Keep on taping (those toes)

-Seeing that makes me want to quit, said a pupil of mine today (half joking, I must admit). And what did she see? My toes.

Five days to go. I wonder how my nerves let alone feet are when we are Thursday this time and I should be packing my pumps and dress together with numerous band-aid packages ready to leave early next morning. Today neither feet nor nerves were that marvelous but then again, there are days and there are days, especially in dancing. Yesterday I had a small victory over a dance I've nerve-wrackingly hard tried to get into one satisfiable piece for a long time and my spirits were unusually high for the past weeks regarding the upcoming competition. And why am I so late with my practicing? Well of course, I am a teacher. Like a mother, before myself I take care that my children (even though I really don't have any children dancing) know their hops and trebbles as well as they can. The perfect example was the biggest show I have so far made with a colleague a couple of years ago: we trained our group of dancers for half a year and throughout the summer spent hours and hours at the studios almost every day, yelling and pleading and all between trying our best to make them dance as we wanted. And then I finished my own solo in my livingroom in the middle of the last night before the big performance.

Even though I realise my perfectionist tendencies towards dancing, I would still sometimes need someone to push me and make me dance better, try harder, concentrate more. I can practice myself to half dead but not always I feel having got so much done even though I would have spent hours of time alone at the dance studio. However an intensive one or two hours of practice with a good teacher makes wonders worth of weeks' work. What can I say, it sometimes feels a weird joke to be a perfectionist flegmatist, though, just maybe it also saves my life and nerves at times. And I know I am not the only dancer to feel this way. We all need a little push from time to time to make us reach for more than the mortal way-too-easily-aching bodies we were given would reasonably let us. For the sake of art, move, beauty, passion.

Now I do have a sense of reality as well. I think rest is good, too, and lately, becoming older and wiser have genuinely realised my good night sleep is irreplaceable. But there are times when the so-called "normal" idea of something does not quite coincide with that of dancers. This is what I count on you to understand - or at least be willing to imagine - if you keep on reading.