Dear Sanna - being flexible

That is so cool we were featured in Notes From Upstage Left! I'm glad our blog is interesting and helping people.

A boy in the company took a 3-week leave starting yesterday, and the company really took it hard even though we knew ahead of time he would be leaving. I, personally, just realized how much we actually dance together. Nearly all of my partnering is with him. Luckily, we have few performances the next 3 weeks, and none with pieces where we partner a lot. However, today we had a special studio exposure to determine which pieces we will be touring with next year, and we had to show a piece I dance almost entirely with this boy. And we found out about it yesterday. Perfect.

So I assumed I would be dancing with the official understudy of the piece, who actually dances the finale with me. He's not the greatest partner ever but I am at least comfortable with him. But I should've known that wouldn't be, since understudies are so rarely used in small ballet companies like ours. They just make the poor saps who aren't in a piece hover around the back of the studio for all eternity, never going in, so that when they are actually needed somebody else goes in instead. When I first heard of my possible partner prospects, I had an instant stomach ache.

I was sure I had mentioned him before, so I looked back to older posts. I said this "more experienced dancer" made me shy. Well that was an understatement. It's moments like this that make me appreciate that this blog is anonymous, because the truth is I have a huge crush on this guy. It's just a crush and nothing more, because he is married, besides the fact that we can barely communicate with a spoken language and I can barely look at him. I know it's completely stupid, but I can't help it, and I find myself spotting him in the room all the time. Anyway, partnering any dancer with seniority over me always makes me uncomfortable, and the replacements for my partner all dance principle roles. And if it's not enough to have to teach a new partner and get used to dancing together and embarrass myself with only one day to prepare, I ended up dancing with 3 different partners (4 if you count the finale where my partner did not change, and 5 if you count my old partner who I only stopped working with yesterday).

My stomach was in knots, for my own mind, and also because I knew the artistic director would be especially critical of me. The girl is always blamed for partnering malfunctions here. But it was surprisingly not that bad. The director even said I looked good (with my crush! hehe just kidding that part doesn't matter...) but I just needed a little more punch.

Anyway we'll see what happens during rehearsals for the next few weeks until my partner returns. I hope it's not a whole new nightmare if he is really out of shape when he comes back.

Janie