6 or 1?

Which is better?

Having a handful of jobs that each require their own individual planning and preparation?

(Not Pictured: BYU Children's Creative Dance, and working for myself trying to teach yoga from home)

Sure, my hourly rate is more than double minimum wage, but it is quite challenging to actually get the hours.

Love it? Yes. I get to teach dance and yoga--what doesn't sounds great about that? No desks. No managers (basically). Trying to help people feel better in their bodies and enjoy moving and living. Plus, I do have good amount of free time (due to the difficulty of getting more hours).

Tiring? Yes. For example, I need to choreograph 8 dances in the near future. I have some job to go to 6 days a week. And it's all teaching. Teaching (especially the younger ones) is tiring. Many hours not spent at the job is spent planning for the job. Not to mention the driving or biking to each of these various locations.

But what would I be doing instead? It's better to kill yourself with what you love, right?

Not to mention, for the past two weeks I have been rehearsing with Utah Regional Ballet for their Choreography Design Projects show. Didn't know about it until the artistic director asked me to choreograph a week before we were scheduled to start. Choreographing = extra tiring. So after the shows this weekend, perhaps the many jobs won't feel like so much anymore.

12 hours

On Tuesdays, Aaron is gone for 12 hours. He has a class at 8:00 a.m., then goes to work, then has more classes from 3:30 until 8:15 p.m.

Tuesdays are also my only day off. By day off, I mean I have absolutely no obligations to work. Aaron also has the car, and thanks to a flat bike tire that means I am pretty much homebound.


So what does Rachel do for 12 hours (mostly) at home?


She cuddles up on the couch to read her scriptures. Then she sets her alarm for 9:00 and takes a wonderful morning nap. (Yoga class was at 6:00 a.m. today)

She heads to the computer to pay some bills, check and reply to her e-mails, demand her security deposit back from the previous landlords, and check her Blog's List updates.

She makes up one and a quarter dances for the production of The Little Match Girl that the dance studio she works at is putting on in December. (It is a really sad story for Christmas time. I had never heard it before now. This poor girl tries to sell matches to make money. Instead, one night, she lights them to try to keep warm. Then she dies. Merry Christmas.) Then she devises a general plan for another dance, and searches Youtube for kid-friendly Hip-Hop Christmas music. She finds "Christmas Everyday" by The Temptations.



She eats salad, a piece of toast, and snacks on the left over chocolate chips that weren't used in cookies.

She decides to make bread, and makes it. While she makes bread, she also makes a batch of steel-cut oats, stores them in 4 mason jars, and refrigerates them for quick and easy morning meals.

Making all these things in the kitchen makes her realize she should probably clean the kitchen floor. So she sweeps, WetJets, and then does the same in the bathroom.

She makes up thirty seconds of another dance while she waits for the bread to be done, then she eats three pieces of hot, fresh bread. One with butter, one with butter and raspberry jam, and one with butter and cinnamon sugar. She likes butter and jam the best.

Next, she spent way too long editing, adjusting, and resizing pictures that she couldn't even walk to the photo place to get them printed because the store would be closed by then. She even put real clothes on to go outside. All in vain.

She then proceeded to get back into comfy clothes, send her students an e-mail with the written version of the combinations they are going to be evaluated on next week, and stare out the window.


If you are still reading this, I am very impressed with your diligence. I will spare you the rest of my non-eventful evening and end this post here.

design workshop

Last week I began a summer choreography workshop with Jacqueline's School of Ballet. The school is connected to a semi-professional ballet company here in the Valley called Utah Regional Ballet. The company has some very amazing young dancers, all of them are about my age. For two weeks in the summer they have a design workshop. This year, they have brought in Troy Mundy, who is a choreographer from Australia who has set and made work all around the world. I heard about the program from my friend Roxanne Gray, who I danced with at BYU. She did the camp last year and was excited to come again this year.

This is how it works:

In the morning, the dancers take a modern class and a ballet class. Roxanne and I try to go to the modern classes when we can. It is great to have the opportunity to take class again, and from a great teacher. Angie Banchero is faculty at UVU, and she is great fun. When I first met her, at least to my recollection it was the first time we met, she said "Oh my! You got married. I swear you guys are like my little 10 year olds!" What exactly she meant, I am not sure, but I wasn't aware that I had ever met her, and she definitely didn't know me when I was 10.

Then we get an hour with Troy. He has choreographic exercises and tasks for us to do. Some days it is writing a sentence about our bodies, then taking each letter in the sentence and writing a body part, then using those body parts to make up a phrase of movement. Some days it is creating four characters and using those characters as the inspiration for our movement. He has a lot of good ideas that I have never experienced before.

Then we eat lunch, quickly, and try to use as much of our free hour to plan what the heck we are going to do with our dancers.

After lunch we get 2.5 hours with a pre-determined set of dancers to create and teach some sort of piece. Some days you get 6 dancers, some days you get 18. Sometimes you have members of Utah Regional Ballet, and sometimes you have 10 year olds. It is quite a challenge with the varying degrees of abilities, not to mention the fact that you are just racking your brain and body to try to create something to show at 3:30. So you work, you have the dancers help you make stuff up, some like it, some hate it, sometimes they cry, sometimes they laugh, sometimes you are pleased at the end of the day, and sometimes you would rather shield your eyes and not watch.

All in all, it is a really great experience. I have explored new movement styles, new ways of approaching how I can choreograph, and how I can help instruct and use my dancers. It is extremely mentally draining, though. Yesterday began a two day project, so I should be using this time to plan and prepare what I am going to do with all the random scenes I created yesterday....