Zills

I'm taking my 3rd class under The Neighbourhood Strays and this time it's Zills. Good lord. I love those things, although it seems like I'm the only one who does in class. I studied piano for 8 or 9 years on top of being in 3 concert bands growing up, and well the good old music class in high school. I guess you can say that I understand rhythms and timing and musical patterns. So when Andrea busts out a new zill flourish I can catch on almost instantly. The steps and combinations we learn for our bodies aren't overly complex, just tricky to keep them in line. For example, Laura was sub-teaching 2 weeks ago and she taught us a grapevine step with hip locks, with snake arms, and again with back bends. This week past she went through double-step grapevine which threw me for a loop , but I learned a trick pretty fast: don't turn your body when you switch directions, you're already set up to step front-front, back-back. Yay me. In either case, once you get around to it, it's not all that difficult for either of the individual pieces. Adding zills to the grapevine with a back bend is a little more complicated, but not impossible. I can see myself improving each week and it's fantastic. I think I might even want to incorporate my zills into my solo that I'm slowly dreaming up. It's pretty vague and spaced out so far, but it will involved back bends leading into a drop with some floor work, and it will also have belly rolls and mad isolations. I don't know how I can manage zills in that, might have to come up with 2 of them :) We'll see...

Next Class in the Fall: Improv or ATS

SHIMMY!