Facet #3 | Depth of Technique - The Invisible Key to Ballet
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Thank you for your patience with this episode’s release!
I’ve been hard at work launching the first annual International Adult Ballet Festival, an intensive, showcase & competition for serious recreational adult ballet dancers to call home!
Ballet is a legitimate & prestigious passion for adults of all ages & skill levels to pursue with all their heart, regardless of aspirations of professional dance. IABF is an opportunity to experience the intensives, performing, and competition opportunities typically reserved for young dancers.
I’d love to meet you on the stage in Miami in 2022. All levels are invited to join and perform, whether you’ve got your heart set on a solo, a group piece with your friends, or dance as a part of the Broche corps de ballet. Choose to stay in the group hotel block slumber party or stay on your own and join for the classes and the show.
Registration is now open at IABF.dance
Now let’s get onto the episode - Facet #3 - Depth of Technique - The Invisible Key to Ballet
This episode, like all episodes, depends on you, your goals, and what you want from ballet. If you listen to this episode and this facet isn’t exciting to you, then that’s just fine!
You don’t NEED to achieve a high level of this facet to have fun with ballet. You definitely want to be familiar with the basics of technique to stay safe, but plenty of people out there love ballet without studying this facet deeply.
It’s perfectly valid to dance because you love ballet class, because you enjoy moving with the music or being in the studio environment with your ballet friends.
But, if you’ve been dancing for a while and wonder why your pirouettes aren’t working yet, or why your petite allegro isn’t getting quicker, or why your legs won’t stay turned out in the center or lift any higher, or why your port de bras still doesn’t look quite how you want, then this is the facet for you.
Facet #3: Depth of technique, the invisible key to ballet.
Let’s dive in. What is Depth of Technique all about?
This facet of ballet is where we take each movement within the breadth of vocabulary, and work on it until mastery.
As we discussed with the 2nd facet of ballet, breadth of vocabulary involves knowing which foot to put where, how to link the steps together, and what each of the steps mean.
Depth, on the other hand, is where we work to master movements within the ballet paradigm, which involves turned out legs, pointed ankles, long toes, stretched knees, elongated posture, and arm movements to extend our lines from our back and create gestures.
Within the facet of depth, we build the mechanisms that make ballet look and work correctly. The depth of technique enables us to create the look of effortless elegance while secretly and invisibly working really hard to control the body. The depth of technique enables us to use gravity & physics to our advantage to turn, leap, lift our legs up high, and more. And it is what gives ballet the “look” of gracefulness, and the “je ne sais quoi” of floating across the stage.
I call this developing Ballet Mode
Let’s take this conversation back down to earth and talk about what this means in a practical sense.
First off, I’m a big believer that you shouldn’t just take my word or any teacher’s word for this stuff.
You should prove it to yourself. Try to understand the logic of it all. Understand the theory. Then you can self-correct, keep learning in a group class where individual corrections are not given, and watch your own videos to correct yourself.
So I hope this episode arms you with the knowledge of what we are trying to learn with ballet technique to give you the tools to keep learning and growing.
When we train the facet of depth, we are ultimately teaching the body how to move with a different set of muscles than what we use in our normal life. This is where we develop a second set of movement patterns.
We all have one movement pattern already, which is how we get around in our normal life. Let’s call it “human mode”
Human mode involves a set of physical principles of how our body interacts with the world that we develop from infancy. This includes things like walking, jumping, crawling, stepping over puddles, picking things up, sitting in and getting up from chairs, communicative gestures, and talking with our hands.
Make no mistake, a human body is heavy. But yet, we move it around this world with ease. How?
Walking is not easy because your legs are light. Walking is easy because of physics and technique and how your body is designed to work with gravity.
Your foot is a pendulum and swings in your hip to achieve a step. Like a swingset, it is not difficult to get the swing to move forward once you pull it back and release it. In the same way, it is not difficult to walk when your leg is lifted and then your foot swings forward like a pendulum.
This facet of Depth of Technique is all about building up a second set of movement patterns. Let’s call it “Ballet Mode”
In developing Ballet Mode, we need to circumvent our body’s dominant movement pattern to build a new way to exist in the world. We need to teach smaller muscles to do the work that bigger muscles normally do. We need to teach a new set of muscles to work together to do something they don’t normally do.
We need to teach this set of smaller secondary muscles how to move our limbs in a new way, without relying on the same principles of physics and efficiency that we are used to.
When we enter ballet mode and turn our legs in the hip socket (aka turnout) and move our arms from our backs, we lose some key strategies that our body has so skillfully developed.
First, we lose the hip hinge. This is where the hips rock or “hinge” back, and then can thrust forward. This is basically how we get up from chairs, squat, lift heavy things, and generate power to jump. But, because the hip hinge relies on our feet pointing forward so that we can rock our hips back and then push them forward, once our feet are turned sideways, there’s nowhere to balance that forward/backward movement.
Once we turn our legs out, we need then to teach our body where power comes from without a classic human hip hinge and develop a new strategy. The hip hinge loves to creep into our pirouettes, jumps, and pointework, because it’s naturally how we humans generate momentum. In the absence of a new strategy, the body falls back on what it knows.
Second, we lose our normal balancing mechanism, which is to move forward and back with soft knees. Why does this strategy work for Human Mode? Because our feet point forward and our knees bend the same direction. This allows us to balance because our knees, ankles, and hip movement can absorb any wobbles and micro movements in our body. But when our legs are turned out, our knees and ankles cannot manage this forward/back movement because when they are turned out, bending the knees doesn’t result in forward/back motion. And besides, we have to keep our legs super stretched straight in ballet.
So, we need to teach our body how to balance without feet that point forward to accommodate for forward/back movement and adjusting.
In Ballet Mode, we need to teach our body a new balancing strategy and how to generate vertical & rotational forces to keep us balanced. For example, we say cues like lifting through the top of the ears, shoulders down, stomach lifting up, kneecaps pulling up, front of hips up, tailbone down, toes pressing down, and arches lifting up. These are all vertical forces.
We also learn to generate equivalent rotational force in opposite directions to help us stabilize. For example, we generate a slight rotation of the obliques to balance out the leg in a la seconde or passe, or equal turnout and rotation of the hips in both directions.
And third, we lose our normal way of moving our arms with our hands. When we talk, communicate, and explore our world, we do it with our hands. We reach for something with our hands. But with ballet, we need to think of our hands as secondary, as “coming along with” the arm. The upper arm, back, and shoulder move, and the hand follows. The hand doesn’t lead with ballet. It gestures, but it is not what initiates the movement. It’s an afterthought. This is a huge part of the effortless look of it all.
In developing Ballet Mode, picture a movie about a dysfunctional team of misfits who need to come together to beat the well-oiled machine of skilled players. It’ll take a dedicated & enthusiastic coach (aka your positive mindset), a lot of hard work, and a good montage.
Example - Ballet Walking vs Human Walking
Let’s take a concrete example of comparing the mechanics of ballet walking with that of human walking.
First, in ballet walking there is no pendulum. Your leg is not swinging in the hip. Ballet walking is all musculature and involves no gravity to make your momentum. The leg is completely controlled as it moves forward to step on.
When you pick up your leg in Human Mode, the muscles on the top will be the ones to lift it, aka quads & hip flexors. When your leg is turned out and in Ballet Mode, the muscles on the top will be different ones, namely inner thighs & sartorius come into the picture. Therefore a set of muscles will be involved with keeping your legs rotated and another set will be involved with lifting it. Neither of these sets will the muscles that normally lift your legs. They’re not used to it, and the ones that are really good at it already would rather just do the job for you.
Second, the motion of the knee and foot is different. In walking, the knee comes forward first. The knee is the first thing to pass your other leg, and then your foot swings through linearly from back to front. But, with ballet walking, your knee stays back and allows your foot to be the first thing to pass your other leg. The path of your foot is more of a circular motion than a linear motion.
But, your knee is a linear joint, and it only hinges. If your knee joint moves circularly or twists, we have a big problem!
Therefore, the only way for your knee to make a circle is to involve the hip, which adds more axes of movement. When you integrate the movement of your femur bone in your hip joint, you can make your foot move in a circle. Therefore, when your knee is turned out to the side using your hip, you can move your foot in a circle to have the action of “presenting” your foot to the front and stepping on it.
Third, the mechanics of propulsion are different. When you’re walking in Human Mode, you can simply lean forward and your legs will follow. The leaning action will cause gravity to help you move. But with ballet walking, you need to propel yourself from your back foot, toes and leg. You need to push and propel yourself from the back foot to the front foot, not *fall* onto the front foot. A body is pretty heavy, so this is actually not a trivial task to push your body without the help of gravity.
Fourth, balance is difficult because your feet are sideways. If you push too far forward, or not far enough, you don’t have any leeway. You either get right onto your foot, or you stumble. Without that little “landing strip” of a parallel foot, there’s less room for error. Stepping onto a turned out leg requires the utmost precision in momentum, whereas stepping onto a parallel foot is more forgiving if you push a little too hard or not hard enough.
Not to mention that when you put your weight onto a turned out leg, there is a different set of muscles responsible for keeping the hip stable on top of the femur bone. To step onto a turned out leg is a challenging proposition.
And finally, if we’re doing a gestural port de bras with our walking, our mind will think about our hands leading the communication. But, this will cause the arms to move in a way that we don’t want for ballet. If we lift from the hands, the elbows will often drop to point to the floor instead of staying lifted. The wrists will be overly active instead of simply being the connection that holds your hand to your arm. And the gestures will look distinctly human and not ballet
Lack of gracefulness or awkwardness comes when Human Mode & Ballet Mode are intertwined. When the Human Mode is trying to take over, when the momentum is coming from Human Mode, but the legs are trying to be turned out. Or when the mind is moving the hands not the arms. Often when something just doesn’t quote un quote “look right” it’s because the two modes are mixed. Words like clumsy, awkward, messy, and sloppy are all often used to describe this mixing of modes. We can feel that the intention of the movement isn’t right, even though it’s difficult to pinpoint why.
So how do we develop Ballet Mode? Through barre work.
Why do we develop these motor patterns holding onto the barre? Because of risk, fear, and our natural responses.
When we turn out our legs, we immediately put the body into a confusing and risky state. It may seem inconsequential as it’s a small change, but I hope from the whole first section, you’re starting to see how big of a deal it is for your body to move with turned out legs.
Everything is new. Everything is different and nothing is familiar.
The body does not have strategies for power, balance, and control.
Thus, we hold onto the barre, so that our body can learn to develop these new stabilization techniques and movement patterns without reverting to our default.
If we are afraid to fall, our body will never allow us to shut off Human Mode. Your body will always try to protect you from falling and from getting hurt. Holding on allows us to get the body to trust us enough to build up the new movement pattern.
Especially as adults. The older we get, the more afraid we are to fall, and the more afraid we are to fall, the more our natural responses will try to protect us.
When we turn the legs out without holding on to anything in the center, the body is more likely to revert to human mode to try to save you from falling.
There are some things we can only learn in the center, like much of the breadth of vocabulary and moving across the floor, but there are others that we can only learn at the barre, like power, balance, and how to carry the legs and maintain rotation in all the different positions.
The thing is our body is really clever. It is designed to be efficient. It is designed to make movement easier so that we don’t need as much food to survive and don’t need to use as much energy. Especially by the time we’ve reached adulthood. If you’ve survived until this age to listen to this, your body knows how to make your life easier and keep you from hurting yourself, and will be very quick to revert to Human Mode without you even knowing.
So we need to tell the body we are using these obscure muscles. The mind needs to constantly remind the body to maintain core usage and turnout engagement so that your body doesn’t switch them off and go back to default.
How barrework works to make center better
In the beginning, I said “if you’ve been dancing for a while and wonder why your pirouettes aren’t working yet, or why your petite allegro isn’t getting quicker, or why your legs won’t stay turned out in the center or lift any higher, or why your port de bras still doesn’t look quite how you want, then this is the facet for you.”
Let’s get into that part.
One of the great benefits to being a ballet teacher who started ballet as a near adult (age 17), is that I remember the beginning. I remember being so confused about what we were doing at the barre. It seemed so unrelated to the center and completely not like anything you see on stage. And the barre seemed to have no impact on what was going on in the center.
Perhaps you’re wondering the same thing. Perhaps your teacher told you that tendus are the key to pirouettes and that made very little sense.
And the thing is, barre work is unrelated to centerwork if you look at it from one perspective, which is the vocabulary and breadth. Yes, it’s true that if you want to understand the 8 body positions, and learn tombé pas de bourrée and a waltz turn that you need to spend a lot of time in the center. But that’s breadth of vocabulary.
At the barre, we are learning depth of technique. We are developing the invisible key to ballet. It’s invisible because you won’t know it’s working until much later. It takes a really long time to develop Ballet Mode.
As I mentioned last episode, ballet is incredibly unique in that we need to do two main things in our training …. Learn a new movement pattern AND learn how to dance. Aka depth and breadth.
The theory of barre work goes like this: we develop these motor patterns at the barre and then when we move to center, the ballet motor patterns are so activated and ingrained that our body will point its toes on its own, stay turned out and balanced in your pirouettes, be able to change course if there is a slippery spot on the floor, and know how to launch into a leap on turned out legs with effortless port de bras.
How does it work?
We need to show our body the collection of muscles that needs to work together to accomplish a specific goal. The analogy of a team of misfits comes into play here.
We bend the legs, we come in and out of 5th position, we rélevé, we brush the floor to generate speed, we lift the legs, we kick the legs, we point the ankles every time the foot leaves the floor, and we keep our arms held through it all.
We need to train the body to move our legs & arms in all possible ways while externally rotated. Stand parallel and think of all the ways you can move your body. Now, turn out your legs, and move your body in each of those ways. Now you have come up with all the things we do at barre.
When the legs are rotated, we need to show the legs which muscle is capable of lifting the leg. Your legs don’t even really know. How would they?
When the upper arm is rotated and the shoulder blades are down and wide, we need to show the arms how to move and which group of muscles do that job.
And then we need to teach the body to do that *every single time*
Training our body what to do when the going gets tough
Most importantly, though, we are training our bodies how to respond to different situations and develop strategies to correct problems that might arise.
Think of any kind of training. What is it? It’s not just what to do when things are easy. Driving is easy on a straight open road. But what do you do when pedestrians are running out and cars are weaving and it’s snowing?
First responders look at a burning building and take different action than I would. A paramedic would pull up to a car accident and approach the situation much differently.
Adrenaline is racing, the situation is complicated, but that’s where training comes in. They are trained to know what to do in different situations. Trained to respond to pressures, problems, and challenges.
But how did they get there? What is training?
Training is taking your natural response and putting space before you act so that you can decide what to do instead. Imagine training a dog to override their response and do something else instead. When we feed our dogs, we put their bowls down and ask them to wait before they eat. They struggle, they really really really want to eat right away. But they put space between their natural response to make a choice on what to do.
Alright so maybe ballet isn’t as intense as those examples, but it’s the same idea and when it comes to your physical safety (and sometimes mental safety if you’re afraid of messing up, failing or looking silly), your body has a very strong natural response to protect you.
You have a natural response already, which is often to lift the shoulders, contract the core, hinge the hips back, lift the legs from the quads, and everything we talked about in the first section.
So when we put the body in increasingly challenging situations, for example as the barre goes on, dégagé is more challenging than tendu in that it’s a stretch of the leg AND a lift, we want to teach the body how to continue reacting in the way of Ballet Mode.
Or if we put the body in a balance, we want to teach it how to stabilize. It doesn’t know how to stabilize in these different ballet positions.
In a retiré for example, we need to develop strategies, think back to the vertical and rotational cues that I mentioned earlier. Rotating the standing leg/hip pulling the inner thigh forward and wrapping under the glutes while simultaneously lifting the inner thigh of the retiré, dropping the back of the working hip under and pressing the knee back. And then the vertical forces, lifting through the top of the ears, shoulders pressing down and wide, lower stomach lifting up, kneecap pulling up, heel lifting up, and toes pressing down.
And so in a balance at the end of a combination, it’s more than a balance. It’s teaching your body how to correct. So when you fall backwards, what are the strategies for generating more consistent up/down momentum to combat that backwards movement. Where is the placement to stack your body up to mitigate the forward/back movement in the first place.
We also need to teach our body about power. Power from the shoulders and power from the hips looks different in ballet mode than in human mode. Our natural protective response will be to pull the shoulders up. But in ballet, we need our lats in our back to be ready for action, so we want them to be pulling the shoulders down.
And how to plié without a hip hinge. Where is the power without the momentum from the hinge? From the inner thighs, calves, the 6 rotators right under the glutes, and if we’re jumping, also the feet and ankles.
This is a huge part why pirouettes are so difficult for adults to maintain technique and therefore to land. The fear response and protective mechanisms are extremely powerful in a pirouette. The older we get, the less amenable we are to falling, and one of the sensations that signals you’re about to fall is dizziness. We are very averse to the sensation of dizziness and spinning, so in a pirouette, the body will revert to Human Mode very quickly to protect us. If you’ve been following me for a while, you of course know that I believe everything is possible, if you know what to work on and keep going with it.
For adult dancers, building proprioception (aka your brain’s ability to know where your body is in space, often trained by balancing with your eyes closed) is so important for building confidence to overcome this. Also, as crazy as this might sound, just practicing being dizzy. Spinning in a circle in parallel to get used to the sensations. Sitting in an office chair and spinning in a circle. And making that spinning feeling not so foreign.
Power vs Pirouettes
Speaking of pirouettes, I want to take a brief moment to note the difference between the type of skill that gives us pirouettes versus that of something like extensions.
I think of these skills as precision moves versus power moves.
From my experience with powerlifting (squat, deadlift, and bench press) versus Olympic lifting (e.g. snatch, clean and jerk), powerlifting requires sheer will, strength and determination. There’s of course technique involved to do it safely and correctly, but you can muscle out the movements. More muscle = more weight.
Olympic lifting requires precision. It’s precise, it’s detailed, and your muscles can’t save you if the detail and finesse isn’t there. Many moving body parts and elements of physics need to align at precisely the right time to make the weight go up. You must learn which muscles to hold, which to release, and then coordinate that timing precisely. Every time. Technique, strength, precision, coordination, timing, and trust.
I think of moves in ballet kind of like this:
Power moves are things like
Developpes
Grande pliés
Big jumps in a la seconde
Precision moves are things like
Pirouettes
Sauté de chat
Pointework
Power vs precision; timing versus muscle. All need strength and technique, but it’s applied very differently in these cases.
Gravity is constant. It never gets tired. So must we always lift our bodies in opposition to gravity. And that is a part of why ballet is so hard. But truthfully ballet only works in a world with gravity. The moves require momentum. And when you learn to coordinate your body to work together, gravity becomes your ally. When you discover alignment, you learn how gravity helps you balance. When you discover how coordination of your limbs and trunk produce momentum, you learn how gravity helps you turn and jump.
And when your body itself is working and gravity are working together, not in opposition, is when we find gracefulness and fluidity in our movements.
When every part of your body is working simultaneously towards a common goal, that’s when you feel like you’re floating and when it looks like you’re weightless.
Golfers must use their hips. Boxers. Skiers. Throwing, hitting, leaping, and generating momentum comes from the hips. In every sport. And so must dancers. It’s just that our hips are quietly being used.
Calibrating precisely how, in what direction, and how much force to launch up onto pointe. Sometimes not enough, sometimes too much, sometimes too far back or forward. It’s like there are all these tiny knobs to turn and fine-tune.
The time to train your body on how to keep your posture and your turnout is not in the midst of a precision move. That’s like learning to change lanes for the first time on the highway, or working on your accent during a public speaking engagement. It’s not the time, and it relies on patterns that you’ve already built.
Ballet Mode ON - Training turnout
First of all, with everything in ballet, it looks easy. But it is not. Just to be clear. I hear this a lot -- “I’ve been doing this for a long time, I should already be better at it.” Or “why won’t my legs stay turned out?”
That’s because it’s difficult. Perhaps by now you’re starting to understand why it’s so difficult, in that it’s not just turning the legs out, it’s completely circumventing our body’s natural responses and mechanisms.
Turnout is an active movement because at every second, literally at every second, our body is trying to revert back to its normal state of parallel. Our body is desperately trying to return to a state of efficiency. We don’t turn out our legs at the beginning of the combination and then we are done. It’s every second, both legs, always trying to turn them out more.
Training turnout is not about the amount of turnout, but the direction and the fact that the energy is being expended to try to turn the legs that activates the muscles.
I cannot hammer this point enough. Your legs are always at every moment expending force and energy trying to get back to parallel. Therefore you must always expend energy and force trying to keep your legs turned out. It would be like if you were pushing something heavy up a hill, let’s say a car. You could be exerting force with all of your might, and the car would not be moving. But the second you stop exerting that force, the car will immediately roll down the hill. Same with your legs. The second you stop exerting turnout force, your legs will return back to their natural state.
The fact that you are continually asking your body to turn out the legs in so many different scenarios, this is how you teach it that it’s what you want. It doesn’t matter how far they turn, but that they turned.
Second of all, we are training our posture and hips. We must learn to hold the spine upright and the hips in place. The pelvis must be in a quote-unquote neutral position, which almost never feels neutral unless you’ve trained your hips to be there. I think the best way to think of it is to flatten the crease at the front of the hip.
We must also train our core to “brace” against movement. While we are dancing, there is a lot of movement. Our legs are flying around every which way, our arms are moving, we are turning, jumping, etc. That’s a lot going on! And our body, the part between our shoulders and hips, needs to be strong and stable. This is again a very active thing. It’s not that you think of your core once and it remains. You must train your core to stay active for a very long time, while other things are trying to coax it to let go.
And then our arms and back -- we must train our body to move our hands from our back.
In ballet class, it is difficult to engage a muscle you've never felt before. Ballet doesn't put you into positions where your muscles naturally fire. You have to fire them up yourself. But, if you've never felt what it's like to have these deep muscles firing, it's hard to recreate that feeling on your own.
We’ll talk about cross-training for this soon. But for now, keep that thought in your head.
So the question on everyone’s mind -
Can adults learn ballet?
I don’t mean the basics, I mean the higher level stuff. Can an adult learn ballet and dance at a high level?
Yes. But how adults learn it is very different from how kids learn it. In the same way as kids absorb language like a sponge, adults learning a language need a very different kind of training.
As a child, it is very easy to learn languages and change your speaking accent. As an adult, this is much more difficult, but not impossible. It simply requires a different kind of training than for kids. Kids will simply pick up an accent, but adults need to study it.
Adults will need to learn the mechanics of pronunciation. Where your tongue goes in your mouth to make a specific sound. How to hear the difference between different sounds. How to know if you have successfully made a sound.
Adults will study the grammatical rules and work to understand the details about how the language works.
This is a much different activity than simply speaking, engaging in conversation, reading books, and watching movies in a foreign language. Immersing yourself in the language as an adult doesn’t necessarily result in more technically correct speaking.
You can probably pick up a language well enough to get by through immersion, but for technically correct speaking, you’ll likely need focused study.
The same goes for ballet. Simply dancing and following along in an open class and picking up combinations does not lead to more technically correct dancing. The skills of maintaining turnout, developing gracefulness, and finding the correct intent of a port de bras don’t necessarily improve, though the experience and the knowledge to be able to follow along does.
There’s a big difference between learning the vocabulary and perfecting the technique. Learning the vocabulary allows us to follow along in a combination, but perfecting the technique allows us to execute on the bigger skills -- high legs, pirouettes, higher jumps -- and achieve technical graceful dancing.
It’s much easier to pick up vocabulary by watching, though, it is still quite difficult for adults to pick things up without the details of how exactly the transition steps work and without an understanding of the patterns and structures used in choreography.
But it is much more difficult to know exactly how to achieve the technique just by watching.
What does this type of training entail? Here-in-lies the interesting dance between training breadth and training depth.
Training depth of technique is a different kind of training that involves mostly standing still & working slowly through the details of the movements.
Within all of ballet, breadth and depth are intertwined, in that you need them both to perform a variation, but they are developed separately, and working on them both at the same time is very challenging. Working on breadth is counterproductive to depth, and vice versa.
If you want your legs to remain turned out, toes pointed, and port de bras strong while you dance, get your pirouettes, your extensions, or your split leaps, those skills are not taught. Because how you get them is not a waltz combination with 99% waltzing and 1% pirouettes. And how you get your legs higher isn’t with a complex adagio combination. And how you get your split leap isn’t through a multi-pass grande allegro combination culminating in 1 split leap that you do right before class ends.
These skills that come from depth are trained at the barre, by teaching your mind how to think more specific thoughts about how to execute the movements.
Seek out training and teachers who train your mind and body how to actually accomplish this. At the barre, it’s very common for the teacher to only be saying what the steps are and what the combination is, but that’s not what’s actually important for Depth.
The best teachers for this type of thing will be people who started later in life, who teach adult dancers, or who had an injury or some other event that caused them to re-build their technique as an adult. Someone who was a natural turner likely won’t be able to help you figure out how to turn if it’s not working for you.
The steps and combinations we perform at the barre help keep us in sync while we train, and they help you with the skills involved in breadth, but the steps are training an entirely different facet and often HIDE the fact that at the barre, what’s most important is training the muscles.
If we are 100% focused on the combination and what comes next, we are not leaving enough room to focus on technique. Ballet training should be teaching you how to direct your body and your muscles, not exclusively about remembering the combinations.
Your mind creates turnout. Your thoughts help you remember to turn out, and your brain activates your muscles. And if your thoughts are all stressed out about what comes next, there’s no room for the technique.
So here’s an example of what the teacher is saying:
Reminding the combination only 5,6,7,8 Tendu front, close, front, close, front close, plie straighten, now we go to the side, side close side close side close plie straighten, etc.
Cueing technique: 5,6 (already beginning to feel your hips narrowing in the back) ,7,8 (elbow lifted to the side), tendu front, heel goes out first, close lift the front of the hips as you close, tendu front, close lift as you close, tendu front even more heel forward, plié pressing the knees back and hips forward. Now to the back, Belly button stays pulling diagonally up to the spine even here to the back, close,
To become more technically correct in your training, you need to dedicate thoughts and mental space to thinking about how to move, not just what to do.
Eventually, your body will do this without supervision. In the same way that you learned to drive, and every time you went to switch lanes, you used to have to think blinker, blind spot, hands on the wheel, and go, but now you can do it while singing along with the music, thinking about your first meeting at work, or with the kids screaming in the back seat.
But initially, you had to think those thoughts in order to train your body to do it without you.
What are we doing at the barre? The way barre is laid out is not arbitrary
Question I get sometimes: “why do we spend so much time at the barre and only a few minutes dancing in the center? How will we learn how to dance if we don’t practice it?”
But then right on the other side of that coin, I also get this statement “when I watch myself dancing in the center, I can see all the things I need to fix - my legs don’t stay turned out, my arms are all over the place, I can’t land my pirouettes, and my toes aren’t pointed, but I don’t know how to fix it”
Well, the answer is that we fix these problems at the barre. Once we are in center, it’s too late to fix technique. In the center, while we are dancing, we must rely on motor patterns that we’ve developed at the barre and it’s no longer the time to micromanage our technique the same way as at the barre. We must begin to trust it, because we have a lot more things to worry about in the center.
As we talked about with driving, if the first time you tried to change lanes was the highway, your little checklist of the blinker, blindspot, change speed and change langes would go right out the window. So you practice on smaller streets, get the hang of it, then hop on the highway.
But, at the barre, the order of the exercises is crafted to warm up the body temperature, activate the muscles that don’t do as much work during our daily life, and then train the movement patterns.
Often times the combinations alternate between slow and fast to train the muscles to be able to work differently in sequence.
But, also the choreography is typically designed to help you understand a specific concept or movement. The choreography will also purposely distract you from thinking about your technique so that you can practice focusing in the face of chaos. And, as a teacher, it’s very useful to see what happens to the student’s technique when their mind is confused and not able to micro manage. The teacher can see where the technique is already on auto-pilot, and which parts fall apart. This is very useful to know how to structure the training going forward.
Now we know what we are trying to do, how do we do it? The act of noticing and correcting is the key to training.
Once a dancer knows the goals of the movements, which muscles to activate, and what “correct” looks like, there is a huge gap between knowing and executing.
Building awareness so that you know when your body is most likely to lose engagement and training it not to.
The mind knows what should be done, and the body takes a while to catch up. It can be a little frustrating when you *know* that your toes need to be pointed, that your legs need to stay turned out, and that you need to keep your elbows supported.
So what kinds of activities and training will get you from knowing what to do, to your body doing it without you thinking about it?
First of all, most of it looks and feels like nothing. It’s not glamorous, or exciting, or instagram-worthy. It’s putting your body in situations where you can train it on what to do.
Standing still in 1st position and trying to maintain activation in your hips, core, shoulders, triceps, and neck. Maintaining this while counting to 60. Noticing when something has lost engagement and getting it back.
It’s this act of noticing that is so key. Noticing and learning what the sensations feel like when you use the correct muscles vs not use the correct muscles. And then having the knowledge of how to re-engage the correct muscles when they’ve gone away.
This is a very meditative act. In meditation, your whole goal is to notice your thoughts and without judgement, bring yourself back to your focus. When you’re training depth of technique, you want to notice what your body does naturally when you’re not looking. You want to become hyper aware of every movement, conscious or not, and be able to redirect it to how you want it to be.
What appears “beginner” is often advanced. Sometimes advanced class looks like learning how to stand still with perfection. Learning how to make all the ballet muscles work in just the right way. Learning how to sweat standing still and training the mind to stay clear, present, and focused.
Not everyone enjoys this activity. You don’t have to. To be clear, you really don’t have to. Adults have so many choices when it comes to what they want from ballet. All adults should learn the basics of how to stay safe, how to keep the hips under control to protect the lower back, how to keep the ankles stable, and how to keep the knees tracking over toes.
Let’s say that’s a 3 on the scale of 1-10 of the technical depth. Anyone learning ballet should get there for safety. But for the next levels that I’m describing here, if this isn’t why you love ballet, then arguably you don’t have to work on it.
But if you do, let’s talk a little bit about 3 different settings where you can learn this:
Private Lessons, practicing by yourself, learning in group class
Like changing your accent when you speak, this skill requires awareness, and seeing what your body does in the micro moments during a movement.
Private lessons are amazing and so helpful to get real time feedback on how your body moves and see things you might not see yourself. If you have the resources and availability to seek out private lessons, I highly recommend it. Seek out a teacher who can help you with your technique, who will work mostly on standing still with you. Ask to work on deep technique, ask to work on 1st position. Ask to work only on tendus and pliés, as those are where your body learns the fundamentals of how to stand, how to bend, straighten, and move the legs while they are in a rotated position.
But, I truly believe that private lessons should have to be the norm. In the quest to make ballet more accessible, I hope to give you tools to get a lot of the way there in a more affordable way with group classes, studying and watching videos of yourself.
Self-correcting in group class & practicing by yourself - body awareness and how to know if you’re doing it right?
Your goal with technique is to learn about the technique checklist and the thoughts you want to be thinking so that you can take class at any level, anywhere, and have a checklist of things to remind yourself of, and then KNOW if you got it.
Whether that’s by feeling it, using a mirror or video.
Training this in a group class requires extraordinary humility and curiosity. You should *always* be checking if you can turn out more, pull up more, etc. You must always dance under the assumption that you need to turn out more. If you hear “even more heel to the front” and you think “well, I already did it” then you are missing half the fun.
When I was starting ballet, I remember in group class the teachers would say things like “turn out your legs more” or “more core” and I’d think, I already did, I already turned them out, this correction must not apply to me.
The goal is to always try to coax more from the muscles. Always try to turn out more, pull the belly button up more, stretch your feet more, etc.
Video can be extremely helpful for this. I think it is more helpful than the mirror, because how things feel is often not what they actually are. You can think that you’re turning out your legs because it feels hard, but then when you watch the video, you can see more objectively. Having a removed perspective of yourself by watching it on video, especially if you can wait a bit of time before you watch the video, is helpful.
Videoing yourself can be hard. Now you start to see why we did the mindset episode in the beginning. The first time you see yourself on video, you might want to give up immediately. If you have one of these inner critics like I do, it might tell you that you look terrible, you’re doing nothing correctly, everything is wrong, and what are you even doing with your life.
But, don’t give up. Just set that voice aside, watch the video, and keep going. Video is very unforgiving because it shows you what is happening, which is why it is so helpful for this type of work.
The same for training how you speak whether that’s removing filler words or changing your accent - you have to get a clear picture of what exactly is happening in order for you to make any sort of changes.
But again, like I said, if this isn’t your cup of tea, private lessons can give you this sort of feedback without having to watch yourself on video. And, you don’t have to love this facet!
Practicing incorrectly, dangers of bad technique & permanent bad habits
Now, when it comes to encouraging self study, this is where I get questions and anxieties like if I practice at home, will I develop permanent bad habits?
I have a bit of an unorthodox opinion on this topic, that perhaps has come from the years of teaching hundreds of adult dancers and seeing that you can get wherever you’re going, no matter how you get there. People have come to my classes from all kinds of backgrounds - whether learning as kids, learning as an adult, watching youtube videos, starting with barre at the gym or having no experience at all. As long as they’ve kept coming, they all got where they were going.
In my eyes, especially with adult ballet dancers, there’s no such thing as a permanent bad habit. Our whole goal in our ballet training is to become hyperaware and be able to change our habits. The idea with training is to notice what you’re doing and be able to change it. So, if you get a bad habit, you already know how to fix it. You’ve already developed the skill to change your habits, so you can surely change another.
I favor the idea of getting really good at changing your habits. Get really good at the meditative aspect of ballet training. Of observing. Of changing. Of noticing. Once you start assuming you can’t change what you’re doing, that’s when our training hits a plateau, so be careful in general of falling into the mental trap of bad habits.
When a new dancer learns something new, sometimes I’ll hear a really stressful reply that “I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time!” But, the thing is we can’t skip concepts. So first, we have to learn the beginning. When our eyes are ready to be opened to the next level, we’ll see that we didn’t know about it that whole time. That doesn’t mean we are wrong, or that we’re permanently ruined. It means that we have a new habit to work on.
We are not fighting bad habits, we are in the business of building new habits, tweaking existing habits.
The top skill here is to observe your own dancing, with humility, kindness, and an open mind, always ready to tweak, change, update, and grow with new information. Get insanely good at building habits, observing what your body does sneakily, and changing your patterns.
Adult beginners learning technique vs returning to ballet rediscovering technique
As always, there’s a big difference between returning to ballet after having danced as a child and learning fresh as an adult.
Returning to ballet
Some of technique is also one-and-done, e.g. returning to ballet people still remember it, but the body can’t always execute what the mind remembers.
Sometimes, people return to ballet after decades of time away and the body still has Ballet Mode intact. The body hears the ballet music and activates Ballet Mode almost without their knowing or doing.
From what I understand, it’s a pretty eerie experience.
As someone who started as an adult, I have never had this experience with ballet, but I have had it with listening to music. Like when you haven’t heard a song in 10 years, had completely forgotten about it, but when it comes on the radio, you can sing all the words to it and somehow you’re having an out of body experience watching yourself singing all the words.
Or swimming or riding a bike. I have no idea how I can float in a pool or keep a bike upright. I know I learned these things and have memories of struggling to learn them, but I don’t know how it is done. I couldn’t teach someone else how to do it, nor could I describe to you what my body is doing.
But, no matter how long it’s been since I floated in a pool or rode a bike, I can still do it. I might be out of practice, and get winded quickly on a bike or not have as much control over the steering.
But my body didn’t forget how to do it.
Returning to ballet is quite similar. Often people think they’ll be starting from the beginning, but if they took ballet through around ages 12-14 and certainly through the teen or early 20’s, ballet mode is sometimes very well intact.
The longest break I ever saw was 50 years. An 80 year old woman came into my Denver studios having not danced since age 30. Ballet mode was completely intact and she had just the most beautiful developpe with an incredibly “presented” heel.
For people returning to ballet, I’ve found that some love to work on depth as an adult, but others don’t. But for others, they love the details and the technique.
Learning anatomy later on is often a very fun and interesting experience for people with muscle memory developed as a child. Some adults find this fascinating and love to learn more about how their body does what it does somewhat without thinking.
But others may have a really strong negative thought pattern reactivated by technical cues. Depending on their early training, digging into the ‘how’ can bring up bad memories, or trigger negative thought patterns if they were taught to beat themselves up in order to learn the technique.
Some teachers teach their dancers to feel badly or ashamed when their body mixes Human Mode and Ballet Mode. They teach with embarrassment or humiliation and sometimes these early traumatic experiences can come right back up if the dancer focuses on technique.
These adults often don’t want to really dive into the ‘how’ and just enjoy doing it and dancing with what their bodies remember.
This is a very different experience than adults who started completely from scratch
Adults start at drastically different places with their knowledge and bodies. Over a lifetime, adults diverge quite a bit with their strength, flexibility, injuries, knowledge, experiences, and need a very different way of learning than kids.
Injuries such as car accidents, issues during pregnancies, scoliosis, broken bones, or sprained ankles can cause different strategies in the body to develop.
Different activities such as horseback riding, gymnastics, and ice skating all come with different strategies in the body.
And if we grew up skateboarding, skiing, crawling, playing, or swimming, our coordination will be drastically different.
Some of these strategies are more or less compatible with Ballet Mode, making some things more or less difficult to learn.
Some may take more time to develop coordination and control than others. Some may find turning easy but footwork like waltzing really difficult. Our lives to date
All in all
The top skills can feel elusive and no one is teaching you how to get them. It can feel like either you have them or you don’t. EIther you have your extensions or you don’t. Either you can land pirouettes or you can’t.
But that’s simply not true. You can learn it.
This stuff isn’t magic. It’s just anatomy. Turnout and technique can seem mystical, but it’s really just a collection of muscles that we are training to work together in an unorthodox way.
There are so many muscles responsible for keeping your femur bone attached to your pelvis, some lift your femur bone forward or back, and some rotate it inwardly or outwardly. It’s a matter of training them to work together.
There is no roadmap for your specific body and your specific set of unique life experiences. But, the framework is the same. We might have unique anatomy and a unique history of injuries, development, and more, but we walk together on this path, even in our uniqueness.
And the thing about journeys is that happiness never comes magically at the end. We find happiness along the way, which makes it easier to come back day after day, if we actually enjoy it.
And the best news of all is that we’re not in a rush. We have our whole lives ahead of us. So let’s take our time, relish in the details, and have some fun learning about ourselves and the world along the way.
