The Wizard of Oz

I don't usually blog about specific life events, but last Sunday was so memorable I'd like to digest it this way.

For the last semester we worked on our Wizard of Oz ballet in the ballet school I go to, and Sunday was finally the performance day. We had a double cast (two performances) and in the first one I had a solo as Glinda, and in the second one I was the Wizard. These were both solos on pointe and this was the first time I ever got to do that, so it was really memorable and exciting for me!

Here's an early picture of me posing as Glinda, taken around February, I think.

I've never been anything remotely remarkable when it comes to ballet. I don't think I'm completely without talent: I've always been praised for my soft style and musicality for example, but the truth is I'm not a very kinesthetic person. My memory for movements and steps is not very long, I have to refresh it all the time, or I'll forget everything, and the next time I come around something that should be easy, it's going to feel like I've never done it before. I'm also not very flexible and don't have the kind of muscles that give you a lot of explosive power, so I'm not good at jumps and stuff, and also not so great with a lot of fast and tiny movements with my feet.

However, I am a very visual and artistic person, and since I also love telling stories, I think this is the combination that brought me to ballet in the first place and why I still do it. This, and finding a school that was so accepting and appreciative of everyone, regardless of objective talent, has finally, after 13 years of dancing, made me able to get to the level where I can do a solo on pointe (at least in a small school and a small city's theater's stage). I've been in my current school for four years, and in that time I have improved more than in all my previous years of dancing! Last autumn I was good enough to join the representative group of our school, and because of that, this ballet year has been more exciting (and busier) than any year before!

The "grand finale" of this year was the performance day last Sunday. And I was SO nervous before it. I can't even remember the last time I've really been nervous before a performance, dancing as a part of the group has been so normal for me for so many years, but I don't have much experience doing solos and definitely not on pointe. Before I came to this school I was not good enough to dance anything on pointe on stage. All my skills in pointe work have been developed in this school. But this year I really did develop faster than I ever had, partially because I finally found exactly the right pointe shoes for me! It was almost a miracle how fast I improved after discovering those shoes! I had been dancing with the wrong kind of shoes for 10 years, and nobody had ever even noticed...

So, by the beginning of 2019 this all had led to me being cast as Glinda, and the Wizard (plus I had a couple of the usual "corps" roles everyone in my group was doing). I was so excited! It had been my life long dream to be able to do a classical pointe solo on stage. I'm 25, almost 26, but, I finally got there! The rehearsals weren't always great of course, I still had a LOT of work to do with Glinda especially, it being undoubtedly the more difficult role, dancing-wise. At some point I really struggled, and I had some problems with nerves towards the performance day. I remember this one rehearsal where my mind went completely blank at the beginning of my solo, and of course, forgetting the first few steps, I kinda panicked after that, and the rest was a disaster.

But in the end, the actual performance went well. I felt like it went well, my teacher praised me, and I got a lot of positive feedback from other students. I'm not sure if my parents' feedback counts, because, well, they're my parents, and they tend to think I'm brilliant, no matter what I do, but they did seem even more impressed than normal. And I don't even remember the last time I'd had that kind of adrenaline rush! And how I felt afterwards. I was terrified three days before the show but it went well, and afterwards I just felt so great. I hope I'll get to do something like that again, I really hope I keep improving and get to do more difficult things, because it's just so exciting!

After Glinda, everything else felt like a piece of cake. Well, I did make a mistake in the poppy dance I was in... Before the dance started I knelt down on the stage with the wrong knee, so I had to change it because it mattered to what happened next, but, I think I was able to do it in a subtle way. I hope! I guess I'll get to see it at some point in a video.

Here I am in the poppy outfit.

After the first show was over I was definitely starting to feel tired because of the emotional and physical roller coaster Glinda had put me through, but I was also starting to really be able to just enjoy everything and not worry! Though, during the rehearsals I managed to place myself in a really uneven spot on the stage. There were a lot of weird bumps and holes, and I hit my toes in them and they got a pretty nasty ache after that... But I was able to relax my feet well enough before the real show, and all went okay!

Here's the Tornado scene, I was there lifting Dorothy up, too. Photography by Jani Tykkyläinen.

I really enjoyed dancing the Wizard, because after the technically demanding and almost "naked" Glinda it was kind of relaxing, because it was less about the technique and more about the illusion of the Wizard. It kind of felt like I was doing exactly what the Wizard does too: Hiding behind an illusion instead of actually dancing that much. But I don't mean this in a negative sense, I just thought this suited the role of the Wizard perfectly!

Here I am as the Wizard, hiding behind and doing fun stuff with the golden "wings". Photography by Jani Tykkyläinen.

After everything was over and we were all standing on the stage, our teacher giving the usual speech, I was in for one more surprise: I got the award for the most advanced student this year! I have certainly not been awarded anything in ballet before, not me as an individual dancer, and while I of course knew that I had improved a lot during this year, I wasn't even thinking I'd get this kind of reward for it, since I had the impression that only little kids got awards this year. And even if I hadn't thought that, I could've named a lot of other good candidates for the award, so, it was definitely a surprise, and really the cherry on top for already a great day and a great year!

I'll try my best to translate what my teacher had written about me:

"Eve is a persistent and hardworking dancer, who has an engaging, soft and flowing quality of movement. She has worked her way up from the adult ballet classes to being a member of the representative group Prima, which shows great perseverance and also talent and intelligence."

This is from the first show's end.

I celebrated everything at home by eating sushi and watching the cartoon She-Ra. Though I was so tired I could barely focus, I also wrote everything in my journal before going to sleep.

One more picture of me as Glinda, with my girlfriend who has also turned into a bun head with my influence, a couple of years ago! She was a citizen in the Emerald City, and one of the Wicked Witch's minions (which were not exactly flying monkeys). She has also made a lot of progress in two years, from having a few steps on stage, to two full scenes!

Just to make sure that this day was actually PERFECT, Finland won the World Championship in hockey, which is a HUGE deal here. Like, the time Finland won the championship for the first time is probably right there on the pedestal next to the day Finland became an independent country. Yeah, it's that huge. After even this third time, people have been pulling crazy stunts to celebrate and companies are already selling merch based on inside jokes sparked by the games of the tournament. So, of course I was watching that game until midnight too, though I was too tired to focus completely. But I was so happy about everything and it only added to my happiness.

Sometimes a day is just as perfect as it could possibly be, right?

Blog survey for writers: 10. What are some really weird situations your characters have been in?

Sometimes, when I was younger I had a habit of making situations really weird by mixing comedic elements with serious scenes. The problem was that I didn't really know how to do it skillfully yet. This was especially evident in my impro comic with my friend, because we both had this habit.

There was a time in the comic when Viola and Keller were participating in a singing contest their school held (which was weird on its own right because the prize was an actual recording contract...) and while Viola was watching Keller's performance, thinking how good she was, she saw a faint image of angel wings behind Keller. And then suddenly, surprise: Time stopped! And for some reason Viola was the only one whose time didn't stop. And she saw an image of a moon looming above her, and it started talking to Viola, saying that it was Keller's "sign" and had come to warn her.

Um... Some supernatural power, huh? Couldn't even come to the right person at the right time.

This was from my friend's pen, but I made this whole thing even weirder. Because I made the sign reappear when the girls were flying towards the cursed mountain in some freaky big soap bubbles. (Unexplained, of course.) And the sign told Keller that she had only two weeks left to live as a human if the girls didn't hurry up and complete their mission in that time!

Yeah, I had probably started to feel self-conscious about how little the characters actually did for their magical mission, so I wanted to speed things up. It sure worked, but looking back to it the scene with Keller floating in a bubble listening to her death sentence from a moon is pretty weird.


But it's not like my stories haven't been weird since then.

In my university years' writing project "Ashland" the characters were visiting a neighbour town when they passed by a haunted house, and heard the ghost claimed to be someone they knew very well, and who shouldn't have been anywhere nearby, so that was pretty weird.

Once one of them had to dance with another character and spin her around until she fainted, because she was possessed by a weird demon.

I've also drawn a good amount of character meme based situations for these characters for fun, and many of those are pretty weird and funny. Maybe not so much if you don't know the characters, but oh well, I'll share some of them anyway...

I drew these, because I like trolling on my characters' personalities and there isn't always enough room for that when you're telling a "serious" story.

Anyway, this is what I had on top of my mind, so let's leave it at this.

Stress

People have always told me I'm SO calm. Calm, calm, calm....  Peaceful, relaxed, never look like I'm nervous. That I come off as confident, at ease, that I know what I'm doing.

Even when I'm doing something that does actually make me a little nervous, like giving a speech.

For the most part, I agree, anyway. My emotions tend to be slow-moving, and my basic mood is happy, peaceful and content. I don't generally experience much fluctuation in my mood during the day. (This does mean, however, that once I do get upset, I stay that way for a long time.)

In the recent years it hasn't been so natural to feel at peace all the time anymore, though. A lot of things have increased my stress levels:

• realizing I didn't want to do any of the most obvious jobs for my degree, and that it would be difficult to find a job with it
• still trying out one of those jobs while writing my master's degree and being worn out from it
• then finishing my degree and seeing that the reality really is that it's almost impossible to find meaningful work, since I'm either not qualified, or overeducated
• overworking myself as a mail carrier, for the money and to see what it would be like to have a full time job while still trying to maintain my almost daily ballet classes, my fiction writing and other hobbies and friendships
• quitting after four months due to physical burn out (I mean I was practically exercising 8-9 hours a day! Who does that except athletes!?)

The worst is definitely behind me by now, though.

Before graduation I had always had very socially oriented jobs. Especially at my last one I was organizing events and leading groups all the time. After the day I would always find myself so mentally exhausted that I didn't have energy to do my creative work anymore, I just wanted to lie down and do nothing. I should've known sooner that I'm too introverted for that kind of jobs.

After graduation I had this idea that I would have to have both solitary, and practical, ideally physical job to balance out writing, drawing and my other creative "brain work". That way I wouldn't run out of mental energy anymore! Well, obviously it wasn't the case. Sure, I didn't run out of mental energy, so it seemed to work fine at first. But in the end, I ran out of physical energy, and the result was the same. I was too exhausted to function properly after two months. My body simply didn't have enough time to recover, when my ballet class ended at 9 PM and I'd have to get up 5 AM for more physical labor. 

In the end I wasn't able to do anything more than the most basic things to keep my daily life going.

However, during that time I noticed I really didn't need to save my "brain work" for just creative stuff. I still had a craving to study all the time. I noticed I was filling the gap that graduating had left by reading a lot more non-fiction than I'm used to, and watching a lot of religion related Youtube channels with a "scientist's" mindset. Even though I thought I had left it behind and didn't want to study religions anymore. Turns out I do! People's thought processes are just way too fascinating for me. They beg for analysis.

And after I left for a sick leave from my mail carrying job, due to exhaustion, I just suddenly had this idea that I wanted to do research and go for a PhD. All the stress that had been building up for a few years now, seemed to fly out of the window then. I was so excited. I put together a vague research plan in a few days and sent it to a professor, who thought the topic was good and I should continue with it. So, now, a few weeks later I have applied for an early-stage researcher's position. I don't expect to get it, since I came up with this plan so close to the deadline, but I have a few alternative ways to go with this, so at some point in the next year, I will definitely be able to really get this going.

I think that research could be a perfect profession for me in the long run. It could be introverted enough. I could still handle some teaching. Obviously I haven't given up on my dream of writing fiction full time. But right now I want to see were this route might take me, as well.

If it released me from years of slowly building stress in a day, it's got to be worth a shot.