Two weeks down, four to go…

Julian is sad that the weeks are flying by. He’s completed two weeks already and has just four to go. However, they are definitely taking their toll on him. I’d recommend that everyone – girls and boys alike – really get in shape for a summer intensive like the American Ballet Theatre six-weeks in New York. It’s grueling, especially if you don’t normally dance seven hours a day (in humid, hot conditions). It also makes a difference if you don’t normally give 150 percent in your classes but you feel pushed to do so once at the intensive – both by the calibre of teachers and students.

After a day at home sleeping off a night of stomach upset, Julian went back to the intensive only to find himself sick again at the end of the day. He managed to throw up just once and then hobbled through watching the ABT performance of Swan Lake. We did, however, have to take taxis there and back. Once home, he suddenly got hungry and at the rest of the soup I’d made for him and then slept for 10 hours and woke up hungry.

While there we ran into a former Teen Dance Company artistic director, and a current master class teacher, professor at Buffalo State University in New York and choreographer for TDC (who will also be teaching at the upcoming TDC summer intensive), Carlos Jones, and he commented, “This is how you are supposed to feel.” This was after we asked him to come down to Julian’s seat at the Metropolitan Opera House to see Julian, who could not bring himself to move from the spot without feeling sick! (I guess that made us feel a bit better, although we haven’t heard of anyone else feeling this way. Of course, Julian is coming from a very dry climate – California – and Carlos said the humidity would be a tough climate change for him.)

I promised some more accurate information on the levels at ABT. They are from lowest to highest: yellow, red, blue, green, violet, aqua, indigo. Green and below are intermediate and everything from violet and above is advanced. The boys of all levels have men’s history and conditioning classes together. Otherwise, they are separated. So the intermediates, for instance, have partnering and men’s class together.

Julian is actually very satisfied with his level. He wanted to be in green but when he saw how good the boys in green were, he knew he was in the right level. Plus, the boys in green spend a fair amount of time with the boys in blue. In fact, Julian has friends in green, and they all seem to hang out together and help each other and teach each other things. Julian sometimes knows something a fellow green dancer doesn’t know and vice versa, so it works out well.

As for competition, I assume the boys all push to do better than the next, but at least at the intermediate level, the boys are friendly and nice and don’t seem to let competition get in the way of freindship.

Julian really adores his classes at ABT. In particular, he is getting a lot out of the partnering classes. This is the first chance he’s had to really work on ballet partnering. He hasn’t done much “guy stuff” in the men’s class, but he likes the camaraderie of being with all the boys. Technique classes are enjoyable also, and his choreography class, which is a jazz piece set to Elton John music, he says is awesome.

All in all, the classes, while tiring, are improving him already. He says he’s much better after just two weeks in New York.

As for his foot, which is better after one day off this week, the best I can do is to relate what chiropractor George Russell wrote to the physical therapist at ABT:

Julian appears to have a chronic sprain of the left anterior portion of the deltoid ligament of the ankle. It’s tender to the touch and hurts when he lands from jumps. the posterior part and the spring ligament appear fine. He’s pronated and in his barre work I coached him to even the two malleoli and get his weight a little more onto the heel, balanced inside to outside. I gave him a different foot exercise — lifting and spreading the toes, looking at the balanced malleoli and lifted arch in the mirror, and then letting the toes down without losing the alignment. He was doing doming over a tennis ball and resistance band work, which didn’t allow him to pay close attention to form and talar positioning.

Adjusting and icing the foot has helped, as it has in the past. Two days off will help as well. Julian does not plan to dance over the weekend. We had hopes of using the weekends for dance classes, but at least right now, he’s way too tired and needs the weekends to recover.

Tomorrow we go to see Marymount Manhattan and to find out about it’s dance program. We’ll get a tour from a TDC alumni.

Julian will be staying with another dancer and his mom for five days next week while I’m at a conference. I pray he stays healthy while I’m away! I really hate going at this point, but I can’t get out of it now. Hopefully it will all go smoothly. I will instruct him to drink lots of Gatorade and to use the packets of electrolytes that I have purchased at Whole Foods as well as better tasting Emergen-C packets. He’ll get much more sleep at their place, and it’s air conditioned. So, hopefully he’ll be okay. They do go to Broadway Dance Center twice a week to tap, but I told him not to tap if he doesn’t feel up to it. He can just watch. Or he can take part of the class.

Ugh…my nervous, worried mother is setting in. Why did I ever think I could leave him here in the city without being a wreck? If he hadn’t gotten sick this week, I’d probably be fine with it, but now… Okay, positive, creative thinking: It will be just fine. He’ll be just fine. I’ll let you know when I get back in a week.

More Opportunties My Dancing Son Can’t Take Advantage Of…

Okay, the Teen Dance Company Second Stage performance has been put to bed, quite successfully I might add. I was quite impressed, if I do say so myself, with all the kids’ performances and with the student choreography in particular. I think it is amazing that the studio offers a student choreography track, and it’s great that even a few of the students take advantage of that opportunity. Their numbers had such variety and scope. It really was amazing.

I thought Julian looked pretty good,, but he’s my son. (I can actually be quite critical, if you want to know the truth.) He was better on Saturday night; by Sunday he was tired. Plus, at the Friday night tech rehearsal he hit his head hard enough for Mark Foehringer to be worried that he had a concussion. Of course, I was not told about the severity of this incident until Saturday night when Mark told me he couldn’t sleep on Friday night, because he was so worried about Julian. He said he almost called me at 3 a.m. to tell me to wake Julian up and check on him. Great…a little late, I thought.

Julian told me he had hit his head and had a headache afterwards and a little trouble remembering some dance combinations after that, but I really didn’t think much about it. Next time I’ll pay closer attention. He just didn’t make it seem serious, and he gets minor injuries like that a lot.

I was pleased to have a new blog reader who lives nearby show up with her son to watch the Saturday night show. That was a real thrill for me, although they left before I could talk to them when the show concluded. (Hi Sarah!)

Julian had Monday off to rest and then his Dad and I had to become the mean parents and keep him home from TDC on Tuesday when we discovered some missed assignments from the last few weeks. (He told us he had changed…handled his schoolwork…Don’t ever believe your kids. I hate to sound distrustful and jaded, but teenagers just don’t always tell you the truth. They tell you what they think you want to hear, what gets you off their back and what they want you to believe.) Then, I discovered more missed assignments, so we cut out going to jazz at Studio 10 and yesterday I drove all the way to TDC, went in and talked to Mark Foehringer, and then took Julian home. You see, I feel down on my job of Big Bad Disciplinarian. I didn’t want Julian kicked out of a spring concert piece of ballet choreography, and Mark was running a rehearsal last night. He told me it was a good night for Julian to miss rehearsal, if he was going to miss, though, so we turned around and went home.  We’ll see if missing three days of dance made any impression on him at all.  After this, missing class and rehearsal will make a bigger difference…

As for those missed opportunities, it seems that Julian’s commitment to TDC is going to prevent him from having a role in Los Gatos Ballet’s production of Copellia, which he was asked to be in. He really wants that role — maybe more to hang out with the girls than to do the dancing , but the tech rehearsal and performance are on the Thursday and Friday right before a full week of tech rehearsals for TDC’s big Concert in May. So, Mark  has initially said, “No.” Julian was bummed.

Then, he was going to be in the Studio 10 spring show, performing only in the jazz III class’ number, but that show is on June 13. School ends on June 12 and American Ballet Theatre’s summer intensive starts on June 15. We figure that we might have to get on a plane on June 13. At the least, we’ll be busy getting ready to go to New York, so this performance won’t be happening either, much to Julian’s dismay. That means he’ll be attending class between now and May and learning the choreography, but at some point he will not be able to continue with it because he’ll be sort of in the way. At least, he won’t have a spot in the number.

By the way, yesterday Julian’s dad registered him (and paid the nonrefundable deposit) for the ABT summer intensive. So, I guess that is a done deal. We have half the dance world and the magazine publishing world and my old Syracuse University friends looking for sublets for us in NYC! We have not yet notified the camp that he isn’t coming…some little bit of fear on our part that should something happen his summer will go totally to pot.

Sorry I haven’t written more this week. I’ve been busy writing for dance magazines. I finished that piece for Dance Teacher on getting boys into dance class and keeping them there, and now I’m working on another for them on how to keep tap dancers’ feet healthy. (I wrote a similar story for them on dancers feet in general last year.) I’ve also been working on a story for Dance Spirit magazine on several teen dance companies, including TDC.

What’s a Mom to Do When Her Dancin’ Boy Doesn’t Think?

I pulled up at my son’s school on Friday to pick him up and take him to dance just in time to see him jump up onto a fence with his right foot and land back on the ground with — your guessed it — his hurt left foot. I was livid. I wouldn’t talk to him for the first 15 minutes in the car. Then, when I finally did open my mouth I told him to quit dancing or at least go tell all his dance teachers to forget about having him in their recitals and ballets in May and June.

What was he thinking? He wasn’t thinking. He admitted it. And what was I thinking? Taking him to fancy sports doctors and all? Sometimes I think I’m crazy.

The good news is that at Ballet San Jose School the ballet mistress and school director, Lise LaCour, is concerned about Julian’s recovery process — and having him ready for the end of the year ballet and showcase. So, she has not only asked her best instructor and only male ballet teacher, Peter Brandenhoff, to keep an eye on Julian, and she has requested that Julian come for extra classes. The extra classes seemed like a pain in the patooty, and Julian isn’t too crazy about it. We were a bit worried about him overdoing it and getting hurt again, which would not be good, but we’ve seen the logic to Lise’s approach.

By attending extra classes last week to do only barre work, Julian has been strengthening muscles he will need to do the jumps and turns he can begin doing a little bit this week. This week, he will continue doing extra barre work while he starts across-the-floor exercises (one out of every three times the others do the exercises). Next week, he’ll increase the amount of across-the-floor work he does (every other time the others do the exercises) while continuing to do double the barre work. As the week progresses, if his foot feels fine he can even do a little extra across-the-floor work, meaning that he can do some of the exercises in the extra class as well. Little by little, he will get stronger without hurting himself (hopefully).

He is doing all of this in a jazz sneaker at this point, mind you, to protect that small bone and growth plate on the side of his foot. He will dance in that for four weeks before going back to his normal jazz and ballet shoes. For hip hop, he is wearing regular street shoes or sneakers.

The other part of this good news comes with the extra attention Julian is getting from Peter Brandenhoff. For years, I’ve been trying to explain to Julian that when he does barre work he has to do it as if it is an isometric exercise. I’ve shown him with my arm the difference between raising my arm with no resistance and with a lot of resistance, with the muscles loose and the muscles tight. Somehow, he never got the message. However, Peter spent some time with him last week as part of his recuperation and watched him do his barre work very carefully. First he simply corrected his technique. The, he showed him how tightly he had to hold his muscles with each move and even when holding a position. Julian came our of class dripping wet — for the first time! He’ll never be able to take ballet class again and be able to tell himself he’s working hard unless he works like that.

That made me as a mother the happiest! Yes, I want him back in shape so he won’t get hurt. Yes, I want him ready to perform in his end-of-the-year recital, ballet and showcase. More than that, I want him to improve and to excel, and the lesson he learned from Peter will help him accomplish that. He wants so badly to be a good dancer, and he spends so many hours at the ballet studio. Yet, he doesn’t seem to improve as much as he or I think he should. Now he should see that improvement come in leaps and bounds. At least I hope that’s what we’ll see.

Of course, he could again stop thinking and then he’ll either just forget what he’s been taught or get hurt again. That’s a boy for you.