Turnout

Briefly- in dance you hold your body in different shapes, for safety, power, beauty. One is called turn out, and it is both fundamental and I think lifelong. The idea is, while standing upright, your hips would turn so far from the center line of your body as to make a straight, 180 degree line from your left toes through your left heel through your right heel to your right toes. 

This is a line I essentially have never seen myself make. Somehow I carry on, and live a rich, full life. In ballet class I just do something different. But on the ice... they told us to do it so I am trying. I am too new to know if there is a workaround. 

 

I’ve been working on my turnout. I check it at home standing on a rug that has a floral design laid out 8 points. I go from a scant 90 degrees before stretching, to similar to what you see above. I don't know if other people with this turnout self select out of these disciplines, or what, but this is a bit of an outlier in the direction of bad. What you also can't see is that I am using friction from the ground to hold this position, and once I raise a foot in the air on the ice my toe swivels in. 

However! I think I was only using turn out in class because other, more intermediate students were working on it, and I have much to work on before I get there properly myself. 

I did not need my wrist guards today at Coffee Club. From what I can see, the ethos at Snoopy's Home Ice is conservative for adults. We are really drilling the fundamentals so there is very little opportunity to fall down. Our coach even joked that falling out of an outside edge is "a hard fall" (so don't) which is the opposite of what they tell us in Oakland which is to fall forward only and never backward. I literally love that there is a life stage where you just hang out at the rink with your friends for thirty years after your kids are grown, I love to see seniors like glowing with vitality and following their dreams. And, I am learning that they have a different relationship to their knees, hips, and feet than I do, with different considerations. 

Okay there were millions of places to stretch my hips but they were kind of too nice. Like the barrier plexiglass was pristine, I can't put my skate on that. I ended up in like the saddest unintentionally weighted (from the skates) pigeon pose on a carpeted bench. Then class started but I didn't realize so I just used the totally empty outside of the rink to do very ill advised ballet barre leg swings in skates (ill advised because of the momentum and the blade. They felt great.) until my eyes focussed through the barrier and I saw classes forming and I hustled onto the ice. 

I guess I also just feel at home in Oakland in general so I can just pop my foot up wherever. I do avoid purpose built handrails out of courtesy but I will use a balustrade bar that could double as a handrail.