Here we are, 3ish weeks into the 90 day challenge. How’s it going? Well, you can see I’m getting a little better. I had a nice almost hour and a half of practice today thanks to checking out the new zil video from Rachel Brice over on Datura Online. I really enjoyed it! I’ll need to revisit it, as I found some of the combinations challenging and my zils really, really need work. First, I need to tighten the elastic on them. I started out with my big silver zils, which were too tight and too loud (hard to know if you’re playing right when you can’t hear the teacher over your own zils!) so I switched to my old brass ones which have a much more reasonable volume, but the elastic is completely shot. Oh the joy of living in a dry climate!
You’ll frequently see +stretches at the end of my time tracking, because I’ve been working hard to get daily stretching back in my routine. I’ve gotten some good advice on what I should be working on to correct some of the things in my body that were impacting my dance ability. Unfortunately, since a lot of it is leg-based, my healing excision site has interfered with some of it, but I’m doing what I can when I can, and as I heal I can add more and more back into my routine. I had a really good on-line stretching session with my friend Jen yesterday. We keep each other accountable! I’m hopeful that we can go back to our weekly Wednesday Skype dates, and I’ll definitely feel more motivated to stretch between dates if I know my accountability buddy is going to ask me about my progress!
I’ve also decided that on days when I get busy and only have a few minutes to practice, I need to make myself do something challenging. So on Monday I drilled hips on the down (not my strong suit) and on Tuesday I did chaine turns coming out of and landing in a deep plie in 2nd, which I suck at. A lot. I almost never practice that sort of thing at home, so when it comes up in a class situation I tend to do very poorly with it. I think those deep plies will be the next big challenge I obsess over until I can get it right. Since a lot of my trouble with them comes from the same issues I’m addressing with my stretch regimen, it will be a really good way to track my progress with that, too.
And that is way too much detail about what I have been working on for the past week!