Following our onstage warm-up barre, my class and I returned back to our section of the green room.
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| Our teeny weeny dressing room section (for about 6 or 7 of us!) |
Literally within 5 minutes - we didn't even have time to grab food (graciously provided by parent volunteers) - we were called onstage again for a pointe warm up. The other dancers (who had been waiting through our warm-up barre onstage) had already started by the time my class and I were able to put on pointe shoes and run and join them. Warm-ups on stage are fun (for me, anyway) and I believe they help to familiarize one with the stage as well as become comfortably acquainted with the space that will soon be performed in. I feel that these warm ups helped exactly to do this for me, and I was very happy to have the feeling of that control of making a place your own. The experiences you have in a performing space greatly affect your overall feelings/emotions and inevitably your performance later on. You have to keep a positive mindset, accepting that mistakes WILL happen during rehearsals onstage and even that that is a good thing. Perfect dress rehearsal = bad show! Bad dress rehearsals = good show. It's really true, and I've seen it proven so many times.
I left the pointe warm up a few minutes early to prepare for dress rehearsal which was starting shortly. My class and I were starting off in the 2nd number, hence a possible sense of rush! I fixed hair, put on all makeup, got costumes stuff together, and prepared to get ready to go on. I definitely had a concerned focus for my first number as it is a difficult Bournonville style ballet which requires great control and strength. From the beginning to the end, the excerpts we performed from Le Conservatoire require extreme control, precision, and self-containment while still expressing love, happiness, joy and energy. The first part of the piece starts with a slow adagio - flowing arms, slow grande plies, legs held, extended a la seconde (to the side), and generally slow movements can easily throw anybody, especially if you're nervous. It's hard enough in daily class for most dancers as it is, but onstage, with no mirror and and audience...! (I probably don't even need to say that most of us were seriously intimidated by it all.) The second part picks up in tempo though still keeping a sense of the movement in the opening adagio section, but adds bouncy movement and grande battments, which as the ballet dictionary states is: "An exercise
in
which the working leg is raised
from the hip into the air
and brought down again, the
accent being on the downward
movement, both knees straight.
This must be done with apparent
ease, the rest of the body
remaining quiet." The heightened excitement of being onstage and in front of people, while also worrying about getting everything just right in the exact order can lead to nerves and shaky muscles, and you might end up feeling like you just can't do it. You fall off your supporting leg or otherwise mess up, etc. It unfortunately just happens with those annoying feelings of stage fright/jitters! During our rehearsal for tech I had just that problem, and I wasn't the only one. The adagio section is so difficult and set up in a way that it is very controlled. It has such major weight shifts and transfers that pose as a challenge and make it so that it's almost all you can do to not fall off of your leg. In fact, our Bournonville specialist and instructor Ms. Elver had warned us of how we would feel onstage. "I know", she said, from her previous experience of dancing 32 years with the Royal Danish Ballet of Denmark. When nervous, you get light and "above your body", losing the weight of the movement. To counteract this, you want to feel like a tree rooting into the ground and the stage. You need to focus on feeling that grounded connection to the ground and through the floor to help stay strong and steady.
Like I've said before, bad rehearsals mean good shows. For me, it's very important to make every possible mistake my second-guessing pre-performance-stressed-out brain can think of before the actual show! It's a relief to know "okay, I did that here this time, but now I know that this goes this way" or "this can happen this way but I know that I can correct it this way" etc, etc, ad infinitum! For tech, it was one of those. My legs were really shaky first time onstage for Le Conservatoire - our first day at the theater. Once we got to the grande battements, I just couldn't do them! They physically wouldn't happen. It's personally disappointing when something goes wrong and you obviously know that you can do it! But, tech day is tech day, and you move on and do the best you can. Don't make yourself crazy (lol, what am I saying?! It's dancers we're talking about here. They obsess and dwell and then obsess some more! But that how things can be perfected.). Everyone was slightly low coming off of that piece, because we all felt that it was junk for that run through. But our teacher was actually happy with all of the run throughs which included the following rehearsals, and tried to banish any negative thoughts of "we don't look good".
The day of the show as we got through our pieces and others went through theirs, I'd say the day went by tolerably well. I wasn't in the 2nd act, which was actually nice because I was able to watch pieces from the audience, and even surreptitiously record video to help friends analyze their performance and see what they might need to correct if needed. See below some videos of dress rehearsal - "Girlfriends" and "Little Red Riding Hood" from Sleeping Beauty. You'll notice in the 2nd video the technical problems that can happen as they figure out lighting, sound, etc! Enjoy...
"Girlfriends" part 1:
"Girlfriends" part 2:
"Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf":
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