Jarkko Lehmus Diary

Swearing, Boozing and Coordinate Losing

It's Thursday. Two weeks since the last entry. A week and a half since I remembered that I wrote it. Clever... After I'd read it I thought briefly about rewriting it or even taking it off, but I decided to keep it there to remind me to be slightly more lenient to my inherently evil liver.

There comes a time when a man has to choose between disowning one's heritage of intestinal rape by alcohol to live a life of a professional demi-god in tights and living the life of a portable ethanol burner complete with wasted nights of randomness and debauchery and making fool of oneself in public. Or so I have heard.

To ensure the quality of my entry on this particularly fine Thursday I've decided to opt to turn on the Secret Agent Channel, don the smoking jacket, fire up the shisha and almost totally disregard my earlier ramblings.

The events of the past couple of months have been quite draining, but there has finally been closure on various fields: as I mentioned the pay deal was finalised, I'm again involved with what the company is doing on a daily basis through the creation of Sleeping Beauty and Robert, our earlier Equity rep and a very long standing member of the company, has eventually left the us and quit dancing altogether at the ripe old age of 28 to pursue a career with the Glesga Polis. In general the working environment has stabilised quite a bit for a little while. It might just be the calm before the ever-nearing first night induced storm ensues. The extras are creeping out of the woodwork and the company has been on the lookout for a few more bodies because of some issues with working permits or some such red tape. The upside of having too many people in the class has been that we've got separate men's and ladies' classes twice a week now. It's bliss to have all that space and to actually have the time to do some proper jumps and turns. Or it would be bliss if I wasn't totally rubbish... There's only one way to make that situation better, though. Get stuck in, look like a turd for a while and learn to fly again. Simple really...

When even two hands and a Black 'n Decker aren't nough to make me look like a ballet dancer I choose to escape in the surreal world of children's parties and pirates, dinner parties and beat poetry, birthday parties and falling over and burlesque parties and monocles... I think I see a pattern... At this point I feel it's time to apologise for yet another pictureless entry due to the unpublishable nature of everything that I have lately found on my camera.

Meanwhile in the Big Ballet House: as I mentioned earlier, Amanda's contribution has been enormous already and will significantly lessen the stress of putting multiple casts on, which is good since I need all the help I can get to cut it in my princely role in the second cast with the pretty boys. It has also been interesting to observe the impact the professional way Miss Eyles conducts the rehearsals has had on the existing ballet staff.

I mentioned sometime earlier that I occasionally feel like a crappy ballet dancer and need reminding of my particular strengths. Getting a couple of martial arts sessions a week has gone a long way towards getting rid of the feeling of fragility and reopened the door to a slightly rougher physicality, but the experience of doing a long-awaited release-based contemporary class last Monday drove the reality home pretty well: I'm in a limbo. I'm not pretty or technical enough to properly mix it with the ballet guys, but neither am I fluid or grounded enough to be a full-blown contemporary dancer either. my current relationship to dance is very much akin to my relationship the languages I use, or the place I call home: I have lived abroad and spoken a foreign language for such a long time that I've learned quite a few of its nuances, but don't really understand it fully while at the same time I've lost touch with what I grew up with. My journey so far as a professional dancer and as a person has expanded me and taken me to places I thought were beyond my reach or never even thought of at all. How do you navigate if the sky above you is different to what you used to know?

That's a recurring topic that I could go on for far too long, but you can let that sight of relief out for I won't bore you with any more of my existential dilemmas.

Going back to the life and times of The Scottish Ballet, I have totally overlooked quite a significant event in the history of the company in the form of an open day at the Tramway. Basically the company took over our future HQ for a sunny Saturday and staged a "behind the scenes" -day where the public was invited to watch a class, a couple of run-troughs of Fearful Symmetries, attend dance workshops, watch make-up and costume demonstrations and hear members of the orchestra getting their groove on. The crowd that turned up was a great mix of the local communities, the usual Tramway weekend crowd and the company's regular following. All in all a positive day and a step towards making the company more accessible to the general public. I hope there's more to come in the future.

Now that we're on the topic of Tramway: I go past the site every day on my way to work and have seen it progress up tp the point where the ground has been stabilised and the next step will be to bring the steel on site, put the magic beans in the ground and watch it grow. As far as I know we're on schedule. I'll keep you posted on the progress of that one...

TO finish off for the day I'd like to hop over the Atlantic for a moment to guide those of you that are socially inclined to the new dance networking online community set up by my friend Kristin Sloan (the driving force of The Winger http://thewinger.com/words/ and quite possibly the hardest working little thing ever) from NYCB. You can find the site at http://intermission.ning.com/. Pop in and say hi to Miss K. She's got some interesting topics on the go in there.

On that note I will love you and leave you for another evening in the House of Stretch.

Torn Things, Union Shit and Invisible Spine

Today was the day... Err... Yesterday was the day that the dancers' pay deal got finalised after almost a year of negotiations. Finally I've got that off my table and I've got some time to focus on organising the running of the dancers' accident cover, looking into the injury prevention and occasionally even having a private life!

I've been trotting up and down the paper-trail like a bloody Cerberus to make sure that everyone knows what they should know and that they have all the papers they really should have known to have sought for themselves all the while trying to maintain the illusion that I'm here here just to dance.

My mission to appear as a regular dancer wasn't helped by a repetition induced strain of my left tricep resulting in a couple days of rest. Having a little detachment from the job has enabled me to observe it all the better: our latest addition to the ballet staff, Amanda Eyles, has already made a marked difference in the way the rehearsals are run.

After all these years we're finally fully staffed in the artistic department. For me personally it has been very interesting to observe the impact that Amanda has had in the daily running of the company. i don;t really know her background that well, but I know that she knows her shit and if she doesn't she'll check it out for the next session. I've got plenty of respect for Ms Eyles and I do believe that her presence within the company will make a marked difference in the way the company will appear in any given performance.

After almost a year of wrangling the pay negotiations are finally over and I'm snipping all the loose ends relating to the Equity membership, the dancers' insurance and still trying to establish a clear structure of prevention, diagnosis and rehabilitation of injuries. So far I'd like to thank Shaw Bronner and Helen Laws for their support and Paul Cameron and Robbie Smith for their interest in working with the company. I am determined to get through the red tape to eventually clarify a proper course of action for the treatment of injuries in this company.

Politics aside I've been growing my hair for the role of The King for Sleeping Beauty. I'm second cast as one of the princes and will have to actually do quite a bit of very balletic dancing! It's been scary and exciting throwing my limbs about with all these ballet boys. A year from now I'll be wearing a sparkly top and white tights... As fu****g if...

Since the last time managed to string a few sentences together we've done the Edinburgh Festival, again, and a very quick stint at the Tramway and another one in Aberdeen. Now the full focus of the company is on getting Sleeping Beauty on the stage.

We might work ever so hard, but foreign touring still eludes us; there have been talka about Portugal, New York and China, but none of the above has actually materialised so far. I'd be proud of showing the company around on the European festival scene with just about any program we've done in the past. Unfortunately it takes a very long time to convert interest into a booking...

I'll keep this short and sweet for once, since I'm trying to get to work on time to do that dancy thing that I'm actually paid for. I promise that next time I'll have some photos and some randomness for your entertainment.