one of my art goals for this year was to play around with colour palettes more so here I am and here is yet another yuuri because who else would I draw
aaaaaaaah I hate working on stupid shiiiiiiiit it’s been 7 fucking hours of almost non-stop working uuuuurgh
And we don’t even know what kind of writing we’ll get in the exams what kind of stupid shit is THAT how am I FUCKINF supposed to work if I don’t know how I have to use the knowledge in the end aaaah
thank god it’s only two days BUT STILL SINCE I PROCRASTINATED LIKE A SHIT I HAVE TO GOBBLE EVERYFUCINK SHIT RIGHT NOW AND ITS SO BORING OMG SAVE ME
After that back to my parents place for a bit (gonna see the docs and get my meds, I think it’s gonna help me uurgh I’m all out of Xanax and my stomach has been literally killing me lately)
I don’t want to leave my apartment since I cleaned up and tidied everything up here I feel so good there… I could literally sleep on the floor it’s so clean and vast…
It’s my place and my life, my stupid posters and figures and plushies…my food, my rules… Clean my hands and everything else as often as I want… No one to look at me with pity if I attempt dressing in a non-gender conforming way, no one to continuously misgender me like “nbd lol” (look it’s not because i don’t say anything that it doesn’t bother me i just feel ridiculous and embarrassed by it all god…i’m just not confident enough to affirm who i am (and frankly a bit tired of doing so))… No NPC on the streets judging me cause I’m fat or ugly… I can just be myself, put a fuckton of glitter every-fucking-where if I want (especially on my dumb and bloated face) and chill in my leopard onesie with tea and ytb let’s plays hjdskl
After these exams and the inevitable trip to my parents’ place I’ll be back home, ready to work on my research project and my language learning… I also got a sewing machine, I can’t wait to try it… Courage, courage, me.
The grave of Marie Taglioni, a ballerina who pioneered the en pointe style of dance. Young dancers often leave their dancing shoes on her grave.
to some of the comments I’ve seen on this—
Marie Taglioni had a different body from other dancers. Modern ballet dancers end up with ‘bad backs’ because we’re trying to reshape ourselves like her but we don’t talk about it.
Looking at that photo, you can see her sloped shoulders and bent-backwards posture. Her head and upper body look pretty relaxed, but if you try to draw a line down to her feet, there would have to be a deep bend in her lower back. That’s something she’s doing intentionally.
It’s unclear at this point whether Taglioni had scoliosis or some other atypical bone structure. It’s clear from portraits that she always had those rounded shoulders and when she stood naturally, the curve of her spine made her lean forward quite a bit, suggesting kyphosis. Although she came from a major ballet family, as a young woman she was repeated rejected by ballet teachers, who referred to her (apparently to her face) as “that little hunchback”.
Training on her own with her father, she developed a way to tuck in her lower back, raising her arms above her head, which lifted up her ribcage so she looked…kind of more like a typically-bodied person.
But it didn’t really make her look like everybody else. Apparently, the posture (and the hours a day, every day, she spent building the strength to hold it with ease) made her look eerily weightless compared to other dancers at the time. To add to the effect, she built up her calf and ankle strength until she could dance for long periods en pointe, which had previously been a very occasional stunt (which involved a lot of arm-flapping, trying to balance. Her statuesque still arms and sheer strength made it look good for the first time).
Her father choreographed the first Romantic ballets, all about faeries and ghostly maidens, to showcase her floating look. She wore knee-length skirts to showcase her gnarly calves and awesome footwork.
When La Sylphide debuted in the spring of 1832, Paris was boiling up toward the June Rebellion (you know, all that in Les Mis). Her scandalous skirts and the dark, haunting sentiment of her dances spoke to the wonder and grandeur and fear Parisians were feeling as they questioned the fundamental order of their world. (She made Parisian teens feel like you feel when you listen to Les Mis.) She was a big fuckin’ hit, performing in the same Paris Opéra that had refused to enroll her as a student.
You know that most basic image of what a “ballerina” is? Arms up high in that pretty frame that starts to hurt real quick and your butt tucked in and your hips all weird? That position wasn’t part of the ballet canon before Taglioni.That’s us trying to make our bodies look like what Marie Taglioni made with her body because people were assholes to her.
Dancers started leaving shoes for her blessing, in a way asking how they can struggle to do what she made seem natural.
That’s us still telling most people they don’t have “the right body for ballet” while we tell the few people who do that they still aren’t enough, because we want people to look perfectly aesthetically able-bodied while doing the thing that a non-normatively bodied woman created for herself.
I’m not saying able-bodied people can’t dance! But hey, maybe we should think about it before we tell anyone they have to dance or be shaped one way.
(In case you’re wondering, it’s not clear if she’s really buried at the be-shoed grave in Montmartre or if that’s her mama. So that’s one of a couple reasons we can’t figure out whether she had a particular condition.)
Sooo…about that grave in Montmartre… After some researches, I can now say that we are totally sure she is not buried here. We know this because she was primarily buried in Marseilles – and got her mother buried in Montmartre. There is still a gravestone for her in the Saint-Pierre cemetery in Marseilles – however, she is not there anymore!
So I wondered where she could be now, and, surprise, surprise, she’s in the Père Lachaise! Apparently her grandson moved everyone there at some point… That’s so interesting, if I get time I’ll go take pictures of both the Montmartre memorial and the actual family grave in the Père Lachaise… Meanwhile, you can have a look at them on this link, which also recaps about everything I said above but in French…
So if you got a little dancer in your family/friends/acquaintances, please show them the right grave! It would be so nice to see more ballet shoes on it…
The Estrela Mountain Dog is a large breed of dog which has been used for centuries in the Estrela Mountains of Portugal to guard herds and homesteads. The Estrela Mountain Dog is one of the oldest breeds in Portugal.
From birth everyone is given a mission statement to live by for the rest of their existence, like “put others before yourself” or “show kindness to all”. You have “Live Fast Eat Ass”
