Love of the Day: Absolute Beginners Ballet with David Kierce

I'm pretty late to the whole 'ballet class party' - about 30 years too late if we're talking prima ballerina ambitions (I'm clearly not). I didn't really have the kind of childhood that included dance classes and in any case, as a die-hard tomboy, I couldn't have been less interested. Horse riding, maybe. Ballet? noooooo way.  However, a couple of years' inept dabbling with yoga, aerial circus and hard-core barre classes at hipster gyms (Blok in Clapton is great if you want your ass properly kicked) have culminated in the veils of ignorance being lifted from my eyes!

I look JUST like this doing ballet

I had always seen ballet as overly-feminine, overly-trained, overly-classical, but coming to it via other disciplines has completely changed my point of view - it is quite obviously GREAT. On the most basic level, it gives you an endorphin hit just like any kind of exercise. On top of that it teaches you how to hold yourself in a way that helps with any aerial, gymnastics, pilates or yoga type activities you might be doing. It encourages you to stand up tall and assume postures that achieve the brilliant confidence-boosting, mood-enhancing effects that Amy Cuddy describes in her crazy popular Ted talk, in a similar way to yoga. But, like aerial circus, ballet gives you something extra, and that is the fact that you are Striving For Beauty. You may not actually be attaining it (I'm pretty sure I'm not) but just aiming to create something beautiful with your body movements has some kind of magical quality. It's uplifting. It's transcendent.

Anyway, I've tried a few different 'beginners' classes in London and every single one has been too god damn hard (Pineapple and Danceworks, I'm looking at you. Why advertise your class as being for beginners when it just really, really isn't?). So I was pretty much overcome with jubilation when I finally plucked up the courage to go along to David Kierce's Absolute Beginners class at the Central School of Ballet, despite the intimidatingly professional-sounding venue. Man, what a difference! Finally some steps and instructions simple and repetitive enough for me to follow and maybe even improve at! There's no denying that the class is simply huge - 60 people to one teacher, omg - when I first walked in I was like Holy S**t, this is going to be useless. But David is like a ballet sergeant major, in complete command at all times,easy to follow, and with the amazing ability to give everyone there a few moments of bespoke guidance. This guy is loud, Australian and - the most important element - genuinely funny. I've never had such an enjoyable class experience.

There's tons of emphasis on technique, but it's delivered in a low pressure, understanding and humorous way. The class also somehow simultaneously allows you to exist in some kind of dance fantasy in which you can express emotion through these super basic movements, possibly due to the brilliant music choices. This is how adult ballet SHOULD be, surely? Not all grim discipline, elitism and hectoring - none of us are ever going to make it to the stage after all - but a fun, constructive session that you look forward to going to each week.  I bound out of it feeling good about myself and the world, determined to carry on with the slightly ridiculous task of learning to move my brain-carrying machine with elegance and grace.

Love of the Day: Astrology

You may not know this, but Mercury's in retrograde right now. That means it's a bad time to start anything new, especially things to do with electronics and/or communication (so basically the whole of the internet-based modern life), but a good time to complete unfinished projects, or look back at things you have done in the past.

So, instead of starting a new electronically communicated blog this week, as I've been thinking of doing, I've decided to reinvigorate this baby. Well, why not eh? I still have loves and I definitely still have bugs!

Chances are that you are one of those people who does NOT care about astrology and is NOT INTERESTED in such rubbish - shutters slammed down, science and logic only here please, metaphysics move right along! And I respect that. I know astrology is not really logical; I appreciate that the idea of those big balls of rock and molten metal out there in our solar system exerting an influence on our lives can seem utterly far-fetched. And to be fair, I completely understand if the term 'celestial bodies' puts you right off, it probably would me too.

But I don't love astrology because it's logical (... haven't our greatest thinkers established that logic its very self is nought but a construct anyway? Just saying). I don't love it because I think it's 'true' and can accurately predict the future, so that we should all be living according to it's advice. I love astrology because it's interesting. For me it's a kind of acetate scrawled with archaic designs that I can lay over the humdrum, strip-lit, grey, work-a-day life. It adds an extra dimension of fascination to encountering and getting to know the intricacies of a new human's personality. 

I am not 100% convinced about the workings behind astrology, but I do see patterns of accuracy in it that I can observe with my own 12-boxed brain (oh, you're an Aquarius? In you pop, box no.1 on the left there!). Time and again I see patterns: Sagittarius and Virgo couples, for example, Taurus and Pisces friendships. People SO strongly reminding me of someone else that I just know they're the same sign - and then having it confirmed. Who cares if there's logic to that? It's fun! I love being right and astrology makes me feel secretly right about things that are otherwise absolutely nothing to do with me - yesssss!

Astrology is also, to me, my childhood. It's my family, back when they were still a big, bright, messy collective who sat around the dinner table, eyes flashing and tongues wagging. Rushing to opinionate in conversations that almost always involved sentences like  'well, obviously she would - she's a Leo for god's sake! Blimmin Leos.' It's part of my nostalgic-family-feeling from before each of them were, one by one, drawn away from the glowing dining room and into the dimness of distance by thin threads of beloved resentments, cherished hurts, 'irreconcilable differences'.

Mercury is in retrograde, and it's a time for nostalgia, so today I am also nostalgia-ising about my big old broken family, who used to float around me with loving arms and hot-beating hearts, but now drift in distant seas. And I'm listening to Joni Mitchell because we all liked her, bunch of hippies that we were/are. Joni understood about distance and love, and she understood about astrology too.

Awww, just look at her shine: