Facet #2 | Breadth - Vocabulary, Grammar & Memorization
Let’s talk!
Before we get started, I just want to say the biggest thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing these podcast episodes with your adult ballet friends, for starting conversations on these topics, and for being here with me on the show.
Since starting this season of the podcast, I’ve received so many messages from adult ballerinas like you telling me that they had been feeling so alone in their journey of navigating the wild west of adult open ballet programs, feeling stuck in their progress, or sometimes the only adult dancer in their small town, and that even just hearing the podcast episodes helped them feel less alone and more motivated than ever to keep going.
Right now, it can feel lonely or frustrating and it can feel like you’re left to your own devices to navigate your ballet journey. You never know who is suffering silently in your ballet classes or in your circles of ballet friends, so sharing an episode with them can help them feel supported in their ballet dreams. You might just be a part of helping someone stick around for just a little bit longer with ballet.
So truly, thank you for being a part of this movement, for encouraging your ballet friends, and for paving the way for adult ballet. We are dancers, and there are so many more with undiscovered or unfulfilled passions.
Alright, let’s get to it. Today on the show, let’s dive into Facet #2 - The Breadth.
Components of Breadth
This facet is the breadth of vocabulary in ballet and how we move our bodies from foot to foot across the floor and throughout space. Within this facet, we have 4 components:
Vocabulary - what the ballet steps are
The grammar of how the steps fit together
Picking combinations up quickly in class
Memorizing an excerpt of choreography
Let’s talk about what each of these are.
First, ballet steps. There are about 300 ballet steps to learn, maybe more or less depending on how you count a “step” versus a variation of a step, but either way, it’s a finite number of steps. At a certain point, you’ve reached all the ways that you can possibly move your legs with external rotation (aka turnout).
Within a given ballet step, for example a tendu or a pirouette, there are two types of things to learn. One is what a step is, which is what I’m talking about here, and the other is continuing to execute and perfect it. It’s one thing to know what the step is, and another to execute it with increasing levels of technique. We’ll talk about Facet #3 about Depth of Technique and how to execute the steps more and more correctly on the next episode, but on this episode, we’ll focus on knowing *what* the steps are.
Second, ballet grammar. This is how the steps fit together. Just as English has a structure and certain words do or don’t go next to each other, so does ballet. For example, depending on where you’re standing, in B+, 5th position, on 1 leg, etc, there are certain steps that belong next to each other and others that don’t.
Third, picking up combinations. This is a special skill for ballet class only, not for the stage, where you can listen to a teacher demonstrate (or sometimes only verbalize and do hand gestures), and then memorize the combination quickly to do it right then and there. This is a skill. Yes. This is a skill just like all the rest of the skills we’ll talk about here. In the same way that a sign language translator gets better and better at holding past words while translating the current words, this is a skill that gets better with practice.
Much of this skill has to do with understanding the structure of how exercises are put together and created. Ballet choreography is not arbitrary, and once you figure out the rules, the memorization becomes easier (note I did not say “easy” -- just “easier”).
Fourth, memorizing choreography. This is different than picking up combinations in class. Memorizing choreography is learning a set of combinations for an exam, or learning a variation to study for many weeks or even to perform. This is longer-term, and has less to do with patterns and structures of ballet class exercises and more to do with repetition and practice.
How to learn these components
One and done! Check it off and you’re done
The facet of breadth is a unique facet, in that it doesn’t require as much maintenance as the other facets do once you learn it. It’s a “one and done” type of thing, especially when it comes to the vocabulary and grammar. Memorizing choreography & picking combinations up quickly do require a bit of maintenance to keep practicing, but the vocabulary & grammar of ballet? Not as much.
To be clear, the “one” in “one and done” could still take many years to learn all the steps and how they fit together, but one day, you’ll find that you have learned the steps, and you’ll know the common patterns of how the steps go together.
In juxtaposition, as we’ll talk about in future episodes, technique, strength, flexibility, and artistry are fluid, your body is constantly changing, you’re working on them every day, and you’re never “done.” Every day, you hit the barre and get to work on all of the technique, and you can’t “check off” these items.
But, arguably, you’re “done” learning new vocabulary and new patterns at some point.
Just like a language — you can memorize vocabulary, and once you know it, you don’t need to re-learn it or even do any focused practice on it, it’s just there. But, once you know the words, you can always continue to work on how to make your writing more fluid, more expressive, more concise, or your handwriting more neat.
Learning & teaching the vocabulary & grammar
So how do we teach the vocabulary, patterns and grammar, and how do adults learn it? This is a really interesting question, with an answer that might seem obvious, but is actually quite a bit more complicated.
It would perhaps seem like in Adult Ballet Utopia, where the responsibilities of adult life were simpler and you could have a long-running class with the same teachers and the same students week to week for a span of years, you could simply learn the steps from A-Z, spending a few weeks on each step, in a neat and tidy order.
But, I’ve found from my 3 years running the Denver studios which were structured as close to Adult Ballet Utopia as possible, that learning vocabulary in a cohorted group class setting is still quite challenging, because the learning process is so vastly different among a group of adults.
First of all, beginning ballet as an adult is a way different experience than that of an adult returning to ballet. I’ve seen dancers return to ballet from 30 or 40 year breaks, and their body still remembers a pas de bourrée and balancé and the mechanics of a pirouette. It’s like music, where even if you haven’t heard a song for 10 years, when that song comes alone, you can sing along and magically somehow all the right words come out, even though you don’t consciously remember them and probably couldn’t cough them up without the music playing.
Often we find these two groups of people, the beginner adults and the returning adults, in the same classes, because adults returning from a break will want to work back up their stamina, strength, flexibility and memorization skills and a beginner class is a good place for that.
But their needs when it comes to this particular facet of learning vocabulary & grammar are so broadly different.
Within the vocabulary & grammar component of Breadth, I’d say there are 5 levels of “knowing” a step or a pattern.
Never heard of it
Know of it / remember seeing it
The mind knows it but the body doesn’t always cooperate
Pretty good with it, and can put it together within a combination without too much effort
Don’t need to think of it anymore
Often, returning adult ballet dancers start around level 3, and sometimes level 5. But new adult beginners all start at level 1, “never heard of it”.
As I said, this facet of Breadth is quite unique in that it is a “one and done” type of a thing. Going through levels 1 and 2 of vocabulary & grammar again is quite boring, unnecessary, and for the most part, unhelpful. Once you’ve learned what the step is, you’re done.
Teaching steps & grammar is one of the hardest things to do in a mixed-level environment, which is in part why I think so many open classes gloss over breaking down the steps and expect you to just fumble along until you pick up the steps.
Some things are easier than others to teach in a mixed setting. Teaching technique to a mixed level group is actually quite a bit easier, because you can challenge the advanced dancers with more advanced technique within any combination. At any point in a dancer’s journey all the way until the pro level and beyond, a dancer can continue to learn more from the fundamentals of technique. Simply standing in 5th position focusing on technique & muscle engagement is a full-body workout at any point in your ballet journey.
But, to spend 20 minutes slowly going back and forth to teach pas de bourrée, and half your students already know that step, they’re going to get rightfully bored really quickly and you’ll feel the pressure to move on. When the room has mixed knowledge of steps, then it’s really difficult to keep the people engaged and challenged who already know the step while going slowly enough to challenge the people who don’t know it yet.
Think of a writing class in which half the class was native speakers and half the class was learning the vocabulary for the first time. Half the class needs to simply drill the vocabulary and learn to spell the words, while the other half can work on putting sentences together. Teaching vocabulary is really hard because you can’t keep everyone occupied while you’re teaching left / right / left.
There needs to be a separate place for beginners to learn the vocabulary & grammar of ballet versus people starting back up again, or who have already learned the vocabulary at approximately level 3 of mastery.
Additional skills needed to learn the grammar
Even within a group of adult beginners, we have a wide range of starting points. There are many skills required for putting together the vocabulary & grammar.
First of all, executing much of the steps and footwork requires being able to balance on one leg and transfer your weight from one leg to the other. If you’ve started dancing as an adult, you may well know that this is actually not as easy as it sounds. If you’re off balance and trying to learn a step, your mind will be so consumed with the anxiety of falling over, that you won’t be able to think clearly about the footwork.
Additionally, if you’re falling in one direction or another, your body will naturally put your foot down to try to save you from falling, which will make it challenging to learn footwork. For example, if you’re learning a pas de bourrée which is 3 definitive and specific steps, and you fall over and put your foot down, now you’ll be mixed up as to where you were supposed to be in the step. Or if you do a glissade, and you’re falling backwards, it’s going to be challenging to know where to put your second foot, because your natural tendency will be to put it in the back to save you from falling, but in reality you need to put it in the front in most cases.
So your balance affects your ability to learn footwork, because those natural reaction centers will fire up and mess up your efforts.
An adult getting started with ballet who struggles with balance will take quite a while longer to learn footwork than one who doesn’t, because they’re *also* learning the skill of balancing at the same time. For some, the skill of balance might already be at a higher level from a different set of life experiences such as ice skating, gymnastics, a longer time spent crawling as a child, or other dance styles, so picking that up might come more quickly.
To the person struggling with balance, it might appear that they picked it up immediately, but what you didn’t see is the behind-the-scenes work where those pre-requisite skills were already learned in a different context.
Second of all, adults are often coming to a program from different ballet programs all over, so what one person knows after 1 year of dancing is widely different than what another knows after that same year. One school might teach pirouettes in the first year, whereas the other might wait 2 years. To assemble adult ballerinas from different programs into one place is challenging.
Third, body dyslexia plays a massive role in the speed of learning new vocabulary. I touched briefly on body dyslexia in a previous episode and received a flood of messages from dancers who felt understood, so it’s worth mentioning again in a bit more detail. Body dyslexia is a term I made up from what I observe with adult dancers, but it is a real thing.
This is where a dancer doesn’t respond to the same directional cues, such as left and right, up and down. This makes footwork like waltzing and glissades challenging, turning directions and rond de jambe directions difficult to remember, and sickling & winging of the ankles challenging to feel. These dancers often need to think about moving in relation to themselves, such as “backwards” or “turn towards your back” or “step down.”
This dancer often has a huge amount of anxiety from years of messing things up and being chastised in class, or having teachers get frustrated with them.
This anxiety (and really any anxiety) takes up a huge amount of mental space, and causes you to almost black out or blank out. This happens to all of us with petite allegro, pirouettes, pointework, fast frappés and more, where we panic that we won’t get the steps right or have that anxiety creep in. This anxiety makes it impossible to use that incredibly powerful tool in your head to help you.
So for this dancer, they need special training in a very patient environment with a teacher very willing to experiment with different language and cues with zero frustration. This dancer also needs cues to remain calm, breathe, and keep the mind present and focused in order to actually think clearly.
This dancer will often report that they’re overthinking it and need to just let it flow in order to get the steps, but that’s often not quite what they actually need. We need to think thoughts like step left, step right, turn behind yourself, finish facing the corner. Your amazing brain will help you through learning and mastering the steps. Where the overthinking comes in is really the racing panicking thoughts. Step left or no wait do I step right, you’re wrong, you won’t figure this out, you’re getting it wrong, you’re messing it up, why can’t you ever figure things out, it’s not even that hard to do.
We need to train the mind to be able to think clearly about what to do without panicking that you’re messing it up.
Fourth, body awareness is vastly different between adults. Proprioception is the technical term for this -- the ability to internally know where your body is in space. Several factors impact this, such as hypermobility and very flexible joints, pregnancies that can cause changes to those deep core muscles, skipping the crawling phase as a child, vertigo or other balance issues, ankle sprains, scoliosis, car accidents, and more.
Adults starting with less proprioception will have a harder time knowing which foot to step on next, because they’ll be less aware of which foot is in the air or where that foot is exactly to step on.
And finally, if the dancer has very strong pattern recognition skills or has ever learned a second language, picking up the patterns, reversing combinations, and putting together the grammar of ballet will often come a little bit easier.
Not to mention, some people have a higher tolerance for feeling lost, whereas others strongly dislike the feeling of being a hot mess and prefer to take the time to organize themselves.
All in all, there are many additional skills to learn in order to master vocabulary & grammar. Kids surely have differences, too, when they come to ballet class from the beginning, but for adults, the gaps become quite a bit wider, as we fork off and our life experiences over many years will cause the gaps to widen. This means that a room full of beginner adults is a group of very different levels.
In all cases, we all need to learn these other skills of balance, coordination, spatial & directional awareness and pattern recognition. It’s a matter of if we are using ballet to learn them, or if we have already learned them in another way.
My point is, no one skips learning these skills. It will just affect how long it takes to reach different levels in ballet, whether we are learning these things *in* ballet class, or if we’ve already learned it elsewhere. As you look around the room, don’t compare yourself to the progress of another dancer. You all have the same skills to learn, it’s just that you might not have seen your classmates learn some of those skills in front of your eyes.
Memorization
I want to touch on the last two components of this facet of Breadth. Let’s talk about picking up the combination quickly in class and memorizing combinations for longer-term projects or performances.
These are really two different types of memory.
Let’s start with picking up combinations quickly in class. For any of the musicians out there, this is similar to sight-reading, in that it is a very different skill than working through the same piece for a long time. Or for people who wait tables, this is like if you forgot your pen and paper, and you have to remember the order for long enough to get back to the kitchen and relay it.
It requires you to be able to think quickly, adjust to quick changes, and anticipate what’s coming next and hold a bunch of information in your head while having to think of other things like music and technique. But, what helps the most in picking things up quickly is understanding the grammar of ballet, the patterns and the structures of how it’s put together.
The way ballet class is put together is not arbitrary. What we are doing at barre, order of exercises, and how certain steps go in a specific order to warm up your body, activate the deep ballet-specific muscles in a methodical way, and stretch and strengthen throughout class.
We want to be able to recognize patterns in choreography, and understand how the combinations are put together so that we can understand more and memorize less.
Combinations are most often structured in sets of 8 counts. For example, a tendu combination is often 32 or 64 counts, with another 16-32 counts of stretches at the end. For a 32-count tendu combination, we could think of this as 4 sets of 8. So if we had 1 pattern that took 8 counts to complete, for example 3 tendus & 1 demi plié, we could repeat that pattern en croix and end up with 32 counts. Now we don’t have 32 counts to memorize, but instead we have 1 8-count pattern to memorize, and then secondarily we are memorizing the directions to apply this to.
The auxiliary skills and information that we want to practice that will help with this are:
Be able to recite the general structure / order of ballet class. If you’re finishing tendus, knowing what exercise is likely to come next.
Be able to take a single piece of choreography and apply it to the en croix directions.
Be able to reverse a combination either front to back at the barre, or left to right in the center.
Be able to get lost and know how to pick it back up again.
Maintain focus during combinations, think clearly during fast combinations, manage anxiety to keep the mind clear, calm and focused.
To take it to the next level, being able to design a barre combination is a great way to solidify your understanding of the patterns as well.
The facet of musicality, which we’ll talk about a little later in the season, can really help with memorization. When you reach a high level of musical understanding, you will able to listen to any song and know what count it is. So if you got lost, you would know when “count 1” was in order to be able to pick back up again.
Our goal is to have the combination become secondary, so our mind can think of other things. In order to free up mental space to work on the other facets such as technique, artistry, port de bras, and more, knowing the combination will eventually need to fade away from being the dominant thing you’re thinking about throughout class.
As with everything we’ve talked about, there are a whole host of skills here that we all have to learn. Some of us learn these with ballet as the catalyst, and others learned it before the ballet studio. You can learn these things with meditation and focus work, with memory games, with sudoku or logic puzzles for pattern recognition & reversing, or by learning a second language.
Whether you learn these types of things elsewhere, or you learn them in the ballet studio, we all have to learn them!
And finally, the last little component, of memorizing longer combinations or choreography. Especially with choreography, there aren’t quite as many patterns or as rigid of a structure as class combinations have, so much of this is practice and repetition to really get the movements into your mind and body. Writing the combinations down is also extremely helpful to helping your mind focus on the transitions, the footwork, and the port de bras details. Finally, a very popular and common tactic is to go to bed visualizing yourself going step by step through the movements and choreography to help your mind memorize and grasp the steps.
Missing Pieces in Adult Open Programs
What are Adult Open Programs Teaching? What are you getting in class, and what should you seek outside of class to reach your goals?
Most adult open drop-in programs focus only on one individual component of the facet of breadth -- which is picking up the combinations quickly.
They generally expect that dancers are already at levels 3-5 of knowledge of the vocabulary, don’t explain the grammar & structure, nor do they practice memorizing choreography for a longer period.
Why? It’s complicated. As I mentioned earlier in the episode, covering levels 1 & 2 of vocabulary & grammatical structure of combinations in a mixed-level class is really dicey when you’re trying to keep the whole group happy. It is quite boring for people already at level 3, so the safer bet is to just assume people are there already, and let the newcomers fumble until they pick it up.
Additionally, it’s actually a pretty specific skill to be able to teach footwork to someone who’s at level 1 of knowing a step, especially when there are people in the class with different learning styles or who don’t respond to the usual “left and right” vocabulary. For many ballet teachers who’ve been doing ballet their whole life, to break down a step into its micro components can be really difficult. If you’ve been doing ballet your whole life, and have only trained to teach kids who already know the steps, then translating those teaching skills to beginner adults who don’t know the steps isn’t always an easy transition.
As for the structure, again I think it’s one of those things where if you’ve been living and breathing ballet, it will feel so obvious to you that you might not even think to stop and point out that combinations are in sets of 8, or the methodology of how to reverse something, or explain the different en croix patterns.
And, why don’t open programs focus on longer-term choreography? The nature of an open program means you have different people week to week, so if you keep the same combination over many weeks, new people coming in and out will cause you to re-cover a lot of material. But, on the other hand, wrangling a group of people to come to anything longer than a 3-week series is near impossible. Most programs that last for much longer than that will see quite a high attrition rate in the latter weeks. Life is complicated for adults.
Level & Drop Off Gap
Therefore, teaching only this one hyper-specific component of the Breadth facet results in an interesting level gap and drop off point.
The dancers who come in not knowing the steps might feel befuddled and just drop out immediately and not come back.
But those who do muddle through and manage to piece together what’s going on will reach a point where they will get bored and feel like they’ve plateaued. This is that “3-year” dropoff point that we see among advanced beginners that I mentioned in an earlier episode. Here’s why it happens.
Once you’re done learning the combinations in your adult open classes, it will feel like you’re “done” with that level and you’ll get bored pretty quickly. Revisiting and continuing to practice the same vocabulary and patterns without also having a technical layer to dig into is pretty boring.
So the dancer braves the gap to the next level and gets started on the new higher-level steps and patterns. But, in this case, they’ve most likely missed the technique, as it’s not often taught in open programs.
The most ideal path is to learn the vocabulary & patterns of a given level, mastery of the steps & grammar. Then, now that the mind is cleared of thinking of the combination and free to think of other things, now it’s the time to layer in technique. What muscular cues should you be giving to your body? How can you engage your rotators to hold your standing leg turnout? How can you keep your posture even during fast combinations? What are your fingers and toes doing?
When the combination takes a backseat is when we can turn our attention to technique, artistry, and improving in other areas. We should spend time layering this in before going back into that mental state of confusion over steps. Working on breadth and depth are mutually exclusive. Each of them take up a lot of mental space at level 1. So once we have mastery of some breadth, it is time to work on technique.
But, if this technique is never layered in, then the boredom will have you seeking out the next thing to work on, which in the absence of technique, will naturally simply be more breadth. After a while of only learning breadth, the more advanced steps won’t actually be successful without the technique. Pirouettes won’t be landed. Legs won’t go any higher. Saute de chat’s and split leaps won’t split.
And then, we get the common 3-year dropoff point of adult ballet dancers. The dancer knows what to do and they can keep up in class, but their body and muscles haven’t learned how to do it. The dancer gets frustrated, maybe assumes that they can’t learn these things because they haven’t so far, and they keep going to the same class and see no progress. So they leave ballet.
So, what’s the solution?
I know you’re itching for a solution at this point, but stay with me while I keep laying out the facets. I want you to have a really solid lay of the land, deeply understand the challenges with how the adult ballet world is what it is, and why I don’t think the solution is to make it exactly how kids are trained.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a little bit of hope ….
If you learn things in the wrong order, will you get permanent bad habits and be forever lost? If you’re in a class where you are only getting breadth and no depth, do you need to give up now and quit forever.
If you’ve been following me for any length of time, surely you already know that my answer is no, not all is lost!
To be honest, I’ve seen it all, ranging from all the extremes. I’ve seen dancers who knew every step in the book but didn’t even know there was technique to be learned or that they should even be thinking about muscle activation. And I’ve seen dancers who were trained as children, working on technique exclusively for years before being allowed to layer in any kind of breadth of steps.
I’ve seen self-taught dancers who learned from videos, and I’ve seen dancers who were too afraid to practice on their own and only danced with a teacher present.
And, I’ve seen it all work. So, as much as us black-and-white ballerinas want a definitive answer and like to know the right/wrong way, the answer is truthfully that as long as you pick up all the pieces somewhere along the way, you’ll be fine.
There are more efficient ways to go about it that I’ll lay out, but as long as you keep going, know which pieces to seek out, and seek them all out, you’ll get where you want to go. I have no doubt.
Next week, we’ll dive into Facet #3 - The Depth of Technique, all about how to take a step that you know, and execute it with more and more technique.