Practice makes long weekend seem longer

Today was the first day of my 4 day weekend - which, of course, would be a holiday, but for dance practice. Unfortunately, my mind and body both think it should be holiday time, so focusing on practice today was like pulling teeth.

First, I memorized the demo for my varnam. A demo is the description of a Bharatanatyam piece that the performer gives before the piece, including gestures from the abhinaya. This is particularly useful to audience members who aren't familiar with Bharatanatyam since it explains what the miming gestures in the piece mean. At any rate, as of this morning I hadn't memorized any demos, so I have some work to do. Now, I've got 1/4!

After that, it was time to straighten out the tattimittu for my varnam. These are the final rhythmic steps before the end of the varnam that accompany the miming gestures that tell the last part of the varnam story. Performing them is a bit like patting your head while rubbing your tummy - you need to divorce what your feet are doing from what you're hands are doing. For me, the divorce has yet to be finalized.

On the upside, my physical therapy is going really well. My clamshells got upgraded to crab walks and my heel taps are elevated to the height of a full step. Also, my IT band has loosened substantially. When I started foam rolling them (see below), I was on the verge of tears with the weight of only one leg on the roller. Today was the first day I did full two-leg rolls with totally bearable pain. Success!

What's up IT band!

So things were looking up, until the last 5 minutes of practice and the skin on my left big toe split.

WTF??

This is definitely a mode of failure I hadn't anticipated. Surprisingly, it doesn't hurt that much, and can be easily covered with a bandaid. Hopefully it won't impede the last week of practice.

T minus 7 days!

First Orchestra Rehearsal

Last night I had my first orchestra rehearsal. There was a lot of learning to be done - it was the first time seeing microphones and mixers set up, the first time performing with the mridangam and violin, and the first time going through everything with a braid, spetum clip, and other uncomfortable costume pieces.

For those who are outside the Bharatanatyam world, let me explain why these things suck. The braid is like two pounds of swinging junk attached to your head. I got a cramp in my back at one point for the extra weight pulling my head back.

The septum clip is a new one for me. It's not something you typically wear in a run-of-the-mill group performance. In part, that's because everyone hates them. A lot of people find them uncomfortable because they pinch the inside of your nose and make you want to sneeze. I didn't have that problem. The other problem (which I definitely had) is that it's a wick for sweat and nose-products that drips down right into your mouth. Ewwwww!

Why do people choose to wear these?

I also managed to bruise my shin with my bells. Normally, the problem with bells is that they give you blisters. To avoid this, I tied them really tight, and came across this alternate failure mode. I hope the swelling goes down before Tuesday when I do my stage rehearsal.

I couldn't drink enough water to replace what I was losing. My saree was completely soaked by the time I finished. I drank as much as I could once I finished, but I still woke up feeling like I had a hangover in the morning. And I have to do this (and worse) three more times. OMG!!!

What's next? For the long weekend, I'm sequestering myself in the south bay to focus on dance and avoid undue driving back and forth. Last night, I stayed with Kjirsten and family in Fremont. As much as I love the city, it was very peaceful falling asleep to the sound of crickets.

Now, I'm staying in my "Gsuite Mountain View Getaway" apartment. For those non-Googlers, Google offers up their corporate apartments for free on weekends to employees if they're available. Since who would stay in Mountain View by choice on a long weekend, there was space available! So here I am.

No SF, but could be worse

Today I didn't practice because I was completely exhausted. Tomorrow, however, no excuses. And, hey, what else am I going to do in Mountain View on a Saturday?

T minus 8 days.

Sleep and the Final Stretch

Last week was rough. A combination of things, some physical (new physio exercises made my legs hurt during practice), but mostly mental, made me completely exhausted. A big problem was falling asleep. With looming rehearsals and performance, there's so much to get done. So in spite of being absolutely exhausted when I went to bed, I was consistently awake for another 2+ hours running through all the random tasks to get done the next day. Not cool.

However, by the end of the week, a lot was settled. I got a videographer and photographer booked last week, and Kjirsten settled the food. All are costing me more than I'd estimated, but I'm not quite in the poor house yet. I hope my future children weren't planning on going to college*. I also watched and helped out at the last arangetram before mine. Strangely, I felt less stressed after it was done despite a lot of 'OMG are you READY?!?!?!' inquiries. No, I'm not ready. But I will be in two weeks. Please keep your pants on.

I also got through my first couple of last-mile practices with my Guru. They have gone extremely well by my standards. There's a lot to improve, but nothing that warrants panicking. I had my first rehearsal with my vocalist: the wonderful Sindhu Natarajan! I had a lot of fun. Dancing with live musicians is always so much better than with recordings, plus Sindhu has one of the most gorgeous voices I've heard. I'm getting excited for my show.

So there's a lot more crazy to come. First orchestra rehearsal is tomorrow, then stage rehearsal Tuesday, then final orchestra rehearsal next Thursday, plus a whole lot of practice in between. However, Friday is my last pre-arangetram day at work, and I'm staying in the South Bay this weekend, so I feel like a lot of the build up stress will be mitigated by having a single focus. As well, my boyfriend is back on Monday, my parents arrive on Wednesday, and my sister and the Gaby arrive on Friday. So much to look forward to!

T minus 10 days.

* Of course, they will always have the more affordable alternative of University in Canada.

Where for art thou Rama? Also, my friends are too small.

One of the intents of this blog was to post detailed descriptions of each of my pieces. So far, I've managed to cover 2/7. Emily FAIL. In the spirt of catching up, here's a description of my javali.

First off, a javali is a love lyric, generally told by a longing nayaki (maiden) searching for her nayaka (lord). This might sound familiar because, as I explained earlier, varnams usually express the same theme. However, since my varnam rejects this old chestnut, it was time to get my lusty maiden on.

In my javali, the nayaki is lusting after Rama, the 7th avatar of Vishnu notoriously lame husband by most accounts (see Ramayana).

Remember what they say about Gods with large bows

In spite of him forcing his wife through fire and still kicking her out of their home, this nayaki considers him quite a catch. She waits and waits for Rama to show, but no dice. Instead, she finds her friend and asks her to go find her Rama and tell him of her suffering, because everyone knows nothing attracts a guy more than abject desperation.

Why is she so into him? She thinks he's quite well-spoken - this will come up over and over in the piece. He's also a good singer and some other stuff. Oh yeah, and he's awesome in bed. I kid you not people, this is literally a line in the piece. Cover your children's eyes because otherwise there are going to be some questions.

After performing this for my student teacher for the first time, her major criticism was: your friend is too small. Apparently, I was persistently talking to a person who was clearly a foot shorter than me. Thus, from now on, I order all my short friends (you know who you are, Radha and Lakshmi...) to stand on stools of at least 6 inches in height when speaking to me. That is all.*

T minus 15 days.

* I blame my approach to this problem on Judge John Hodgman.

Raising a Small Army

It turns out that the secret to a good arangetram is to convince others to the work for you. Granted, this only goes so far - I have to do the actual dancing myself, of course. However, just about everything else can be offloaded to others. When you have parents arranging an arangetram, this is obvious since the organization of the event is your sole focus, aside from feeding, housing, and chauffering the talent. In my case, I have been almost entirely focused on the dance part (and my job, and the usual chores of life) and basically ignored the organizational side. With one month to go this is no longer an option.

Enter Kjirsten, my pseudo-parent in shining armour.

Artist's Rendition of Kjirsten

Like Krishna leading the Pandavas and all those other guys, Kjirsten has taken up the cause of organizing my sad mess of an arangetram. So far, she has gathered a ton of volunteers by asking each person inidividually, and outlined all the tasks we have to do for the day, which at the moment is somewhere around one bajillion things to do. She is a rockstar, as are Savi, my classmate and Kjirsten's daughter, and Kjirsten's husband Vikram.

To give you a sense of all the things that need to be done, here is a highly abridged list:

• Lighting for performance
• Sound for performance
• Video for performance
• Photography for performance
• Make up
• Hair
• Costume Changing
• Sweat Dabbing
• Food for volunteers
• Food for guests
• Food for orchestra
• Transportation for special elderly guests

And so on and so on. I didn't realize how screwed I was until Kjirsten kindly asked whether I had volunteers for all of the above tasks. I stared blankly. Aside from laziness, the problem I have recruiting volunteers is what I would like to term caucasian shame. Basically, my people* don't have much of a tradition of calling on random people to help with work, especially ostentatious dance recitals. When you and your neighbour can't agree on which version of Jesus to believe in, how are you going to ask them to help you pick out snacks for your friends?

So now there's a ton to do, but things are getting done. Kjirsten, THANK YOU!

* You might notice my liberal use of the term 'my people', and confusing context switches where 'my people' transition from Canadian to Irish to Indian to *gasp* American all in rapid succession. You have observed correctly.

Road to Recovery

On Friday I had my first physiotherapy session on Friday morning. Naturally, this is physiotherapy offered at Google. I had been waiting for 6 weeks for my initial appointment, which I scheduled the day after I originally hurt my knee during the photo shoot. Although my knee has since improved, it still gives me occasional trouble, so I was excited to get some expert advice.

Within a few minutes of simple physio tests (lift this, bend that, etc), the physiotherapist had a fairly certain diagnosis: I have zero hip strength. This is not what I was expecting. The turnout for our dance posture is pretty dramatic, and I have no idea how one does that without hip strength to keep one's legs pried apart. Apparently, the other way to do it is to put a lot of torque on one's knees.

I've been given one simple set of exercises: clam shells. This is where you lie on your side, with heels pressed together, and lift the top knee off the bottom knee while your legs are bound together with a theraband. I was started off with the wimpiest theraband tension and I can still barely get my knees apart. This is me trying my most hardest:

We'll call this The Before Shot

Note that that shot was taken on the 3rd day of doing exercises. The therapist says that it will take a couple of weeks to notice a difference, and by 6 to 8 weeks I shouldn't have to do them anymore since once the muscles are activated I'll be using them all the time in dance. I'd say this is very good news, though it would have been nice to have 6 weeks ago.

Into the Deep End

zOMG what a crazy weekend! In addition to the usual practice practice practice, I had invitations to package up and ship out, blouses to hand off for stitching, and a Shriya to help out for her arangetram. By Sunday night I was more tired than I was Friday night, which for me is very unusual.

It all started promptly at 10:30am when I got to my practice space in the city. I was exhausted, but man is it cool to have a big open space, with cushy nice dance floors, in the heart of the Mission.

A little piece of heaven

Practice itself, however, was brutal. I've fallen a little behind in my stamina practice, so it was hard doing the second day in a row. I was amused when someone came in and asked if this is where the hip hop class is. Umm, yeah... Just getting ready for my role in the next Lil Wayne video. I hear he's really down with Vishnu.

After a shower and a quick brunch, I roped my sister and boyfriend into helping me package up the 150 or so invitations I had to send out. It took longer than I thought, but before dinner we had it all done.

So much for having my apartment cleaned last week

Another unanticipated problem: apparently, 150 envelopes is not something you just dump in your corner mailbox. Sigh. So I had a trip to the USPS office near my place on Monday to get the invitations on their way.

Finally, Sunday, all day, was arangetram madness. This was my first time helping out back stage at an arangetram.

Where the magic begins

I can't believe how much stuff there is to do. It takes like 5 people just to get the performer's make up on. I have no idea how my arangetram is going to happen. On the plus side, dancing for 2 hours in front of everyone I know seems so simple compared to all the organizing and preparation that needs to go into getting the performance together. So at least I can fall back on that...