Learning two performance pieces

On the first full day of camp, we are learning our variation and our rep piece. Class was with Pedro and he gives a really great but hard class!
At lunch I had a half hour with the massage therapist, Gary, who works on my neck and shoulder, which has been really tight. For variation, Danile is working with us on the peasant variation from Giselle. Short at 50 sec, but I'm grateful because we will have time to work on presentation and not just desperately trying to remember steps. Rep is waltz of the hours from Coppelia with Pedro. It's going to be longer and more complicated but not technically challenging. The fun part of rep is we're all in it together and learning how to work in patterns. We end with turnout workshop which is really interesting. I have very wide range of internal rotation but hardly any external (pretty much opposite what you want for ballet, oh well). I also discovered that I am barely engaging my adductors, so something to work on at home. With all of this new material today, it's exhausting but we have a nice dinner at Charlie's Bistro and Stephanie (financial planner from further north of here) joins us.

Dance camp, Vancouver, WA again!

This is my second time at this camp. I was here two years ago when they first ventured west. I had mixed feelings about that camp for various reasons. This year the teachers include Pedro and Danile who I haven't had the pleasure of taking class with since our last Richmond camp in 2010. On our first day (yesterday), we met everyone and I was impressed with the high level of education and achievement in campers' day jobs! We have a few PhDs, several engineers and a roboticist. First day is usually a gentle intro but we started with EBAS which is a great way to help retrain your body for proper alignment but is also a lot of work to do correctly. Tech class was with Danile and she gave a great gentle class. Heidi and Danile did an alignment workshop to further dig into EBAS technique. Dinner was at Orchid Thai, which has moved from its old location two years ago. In fact there seems to be an increase in activity and businesses in Vancouver.

New neighbourhood cheese shop

Even more reason to love my neighbourhood! There's a new cheese shop. I picked up a few cheeses for a World Cup viewing party this past weekend and they were all incredibly yummy! The shop will give you samples of any of their cheese and they are labeled with animal source, country of origin and if it's raw.

 More info on the shop and it's proprietors here, and I'm really looking forward to their first events.