Sing Out, Луиз!*

Number of Steps: 10926

Well… I am sore as hell… let me just get that out of the way.

This morning we tromped down to school for a slightly earlier morning than we’ve had yet for our first singing class with the incomparable Марина (Marina).  I love this woman.  She speaks almost no English, but still manages to communicate so much about singing it’s really amazing.  And boy does she remember me from last year.  I ran into her yesterday, at which point she gave me a big smile and a flurry of happy Russian, and this was only compounded today in class when I got up to sing.  I wasn’t great, but I wasn’t bad, and she noted that I had gotten more confident since last year.  Yeah – she REALLY remembers me from last year.  Then she asked me if I wanted an easy song or a difficult song, so of course I answered a difficult song.  So she gave me “Your Daddy’s Son” from Ragtime.  This is a song I could never actually use anywhere, but it definitely is tough.  Two students sang it last year, and I’m sure I’ll have a good time working on it this year!  It was also a lot of fun hearing everyone else sing.  We really have a good group of voices this year, so I really think this class is going to be a hoot!

After our awesome hour with Marina, we headed over to ballet with Рэнад (Renad), who is some sort of sculpted god.  Seriously, this guy is the very picture of elegance and grace.  And though last year he seemed a little shocked to be dealing with non-dancers, this year he knew what he was getting into, and he really did a great job working us into the basics.  That said… he also beat the living hell out of us.  The adagio sequence nearly killed me.   

After dance class it was another hurried lunch of buckwheat and veggies before meeting to go over our beginning of class etude.  Yesterday we were told to up the stakes, so today we killed a groom at his own reception.  Boom.  This was, of course, a little over the top.  But still, it was a lot of fun.  Then we played a pretty intense game of Mafia – but the added element was that we had to choose a time and place and then create characters for ourselves within those circumstances.  It was a lot of fun, and turned out to be a pretty fascinating acting exercise.  After that we did our first round of object etudes.  I was a G2 pen.  It went alright, but it wasn’t nearly detailed enough.  Ah well.  Better luck next time… if I ever come up with another idea.  Argh!

There was no show to see tonight, so I headed straight back to the dorm and met with JT about possible shows for the group to see for the rest of the month.  It was a lot of fun going through all these theatres, getting an idea of what might be ahead of us.  

*Луиз = Louise