After reading Readers 2 and 3 BAPP

To me those two readings complete each other. One focuses on learning about ourselves directly from ourselves and/or our surroundings whereas the other one discusses learning with others within a professional community.

In a professional ballet company and especially in the corps de ballet those aspects are very significant.

There’s much to be learnt from working as a team. Dancing in the corps is about being absolutely together and still being able to keep some individual identity.

Dancing soloist roles can be quite nerve wrecking, predominantly because once on stage, one feels very aware of being on one’s own in the spotlight.

It is easy to lose conscience of what the show is about. That is when the professional community has a huge role to play. Ideally Soloists and Corps de Ballets, by working together, turn the  show into one big story built from everyone’s mini stories.

My first classical soloist role with the company was the Peasant Pas de Deux in Giselle. I was so nervous I could barely breathe. Before going on stage, having my colleagues saying ‘Chookas’ to me or giving me chocolate, made me realise that I wasn’t going to be on my own out there. Interacting  with people on stage and build my stories with the corps de ballet around me made me feel stronger. To me, that really is an example of how positive the cooperation of the professional community is.

There is also all the learning that happens off the stage. Although to me it is the same principle, as I usually treat class as some kind of performance : performing for the people around me, my colleagues, the ballet master.

Besides dancing, there is also professional networking. I saw some people around me succumbing to the distraction of professional networking forgetting about some technical aspects or their craft. It needs to be balanced to really work because life is not just about being able to promote ourselves, it is also about knowing that we can back it up. One’s career should be succes

sful thanks to the hard work and one’s artistic qualities not thanks to social connection.

As an artist and as a person, I self reflect a lot whether it’s on the way I danced last night or on how I spoke badly to my mother the day before. At work, I would use active experimentation by practicing steps more than a hundred times if I have to, until secure. I also use abstract conceptualisation on stage a lot with the way I react to a narrative, I like to play with that and find new ideas, new actions and reactions. I would use reflective observation for some technical aspects, but in my opinion everyone has a different body and we are all our own artist so observing other people in that respect can be inspiring but also tempting to become a copy cat.  Concerning just basic practice learning (just doing something and learn from it) it is something that is harder for me as I like to plan each second of what my body is going to do on a particular show, I try not leave room for any mistake but sometimes ‘just doing it’ makes the movement more fluid and more in the moment, it is something I need to learn to trust.

Since I have been in the professional world, it seems that I have been more inspired by individual connections with individual artists. Indeed, I find it difficult to be part of a professional community in general because, as a person, I do not feel part of any community (or I’d like to think that). I have many one to one connections, on stage and off stage, and I learn a lot from them.

Although I do admire the unconsciousness and force of a group energy, I find it hard to have a similar opinion or vision as my peers. My vision of the world gets distorted in a group setting, I feel everyone becoming more and more invincible and myself becoming more and more vulnerable.