancer's lines. I had a wonderful teacher who has taught me to make the most of what I have, and at one point I think she tried to tell me something similar, when I was laughing about how of course there was no way I could ever dance ballet, that maybe I wasn't so far away from it as I thought I was. But anyway, a couple of days ago I was skimming through some old audition clips from last year, when I was trying to send out audition dvds to different character dance companies. I had filmed myself doing a ballet class as well, just in case that was required, and I stumbled upon the clip of myself doing adagio. In class, adagio was probably my least favorite part: it requires lots of long, slow, graceful extension of the legs, which always gave me loads of time to note my lack of turn-out, bent knees, and lack of a graceful line. But when I watched this clip, it was actually beautiful. Of course there were still mistakes - my knees should've been straighter, my head should've been aligned with my spine, my elbows were cocked forward to much - but all the same, it was beautiful. Not gorgeous - I'll never be Svetlana Zakharova or anything close, that's for sure, but it's not unpleasant to watch my adagio either. And that's something. Given that, plus the fact that I know, thanks to my teacher, how to really become a character onstage, I think there might be a chance for me as a ballet dancer. Not, of course, in a big company, but maybe in a small start-up company with an aim at a more Russian style and a more classical repertoire. Maybe. Something my teacher always told me, and which I've found for myself to be true, is that if you are a good actor nobody will even look at your feet.
And speaking of good acting, I just had to attach these two clips of Olesya Novikova, a dancer with the Mariinsky Ballet. Now, she has got good feet and legs, but you almost don't notice because of her amazing acting. The first is her as Aurora in Sleeping Beauty - her first entrance - you can really see how she is so nervous and sweet and flattered that all these handsome suitors might be interested in asking her hand in marriage. The second is her as Giselle in the Mad Scene - for non-balletomanes, Giselle is a peasant girl in love with a man she believes to be another peasant, but who is actually a prince in disguise. In the Mad Scene, the princess whom this prince is engaged to comes with a hunting party to Giselle's village, and Giselle, with some help from Hilarion, a hunter from her village who also loves her, comes to realize that her supposed fiance has been fooling her and that he thought their love was just a game. She is so heart-broken that she goes mad, and as she has a weak heart to begin with, she dies of grief. Novikova gives what I think is one of the best interpretations I've seen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zAlq0V1i40&feature=g-u-u&context=G2e00da0FUAAAAAAAKAA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Kof0xGLsUg&feature=g-u-u&context=G2a941f8FUAAAAHgAAAA
Well, I think I'll take a brief break to go grab dinner - which did not actually burn after all, just came out rather crusty. Be back in a bit!
Ok, what else has been going on? Well, last week I got to catch up with the neighbors after not seeing them for a while - I got to see Liliya's piano performance - Rachmaninoff, quite beautiful - and go to Timour's birthday party. Poor kid, he fell and broke his toe the day before his birthday, and as he is training as a tennis player, it was a hard hit for him to have to stay out of school for two weeks and out of sports for a month. Thankfully, I think my present might help him pass the time: the complete Chronicles of Narnia, translated into Russian. Of course, I didn't know when I bought it whether he likes C.S. Lewis, although I knew he liked and didn't have the Harry Potter books. But in my opinion, J.K. Rowling just can't compare to C.S. Lewis, and the opportunity to infiltrate a household with such good literature just couldn't be resisted! It was a lovely evening - his family is so sweet. I felt rather guilty, though, because they opened their bottle of nice French liquor to celebrate, and I could hardly drink any! It was just too strong - I don't know if I will ever build up an appreciation for alcoholic drinks. Renat kept telling me different strategies for drinking it - "Try swallowing it very quickly...Try holding it on your tongue for a bit before you swallow to take away some of the burn...Try not to think about actually drinking it and think of exhaling afterwards..." But alas, no matter what he said, I ended each sip with a gasp and a sputter. I couldn't finish my shot glass even...Oh, well.
I went to Easter Vigil Mass on Saturday last, which was beautiful - I got there twenty minutes early, but the church was already packed, and I was lucky to get a wooden folding chair at the side of the cathedral. The singing was ethereal, and the cathedral was so beautiful when the lights were out and the only illumination came from the flickering candles everyone held, gleaming off the gold of the priests' vestments and causing the white plaster pillars to glow faintly in the light. Mass began at 8:30, but I had to leave early, at 11:30, before the closing prayers, because I was nervous about making it home before the metro closed.
Sunday was quite a cool day as well - our ensemble was organizing another competition, Edinstvo Rossiy, which was held at the theatre of the Victory Park Museum. I visited the park during Christmas, but I didn't go inside the museum, and it was really neat to see a bit of the inside (and we didn't have to pay to get in!) as well as some neat dancing. It really gives you a different perspective on WWII to see another country's memorials for it. Unfortunately, I forgot about my camera, so I don't have any pictures, but I will probably go back, so I will take pics then.
Work is hectic as usual. It promises to get a bit busier soon, because one of our teachers and one of my best friends here, Jenny, is heading to the States with her fiance, Andrey, to get married. Andrey got his visa!!! (Which is very exciting and a big deal!) And they will get married on my birthday, June 16th, which is so neat for me as well. I also had the honor of designing Jenny's wedding invitations, which I really enjoyed and which helped spark another idea I'd like to pursue in the States - starting my own online craft website. Of course, I think I might have a problem there, not so much with design ideas or execution as with finding the time!!!
And speaking of time, I'd better take just a few minutes to attach the few photos I have for this blog and then bring it to an end - I've got to make sure all my costume stuff and everything else is ready for an early start tomorrow! I will be sure to post a lot of pictures of the hall and hopefully of me and the other dance troupe members. Wish me luck tomorrow!!! How cool is it that I get to dance there - it's so rare that our dreams are actually realized so close to how we pictured them - usually God changes them somewhere along the way. I'm so lucky this is happening for me!
At least, the snow has finally almost entirely melted. I haven't been inspired to take many pictures of it, though. The spring thaw in Moscow is not a pretty sight. Just picture to yourself: the snow is melting and flowing away, and as the snow melts, the layers of cigarettes, dirt, salt, dog doo, and everything else that has been thrown into/on top of the snow throughout the winter is growing more and more concentrated... So, yeah, don't expect too many pictures. You're welcome.
The last few weeks have been crazy-busy. (I know, I think I say that with every post!) What can I say? Life in the big city. No, but seriously, I have noticed it about myself, and I think it's true to some extent for everyone, that after a certain point I get so exhausted that I stop really living and just start existing. So I go to work, go to dance, come home every night, eat something, go to bed, and get up the next day to do some variation on that all over again. I stop noticing the beauty of a clear blue sky, the sound of the rushing water as the snow melts (the one beautiful thing about the thaw here - the sight and sound of flowing water, which soothes the soul in a way entirely different than does a snow-covered, frozen landscape), the giggling of my younger students when they realize that yes, their teacher is going to draw a dinosaur on the board in the middle of the town and ask them, "Is it BEHIND the shops? NEXT TO the shops? Is it eating Sasha?" etc. I register that those things are happening, but my soul lacks the energy to respond. In one sense, it's a good faith-builder, because whenever a day seems to long to get to the finish, I break it down into small tasks, and then tell myself for each task that, if God wants me to do it, He will give me the strength to accomplish it. Which is an effective way to get through the day, but not the most joyous way to go about it.
Side note here: Multi-tasking is not always the most effective way to get things done. AKA, I've burnt the pizza crust because I was in here typing this blog. That explains the little note at the bottom of my mom's recipe card: "Watch while cooking so that the crust doesn't burn." Ha. Who reads footnotes anyway? Also, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Hence, I'm back in here typing this blog again just after sticking the second pizza crust in the oven.
Anyway, probably as a result of exhaustion, the past couple of days I've been laid up with a nasty cold. Usually, this would be a bad thing, but I have a feeling this might actually turn out to be good, because it's forced me to rest up a bit right before our dance ensemble's performance tomorrow. God really is amazing, because when I first saw the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall on film a few years before, I thought about it the way a ten-year-old kid on his school soccer team thinks about the fields where the Olympic games are played - "Wow, that's such a cool stage! Wonder what it would be like to dance there?" The dream came a bit closer to reality when I came to Russia, but only in the sense that if the same ten-year-old, a few years later, went on a trip, he might pass through the same town where that Olympic field is located and think again about how awesome it would be to play a game there. And yet, here I am - about to dance on that very stage I've dreamed of dancing on for at least the past five years. This is not to say that it will be my best dancing, unfortunately. In fact, I'm almost glad Moscow is so far away from the States - I'm not entirely sure what the calibre of my performance will be tomorrow, given that a) I'm not in my best form technically, b) I'm coming off of a bad cold, and c) I've been quite exhausted lately - so maybe it's a good thing that my friends from home aren't coming to see! No, hopefully it won't be THAT bad...
getting bits and pieces of costumes ready... :)
I was quite excited the other day because I bought a plane ticket to come home. After watching for the past two months, I figured the prices were about as low as they would get, so it's good old Finnair, Moscow to Helsinki, Helsinki to New York, and New York to RDU - all in the space of 16 hours and 40 minutes. I leave Helsinki at 12:50 and arrive in New York a bare three hours later...if you don't factor in the eight hour time difference! I'm going to be one jet-lagged little Moskvitchka. But as excited as I am about going home, even after tomorrow I won't be ready to leave Russia just yet - in May I'm taking a three-day trip to St. Petersburg!!! This is so exciting for me - I stayed in St. Petersburg for six weeks two years ago on a study-abroad trip, and that city captured my heart in six weeks in a way that Moscow hasn't done in all the time I've been here. And when I say the city, I mean just that - I was alone for much of the time in St. Petersburg, whereas I've made some good friends here, but there is a beauty to the Venice of the North, particularly during the White Nights, that makes it well-nigh unforgettable. I'm so excited just to wander the streets again, and to see some of the nooks and crannies I didn't see before - as well as perhaps return to some familiar ones - I would love to catch the Mariinsky Ballet while I'm there.
Speaking of ballet, (which, yes, I've been doing for most of this blog), I'm beginning to feel more and more that I might be dancing when I come back to the States. Of course, this is just a feeling - no concrete facts looming on the horizon as of yet - but, though I've enjoyed character dance a great deal here, I sorely miss the elegance and thoroughness and beauty of ballet. I had an interesting experience lately - in Russian there is an expression "видеть себя со стороны", which literally means "to see oneself from the side". It's like getting an outsider's perspective on yourself. Before, I'd always had the firm conviction that there was no way on earth I could do any form of ballet as a career - when I looked in the mirror with every class, almost all I ever saw was the fact that I don't have the ideal body for a dancer - my muscles and bones are simply not sculpted along a dancer's lines. I had a wonderful teacher who has taught me to make the most of what I have, and at one point I think she tried to tell me something similar, when I was laughing about how of course there was no way I could ever dance ballet, that maybe I wasn't so far away from it as I thought I was. But anyway, a couple of days ago I was skimming through some old audition clips from last year, when I was trying to send out audition dvds to different character dance companies. I had filmed myself doing a ballet class as well, just in case that was required, and I stumbled upon the clip of myself doing adagio. In class, adagio was probably my least favorite part: it requires lots of long, slow, graceful extension of the legs, which always gave me loads of time to note my lack of turn-out, bent knees, and lack of a graceful line. But when I watched this clip, it was actually beautiful. Of course there were still mistakes - my knees should've been straighter, my head should've been aligned with my spine, my elbows were cocked forward to much - but all the same, it was beautiful. Not gorgeous - I'll never be Svetlana Zakharova or anything close, that's for sure, but it's not unpleasant to watch my adagio either. And that's something. Given that, plus the fact that I know, thanks to my teacher, how to really become a character onstage, I think there might be a chance for me as a ballet dancer. Not, of course, in a big company, but maybe in a small start-up company with an aim at a more Russian style and a more classical repertoire. Maybe. Something my teacher always told me, and which I've found for myself to be true, is that if you are a good actor nobody will even look at your feet.
And speaking of good acting, I just had to attach these two clips of Olesya Novikova, a dancer with the Mariinsky Ballet. Now, she has got good feet and legs, but you almost don't notice because of her amazing acting. The first is her as Aurora in Sleeping Beauty - her first entrance - you can really see how she is so nervous and sweet and flattered that all these handsome suitors might be interested in asking her hand in marriage. The second is her as Giselle in the Mad Scene - for non-balletomanes, Giselle is a peasant girl in love with a man she believes to be another peasant, but who is actually a prince in disguise. In the Mad Scene, the princess whom this prince is engaged to comes with a hunting party to Giselle's village, and Giselle, with some help from Hilarion, a hunter from her village who also loves her, comes to realize that her supposed fiance has been fooling her and that he thought their love was just a game. She is so heart-broken that she goes mad, and as she has a weak heart to begin with, she dies of grief. Novikova gives what I think is one of the best interpretations I've seen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zAlq0V1i40&feature=g-u-u&context=G2e00da0FUAAAAAAAKAA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Kof0xGLsUg&feature=g-u-u&context=G2a941f8FUAAAAHgAAAA
Well, I think I'll take a brief break to go grab dinner - which did not actually burn after all, just came out rather crusty. Be back in a bit!
Ok, what else has been going on? Well, last week I got to catch up with the neighbors after not seeing them for a while - I got to see Liliya's piano performance - Rachmaninoff, quite beautiful - and go to Timour's birthday party. Poor kid, he fell and broke his toe the day before his birthday, and as he is training as a tennis player, it was a hard hit for him to have to stay out of school for two weeks and out of sports for a month. Thankfully, I think my present might help him pass the time: the complete Chronicles of Narnia, translated into Russian. Of course, I didn't know when I bought it whether he likes C.S. Lewis, although I knew he liked and didn't have the Harry Potter books. But in my opinion, J.K. Rowling just can't compare to C.S. Lewis, and the opportunity to infiltrate a household with such good literature just couldn't be resisted! It was a lovely evening - his family is so sweet. I felt rather guilty, though, because they opened their bottle of nice French liquor to celebrate, and I could hardly drink any! It was just too strong - I don't know if I will ever build up an appreciation for alcoholic drinks. Renat kept telling me different strategies for drinking it - "Try swallowing it very quickly...Try holding it on your tongue for a bit before you swallow to take away some of the burn...Try not to think about actually drinking it and think of exhaling afterwards..." But alas, no matter what he said, I ended each sip with a gasp and a sputter. I couldn't finish my shot glass even...Oh, well.
Liliya at her piano performance
Sunday was quite a cool day as well - our ensemble was organizing another competition, Edinstvo Rossiy, which was held at the theatre of the Victory Park Museum. I visited the park during Christmas, but I didn't go inside the museum, and it was really neat to see a bit of the inside (and we didn't have to pay to get in!) as well as some neat dancing. It really gives you a different perspective on WWII to see another country's memorials for it. Unfortunately, I forgot about my camera, so I don't have any pictures, but I will probably go back, so I will take pics then.
in a t-shirt for our ensemble - we wore them for the competition, but then we had to give them back :(
and I don't know where the stuffed dog came from - it was in our flat when we moved in :)
And speaking of time, I'd better take just a few minutes to attach the few photos I have for this blog and then bring it to an end - I've got to make sure all my costume stuff and everything else is ready for an early start tomorrow! I will be sure to post a lot of pictures of the hall and hopefully of me and the other dance troupe members. Wish me luck tomorrow!!! How cool is it that I get to dance there - it's so rare that our dreams are actually realized so close to how we pictured them - usually God changes them somewhere along the way. I'm so lucky this is happening for me!
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