Category Archives: ballet lessons
Ballet Lessons: Don’t Make It Happen. Let It Happen.
I danced as a kid, and I loved dancing.
If I think back, part of what I loved so much about it was the sense of freedom. My childhood ballet teacher was really good at teaching sound technique without turning her students into a herd of little automatons. She guided and shaped us while keeping our innate freedom and joy in movement intact*.
As a kid, I had absolutely no sense of limitation (this was probably both my greatest personal gift and my greatest personal curse!). It never occurred to me to question whether I’d be able to execute any given step — I just did it, and it just happened. It didn’t occur to me that pirouettes or tour jetés “should” be hard for a little kid. They were just variations on the stuff that I did in gymnastics or when I was playing.
In short, though I probably couldn’t have verbalized it back then, I felt like all these movements were already in there, and all I had to do was let them out**.
In other words, I didn’t make them happen. I let them happen.
On what is probably the best ballet forum I’ve ever seen, Ballet Talk for Dancers, a recent thread discussed the question of sweat (yes, sweat: if you dance, you know these feels, too!).
One respondent dispensed a bit of wisdom she’d heard from presenters at a workshop for ballet teachers:
in classical ballet, dancers shouldn’t so much make their bodies execute movements as let their bodies execute the movements.
A light clicked on in my head. Of course! This is what I’ve been doing so very, very wrongly since I returned to the studio back in March. I’ve been trying to make things happen. In those rare moments that dancing has felt like it used to, it’s because I’ve switched from making it happen to letting it happen.
When you switch from making it happen to letting it happen, all the tension that can plague serious ballet students — especially serious adult students — drops away. Suddenly, you can move freely. You can interpret. You can smile. You can glissade-assemblé without making faces.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising.
Deep in the roots of Zen practice — indeed, in Buddhism itself — is the idea that control is an illusion. The harder we grasp at it, the more difficult life becomes.
The same idea crops up in other philosophies, as well — from the Twelve-Step movement’s “Let go and let G-d” to Christianity’s “Consider the lilies of the field” to the broader, new-wave “Go with the flow.”
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try to do things — just that we should, perhaps, try to do them with less gnashing of teeth. As in those moments on the bike when a headwind or a hill appears: we can make ourselves ride it, tense and miserable, or we can accept that it’s part of the road we’re on, and let ourselves ride it.
With my bipolar disorder, I can either grit my teeth, resist my own nature, and make my life happen (with exhausting effort and the attending misery and crankiness), or I can accept that I am what I am and learn to work with it.
This does not, of course, mean just rolling over and quitting, any more than just “letting it happen” on the dance floor means not dancing. It means, instead, tapping into the strength and grace that are already there, planted within the depths of my being — and using what I have been given.
I hope this makes at least some kind of sense.
At least where my dancing’s concerned, this may be the single best piece of advice I’ve encountered as a returning adult student. After replying to the thread, I got up, went to the kitchen (where there’s exactly enough space for a small glissade-assemblé or a few chainés turns), took a deep breath, and let myself toss off a lovely little glissade.
It felt really good. In fact, it felt a lot like dancing used to, before I started coming to it with an agenda and a sense of how I “should” go about it. In class, “letting” ballet happen made all the difference.
So perhaps in I’ll work on letting it happen instead of making it happen.
And perhaps I’ll try to apply that lesson to the rest of my life as well.
Notes
*Curiously, looking back, this may be one of the reasons that while some of us really thrived, a couple of students I knew left after a year or so. They were both heavier kids who had already learned to feel uncomfortable with their bodies; to be expected to move freely in a class environment where traditional body-conscious ballet kit was the uniform of the day might have been too much for them. That’s something I’ll need to keep in mind in my own future practice.
**This, by the way, is how good dressage training operates in the equestrian world: you’re never teaching a horse to do something unnatural; if you watch horses enough, you’ll see them execute all kinds of advanced dressage maneuvers, from canter pirouettes to glorious collected trots, as they go about their horsey lives (that is, when we’re not messing with them). As riders and trainers (and every ride is training), we don’t make these movements happen. We teach the horse to let them happen.
The “making it happen” approach pretty much reaches its zenith in the the peanut-roller style of “pleasure” horse (well … and in some subsets of park/saddleseat and gaited horses). You’ll rarely see a horse at liberty move that way. The same goes for poorly-trained saddleseat horses or hunters and even poorly-trained dressage horses: with a little experience, you can spot a horse that’s been forced into an unnatural frame.
Unfortunately, when every horse in the ring has been forced into an unnatural frame, the judges still have to pin the ribbons on someone, and in some parts of the country sound training is so rare that the show circuit unintentionally conspires to perpetuate really weird ideas of how hunters or “country pleasure” horses or dressage horses should move.
But, um. Enough horse-nerding for now.
Ballet Lessons: Don’t Think So Much
I’ve noticed something in ballet class: when I stop thinking so darned much, I dance better — sometimes much better.
I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Zen teachers have been harping on about this for ages now: quiet the monkey mind. Be Here Now.
Proponents of other meditative paths, from Catholic mysticism to just plain ol’ secular meditation, say the same thing. Your mind has to be quiet if you’re going to hear that still, small voice, and so forth.
As people living in the modern world, we’re raised to trust our minds above all else. Wisdom, we think, resides in those billions of neurons; in the chemical sparks jumping the gaps between them. We can best solve problems, we imagine, by thinking about them.
Yet, sometimes, we do our best thinking when we’re not thinking at all.
And I know that I, for one, do my best dancing when I’m not thinking at all.
Not to say there’s anything wrong with thinking — far from it. After all, when we imagine, impart, or learn choreography, that’s thinking. And when we analyze our strengths and weaknesses, that’s thinking, too — but maybe it’s thinking that’s best done after class, after the performance, after we take off our shoes.
During class or on stage, sometimes we do best when we leave the thinking behind — when we make space in ourselves for the still, small voice to move out into the world (where sometimes it becomes sort of a big, loud voice).
Thinking is great. Without thought, we wouldn’t have made it very far as a species.
Sometimes, though, the best thing we can do is stop thinking and let our minds get out of the way.
Sometimes, when we do that, we can really surprise ourselves.
Ballet Lessons: Fear of Falling
At LBS, I have the privilege of working with a number of really good teachers. Even though we’re doing the same basic stuff (it’s all ballet, after all), they all teach a little differently, and that means that their classes amplify one-another.
Recently, I had a class with Claire — the same really sharp teacher who stuck a finger in the middle of my chest and said, “Lift this up and forward!” and sort of instantaneously corrected a major postural fault. That solved a lot of problems for me, though I still have to work on it consciously all the time, and sometimes I even over-correct.
Somewhere around the middle of the class, after we finished a bit of across-the-flooring with a turn, Claire said to another student, “You almost went for a double there, didn’t you?” The student in question agreed that, yes, she had.
Claire then said something very much like, “You guys should always go for the double, if you feel like it. The worst thing that’s going to happen is maybe you fall over. You can either be careful and go for the single, or take a risk and go for the double and you might fall — but you might hit the double! Or, you know, you might miss it a thousand times, but then you’ll get it, and you’ll have it.”
I wish I could remember her words more exactly. The point she was making is that you’re never going to do a double pirouette until you try to do a double pirouette — and that falling isn’t that big a deal.
No matter how badly you want to do something, you’ll never succeed until you try — and you can’t let fear get in the way.
This isn’t to say that you can’t be afraid. Bravery isn’t the absence of fear — it’s being afraid and taking the leap anyway.
In the ballet studio, as in life, people fall down sometimes when they try new things. Injuries occur once in a while, but almost anything worth doing involves some degree of risk — and as far as I know, none of us have died of humiliation yet. At least not in class.
In real life, I guess people do sometimes seriously get hurt or die as the result of actual falls. However, I think the fear of falling itself does a lot more damage — the fear that makes us not get up and do the things we dream about doing.
In ballet, we address this possibility by reaching for moves that are just beyond our grasp: once we have a single pirouette nailed, we reach for a double instead of shooting for 32 fouettés right away!
The student who almost did a double pirouette in our combination went on to hit several as class continued. She looked thrilled for herself, and I think we were all thrilled for her.
In real life, we can do the same thing. If we can set aside the fear of falling, we can stretch our comfort zones a little at a time, and if we do, sometimes we’ll find that they grow by leaps and bounds.
Ballet Lessons
Lesson One: Everyone Starts At The Beginning
There’s a famous saying in cycling circles attributed to Greg Lemond: “It never gets easier, you just go faster.”
It reminds me of something my ballet teachers say: “In ballet, you keep doing the same basic things. You just get better at them.”
Many adult beginners (and probably some child beginners) walk into the studio carrying a load of worry about being beginners. Adult re-beginners often walk into the studio carrying a load of worry about how much they’ve lost in the year or ten years or more that have elapsed since last they slipped on their slippers and danced ballet.
Yet, just as basic elements of cycling remain the same no matter how long you ride — you turn the cranks and balance; that’s basically it — the basic elements of ballet never change. Like cycling technique, ballet technique elaborates upon itself.
The five basic positions (of which you will mostly never use one — the third — unless you can’t get into fifth for some reason) never change.
Everything begins and ends with turnout and plié.
Tendu leads to dégagé. Dégagé leads to grand battement. Grand battement leads to jeté. Jeté leads to tour jeté. Tour jeté, for what it’s worth, looks really impressive.
You learn tombé and fondu at the barre; later they become connecting steps that you will use all day, every day, at center and eventually on the stage.
And still everything will begin and end with turnout and plié.
When we first began class, Denis worried about how polished many of our classmates seemed. Now, he is beginning to show a little polish of his own. He began at the beginning — all the way at the beginning, having never set foot in a ballet studio before.
Last Saturday, at the Joffrey, the population of our class ranged from newbies even less polished than Denis to one guy who danced with a degree of refinement that suggested he was at very least an advanced student who was either filling in a class due to a scheduling issue or possibly working back from an injury.
We all did the same things. Nobody judged anyone else.
We were all true beginners once. Every principal dancer commanding the stage; every top racer commanding the mountain — they, too, were beginners once. They, too, start every single day — every class, every workout — with the same basic things we do. They have simply been doing them longer.
So beginning is important — and not just important. It’s good. If no one was ever a beginner, we would not have the David Hallbergs and Jens Voigts of the world; the Natalia Osipovas and Marianne Voses of the world.
I’m not going to say we shouldn’t worry about being beginners. To worry is human. What we shouldn’t do is let that worry stop us from beginning.
Everyone starts at the beginning … and once we start, we often learn that the little elemental skills we learn at first lie at the heart of something beautiful; that the beginning is, in fact, the most important part.
danseur ignoble 