Colman

Who'd want to be famous for dropping her though? Or worse, damaging her?

I’m now imagining some sort of foot-long tactical comb in black metal with built-in taser.

You were planning to stab someone with a comb?

I’m fascinated to know why people are so attached to intrusive security measures that wouldn’t have stopped any recent attack and generally only have the effect of lining up people nicely for anyone planning carry out the sort of attacks that have been happening. Is it possible that they’ve done a threat analysis and come to the conclusion that it’s pointless? That they do have security staff watching for people acting suspiciously instead?

You really do need them: barefoot is too sticky for ballet. They do feel weird to start with - the soles are in a strange place.

Lucky Brexit is coming up or you'd have to work out how to bill EU citizens for institutions that they're helping fund. <sigh> Tourists also pay taxes, incidentally.

Monday morning in Pineapple? My wife did a few daytime classes there over the summer, sounds like about the right level.

I can imagine colleagues who aren’t interested in doing the curriculum exams doing these after a few years of basics.

Big bag?

Our seven year old boy was asking it too. Though he may have enjoyed the broader elements of the humour more than the subtler bits.

Is saw the same programme in Dublin and they did a hilarious (if turned out rather than in parallel!) version of Riverdance as a closer.

I wonder why you would wonder that?

Why is everyone so worried about bag checks? I'd assume that the ROH have done appropriate risk analysis and decided they can manage the risks in other ways.

Why do you think five hours of dance is having an effect? What else is she doing?

I have a slightly older (1950?) Ikonta folder that works fine. It's really bad at connecting to wifi though, and I haven't been able to work out how the Instagram uploads work.

"Kick" does seem to be the wrong mental model here. Current corrections here are to extend, use the inner thigh and hip muscles with lots of turnout and try to use quads as little as possible, keep the hip still until you're past 90 degrees.

😂😂

Having spent the weekend doing that piece a couple of weeks ago it's giving me sympathetic lower back pain.

Its not that my feet looked horrible - though they did turn down stunt jobs in the Hobbit movies to pursue other artistic opportunities - simply that they were mobile in ways that the normal people in the class found disturbing. People can be weird about feet.

Just relax and enjoy. Five weeks isn't even past the "feeling like a total idiot" phase of learning. I'm four or five years in and I'm just beginning to get a handle on a few things. Ballet is hard.

It's not even just flexibility - it's the proprioception as well. If you wear shoes all the time - especially if you're sensitive about being barefoot - your sense of what your feet are doing and can do will be underdeveloped. I remember utterly freaking out a tai chi class once when our teacher decided to work on foot sensitivity and flexibility by being able to move toes and flex my feet. This was before I started ballet: I fear they'd run screaming faced with even my stumpy and inflexible proto-dancer feet. Normal modern humans don't use their feet at all, apparently.

I've seen it done, though not for long chunks of class on a regular basis, but I'm not going to second guess your teacher on it.

Five weeks is no time at all: if you haven't been using your feet much other than as things to put in shoes and stand on they'll be stiff and you'll have limited feeling in them. Exercises as above, and lots of slow tendus in the mirror once you have a good idea what you should be doing - very easy to learn the wrong thing. Maybe massage your feet occasionally so you increase the sensitivity and your sense of where they are.

There are lots of open classes in London. My wife was there for a week over the summer and managed to get in six or seven classes in five days without trying too hard.

My KitchenAid is coming up to its twenty fifth anniversary.