I am bold! (too bold?)

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First day of the last year of graduate school!!

Truth be told, I feel like it's going to be a fabulous year.  I have been blessed with so many awesome opportunities, and even though things are kind of crazy and everyone in the department is a little stressed, I feel like I'm going to be OK.  Someone up there must be watching out for me :)

I'm really excited about the classes I'm teaching.  I've been given the lower division and one of the upper division major pointe classes - which is really an honor as it's not usual for the graduate students to teach majors by themselves.  This year we are stretched for faculty because of all the people that have left since last year (drama!), so a lot of us grads are taking over courses.  I'm also the TA for "Essentials of Ballet Teaching".  Hands down the most difficult (and yet awesome!) class offered by the department, taught by the toughest professor: Regina Zharina.  (don't tell anyone, but I actually haven't officially passed the second semester of this course yet :-o ) I don't really know if I'll be doing much besides grading quizzes and handing out papers, but it's great to sit through the lectures again as a refresher.

I'm choreographing a piece this semester for the Ballet Student Showcase (Sept 30-Oct 2 you should come!!), and I've got a great cast.  They're working really hard.  We've already got 3:20 minutes done out of 4:54 (which is really good in choreographers terms btw).  It's set to a spicy salsa (el Preso by El Gran Combo) and is designed to be just fun, sexy, and crowd-pleasing.  The piece has to go through three "showings" to be selected (or not) for the actual production.  The first one is Friday - a mere 5 days after the start of the school year - so I began my rehearsals last week with a few dedicated upper-classmen, (Thanks ladies!) and finished off my cast with freshman and new students just this evening.

My final major work of my grad career will be produced as part of the Ballet Ensemble in February 17-19, but auditions and rehearsals begin in October.  Again, this is a huge opportunity for me as a graduate student, and I'm very excited and very greatful for it.  It will be much more serious.  I'm hoping to be able to call it the culmination of my life as an artist.  But we'll see.

Now we come to the hard part.

I am loving this school year, and I feel "highly favored" in the department, but I think it's making some of my fellow graduate students uncomfortable.  Some of them have teased me a little about how lucky I am, or how much it seems I'm being given the best opportunities...and I wonder how much of it is jest and how much is truth?  I don't want to place myself above any of the other grad students; who are all extremely talented, experienced and hard-working, but I have really gone after the things I've wanted from this department and I've gotten a lot of them.  I've been bold, I guess, stepping to the front and asking to be noticed.  And sometimes I have just been in the right place at the right time.

My personality is bold too.  I say what I think, and I tease people a lot.  Sometimes I can really walk all over the sensitive places in other people's lives simply by being who I am (as I did today with a good friend).  I often ask myself why that is "who I am" and whether that's a good thing.  Maybe people would like me better if I were a little more reserved?  But would I still be as successful in "going out and getting"?  The best thing would be to have the wisdom to recognize appropriate times to be bold, and the times to hold back.

That has been my life's struggle, and it's not over yet!