Category Archives: class notes
Wednesday Class: How I Make Decisions
We have a new lyra teacher on Tuesday evenings, and she’s lovely and gives a great class — but I’ve decided that I’m going to bow out of that class, because Ballet.
Basically, there’s too much in that class that trains the muscles I’m trying to de-train a bit (hello, quads; greetings, hip abductors), and the result is that Wednesday morning is a struggle to counteract those effects, which means it’s a less-effective class than it should be (qv: today my left split was laaaaame and my turnout was, by my standard, only meh).
Wednesday is legitimately the hardest class in my week, much of the time, and I want to be fully able to take advantage of it.
Once upon a time, I used to ride my bike a lot more. I cut back on that for similar reasons — I am constitutionally unable to refrain from stomping up hills, destroying my turnout all the way, so I simply ride less.
Dancing has made it easier to decide what to do and what not to do. It feels akin to religious conviction: when conviction is very strong, the decision to live by the tenets of one’s faith is not as difficult as it might otherwise be.
So this is weird, in that now and then I realize I’m sacrificing things on the altar of ballet — but also not weird, in that deciding what to do and what not to do has never been simpler.
Basically, this flowchart governs my entire life (photo by Amy Merrick).
I kind of wish I’d figured this out as a kid. So much of my life has been needlessly complicated.
On the other hand, I had some amazing experiences, and it’s really awesome to have all these other interests in my pocket in case I ever mysteriously tire of dancing.
Class this morning was also complicated by the fact that mold-and-ragweed season has descended upon us, bringing with it asthma and pleural pain. I had to take my inhaler before class this morning, so things were harder than they should have been. I’m still having issues, so I’m taking the night off.
Basically, taking the inhaler before class is rather like taking a nice hit of cocaïne before running wind sprints, only cocaïne is better at turning off the Governor in your brain that makes you slow down before your heart explodes. Basically, you tell your body, “Okay, fondu now, and DO IT RIGHT,” and the governor sticks its fingers in your body’s ears and says, “Don’t listen to him; he’s a putz,” and your body is is like AAAAUGHHH DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO and half-arses its way through everything.
I finally started to assemble my proverbial waterfowls in a linear array during the adage at centre (because by then the initial kick-in-pants offered by the inhaler was wearing off).
Ironically, perhaps, I did better in petit allegro than in just about anything else, though I had to think entirely too hard about the entrechat trois for some reason at first (possibly because we generally do cinq?). It was still rather an uphill struggle, though.
Tomorrow night, I plan to do BW’s class, after which will be heading out for Marco Island early Friday morning. I’m ambivalent about the trip — I know I’ll enjoy it, but I’m not in love with the idea of taking off again just as I’m getting back into the swing of things.
On the other hand, this trip should be a lot more relaxing, and when I come back my life is is like SwanLakePilibolusShowPilobolusClassWendyWhelanTalkMovingCollectiveNutcrackerWinterShowcase, and that’s just the part that isn’t ballet and modern classes.
I’ve also involved myself in the parents’ and adult students’ group at the ballet school, which is pretty exciting. BB and I have sort of become the de facto adult program delegates, which is no big surprise, since we’re basically always at the school anyway.
Anyway, I think that when I come back from Florida, I’m going to switch to Flexibility & Mobility on Tuesday nights.
In other news, I cheated on my favorite shoes by wearing my white stretch canvas ones, and I’m forced to admit that I quite like them. Too soon for a full review, though.
Belated Notes
Since Ms B got married and there are no longer two BWs among my ballet teachers, I shall henceforth refer to Company B simply as BW (because I’m lazy and it’s easier).
Anyway, class with BW was, as always, good. I didn’t dance as well as I usually do, but everyone has those days. Only three of us again, so once again there was much drilling down deep in the technique. There was also more than the usual array of conversation; we were all tired and disorganized (I arrived earliest, only 5 minutes before class time; BW arrived just after, and everyone else was late).
My turnout took a while to turn on — back to Trap 3 last night meant back to Single Knee Hangs (with ronds-de-jambe), and those make the turnouts tight. (I’m going to have to contemplate that, as I plan to use SNH w/ RDJ to open a trap performance on Saturday.) Not that it was non-existent; it just wasn’t up to the standard of Wednesday’s class.
On the other hand, my grand rond got its stuff together after a fashion. Coming from behind, I was rotating the turnouts later than necessary and thus losing much of the quality of the movement. BW laid on hands and fixed me: he proved to me that I can rotate my hip much further in arabesque than even I thought possible, which made for one high extension coming à la seconde. Like, BW even commented on it to B: “See how high that is?”
I appreciate the fact that my teachers aren’t afraid I’m the least to touch me.
Going terre-à-terre, though, my brain was absolutely determined to leave our the waltz turns. This kept making me end up facing the wrong corner. This may have been fatigue (I’m sleeping better, but still not really well, as you might gather from the fact that I’m posting at 2 AM), or it may have been a lack of Adderall. I forgot my second dose until it was legitimately too late to take take it. Ironically, I was so busy cleaning… Anyway.
I discovered that I haven’t lost my attitude balance, and that I can pretty reliably élevé into it now. After class, BW worked on my arms, which are slowly becoming graceful. Minor miracle, there, all things considered.
So that’s about it.
Trap performance on Saturday should be interesting. I’m resetting some existing choreography to Billy Joel’s “You’re The Only One Who Knows.” Here’s hoping I get through without bursting into tears. Seriously, that’s why I’m not even thinking about using “Leningrad.”
Also, a picture from Burning Man, below the fold since it’s mildly NSFW:
This Week In Circus Arts
So these things happened in Acro 2 yesterday (both photos by Starr Peters, I think? … at least, I know the first one is).
I can only describe the first one as a four-way fold. Basically, you pretend you’re sitting in a chair, and then you grab hands in the middle and lean back into each other’s laps, and it’s like, “By our powers combined, we are Captain Awkward-As-Hell-But-Looks-Pretty-Cool!”
Also, if you have only one person in the fold who feels comfortable sort of exploding up from this position, everyone else winds up falling over.
Ask me how I know, heh.
The other one is what we’ve nicknamed the “Scented Candlestick” (as in, “Trick or treat, smell my feet…”), though it has another name in Yoga.
Because I’m a medium-sized person, I base and fly everything and everyone, and Katie (who I’m basing in this picture) is one of the best flyers I’ve had the privilege of strangling with my feet 😀
In other news, today was my first day back in Trap 3 since I went to the Burn. I was expecting to suffer, but it was a review day, and I pretty much nailed everything … okay, except for that one thing where I forgot that my flexibility means I can dump myself right out of the trapeze, but fortunately I was on the moderate-low trap and could easily catch myself in a handstand.
And then I got back up and nailed that thing, too. I failed to catch the name of it, but it was kind of a bird’s-nest variant that you enter by dropping from a front balance and catching yourself with the backs of your legs on the ropes. The downside of being really flexible is that you can slide right off the bar; the upside is that you can get into a super-cool hang with your knees folded over the ropes and your hands on your ankles (or calves, or knees). I’ll have to get a picture of that next time I’m in Open Fly.
Edit: I also nailed pike beat to tuck-through and full ankle beats during the warm-up. I meant to try long-arm beat to front balance, but forgot. Still, I’ve never even tried to tuck through from a pike beat before, and I think I’ve done ankle beats all of once. All of that, though, owes to the rather extreme flexibility of my back. It makes doing almost any kind of beats much easier, because you can get a better release and therefore more momentum.
We ended class by playing what I’m going to call Improv Telephone: everyone lines up, then the first person mounts the trapeze and does something, the second one does the mount and the first move and adds something, and so on. The cool part is that, being the second-most advanced class on offer, we’re allowed to do whatever feels right, even if it’s not officially A Thing.
The result (in addition to a fun little piece of choreography) was the invention of a possibly-new skill that we’re calling the Mer-Horse (I say “possibly new” because basically everything under the sun has probably been done at one point or another by someone, somewhere, but this one definitely isn’t in our existing syllabus, and our trainers are pretty well-trained).
Also, I discovered that I do remember how to do dragonfly on the trapeze, even though I always get confused about it on lyra.
Ballet today was alllll about the turnouts … and it was a good class. There was so much fondu that we could’ve opened a restaurant.
It was also timely, because I’ve been working on maintaining all the turnout — like, alllllll of it, in both legs. It’s a workout, but it’s paying off. It’s much easier now to step into and maintain a 180 degree first or a legit toe-to-heel fifth (regarding which: when I started letting my supporting leg drift, Ms B. came over and grabbed me by my hipbones 😀 Hooray for physical corrections!).
Anyway, the biggest challenge right now is to keep the upper body light and easy while working the turnouts like the fate of the world depends on it. This ties into what BW kept shouting at me last week: “Use your lats!”
So I’ll be thinking about turnouts and lats in class tomorrow, heh. And about not letting the barre-side shoulder creep up.
And also about everything else, because ballet.
Also, petit allegro is finally improving, which feels like a minor miracle. I thought I was having a mental block about Sissones, but it turned out that it was a physical block: my épaulement was interfering with liftoff. Ms. B gave us a useful note about that: there’s that little side cambre in the port de bras for Sissones changée a côte, and if you start to cambre before you start to jump, you kind of wind up crippling the jump itself.
Ms. B complimented me on my turns, which is huge. I applied Modern T’s note about using my chin to spot, and it really seems to have helped. Ms. B said she’s going to steal it for another one of her students who spots with her forehead like I was … so a big Well Done to Modern T for that catch and the note to fix it!
Modern Monday Returns (Finally)
So, technically, Modern Monday has been rolling along without me for the past few weeks, but I haven’t managed to make make it ’til today.
Anyway, in the intervening period, I haven’t completely forgotten how to modern, but it did take a little re-acclimating today. There were quite a few moments in which my body kind of went, “Ohhhhhh, that thing! Riiiiiiiight!”
I was really afraid I would be a disaster, because I’m still struggling at night but opted not to take take a sleeping pill last night because sometimes they exacerbate my depressions. Last night, I did manage to get something like five hours of sleep, though, which is a step in the right direction.
It turned out that I was acceptably able to remember combinations and coordinate most of my movements. I did struggle with an exercise on the floor in which Graham contractions and releases and flat-back were supposed to coordinate with flexing and pointing the feet.
My feet were like, “What is this flexed crap? Are we doing frappé? No! So what the snap?” I had had to think about the feet, which was simultaneously surprisingly hard and actually pretty funny, because they were seriously not into that.
I also struggled with Part B of our petit allegro combination, which seemed simple but wasn’t, because it needed precision, which evidently I didn’t have.
Basically, it went:
Walk, walk, walk, walk,
Jump, spot, jump, spot, jump, spot, jump, spot <= with quarter turns
I struggled to coordinate this and then, when I did coordinate it, I kept turning off-center.
It turns out that I was spotting forehead-first, tilting my head and neck off the vertical axis, causing my whole body to veer off track.
Modern T suggested that I think about leading the spot with my chin. This sounds immensely counter-intuitive, but in my case, it works. It keeps my head and neck on the vertical, which makes the turn stay upright.
Anyway, this explains why my turns and my tours sometimes (okay, often) teeter off their axes — so, one again, modern is benefiting ballet in unexpected ways.
So, anyway, more little details to tune up. I think this is good. The more I dance and watch dance, the more I believe that the bodies of dancers are educated bodies in a very real way. I feel like I should be able to explain what I mean, there, but I’m having trouble with words today, so I’ll have to reflect on that and come back to it.
So, basically, I have a PhD in controlling my legs, but my arms are still in kindergarten. In this position, I felt like my arms were straight out to the sides. Oy, vey.
Saturday Class(es): TURN IT OUT (again)
Along the way, my loosely-connected hips have developed some pretty rocking turnout.
Along the way, I have also noticed that, as I progress through barre exercises (or exercises at centre, or … you know, basically everything else), my turnout tends to creep from awesome to average. It’s never terrible, but there’s sort of no excuse for that … especially since hanging onto the turnout is what makes sooooooo many other things happen without so much sturm und drang (tour lent, I’m looking at you, here).
This became a theme of today’s second class, with Ms J at the helm and only three of us at the oars.
While I frequently take class with Ms J, I rarely get to take class from Ms J … which is a shame, because she is an amazing teacher, and has a laser-focused eye for detail and absolutely no misgivings about using it to its full potential (which is why we love her).
Today, she pointed out to me that I’m being lazy with my turnout in pliés and in relevé balances, particularly those on two feet.
In both, I look fine getting there (and maybe I even am fine; I actually do tend to work my turnouts on the way there), but on the way back, it’s like I just throw my bike down on the front lawn or something. In short, I have been letting my rotators get away with going, “Meh, that’s good enough.”
Basically, as you rise from a plié, you should continue using all those rotators that make your turnout happen … you know, then ones that you’re supposed to keep fiercely engaged all the way down, but maybe you don’t because your turnout is naturally pretty great and you can kinda fake it?
But if you don’t want your turnout to just drift into the Zone of Mediocrity, you have to use them all the way. All the way down (because otherwise you’re gonna have a bad time cranking them back on when you come back up, and you’re also going to fall right over the very second your instructor calls you to center and says, “And we start with grand plié…”) and then all the way up.
All the way.
Which means that as you rise, you’re not just thinking about getting your knees back, but also about rotating your heels forward … and you’re not just thinking about it until your heels are on the ground (which, historically, is where I’ve just kind of dropped the reins and let the horses … by which I mean my legs … run for the barn).
You have to keep thinking about it, and doing it, until you are once again standing in your greatest possible turnout.
If you’ve been in the habit of being lazy about it, as I have, this is HARD.
By which I mean it’s physically demanding (because you suddenly realize, “Ohai, my turnouts aren’t quite as strengthy as I thought!”) and it makes you think and it’s horrible to have to think during a plié combination, because then the likelihood that you’ll hose up the entire combination approaches the singularity, or … wait, I think I’m perhaps drifting into hyperbole as well as mediocrity, here.
Anyway, you have to consciously make even that last degree, that last second, of rotation happen … or at least you do until your body gets used to it or at least just gives up and does it right because it realizes you’re not going to stop making it and sometimes it just has to choose its battles(•).
- You guys, I am pretty sure that this is how I nailed down renversé. At least for the five minutes before I started overdoing all my renversés. Anyway, I can attest to the fact that this does, for many things, eventually happen, or at least it has for me, at any rate.
- Some experts refer to this phenomenon as “muscle memory;” I call it “my body giving up the fight or maybe even kinda developing Stockholm syndrome a little.” So now I get to think about other things I’m doing wrong. Like this one.
Moreover, the same thing (that is, the rotators being like, “Meh, good enough,” not the body finally accepting that your are going to keep making it do this crazy stuff) happens when you’re coming down from relevé or from elevé — in fact, for me, this is when it is most likely to happen.
And, presumably for my entire balletic existence, I have been allowing it to happen. At least, I have until today, when Ms J took me to task on it. (I realize that this is a key component of what Company B was also trying to impart on Thursday.)
She kept me on top of it throughout the entire class, even when I was standing still.
So that is today’s lesson: if you think you’re done working your rotators, you almost certainly aren’t. Unless you’re in modern class, in which you might legitimately be done working your rotators for the moment, because maybe you’re going to get a reprieve and do something in parallel.
WRONG. The correct answer is E: NEVER. NOT EVEN WHEN HE’S DEAD.
For what it’s worth, working on this instantly improved my fourth position (also known as “we would’ve called it fifth but then you would’ve expected it to be the hardest one and you wouldn’t have been willing to try it”). Specifically, my ability to use temps-lie through fourth and to execute grand pliés in fourth without recovering with only two-thirds of the turnout I had when I started.
(Edit: I feel like I’ve said this before, which makes me wonder exactly how distressingly bad my fourth position was when I started dancing again back in 2014.)
Of course, none of this was of any help by the time we got around to doing turns. By then, sleep deprivation had caught up with me, and I managed to execute exactly one halfway decent turn. The rest were horrible, rubbishy disasters.
Petit allegro, too, was awash in fresh horror, as I kept letting my trailing leg just sort of drift home in my glissades and then falling over sideways doing tours (I mean, not all the way over). At least I remembered the combination, eventually?
But I’m pretty sure all that owes to the fact that things were catching up with me by then. Sleep deprivation hits you right in the coordination and equilibrium. In related news, as I learned in today’s first class, sleep-deprived chainés are no joke. Or, well, at least not to the person attempting them. They can be pretty hilarious to everyone else, TBH.
On the other hand, in the second class, I somehow miraculously nailed down the Bournonville (grand) jeté (which, in still photos, has an unfortunate tendency to look like the official “Heeeeeeeeey!” entrance of ballet — in real life, these are really beautiful when executed well).
In case you’re wondering, here’s one ganked straight from the source.
I learned the Bournonville jeté a while back, but then promptly gave myself a mental block the next time we used it and haven’t produced a decent one since until today. I mean, seriously, most of mine look like I’ve basically tripped over something whilst running at full tilt, or possibly like there’s something wrong with the leg that’s in back.
(Edit: I suspect I may have not actually been jumping off the back leg at all, but just sort of launching from the front and kinda letting it trail along. I am distressingly capable of exactly that kind of thing.)
Today, I did about nine of them. A few were even actually solid all the way up, since Ms J noted that I was jumping through my arms and letting them trail behind me instead of carrying them(•) and fixed that, too.
- …As I am forever doing, because my prioprioception in that department is still awful.
I figured out how to carry my arms and shocked the living daylights out of myself by launching a string of beautiful Bournonville jetés into near-earth orbit on the next pass.
Of course, I then failed to plan anything to do with the arms in question on a subsequent saut de chat, with the inevitable result being a kind of Lovecraftian half-breed, or possibly a rough approximation of a T-Rex attempting to pop and lock.
Oh, T-Rex. If only you’d just stop trying. No, wait: YOU DO YOU, T-REX!
And my tour-jetés, today, on the other hand?
Ummmm, yeah. Let’s not even open that can of extremely-confused and possibly drunken worms.
~
PS: today’s first class, Advanced Class, was actually pretty decent all the way through. Even the chainés weren’t that bad. So there’s that.
Thursday Class: Split the Difference
Tonight was my first class back with Company B.
There were only 3 of us, the more advanced members of the class, so he taught to a fairly high standard. (I should say, he always teaches to a high standard, but in this case he also gave us fairly advanced material).
At the beginning of barre, I was worried I wouldn’t be up to hanging with the cool kids, since I’m still fresh back from my Off Season, but once we got into it, I felt fine. My body woke up and remembered that dancing is what it does, and after that everything went fairly smoothly.
I got my left split back today. That’s a huge improvement. I’d been having trouble recovering it after yoinking something in my hip at the July intensive, but a month off seems to have un-yoinked said something. Now the only thing making life difficult is a tight spot in the top of my right quadriceps, but it’s not preventing me from getting that split all the way down, just making it slower getting there. It’ll come.
So that’s another keen reminder of how sometimes it’s good to take some time off, let the body just recover.
In other news, I had developed a weird hait of fouette-ing out of my renverse, and I got that sorted tonight a well. I was, it turns out (har, har) turning (ha!) my renverse into a turn, which, as M. BeastMode reminds us whenever we do renverse in his classes, it patently isn’t. It’s just a fancy way to change the direction of your body, really.
Anyway, if you turn your renverse into a full turn, you wind up doing a crazy kind of fouette thing to face yourself back into the correct direction. That sort of defeats the whole point of the renverse, and while it looks cool, it almost certainly isn’t valid technique.
On the other hand, being able to float through a full rotation in renverse means you have the balance working, so there’s that?
So basically, renverse is a fancy pivot that takes you only halfway around your imaginary box (generally from one corner to its diagonal opposite) and not a turn. And it looks awesome.
We also drilled down on pas de bourree en tournant, which is one of those steps that, at this level, many of us have just been faking forever with varying degrees of success. CB pointed out that it’s helpful to think of the en tournant part as quarter-half-half, and mentioned that even our resident Russian-trained-in-actual-Russia ballerina (and, yes, I’m using that term in the technical sense) says you often wind up having to fudge it a little. So you might go quarter-half-half and then sort of pivot subtly in sus-sous, or whatevs.
Anyway, excepting one instance of my prodigious ability to do the should-be-impossibly-wrong turn, my turns were good today, as were most other things once my body woke up. So that was good.
I love Company B’s class, because he tends to give a slightly slower class (possibly because he legitimately has a full 90 minutes, whereas my other classes are nominally 75 minutes long, but generally run closer to 90 anyway), which allows more time to absorb the finicky little details.
Which is good, because finicky little details are, to some extent, the heart and soul of ballet, though of course they mean nothing if the technique underpinning them isn’t there. They are, however, what puts the finish on.
So that was class tonight.
I apologize for my lack of diacritical marks, by the way.I’m trying out a new Bluetooth keyboard and am too tired this evening to go back and add them after the fact. I suppose I could’ve just used HTML mode on this editor, but I didn’t think of it ’til just now.
Choreography Study Group tomorrow, Advanced Class on Saturdau, teaching on Sunday, back to Modern on Monday now that my car is back from its maintenance visit.
Also, I really quite love this little keyboard, even if I keep mistyping “keyboard” in various creative ways.
Wednesday Class: Look At Those Goalposts Go!
First, I’d like to point out that while “Look at noun go!” is idiomatic, it still sounds hella awkward to my ear in this context. I really want to say, “Watch those goalposts go!” but that doesn’t have the same cultural sense. Maybe I should’ve written: “Those goalposts — look at ’em go!” Or … well. Whatevs.
Anyway, today marked my first Killer Class since before I departed for Burning Man, and while it was predictably a slog because, while well-rested, I am also not quite on form(1), it was also objectively a pretty good class.
(1) I should probably note that I’m really talking about a difference in fitness similar to that in cycling, in which “Fit” and “Racing Fit” are very discrete states.
That being said, I felt like I got through pretty well. Well enough, in fact, that I finished class aware that, once again, the goalposts are on the move.
I took it easy and, for the most part, kept my extensions relatively low today — but I also realized that no longer means working at 45 degrees. 90 degrees is sufficiently comfortable avant and à la seconde to qualify; arrière it’s pretty much the default. It didn’t feel like any trouble to work an from an extension avant or arrière through fondu coupé through développée à la seconde just above 90.
A little of this is a question of strength, but mostly it’s a question of knowing how to use my body in a way that, not too long ago, I didn’t. That, in turn, I owe to really good instruction.
A year ago, I was fighting my own body for higher extensions, and it was largely a question of not knowing how to get there. I knew I was supposed to keep my hips level and that the working leg should be lifted from behind by the same muscles responsible for turnout; I just didn’t actually know how to use my body so those things would happen reliably. Thus, I tended to devolve upon using my quads to lift my working leg.
Anyway, using the right set of muscles has become, essentially, automatic. I no longer battle physics and physiology every single time I work in extension. Pretty cool stuff.
Likewise, even though I was feeling a bit draggy by the time we got there, petit allegro was better than it had any business being. We did:
Echappée, changement, changement, soubresaut,
Echappée, changement, changement, soubresaut,
Glissade avant, glissade arriére, glissade a côte changée, glissade a côte changée,
Echapée, echapée, entrechat quatre, entrechat quatre.
And:
Glissade, jeté, temps levée, temps levée
Glissade, jeté, temps levée, temps levée
Balloté, balloté, balloté, fouetté(2)
Cut under to sous-sous,
Tombé, pas de bourrée,
Glissade, assemblée.
(2)Technically, this was sauté fouetté.
These aren’t difficult combinations (though maybe Me From One Year Ago might disagree?), but both offer ample opportunity for leg-tangling (also know as pas de bébé girafe, a subset of the extensive group known collectively as pas de problème … yes, that’s a pun).
In neither case did I fumble into Baby Giraffe Mode (even though I kept forgetting that the ballotés were coming and doing that thing where you think, “Oh, yeah!” and then do the first too one fast to make up for lost time.
This all compares favorably to where I was a year ago, or six months ago, or probably even one month ago. I just tend to forget, when I’m in class basically every day, that I’m actually making progress.
That said, this habit of checking in with myself and making progress-based comparisons also made it abundantly clear that I’ll need to get my core back together again, since I spent way too much time working swaybacked.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I’m pretty much back in the swing of things, ballet-wise, though still decompressing otherwise.
Teaching Adult Beginners: They Grow Up So Fast!
My Sunday class is making amazing strides — their tendus, dégages, and even ronds de jambe looked so great this week.
I also experienced one of those great moments in which I grabbed a student’s leg and demonstrated how rotation and placement could help her A) keep her RdJs smooth and B) balance her arabesque, and then got to see that amazing thing where the light-bulb inside just clicks on.
And then she did it again, completely on her own, without my meddlesome, grabby hands 😀
That was the best part, and really the highlight of the day. Such a cool moment!
I also guided her into a first arabesque (really, I just offered her my hand so she’d extend her arm to the right spot) so she could feel how the working leg and opposite arm connect through the back and counter-balance each-other, and she totally got it.
(Also, her arabesque looked awesome! Her back is really strong and flexible, which really helps — thanks, aerials! Likewise, because she wasn’t fighting to try to get a super-high extension, she was rock-solid.)
Something I’ve learned through my own experiences returning to ballet and teaching:
New dancers don’t just find it hard to locate the center-line of their bodies when the working leg is to the rear.
They also (and perhaps more importantly) often find that working to the center-line seems a little weird, unnatural, and sometimes even scary … until they try it and it clicks!
For me, that light-bulb moment came when I realized that I could keep my turnout more easily and effectively in RdJs if I really got the working leg all the way back to the center-line, and then that the same applied to tendus. This happened more recently than it should have, if I were better at A) listening and B) applying corrections 
Prior to that moment, I guess I kind of felt like I’d lose my turnout that way. Sometimes, ballet can be pretty counter-intuitive.
If you’re engaging all the (right) things, though, drawing the arc of the RdJ or the line of the tendu right freaking back from the tailbone lets you stay turned-out without lifting (or dropping) a hip.
(That, by the way, is the other part that’s hard for people: they feel like they need to lift that hip even when they don’t. Which, if they’re using correct technique and working within the ever-evolving limits of their own bodies, they shouldn’t at this level, or almost ever.)
This is still one of the best ways I know to gauge my own placement: if my working leg is taking too much weight in a tendu to the rear, or I’m hiking a hip in a RdJ en dedans, usually the problem is that I’m not getting my working leg behind myself.
Exception: if my pelvis is jammed — which happens with ridiculous frequency at the moment because Bodies Are Weird™ — I can’t RdJ without lifting the hip on the jammed side (very nearly always the right).
Instead, my working leg is usually kind of camping out in … I don’t know, 2.5-ième position? Working back to the center line by rotating and reaching generally resolves the related problems.
In some ways, and as much as part of me really hates to admit it (in part because I feel weird in third because I use it so rarely), I feel like this is a really good reason to teach adult beginners to work in third position before introducing fifth.
Then, when they come to tendu derrière or RdJ derrière, they have to think about moving the working leg in towards the center line (by rotating the heel forward and adducting, of course, rather than just by unraveling the working hip, letting the knee point to the floor, and shoving the toes over), which creates the opportunity to feel the difference that it makes when that happens.
Working from fifth, new dancers often tend to let their legs turn in when they extend back (see above re: unraveling, etc.).
Likewise, they often finish an RdJ or point a tendu a little to the side when working from fifth with the working foot closed in back — possibly because early on that seems like the only logical way to get your foot out there.
Later, of course, we get better at pulling up through the pelvic floor and lower core (also known as “pulling up through the hips” :D) and placing our weight to keep the working foot free when it’s in back — but early on, really subtle core cues and weight shifts are anything but intuitive.
With a little hands-on guidance, the sensation of bringing the leg back to the center line through (for example) a rond, on the other hand, can become a powerful physical illustration.
I doubt my student, C, will soon forget what it felt like to “get it” any more than I’ve forgotten.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that she’ll be perfect all the time — but it does mean she’ll be more perfect a lot more of the time, because now she has a memory that connects body and brain through the awesome feeling of an “Ah-hah!” moment.
In other news, the class as a whole is coming on like a house on fire.
Today we worked piqué balances at retiré going across the floor, and so many of them were bang on. It’s really cool to see a group of new dancers experience the thrill of springing on to the supporting leg and being able to just hover there, perfectly balanced, then come down.
We gave them a simple combination: piqué balances at retiré along the diagonal, to the count of:
Brush up – stay – stay – stay – down up – stay – stay – stay – down up – stay – stay – stay
(..etc. The number of piqué balances varied based both on the length of any individual dancer’s legs and how willing she was to really step out beyond herself.)
On the first run, we let them try it on their own. A few really nailed it, but several were shaky because, as is often the case, they felt unsure and tried to bring the supporting leg under themselves instead of launching themselves onto the supporting leg.
(Really, it’s kind of like throwing a BBQ skewer into the lawn — I’m not old enough to have experienced proper lawn darts, so I can’t say that’s exactly spot-on. Either way, that’s the image I should give them: your leg is a lance, and you’re spearing a reclining mammoth … or maybe something flatter, like a giant crocodile.)
What could possibly go wrong? (1)
On the second run, we simply rolled out the very-most-basic partnering, offering them a hand on which to steady themselves. Most of them literally put no weight on the hand in question, but knowing it was there made them feel safe, and the piqued more boldly.
So, lesson of the day for me: hesitant piqué balances might be the result of a little bit of fear. With new dancers, a little hand-holding (or, well, hand-offering) can really help.
(With more experienced dancers, though, yelling works just fine :D)
Anyway, that’s it for now. Sadly, I won’t be checking in with my students next week, as I’ll be off in the desert, doing tendus in the pool (and then building a freaking enormous theme camp at Burning Man).
~
Edit: fixed a thing. I don’t know why I was thinking these piqué balances were at coupé. They were at retiré. We’re planning on teaching these guys piqué turns sometime soon.
Further edit: just so you don’t think my Sunday class is really, really perfect, we still have to remind them about thinking of plié as a continuous movement. Today I explained this as:
Don’t drop and pop — melt and … um … smelt. Yeah, we’ll go with “smelt.”
Thank dog that Aerial A backed me up on that mnemonic 😀
Further, further edit: They have definitely turned into a dance class. Before class today, several them were attempting to figure out pirouettes (and kinda-sorta succeeding: they were upright, weren’t falling over, and were getting around, but they weren’t turned out or spotting).
Kinda warms my heart a little 😀
~
- By Mushy [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
danseur ignoble 