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something i love and something i very much do not
From time to time I come back to the YouTube dance mashup mixes that were big five-ish years ago. (You know the ones I mean. Old Movie Stars Dance to Uptown Funk, which clips Old Hollywood dance sequences with Uptown Funk as the soundtrack; Shut Up and Dance, which clips all sorts of movie dancing onto, well, "Shut Up and Dance." There are many others but I believe those are the ones that seeded what may have turned out to be a trend.) I could watch them for hours. The skill of the vid compiler is one thing to admire, of course, managing to line up the beats and tempos of dances filmed 85 years ago with the beats and tempos of a modern song (that "Uptown Funk" has a brilliant "Stop. Waitaminute," for example) - but even more than that, I love watching the dancing. I love watching the dancers.
I have tremendous respect and not a little envy for people who can move their bodies any way they want (and 9/10 of the time look good doing it).* But they also, especially when they're dancing together, generally look like they're having so much fun. Sometimes they look that way in a dance solo (couple of moments where e.g. Astaire catches his cane perfectly in time and grins delightedly before he carries on hoofing it), but when two or three are dancing together? My god, the moment where one dancer looks over at the other - sometimes it's looking at their feet, just checking in that they're still together; sometimes it's looking at their face, just checking in that they're still together. I love it. The communication. (I once went to a folk music jam at a pub where one guy had a guitar and one girl had a blown instrument of some kind - could have been a plastic recorder, for all I remember, I don't know, a pipe or fife or something - and one guy had a violin, and the best part for me was watching that fiddler watch his buddies and change what he was doing based on what they were doing. Like I could see him watching the guitarist's left hand and clock the chord changes and make his own decisions in that tiny amount of time. Brilliant.) And look, I know the face is part of the body. They're deciding what to do with their eyes just as much as they are with every other thing they can move how they want to. Half the time when they're smiling they're probably miserable; half the time when they're smiling at one another they probably hate each other's guts. Some of the grinning-and-checking-in stuff I love so much is, like, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. These are not people who were happy a lot of the time. I get it.
* For this reason, although it's fun that the vidder can make the beats match up,** I don't have a ton of use for the clips that are (a) from animated films or (b) wire work, e.g. "Airplane!"
** This "Shut Up and Dance" has Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer's Ländler from The Sound of Music at 2:29 where the lyric is "Just keep your eyes on me." I'm saying: There's a right way to do this sort of mashup, and this is it.
But I love watching it. I wish like hell I could move my body like that and have the fun they make it look like they're having.
Meanwhile, my chorus is back to in-person rehearsal as of this evening. And we are gnashing our teeth about it here at my house.
In March 2020, we were within a couple of weeks of a big performance with the big chorus (a 19th Amendment centennial program, it was going to be awesome) and a week or so into Lent with the church choir when everything shut down. I didn't sing a note except when I was putting my kid to bed for like 16 months. I went back to the church job after all the adults (Himself, myself, my in-laws and his aunt) had been vaccinated; the place keeps the windows open, we're pretty well distanced from one another up in the loft, and we're miles away from the congregation - I'd like it even better if the congregation were all masked and not singing, but that apparently changed while I was staying away. Anyway. The big chorus had some steps toward reassembling that Himself and I decided together we'd wait on until after the kid was vaccinated, for a variety of reasons mainly having to do with not being able to keep as wide a personal-space radius in that kind of group. The kid was vaccinated before Christmas, and the first rehearsal of the new year for the big chorus was last week - in a big local omicron wave, so it was a Zoom meeting to review the 19th Amendment stuff we're finally going to do this year. Great! But people are feeling good, or at least a little better, about the omicron drop now, so tonight's rehearsal is in person.
I want to go, and every time I think about going I immediately feel a very strong throb of what I know perfectly well is anxiety. Himself says he knows exactly how I feel, because (among other things) it was how he was feeling about resuming rehearsal with his own chorus, which he decided not to do yet. His chorus had the oh-wait-we'll-Zoom-for-now rehearsal two weeks before mine did and intended to start meeting in person again the week mine went to Zoom. I think we agreed that if my chorus had made its arrangements at the same time his did, I'd have reached the same conclusions he reached; the fact that we had the two-week buffer happened to give my group a little more time to get to where I can actually be anxious about going back rather than making a slam-dunk decision not to. (His group also has a history of, in my estimation, not treating its singers as well as I think it should, so my feelings about his going back there are almost certainly biased against in a way that is compounding my feelings about current pandemic conditions.) "It's your decision," he said when we were talking about how we both felt about it - which of course it is, it has been this whole time, but we had different conversations about it before than we're having now.
The thing is that I am also familiar with rehearsal anxiety because I used to routinely feel like I didn't want to go, couldn't possibly, heart pounding, had to drag myself out of the house because I was up against my max absences - and then by the end of the evening I'd be glad I'd gone. Happened all the time in the Before. Sometimes it was the generalized social anxiety I felt all the time around, for example, when my dad died - but other times it was the generalized social anxiety I felt as a confirmed introvert. Don't Wanna + Didn't Wanna Last Time + Turned Out Okay Last Time = Guess I Will. Which is fine, but it also means I can't tell how much of my current rehearsal anxiety is that and how much of it is but plaaague.
Right now my plan is to go to rehearsal tonight. (I asked Himself if he was secretly hoping I would decide not to go and he said "I don't think so." Introspection is hard for all of us right now also.) I guess I have until wheels-up to make a firm decision one way or the other.
I have tremendous respect and not a little envy for people who can move their bodies any way they want (and 9/10 of the time look good doing it).* But they also, especially when they're dancing together, generally look like they're having so much fun. Sometimes they look that way in a dance solo (couple of moments where e.g. Astaire catches his cane perfectly in time and grins delightedly before he carries on hoofing it), but when two or three are dancing together? My god, the moment where one dancer looks over at the other - sometimes it's looking at their feet, just checking in that they're still together; sometimes it's looking at their face, just checking in that they're still together. I love it. The communication. (I once went to a folk music jam at a pub where one guy had a guitar and one girl had a blown instrument of some kind - could have been a plastic recorder, for all I remember, I don't know, a pipe or fife or something - and one guy had a violin, and the best part for me was watching that fiddler watch his buddies and change what he was doing based on what they were doing. Like I could see him watching the guitarist's left hand and clock the chord changes and make his own decisions in that tiny amount of time. Brilliant.) And look, I know the face is part of the body. They're deciding what to do with their eyes just as much as they are with every other thing they can move how they want to. Half the time when they're smiling they're probably miserable; half the time when they're smiling at one another they probably hate each other's guts. Some of the grinning-and-checking-in stuff I love so much is, like, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. These are not people who were happy a lot of the time. I get it.
* For this reason, although it's fun that the vidder can make the beats match up,** I don't have a ton of use for the clips that are (a) from animated films or (b) wire work, e.g. "Airplane!"
** This "Shut Up and Dance" has Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer's Ländler from The Sound of Music at 2:29 where the lyric is "Just keep your eyes on me." I'm saying: There's a right way to do this sort of mashup, and this is it.
But I love watching it. I wish like hell I could move my body like that and have the fun they make it look like they're having.
Meanwhile, my chorus is back to in-person rehearsal as of this evening. And we are gnashing our teeth about it here at my house.
In March 2020, we were within a couple of weeks of a big performance with the big chorus (a 19th Amendment centennial program, it was going to be awesome) and a week or so into Lent with the church choir when everything shut down. I didn't sing a note except when I was putting my kid to bed for like 16 months. I went back to the church job after all the adults (Himself, myself, my in-laws and his aunt) had been vaccinated; the place keeps the windows open, we're pretty well distanced from one another up in the loft, and we're miles away from the congregation - I'd like it even better if the congregation were all masked and not singing, but that apparently changed while I was staying away. Anyway. The big chorus had some steps toward reassembling that Himself and I decided together we'd wait on until after the kid was vaccinated, for a variety of reasons mainly having to do with not being able to keep as wide a personal-space radius in that kind of group. The kid was vaccinated before Christmas, and the first rehearsal of the new year for the big chorus was last week - in a big local omicron wave, so it was a Zoom meeting to review the 19th Amendment stuff we're finally going to do this year. Great! But people are feeling good, or at least a little better, about the omicron drop now, so tonight's rehearsal is in person.
I want to go, and every time I think about going I immediately feel a very strong throb of what I know perfectly well is anxiety. Himself says he knows exactly how I feel, because (among other things) it was how he was feeling about resuming rehearsal with his own chorus, which he decided not to do yet. His chorus had the oh-wait-we'll-Zoom-for-now rehearsal two weeks before mine did and intended to start meeting in person again the week mine went to Zoom. I think we agreed that if my chorus had made its arrangements at the same time his did, I'd have reached the same conclusions he reached; the fact that we had the two-week buffer happened to give my group a little more time to get to where I can actually be anxious about going back rather than making a slam-dunk decision not to. (His group also has a history of, in my estimation, not treating its singers as well as I think it should, so my feelings about his going back there are almost certainly biased against in a way that is compounding my feelings about current pandemic conditions.) "It's your decision," he said when we were talking about how we both felt about it - which of course it is, it has been this whole time, but we had different conversations about it before than we're having now.
The thing is that I am also familiar with rehearsal anxiety because I used to routinely feel like I didn't want to go, couldn't possibly, heart pounding, had to drag myself out of the house because I was up against my max absences - and then by the end of the evening I'd be glad I'd gone. Happened all the time in the Before. Sometimes it was the generalized social anxiety I felt all the time around, for example, when my dad died - but other times it was the generalized social anxiety I felt as a confirmed introvert. Don't Wanna + Didn't Wanna Last Time + Turned Out Okay Last Time = Guess I Will. Which is fine, but it also means I can't tell how much of my current rehearsal anxiety is that and how much of it is but plaaague.
Right now my plan is to go to rehearsal tonight. (I asked Himself if he was secretly hoping I would decide not to go and he said "I don't think so." Introspection is hard for all of us right now also.) I guess I have until wheels-up to make a firm decision one way or the other.