3 Technique Tips to make your Ballet Better!

Happy Friday, beautiful dancers!

It's been a while since I've posted some handy-dandy technique tips so to make up for that, here are 3 that I think will help you:

1. When stacking your boxes, watch that middle one! It could sink!

When we talk about aligning the body for balance, we often use the imagery of stacking your head on your torso on your hips, don't we? Well, that's not exactly accurate. That picture assumes all 3 boxes are the same size and shape, right? But in truth, a more realistic image is that your middle box - your torso - is solid while the lower one - your hips - is open. If you're not careful, the center box could sink right into it.

What does it look like when your torso drops into your hips? If you are en releve, you will feel your heels drop closer to the floor, your knees might buckle, and your elbows will collapse (if they are over your head, you will see the circle flatten and if they are in first position in front of you, the elbows will be lower than the wrists). If you are flat, you might notice it's hard to shift your leg out to a tendu without pulling your hips back behind your heels, and you might feel your ribcage soften and your shoulders roll forward.

How do we fix this? Engage the core! (I imagine Captain Picard from the Starship Enterprise) 

Engage the core! Make it so! (Getty Images)

If you activate the muscles of the torso - back, sides, and abdominals - you will keep yourself pulled up and feel a lift out of your hips. Your middle box will be balanced over the lower box and you will find it much easier to hold a releve longer and to do things like chaine turns and so on.

2. Use your small muscles to find your turnout and your big ones to hold it!

Do you ever feel a soreness deep in your hips after class, like your hip sockets are inflamed and sensitive? More likely than not, you are overusing your deep external rotators (the Deep 6 muscles are: piriformis, obturator internus, obturator externus, gemellus inferior, gemellus superior, and the quadratus femoris). These muscles are used to move the hip joint by externally rotating the femur head. Many dancers not only use these muscles to rotate the bones but then they use them to hold the turnout, especially when they are at the barre or center, balancing on one leg.

What does it look like when you're gripping your rotators to hold your turnout? Well, you might not actually see it but you will certainly feel it after class! A teacher looking closely might notice that your derriere is tucked under you and your hips are tilted when you are doing an extension; they might also see that you are sinking into the support leg and your torso might be collapsed slightly. Or they might see nothing at all!

External rotators (Courtesy Wikipedia)

 How do we fix this? First of all, you need to access those Deep 6 to rotate the femur but to hold the rotation, use your big muscles: your glutes, quadriceps and hamstrings. Your gluteus maximus is the big muscle of your behind and the gluteus medius is just above at your lower back and protecting your hip bones. These muscles are the ones that will help stabilize you when you are balancing on one leg in the center during adagio and turns, while the quads and hamstrings will hold your turnout once you find it. The key is to not grip: gripping is the enemy of smooth turns and big jumps.

3. Take jazz class for isolations!

One of the things dancers, especially ballet dancers, are known for is control. We control every muscle, every ligament and bone. We tilt our head just so, and we use the pinky toe to spring off for a pirouette or jump. When we start to lose our balance, we do an internal spot-check of every. single. thing. affecting our bodies. It requires us to isolate different parts of our body, even the very smallest of them, to make micro-adjustments.

Yet, we never do isolations! Jazz class is where dancers do this, not ballet. In jazz, we spend lots of time doing series of body isolations: head, shoulders, rib cage and hips, primarily, but we also do head rolls, shoulder rolls, hip rolls, and so on. We connect hips and head in different ways than in ballet. Our arms might move en dehors over our heads when we do a balance rather than in middle third or we might swivel our hips before we do a pirouette. These small movements give jazz its sharpness, its rhythm, and its style.

Dogs doing head isolations (photo InterMountain Pet Hospital)

So why don't we do them in ballet class? You know, I don't know the answer to that other than: it has never been done like that. In most classes, a ballet warm-up might include gentle shoulder rolls and head circles to smoothly warm up the neck and back. We might also do some forced arch releves but that's the extent of it. But how valuable would it be to be able to move a shoulder back or forward during an arabesque or to shift the hip from side to side while balancing? 

My recommendation: get to a jazz class and start working on those isolations. Not only will isolation exercises help you access muscles in different ways, they will also get your head spot sharp for turns - you know we are always looking for ways to improve our turns!

Happy dancing, everyone!