You May Say I'm a Dreamer...

photo by Younghoon Kim

...But I'm not the only one.

The day for me to finally run away with the circus and leave New York City for a little over five months is drawing nearer, and as much as I want to be excited and envision how this vintage circus and caravan lifestyle will play out (lets be honest I'm peeing my pants and having daydreams of running through the fields of England's countryside wearing flowy flowery dresses and my new brown lace-up mens dress shoes)... I must be careful. Expectation takes the joy out of everything, right? So says Sandra Bullock anyway. She's right!

My life lately has been a tornado of extra work for tv (a new day job.. like I needed more) and the usual modeling gigs/temp work as well as the go-sees my agency sends me out on. Only one thing isn't there and I'm happy to not have it in the mix for a while: the auditions for musicals. It's nice to not have to sit at the cattle calls a few times a week, and I don't need to be there as the auditions now are for the summertime. I've also taken on a new so-much-more-than-a-day-job: I've been asked to join the Jennifer Muller scholarship program. I get to take company class as many times as I want during the week in exchange for a few hours work every week. This has been such a blessing not only because I love the company but I have friends in the company and the style of dance is so freeing. I describe Jennifer's class as a mixture of ballet and release technique. It takes a while to click but once it's in your body it frees and lifts you up out of your normal constraints. I will keep working to perfect this technique up until I leave and hopefully after I return too.

Amidst the chaos there have been those moments of clarity and dreaming that I described in my last post...only this time I'm not just absently wishing for something to come true anymore. I'm working towards something special. Next week the flamenco show I've been working on since last summer will premiere in New Haven, CT and all that hard work of weekend rehearsals in Connecticut (and week rehearsals in Manhattan) will pay off. It has been an amazing collaboration with choreographer Melinda Marquez and 12 other amazing women performers. The piece is a tribute to women freedom fighters and we are all dressed in non-traditional flamenco attire and dancing to percussion instruments and a recitation of a Pablo Neruda Poem. Last weekend I had the pleasure of going to see Angel Corella "Castilla Y Leon" perform at the NY City Center. It was their first run in NY after being established in Spain as Madrid's first ballet company in 2008. Angel (a Madrid native who became famous dancing with American Ballet Theater in New York City) took a tremendous leap and landed on solid ground with his company. The repertoire was classical ballet with a flamenco edge. In the duet with his sister Carmen where they combined flamenco and classical ballet I couldn't help but get emotional as it was just so beautiful and combines my two favorite dance genres. It gave me such inspiration for my own flamenco performance coming up! The grace of ballet coupled with the fire and precision of flamenco make for an unstoppable match: dance, in my opinion, at its best.

Today after work I took some time for myself and on a whim stopped into the MoMa to see the Tim Burton exhibit. I love Tim's work even if I don't necessarily share his gruesome imagination. The point is that he has such a tremendous imagination I can't help but giggle at some of his earlier drawings such as the "[Susan] and [Jim] like to hold hands" sketch where the couple are shown with half-dead facades and mischievous grimaces holding pairs of severed hands in their own. The one of another couple "...Enjoying Each Other's Company" had the couple biting each others' legs and arms. His polaroid photograph series and glow-in-the-dark sculptures were incredibly imaginative too. There were, of course, sketches, models, and costumes on display from his films such as Big Fish, Edward Scissor Hands, and The NightMare Before Christmas. Another favorite of mine was reading his handwritten notes of Tim's character descriptions of Edward or Jack. The hero is always a gentle "monster." There's a definite nostalgia to Tim's work that comes from being free to create whatever you please and developing that impulse as a style of your own.

So here I am, looking forward to the near future but nostalgic of the things I will leave behind and how much I'll miss New York, my family, and friends. Once again humble, grateful, and embracing the world in my usual optimistic way (unless someone sets off the Brazilian fire and then...ut oh!) with an excited hope for what's to come. In the meantime, I've got a 24th birthday to celebrate in less than two weeks!!

Carolina The soon-to-be-Traveling Ballerina