The other day I got so conscious again of a habit of mine, which is sometimes so annoying and today I thought let’s write about it on my blog.
I think it is something that I initially developed during my three years on the ballet academy and after that during my whole dancing career, actually.
This habit is that I almost all the time look at myself from the outside, checking how I stand or sit or walk, talk, etc.
It is like an unstoppable cameraman that is always watching me and that is giving me a kind of feedback whether I am okay in that particular moment, or not. It is something that I wake up with and go to bed with. Like an auto-start computer program that runs in the background as soon as the computer is turned on. Isn’t that crazy?!
Is that a dancers thing?

As I said before, I think this cameraman-habit has a lot to do with my time at the National Ballet Academy in Amsterdam. That is where I taught myself to check on me from the outside, to be sure that I was doing the excercise right. I just wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t get bullied or told off by the teacher.
During one year I had a horrible teacher who was so incredibly negative and strict; the army is probably peanuts, compared to her! 😉
I was so afraid of her -and almost all of us where so afraid of her- that I kept my eyes on her continuously. I knew exactly where she was and what she was doing, during the whole class…talking about multitasking, hahaha!

After the Ballet Academy I had a brake for two years in which I studied but after that I picked up dancing agian and I studied different kind of dance-techniques at the Highschool of Arts in Amsterdam.
In this school I was forced to let go of the outside cameraman a lot and I was confronted with the fact that “I just made pretty pictures and that I dind’t DANCE at all!”. My Graham teacher used to shout that at me, during class…he was my private coach for a long time, bless him.
So, I learned to let go of that cameraman a little bit and now that I am writing about it, I realize that I dind’t have this habit on stage, or very seldom, depending on the piece as well.

And now, almost 30 years later, I still have this over-consciousness about myself and about my behaviour and I am still trying to let this cameraman go.
Especially when I am insecure, I notice that this habit is more present than in times when I feel good. When I am with very good friends for instance, than I can let it go most of the time.
There is still hope 🙂