selfish, graceless, centerless happy me

I need to fix my center. The center is from where everything moves. I need it to transfer weight from one position to the next, to change positions more fluidly. I am so bad at that. My biggest thing is I need more control - I need everything to move in one seamless motion and still have high legs, perfect execution, grace. I need grace, dammit.

Hats off to Daddy. Because of all the rigid training I had to undergo learning his choreographies, being choreographed by any other choreographer is a piece of cake. Tito G is working on his new piece "Isang Bagong Bituin" and in the couples' group dance, he would set the choreography on me for the other people to learn. I wonder how other dancers survive, without the same kind of training. It's probably easier and more difficult at the same time. More difficult because they learn things the hard way. Easier because they don't have to deal with my father. I should consider myself lucky.

The NAMCYA has included ballet as a competition category this year. From PBT, three dancers have joined and made it through the first elimination. Second elimination is middle of this month, after our show. One of the three is kind of asking me to mentor her. In the current company ballet heirarchy, she is getting better roles than I am. I'm thinking it's too weird that she looks up to me as an authority figure when I can't even get my own dancing into gear.

Okay, okay. I know it's not that weird, because I did leave ballet for a significant time but I was still a ballet teacher all throughout the time I was gone. Many teachers never really made it to the principal level; they retired early from dancing and opted to teach instead, and many teachers are actually better teachers than dancers. Many principal dancers don't really make good teachers. I had a long argument with Marga about this idea; she couldn't understand how you couldn't teach something you can do well or how you can't do something you teach well. In ballet, it's different. You can have an eye for what's correct technique, yet you can't execute it yourself because of the limits of your body.

I know I can probably train this girl for her competition. But I don't want to. I want to focus on myself. I know, that sounds really selfish, but I have a few years left and this girl is only half my age. There are things that I am just now figuring out about dancing and I don't want to impose them on impressionable girls who were doing fine without me. And I can see it happening: I'd be very concerned about her, perhaps more than I would be with myself and I don't want the shift in priorities right now.

When I was her age, I wasn't mentored. It came a year later, when I entered UP. My mentor had long ago turned her back on dancing and ran her own school while teaching in UP. Similarly, I didn't need all that much mentoring, just a lot of reminders about my center and my attack/approach to the dance, a lot of direction for the kind of dancing I wanted to do, for the kind of dancing that I was capable of and didn't know it. I am grateful for that, never mind the training I endured from my father, without this pushing from my college technique teacher, I doubt I'd be the dancer I am now. I don't think I'm ready to be responsible for someone that way, not yet.

I need to work on myself first. I want to be selfish, while I still can.