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One of the things that gets me about Ballet is that every single move has a name. Which wouldn't be so bad except that it's all French. Ouch. Not to mention the whole body doing crazy contortion/strength things. But in the end I still enjoy it.

On Saturday I had my very first Ballet performance. That string of French up there is the opening pass that we used to get onstage for the Coda of the Pas de Deux from The Nutcracker. The performance was entitled "Our Very own Nutcracker". That it was indeed.

My teacher is completely crazy and really a modern dancer. But she's managed to piece together this studio which now I think has 4 resident 'companies' and I use that term very lightly. But our spectacular nutcracker started off with live musicians performing The Overture.

I was one of the musicians. When she started talking about it I quickly volunteered to play anything. I am so much better at playing than dancing. They did a similar performance last year and so had used piano and 2 violins I think (based on the music we used). So this year I replaced one of the violin players who moved to piano, and therefore my teachers husband was off the hook for playing.

Next up were some entrance/party scenes. Marvelously danced by little girls most of whom don't come up past my waist. Always adorable.

Then, just for some contrast or something, we had our sweets (or the nationalities as I know them more as). These were danced by some older girls that are probably intermediate to low advanced ballet students. Two of the 4 were on pointe. And one of the most spectacular things was one of the older (probably older than me I'm guessing) one's extension. She brought her leg up into passe and extended it so that her knee was somewhere between 6 and 12 inches from the side of her face. Ridiculous.

Slightly not so cool, but w/e, me and my fellow musicians musiced again. In preparing for the whole playing something deal I had looked up Nutcracker music, and managed to find a full score for the suite. And so when I saw that I had myself and 2 violin players I thought of Dance of the Reed Flutes which is scored featuring a melody line of almost entirely a flute trio. So being the crazy overachiever that I occasionally I am I transcribed the whole thing (including some non-flute parts) for our group. Miraculously it worked. I was so proud, although I don't know that anyone beyond like TRM knew about my excitement.

After that was another entirely funny group of medium aged chilluns doing ballet? (running around more so), and hip-hop. Then I really neat African dance by a multi-aged group.

Lastly performing the Coda were 4 ballet students more or less around my age. And most specifically including me. The 11 word title of this post is our 8 count entrance. But somehow I still managed to learn everything quite well. Possibly because I was the only one of us who actually attended every single rehersal. Also aiding my memorization was the fact that it was around 80 seconds tops. It went by in a giant blurr. After the fact I was just like 'omg all that work for something that fast'.

In the end though I've been living for those fleeting moments all my life.