Progress - slowly but surely

Well, let's just say it's been a pretty crazy past couple of weeks.  Even just last week I recall myself having pretty much yet another mental breakdown about the whole circus doo da.  It's been happening to a lot of us at ProTrack at varying intensities.  These past two weeks, we've had presentations for both our major and our minor (one each Friday), and the development process for both was just incredibly stressful (particularly so emotionally).  For both, I just struggled with being satisfied with what I created.  I've really been trying to keep my expectations set high, because as a result of this training program I want to leave with an incredibly broadened, advanced skill set, yet at the same time it just makes it difficult when a lot of your role-models are ÉNC graduates and world-renowned professional circus performers.  Sometimes things that originally seemed inspiring can ultimately turn into something incredibly demoting.  During preparation for both of these presentations, I sent myself into a somewhat of a mental oblivion, for every time I would videotape myself doing a skill or sequence of skills, it would never be up to the standards that I had set up for myself.  My standards for myself are somewhat inordinately high, and I also feel like similarly for all of us, our standards increase as our skill level increases, always being one step ahead of our current abilities.  Once you finally master a trick, it no longer seems quite as impressive to you, and it's sometimes easy to forget the power a trick can have to just the typical bystander.  I was pretty aware of this anyways, but at the same time, it was still difficult to work through.  Regardless, both of my presentations came out satisfactory.  I still don't think they were spectacular, but for the purpose that they served I thought they were satisfactory.  I additionally got some nice feedback on both as a part of our peer-critiqueing process.

For my major act, I put together a bunch of tricks I had been working on, switched the song up, and experimented a bit with adding in a bit of floor movement.  A video is below.

An overdue update

It's honestly been two months since I've provided a worthwhile blog update, and to be quite frank, it most simply comes down to me being a bit lazy.  So, let me give you guys a rundown on the key things that have happened since I wrote in early November about how we were entering a new phase of ProTrack (i.e. - once we started show preparation).  I'm also including two videos in this post, so be sure to click the see more link if you're interested in watching them.

November 2010 - December 2010: Preparation for the winter show ("The Flying Nut: A Starry Night")

ProTrack got broken down into four groups, as decided by the staff.  The winter show is entirely staff directed, so all we basically are doing is performing in a show that fits the artistic vision of our coaches.  It's definitely a good experience for us to have, since things like that happen all the time when producing any sort of performance.  I got cast for the rope group (representing the element of earth) along with three others.  The other four groups were trapeze (representing the element of air), partner acrobatics/dance (representing the element of fire), and hoop diving (representing the element of water).

In November, we began our show preparation on Tuesday and Thursday mornings by training for an hour with our act for the show, and continuing as normal with the other hour in our general skill development rotations.  As we progressed into December, we would spend two hours each of those mornings working on the winter show, and, if I recall correctly, we also began to use Friday mornings for purposes of show preparation as well.