Who knew what a ballet skirt could do

After training at home one day I started playing with my wrap skirt, and quickly got a little obssessed with how many things I could do with it that I had never thought of before. Ballet classes usually have a uniform or at least some guidelines for how to dress, and even though my school doesn't have a uniform, most people still wear pretty much the same colours and styles every day. But at home, you can do whatever you like, right? So, I figured this might certainly spice up training alone at home!

Most of these styles I came up with, I could actually dance in and they would not fall off or get in the way. (All except the last off-shoulder.)

The pictures are crappy because I was just taking them for my own amusement, and so that I would remember these styles. I didn't think I would share them, so I didn't put any effort into it... But then I thought this would actually be pretty fun to share. I gave them cheesy names.

That's it! I hope you had a portion of how much fun I had while doing this. xD

A Corona Post

Maybe this will be interesting for me to read in later years.

The negatives:

• My ballet school closed a couple of weeks ago, which happened pretty fast in the end. Well, I guess everything has been happening fast, but I mean, we were talking with our teacher probably two days earlier that we wouldn't be closing in the foreseeable future. There were no confirmed cases of corona in our area yet at the time and I guess no one really understood how fast it spreads. But things changed in a couple of days and all schools closed their doors. Competitions and our spring show are also cancelled, obviously.
• I'm out of work for the time being. I only started working in a sushi restaurant a couple of months ago and now it's closed as well. It's a new restaurant, so I don't know if it will survive and whether I will have work at all anymore, so I suppose I have to start looking for a new one, which is a shame because I really liked that job but I can't just rely on it being there after this crisis is over. The problem, of course, is that if the job market around here was bad before...
• I had to move in the middle of this crisis, last weekend. Moving is stressful to begin with, so this move was definitely the hardest one for me yet. Me or my girlfriend don't drive and neither do most of our local friends, so we had a friend come over from quite a distance away to drive a van for us, and I was just waiting for the government to ban travelling altogether, but luckily it only started happening today, four days after our move. For now it's only in certain areas though. It was also the first time that I was physically the strongest person so I carried all the heavy stuff myself or with our friend. (Until now I've always had my dad for help!) The day after I was so tired I couldn't do anything but watch Gilmore Girls for almost the entire day.

These were probably the most significant things so far, but I'm sure the situation will get worse. Obviously, just like everyone, I've had to cancel all plans that involve getting outside of my house but right now things could still be a lot worse. In my area we can still go to the store and visit friends even if most places are closed, and there's a lot of space in my city to move in nature and it isn't heavily populated so avoiding people isn't very difficult.

The positives: (Yes, there are positives)

• Some people are awesome. A local law firm decided to buy tickets for cancelled events in the spring season from three local culture and sports organizations since they lost practically all ticket income because of corona. The three they chose were the city orchestra, Kataja Basket Club and our ballet school Relevé. My teacher, the owner, was besides herself. She thought it was a prank at first. The law firm challenged other organizations that aren't so affected by corona to support those who are.
• I have all the time I want in my hands right now and don't have to feel guilty about wanting to spend it home. A feeling shared by all introverts. Even if the loss of work means I'm poor again it is far easier to be poor when you've got nowhere expensive to go anyway. I'm going to enjoy getting my new home in order and I'll be working on my comics and writing.
• Since my new home is finally big enough for a ballet barre I figured I needed to get one right away since I would be training at home. The move was a perfect timing actually, because it would've been nearly impossible for me to do ballet in my old home but here it works out! I asked if my ballet teacher's husband could make a barre for me since he's quite handy and now he's making them for everyone, which is very cool of him!

I'm sure I'm yet to discover a lot of negative and positive things I'll face in the near future, but this is what I've been thinking about these days. I don't want to waste a good crisis, so we'll see what the future holds.

Aand this has nothing to do with corona but I'm besides myself because I finally have ground under my feet instead of a balcony when I step out of the living room door. It's tiny but I'm so happy!

Winning wasn't the point

I recently participated in a ballet competition in Helsinki with the rep groups of our ballet school. This time was quite an adventure for me, since I ended up injuring myself the morning of the competition by falling down the stairs and spraining my ankle. (Yeah, seriously, lol.) I danced anyway and my ankle got badly swollen, and I walked with sticks for a week afterwards, but a month later I'm fine and back to dancing. :)

We did really well in the competition and brought home three golds and three silvers. One of the silvers was from my solo, and we also got gold and silver for two small group dances I was in.

There's one little detail people like to take special note of, though. There weren't too many participants in the adult category, which a lot of our dances were in.

In the solo category there were only three adult participants, and even so they were divided into two categories: 20+ and 30+. I got silver in the 20+ category with only one other competitor who was also from my school and got gold. Naturally, the only participant in the 30+, also from our school, got gold as well.

In the small groups adult category, there were only three numbers as well. Two from us, and one from another school. We placed gold and silver.

When people hear this, they tend to be a lot less impressed with us, than they initially were. Suddenly, my solo isn't the one that was second best anymore. It's the one that placed last.

I get it. They see that our medals were a guarantee, so it's nothing impressive in their eyes.

However, there are a lot more layers to this whole thing than they understand. And I'd like to pay attention to something else, another detail that they seem to miss entirely:

All the adult competitors were from our school, except for one. All the three solos, and the majority of the small group numbers, came from our school. There are a lot of children and teens competing in this competition, but so few adults.

There are a lot of adults doing ballet as a hobby in Finland. But for some reason very few of them participate in competitions.

So, I don't think the important question is whether or not we won. The important thing is that we were there.

Three years ago when we first participated in the same competition, we were the only adult group in the entire competition, and our category was canceled. (We were put together with the teens, the most demanding category and we still got bronze, so that's actually nothing to scoff at.)

Since then, there have been a few adult groups or solos (we haven't been to every competition but the adult categories haven't been cancelled since then, that I've heard of.)

So, to me it's pretty obvious, that the most important part that we're doing is being there. Winning isn't the point. Being there, to represent adult amateur ballet dancers, and hopefully encouraging them to participate more in the future, is the most important thing, at least to me.

I don't know why adults are not participating. It might be that they don't feel confident enough, or it might be that their school doesn't even have a performing group for adults. Whatever the reason, I think it can change if enough people get inspired to take the opportunity to perform and compete, and stand for the fact that adult ballet is not useless or in vain, and even people who start ballet as adults can become confident performers with good technique. (I know a few living proofs of that.)

There definitely is a negative bias against adult ballet, and I think it's safe to say that adult dancers have also internalized some of it themselves. Professional ballet is so much about the right technique and perfection in every aspect of the performance and your body as well, it's a harsh world, everyone knows that. But when you do ballet for fun and for yourself, it shouldn't be about that. It should be about the joy. And I wish that adults would claim their space, and their right to express themselves exactly the way they are. As well as anyone.

So, when someone scoffs at our medals, I could get annoyed and tell them that if you look at our written feedback and the points we got from the judges, you'll see that we still could've placed well even if there were other competitors.

But I would rather point out that winning wasn't the point. Because your right to participate is NOT dependent on who you are, how good you are, or what you look like.

So, if any adult ballet dancer happens to read this, my message to them is: When there is an opportunity for adult dancers to participate, please take it. The more we take them, the more opportunities there will be in the future.

And don't worry about not being able to do something, or not looking right. Be happy and proud about everything you can do. In my eyes, that's the true victory.

What fanfiction taught me

I just got cool pictures from the ballet Wizard of Oz but I already made a post about that so I'm gonna cheer this post up with pictures from it, (mostly me as Glinda and the Wizard) even though they've got nothing to do with the topic.


All photos by Piia Kinnunen (@piijjakinnunen)

I used to have kind of a love-hate relationship with fanfiction and that's something I've been thinking about recently. For a long time I had this arbitrary rule for myself that I don't read or write it. Mostly because when I tried to read it, it just usually disappointed me, and the one time that I made a long fan comic in high school, it consumed me and held me back from writing my original stuff. When I grew out of that comic I decided I wouldn't make fanfiction again, because it wasn't as productive as making my original stuff.

But the thing is I loved making that comic. I was more into it than any of my original stories at the time. It was simply the one that interested me the most during that year. I think there was no way that I wouldn't have drawn it, I was that obsessed with the anime/visual novel: Fate/Stay Night, and so dissatisfied with the ending that there was no other way for me to get over it.

I was able to stick to my rule after that because I just wasn't as obsessed with any series after that in many years. Momentarily, sure, but if a series has a completely satisfying ending I'll usually just have a hangover about it for a week or a month or so during which I may fantasize about how the characters' lives go on, but it's not going to last long enough to be so strong that I'll HAVE to write about it. With Fate it turned to years and I thought about how I saw the story continuing every single day. That didn't happen to me for years after I got over Fate.

Until about three years ago when I almost accidentally watched an anime. Kuroko no Basket.

Oh dear. That was a rabbit hole.

Long story short, I've written close to 300 000 words of fan fiction about that series now. And for the first few months I felt so guilty about it. Like I was doing something despicable.

When you think about it objectively, it can't be. Especially when it comes to anime and manga, since in Japan they actually sell fan works, like, technically you could be a professional doujinshi artist. So, the moral side of it is definitely safe. Even if the original creator was bothered by some material that others make of his characters, considering the content people make of it and get actual money from, I don't see how my fic could be offensive in any way.

So, obviously that's not where my guilt was coming from. I didn't think it was bad to write fan fiction in general. For some reason I just didn't think it was okay for me.

Well, that's kind of hypocritical isn't it? And I guess it was that thought what made me realize what this was about.

I just didn't identify as a "fanfiction writer".

But the truth is it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you write if you have a passion for it. That's all that matters. And I've always been saying this, so it's kind of funny to find this hypocritical side of me.

I mean, it's not different. The way I feel about writing someone else's characters, the obsession I have for the story, the drive to put it into words is exactly the same as it is when I write my own stuff. So, just because, at one moment the story that I care about the most happens to have come from someone else's story, shouldn't make it less valuable. If I feel that strongly about it, I should just write it.

Now, I know that this may sound far-fetched, but thinking like this brought to my mind how often I had ranted about heteronormative people seeing love between people of the same sex as something "other". Using words like "gay love". Oh, how I ranted about love being just love! About how there's no such thing as "gay love". About how, no matter what sex or gender the people in love are or who they're in love with, it's going to feel exactly the same, (as far as love feels the same to people to begin with). It's not "other" and it's not less valuable. For some reason people just feel a need to alienate themselves from expressions of love they're not familiar with. They're afraid to empathize with it because they still see there's something wrong with it, even if they technically aren't against it.

Well.

Isn't that exactly how I felt about fanfiction!

I guess realizing that I was doing exactly what I criticized other people about in another context, was exactly what I needed. It released me from all guilt and made me embrace what I was doing more freely than I had before.

And guess what? I've still written two original novels during the year I've written this super long fanfiction piece. Because working on what you love doesn't drain your creative energy. It can make you more creative. Giving myself the freedom to do what I want, when I want, and not having the obligation to always write just my original stuff makes me more productive than I would be if I forced myself to write something else when I'm really into another thing. While it's true that you can't run solely on inspiration, and sometimes work is just work, and as a professional there's going to be deadlines too, still, in general, being able to do what inspires you the most at the moment, is way more beneficial for your creative energy than forcing yourself to work on the second or third best project at the time.

So what, if what I want to write the most at one moment happens to be someone else's characters?

Writing a story is, in a way, being in love. At least, I believe that the best stories come from being in love with the story and the characters. And our stories always come from somewhere anyway. Just because something is "original" as in, it can't be obviously traced back to one source, doesn't necessarily make it that original in the end. It's always coming from somewhere. Original fiction is just a more complicated synthesis of different things we've absorbed. With fan fiction the primary source of inspiration is more clear cut. However, that doesn't necessarily make it unoriginal, either. What you do with the characters, might still be something the original creator would've never thought of, and it can still be exactly what someone else needed to read. It can still be profound, nuanced, and make for great fiction. An "original" story could be a total rip off and a fan fiction story could be the most touching, well written and authentic piece you've read in a while. Original doesn't always mean better.

I've also realized that I have writing skills that come out in fanfiction differently than they do in my own writing. I've always gotten good feedback on my characters, how they're easy to grasp and like. That I'm good at writing different personalities and viewpoints. In fanfiction, this means that I'm good at maintaining everyone in character. I have a good grasp on other people's characters like I have on my own, and it makes my fanfiction easy to read and relate to, since the characters feel like they feel in the original work. (This is what people have told me, and I believe it, because it makes sense.)

However, I also have a strong drive to interpret things, not just replicate them, so my versions of other people's characters are always going to have some additional depth. In fact, I've come to think that characters that inspire me to write fanfiction fall on a specific point in a spectrum regarding character depth: They have a lot of potential depth that doesn't quite show in the original work. And that's what inspires me to bring it out of them.

So far it seems that I'm definitely not the only one who gets something out of my interpretations, so that's been a really cool experience!

I've come to realize that the same things that I always think, should apply to fanfiction. If I love it, if I have a drive for it, if I feel like I have something to give or contribute in it, I should just do it.

That kind of thinking is what has lead me to the stage, doing these roles in these pictures too, so why the heck should fanfiction be any different?

Sure, a new obsession is time consuming. But if it's meant to be, it's just meant to be.

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?