(no subject)
Urgh.
So I generally try to go about life without poking my head too far above the parpet and having lived in Japan for nearly three years with a mostly positive experience and haven't had to really. Tonight though.
So Yosakoi club.
I've been a member for most of my time in Japan and whilst it's been fine, I've had some long running issues with it. The fact that in the nearly three years I've been in the club, I've learnt five dances. One of which I taught myself using a youtube video. Three club specific performances and two general dances that most teams do. Week in week out we would endlessly practice the same dance, often with minimal feedback or variation. There are a lot more dances out there both specific to the club and the kind of stuff that all teams do at festivals for the finalie.
It has the in-clique and out-group. Not nice, sure but one of those things. Usually it doesn't really influence stuff like formation, more the technical minutiae and costumes. Formation tended to come down to skill, attendance and club seniority.
Not so much any more. To put it in perspective Last year I managed regular top six of the twenty or so people who dance in our club (rather than sing/wave a flag/administrate) with a shared centre 24 count. Year before that I held second row centre or front row end for most of the season. I never held front row centre which was fair enough. As the only foreigner on a Japanese dance team I attract enough attention without needing to hold the centre position. This year I've been relegated to the very back.
This year has already been a bit of disaster. The new song wasn't finished till the end of February. Pretty late given that our first festival is the middle of May. The intructor went mad with EXILE mania and desire for glory and cooked up a far more difficult routine than ever before. And in a personal disaster I sprained my ankle during the first lesson with the new song and missed a month of practice, during that time I also sprained my big toe, both injuries which I couldn' really rest due to work and a series of work/personal engagements that I couldn't miss. By the time I got back I ended up dancing through my injuries as I didn't want to miss anymore, though they were barely halfway through the dance anyway. Fast forward to now, I'm more than caught up. We've finished learning the new dance with barely three weeks before the first performance. I'm not perfect, at the very least though I've memorised the whole dance and hit most of the tech stuff. Pretty much on par with everyone else.
Today though with the official provisional formation I'm stuck right at the back. Behind the the girl who hasn't yet memorised the dance, behind the weird dude who seems to lack any form of muscular control and barely attends 90 minutes out of four hours a week of practice, behind two people who have also missed a lot of practices and behind more than half a dozen people who joined the club after me.
I don't know why.
Some people even asked me if I knew why, noting that it seemed strange. Maybe I've said the wrong thing and I'm being punished. Maybe the tech points I'm missing are down to it (I would do better on them but they come in right where my injuries are still healing). Maybe there is no reason. I don't know why.
Tonight really sucked. Not because I was targeted though.
A mother daughter pair who joined during the month I missed. The daughter is one of my students. Fairly intelligent, a little immature and a slight habit of only paying attention to half of what you're saying then asking redundant questions. Annoying but essentially harmless. The mother has improved a lot and fairly consistently, the daughter seems to have regressed though. She's not having a great time of it at school for various reasons. Now her dancing hasn't been good as she hasn't really knuckled down to it. Still with some gentle support and group drilling she probably would have been fine. That didn't happen. The club wastes a lot of time with extra long breaks, endless conversations on minutiae and costumes and general time wasting so we generally don't get a lot done.
Worse than that though was the teacher zeroed in on the poor girl and picked on her pretty heavily. Not to say that she didn't need help but he went on her too hard and too much without really picking on other people. Constantly called out the poor girl got worse as she was so afraid of messing up. Not helped by the fact that everyone she cares about in the club and plenty who don't have pretty much got the dance down and the truly awful guy doesn't get a tenth of what she gets. Then to make things worse the teacher humiliated her by forcing her to watch the rest of us dance when it was obvious she wanted to get the dance out of the way. As we danced she wandered about not watching us and afterwards declared that she wanted to quit.
The teacher called both her and her mother to a quite corner to talk but the girl didn't want to go. So after some fuss I managed to convince the mother to go talk alone whilst I tried to gently talk to the girl. The poor thing was too upset to really make any serious decisions, she was tired, it was well after nine by this point and she wanted to go home and do her homework and go to bed. The instructor and then her mother essentially had a go at her for not being able to make a decision whether she wanted to quit or not, that the instructor is only trying to help, nigh on heckling her about not looking at people when talking, whining about wanting to go home and what seems to me like a nervous habit of doing a quad stretch. I tried to get them to back off but then the instructor shouted that it wasn't any of my business (looks like I'm doomed to the back for a good while now). Basically they were making her feel ten times worse. I'm not sure a decision was reached but eventually the intructor decided he was done. Poor girl was crying by then. Her mother didn't really have any idea what to do as she doesn't want to quit. I'm sure I'll find out.
How horrible though. After all that I'm not sure I want to go back. I had a little cry too, because I was so upset trying to gently ask the girl simple questions whilst she was being bombarded and trying to get them to back down and let her at the very least sleep on the whole thing. Poor girl.
So I generally try to go about life without poking my head too far above the parpet and having lived in Japan for nearly three years with a mostly positive experience and haven't had to really. Tonight though.
So Yosakoi club.
I've been a member for most of my time in Japan and whilst it's been fine, I've had some long running issues with it. The fact that in the nearly three years I've been in the club, I've learnt five dances. One of which I taught myself using a youtube video. Three club specific performances and two general dances that most teams do. Week in week out we would endlessly practice the same dance, often with minimal feedback or variation. There are a lot more dances out there both specific to the club and the kind of stuff that all teams do at festivals for the finalie.
It has the in-clique and out-group. Not nice, sure but one of those things. Usually it doesn't really influence stuff like formation, more the technical minutiae and costumes. Formation tended to come down to skill, attendance and club seniority.
Not so much any more. To put it in perspective Last year I managed regular top six of the twenty or so people who dance in our club (rather than sing/wave a flag/administrate) with a shared centre 24 count. Year before that I held second row centre or front row end for most of the season. I never held front row centre which was fair enough. As the only foreigner on a Japanese dance team I attract enough attention without needing to hold the centre position. This year I've been relegated to the very back.
This year has already been a bit of disaster. The new song wasn't finished till the end of February. Pretty late given that our first festival is the middle of May. The intructor went mad with EXILE mania and desire for glory and cooked up a far more difficult routine than ever before. And in a personal disaster I sprained my ankle during the first lesson with the new song and missed a month of practice, during that time I also sprained my big toe, both injuries which I couldn' really rest due to work and a series of work/personal engagements that I couldn't miss. By the time I got back I ended up dancing through my injuries as I didn't want to miss anymore, though they were barely halfway through the dance anyway. Fast forward to now, I'm more than caught up. We've finished learning the new dance with barely three weeks before the first performance. I'm not perfect, at the very least though I've memorised the whole dance and hit most of the tech stuff. Pretty much on par with everyone else.
Today though with the official provisional formation I'm stuck right at the back. Behind the the girl who hasn't yet memorised the dance, behind the weird dude who seems to lack any form of muscular control and barely attends 90 minutes out of four hours a week of practice, behind two people who have also missed a lot of practices and behind more than half a dozen people who joined the club after me.
I don't know why.
Some people even asked me if I knew why, noting that it seemed strange. Maybe I've said the wrong thing and I'm being punished. Maybe the tech points I'm missing are down to it (I would do better on them but they come in right where my injuries are still healing). Maybe there is no reason. I don't know why.
Tonight really sucked. Not because I was targeted though.
A mother daughter pair who joined during the month I missed. The daughter is one of my students. Fairly intelligent, a little immature and a slight habit of only paying attention to half of what you're saying then asking redundant questions. Annoying but essentially harmless. The mother has improved a lot and fairly consistently, the daughter seems to have regressed though. She's not having a great time of it at school for various reasons. Now her dancing hasn't been good as she hasn't really knuckled down to it. Still with some gentle support and group drilling she probably would have been fine. That didn't happen. The club wastes a lot of time with extra long breaks, endless conversations on minutiae and costumes and general time wasting so we generally don't get a lot done.
Worse than that though was the teacher zeroed in on the poor girl and picked on her pretty heavily. Not to say that she didn't need help but he went on her too hard and too much without really picking on other people. Constantly called out the poor girl got worse as she was so afraid of messing up. Not helped by the fact that everyone she cares about in the club and plenty who don't have pretty much got the dance down and the truly awful guy doesn't get a tenth of what she gets. Then to make things worse the teacher humiliated her by forcing her to watch the rest of us dance when it was obvious she wanted to get the dance out of the way. As we danced she wandered about not watching us and afterwards declared that she wanted to quit.
The teacher called both her and her mother to a quite corner to talk but the girl didn't want to go. So after some fuss I managed to convince the mother to go talk alone whilst I tried to gently talk to the girl. The poor thing was too upset to really make any serious decisions, she was tired, it was well after nine by this point and she wanted to go home and do her homework and go to bed. The instructor and then her mother essentially had a go at her for not being able to make a decision whether she wanted to quit or not, that the instructor is only trying to help, nigh on heckling her about not looking at people when talking, whining about wanting to go home and what seems to me like a nervous habit of doing a quad stretch. I tried to get them to back off but then the instructor shouted that it wasn't any of my business (looks like I'm doomed to the back for a good while now). Basically they were making her feel ten times worse. I'm not sure a decision was reached but eventually the intructor decided he was done. Poor girl was crying by then. Her mother didn't really have any idea what to do as she doesn't want to quit. I'm sure I'll find out.
How horrible though. After all that I'm not sure I want to go back. I had a little cry too, because I was so upset trying to gently ask the girl simple questions whilst she was being bombarded and trying to get them to back down and let her at the very least sleep on the whole thing. Poor girl.