Final Blog Post #5

Hello everyone!!!
I am so glad that we got to do this project this marking period because it has been one of the most personally rewarding projects of all! I got the chance to improve my dancing skill and just be able to document it and watch my progress this whole time. I love all the support I've gotten from classmates and I also have loved watching everyone else's genius hour projects unfold in the last month. I am proud to say that I did accomplish my goal last weekend and it felt so good to reach it. My personal goal was four fouettes with a double pirouette landing. Here is a video of one of my successful trials. (This is also the video that was supposed to be in my presentation) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVSIDbRMezE&feature=youtu.be

I reached my final goal after a long day in the studio. I think the determination I had that helped me reach it came from the deadline of this project. Having a deadline to reach a goal pushes me a little bit harder and makes me work harder to reach it. Wihtout this project I never would have made time to learn this turn or pushed as hard as I did to reach the goal, and that's why I'm so happy we did it. This past weekend I just had a dance competition called Turn it Up dance challenge at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott. I had so much fun watching other girls dance and seeing this turn performed in so many of the dances. Fouettes are a popular dance skill at competitions and I would say are performed in about 3 out of every 5 dances. Watching from the audience, I could see what the person did well if they looked good or not so well if they needed work. I learned a few things from talking to some girls at this competition and I think my turns can improve some more after watching and learning from these dancers.

 After doing some research in this past week, I found an article that I loved!

http://www.dancespirit.com/2008/11/improve_your_fouettes/

 This gave me some extra tips to think about when doing fouette turns. Now that I have the basic movement down, I can go into the technical stuff so the turns can look extra clean. If I use these tips I probably won't be as wobbly and I will do the turns more smoothly. I like the tip they gave on squeezing the shoulder blades and keeping them down, because this improves the look of the turns as well as the quality of them. And they also talked about what to do if you aren't hitting the turns. They said just to walk away and come back to the studio another day with an open mind. I could totally relate to this feeling because sometimes I would go into the studio to work on the turns and they would be horrendous and I would get very frustrated and this just made them worse. But, if I stopped and went back another day with a fresh start, I could do the turn much better. After reading this article, I was glad that I wasn't the only one who had this problem.

 One of my favorite parts about this project was being able to do the turn with someone else! I think this was an extra step I took to try to gain more skill. Doing the turn with another person is so much more difficult because you have to be facing the same direction at the same time, for the whole turn. Your timing and counts have to be spot on. Luckily, my dear friend Kat, who you all know, was willing to do this with me. After a long time of working together to get in sync, we did a fouette sequence together. I was so happy with being able to do this because this means, I am eligible to do this choreography in group dances, because I can hit the turns on time with other dancers. Here's a video of Kat and me, doing our turns.

 http://youtu.be/UU1sd6CG9iE

 Thanks for reading!!! Good luck with presentations everyone!