Keeping Up With Juliette

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Dance diary   12/03/19   We began the lesson with our own quick stretches  so that we were warm and prepared for the jazz technique ahead. We began rehearsing our routine to All That Jazz. I struggled a lot with incorporating the larger movements with the smaller accents. For example, I struggled a lot with keeping a flexed wrist by my side whilst turning my head or lifting my other arm up and down. I also struggled to lean forward in this one section where we must lift our foot up to our knee in front of us turn slightly to the left and click our right hand beside us. It’s important that we get these small movements precise in the piece so that we keep the jazz technique authentic. Generally, I also struggled to keep up with the timing since there are some quick, complicated sections in the piece which contrast with some of the slower, simpler sections that we do.  For example, we do a quick soutenu tu...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, I've been asked about this a lot. I did a blog post a while back on trophy hunting and I received about 4 comments from someone who questioned my opinion. They asked, well if you are not okay with trophy hunting, why are you okay farming? I also had a small debate with another user on Instagram after I commented on a post informing people about hunting in Africa, saying how bad it was that we treat animals like objects instead of living beings. The user asked a similar question, well if you are not okay with hunting animals in Africa, why are you okay farming? Understandably, this is a question people want to ask and perhaps I didn't explain myself properly before hand, so I'm going to explain my opinion now. To be honest, we can technically farm animals in Africa and kill them for their meat or for their ivory. That way, we get what we want and we dont kill off the species. However, we're farming enough meat as i...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, On Friday lunchtime, I went to the history club where we discuss different historical extracts. This one was about life post 1066, where the Normans at first were considered to be better than the English. However, both cultures soon got to live along side each other. The historian focuses on the metaphor of the Green Tree Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, to prove their point about how the two cultures learnt to live along side each other. The chronicle talks about a tree being cut down in the middle and without the hand of a human, just its own free will, it joins itself back to the trunk and begins to push leaves and bear fruit. In this case, the trunk and the felled part are France and Britain and when it says that it comes back together and begins to bear fruit and leaves suggests that after a while, you don't see the distinctions between the French and the British anymore. We discussed the chronicle being a potentially biased sourc...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, There have been a lot of times when I've had to pick up a routine quickly. Recently, as you all know, I went to Manchester and I did workshops with teachers at a school there. I didn't pick up all the routines there because we had to go through each workshop fairly quickly but it was a good challenge for not only me, but everyone else to pick up a dance quickly. What I did do to help myself was that I would go through the routine when we did it with the teacher to make sure I got the dance then the second time we went through it with the teacher, I would not look at the teacher and I would try and remember the routine myself. I would also get into a space where I could see the teacher because quite often, people do the wrong thing in a routine because they don't see what the teacher is doing. As well as this, I would also not think about the routine too much because actually people mess up in a routine if they're ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, There have been so many times in my life where I've felt beaten down by someone or a group of people. Especially being a dancer, you've got to have a thick skin because otherwise you can become very feeble against people. Quite recently, I went on a dance trip to Manchester. I really 100% enjoyed my time there and for the most part, people were really nice and I loved the positive morale the students at Manchester had on me. However, I couldn't stop sensing a little bit of jealousy with this one girl who went on the trip.  After executing a contemporary routine really well, I could tell she was annoyed because she picked out every little thing that I supposedly said wrong. For example, since we were doing a commercial workshop with one of our professional dancers at the school next, I said "i'm really excited about the street workshop," and the girl's response to this was "it's actually no...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Earlier this week, I went on a dance trip set up by my lovely dance teacher at school, to Manchester. We left at around 2:10pm on a Thursday and it took us around 5 hours to get to our hotel. Yes I know, it was a very exhausting trip. It was made even more exhausting because some of the girls decided to bring in a loud speaker and play rap songs. Nevertheless, I did jam out to a few of them that I knew!  We did stop at a McDonald's on the way there but I forgot to take my purse with me from the bus so my friends let me eat a few of their fries.   After around 30 minutes, aimlessly searching for the hotel and a decent parking spot, we finally got up to our rooms on level 3. We didn't expect them to be that fancy but they were actually really nice. We had a lovely big bathroom with an actual bath and a kitchen with a large fridge and a decent oven. The view was also pretty cool. Although there was a lot of building ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, The media can be a persuasive and manipulating place where people get drawn into the big titles and unofficial political propaganda that people are scared to say, has an impact on them. The classic example of this is Donald Trump. I'm not saying that he's the most amazing person that has ever walked this earth, but I think people have begun to believe that because he has a weird hair cut or an incredibly stupid voice, that that makes him a worse person than he actually is. I was stuck around a month ago on what to write on the subject of gun crime in my English assessment. It seemed like an easy thing to write about at first but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it was more difficult to write about than I  thought. Not because it was necessarily a particularly difficult topic to answer, it's actually a lot simpler than we think, but when we're indoctrinated by such a one-sided perspective on ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Recently I read an extract from the book Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd as a part of my historical scholarship readings group at school. It was a very interesting read and I far better enjoyed it to the previous extract about Richard the Third. I suppose it's because we can find that modern history is a lot more relatable to our time. It was also, in my opinion, far better written. It was less busy and the point of the historian was clearly set.  My favourite line was "it mattered little if you were a princess or a communist, a Nazi-lover, Nazi-hater, Swede, Sanskrit scholar or Irish nationalist. It was, as Bridget von Bernstorff put it, 'utter hell.'" This suggests that although we may like to think that it mattered that everyone was a loyal and committed Nazi in Germany at the time, everything was so messed up that political views didn't matter anymore. It also suggests that people were ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, A couple of weeks ago, I did a blog post on all the dance skills I would like to try and achieve. One of the skills was a leg tilt. I personally think that as a dancer it's essential that you try and achieve this as one of your key skills because it looks good in no matter what routine you do. Not that my tilt was particularly bad in the first place but it still needed some work in order to make it look sharper, cleaner and overall better. I have been working on my middle split flexibility since that comes in handy when trying to do this skill. However, I recently went to a Sunday dance class at my school and the professional dancer who was teaching us basically worked us to death and so the following days, I was struggling to walk because I had pulled so many muscles. Lol. I then had to take it slow for a few days so that I could recover and not hurt myself more. I've not been as up to date with my stretching because of ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Last Friday, on the 1st of March, was my mum's birthday. We didn't do much to celebrate in the morning since we were all fairly busy; my sister had to go to college at 7am and I had to go to school later on. It was pretty chaotic. Not like it used to be, when me and my sister went to the same school. However, my mum didn't hesitate to feel the presents and wonder what was underneath the yards of Christmas wrapping paper. Yes, I know, we're cheap. We just don't see the point in getting birthday themed wrapping paper when we've got tones of Christmas wrapping paper lying around. We only make the effort if we're wrapping gifts for friends. Other than that, we just CBA. Anyway, when I did got home from school that day, we finally opened all the presents. Does anyone else's parents pick up a wrapped up bottle of wine and go "hmm, I wonder this is?" because my mum does that a lot. We also had...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Recently, as I'm sure many of you have seen on my Instagram, I went to the Ivy in Cambridge to celebrate my mum's birthday. It's a very posh restaurant with other franchises in London as well as in Brighton. My mum being my mum told me that it wasn't actually that posh so although what I wore wasn't too bad, I still had my fuzzy socks on in my boots! We were all laughing about that a lot. Anyway, the point to all this is that when we sat down to wait for our food, me and my dad began to talk "businessy" and started to talk about what I want to do with my idea of having a dance studio. If there is one GCSE that I regret taking is business because instead of actually talking about business subjects such as coming up with a business idea or learning how to make a spreadsheet, we're learning about the Equality Act 2010 and the people's rights in a workplace. As such, I'm sure you all would be...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, I did a blog post about a month ago about where I was hoping to do my work experience placement. I was hoping that my first choice would be to work at my current studio, but despite my best efforts to try and get a placement there, they could only provide 1 week of work experience since other people had already applied for the 1st week. Plus the week I would be doing would be filled with admin and prep for the summer workshop which I didn't think was worth doing so I looked elsewhere. My second choice was my previous dance studio. After finding out that I couldn't do the placement at my current studio, I immediately sent an email to my previous studio. After a few days of intense waiting, I finally got accepted! For the rest of the day I was incredibly happy. What the job entales is being a classroom assistant and helping out for the summer workshop. I am incredibly happy that I was given this opportunity and I can't ...