When I first started to study ballet, I hated it. I just wanted to use the technique to develop a more lyrical, stronger, better aligned body for flamenco/Spanish dance, which I already had been studying for several years. I started right in to take ballet class every day, and then moved up to two classes a day, in addition to five or six Spanish dance classes a week.
The first thing I noticed (did you notice this too?) was that I looked absolutely awful in everything I did. The blissful thing about my early days in ballet was that I had no idea how bad I actually did look . . . but even so . . . . Oh well, do you remember the first time you tried to execute a sissone? Mine looked as if I were having some sort of a fit.
The eye is quicker than the foot, or doing the slow twitch . . .
Because I was in class six days a week, I did begin to see some improvement, but things that appear to be improvement can be deceptive. For instance, to your own eye, you may feel you're getting your leg higher, or turning your leg out more, or improving the position of your arms. But you don't know that you're cheating. You don't realize that you're raising your hip, rolling in on your ankles, or pulling your shoulder back. It can take many months even to be able to understand the teacher's corrections -- especially since you don't have the muscular control to 'feel' the corrections deep inside, where these things are actually happening.
The awareness of these things within your body comes slowly, and piece by piece, but it does come -- even for adult students, and even though many teachers think it's impossible. In fact, I remember that during the first couple of years in ballet, before I trained my eyes to see, I thought that quite a lot of the corrections I got in class were a bunch of hooey. Every time I got a correction, I'd try like crazy to make the change the teacher was asking for. Just to be given the same correction again, day after day. Okay, I'd think, let's try it this way . . . no, not right. Okay, how about this? Nope, another nasty comment from the teacher, this time really sarcastic.
I figured people were just making up all these sensations of pulling up the legs, pulling up through the psoas muscles and all the way up to the rib cage, and feeling the 'core of energy.' I didn't believe in any of that because I couldn't feel it. I thought the professional dancers I knew were just on some kind of weird mind trip.
Things to do
- Reading up on ballet technique and kinesiology. We're talking dry reading here. So why do it? You'll find out where all those nasty tight muscles are, and how muscle groups work together. So, even if you can't feel what they're doing yet, at least you can visualize them, and concentrate your attention on where they are. One extremely dry book, but one that I refer to again and again is Both Sides of the Mirror: The Science and Art of Ballet by Anna Paskevska, and published by Princeton Book Company. It has a great chapter on posture and placement, goes step-by-step through every part of the ballet class describing what each exercise is designed to achieve, and at the back has a valuable glossary with diagrams. If just the thought of reading the deathly dull small print of such a book is more than you can stand, consider subscribing to the Blue Diamond newsletter, where I translate all this good stuff into plain (and often entertaining) English.
- Looking at pictures. If you're regularly in class with other beginning- or intermediate-level adults, you may never get to see what movements like glissade, sissone, or pirouette are actually supposed to look like. And when you attend a ballet performance, you're swept up by the action and not concentrating on, 'wow, what a glissade!' Even if you were dissecting the steps, it's not the same as seeing the isolated steps in the harsh glare of the studio, where you can really assimilate the information. One of the things that has helped me is the book Classical Ballet Technique by Gretchen Ward Warren, published by University of South Florida Press. This is a huge, coffee-table sized book that shows professional dancers (including Cynthia Harvey and Susan Jaffe) executing just about any ballet movement you can imagine, in step-by-step photo sequences.
- Developing a seeing eye. If you keep looking hard, discriminating among small differences you see when you watch a group tackle a combination, you'll begin to see accurately. Then, at least you begin to know what you're striving after. Once you can see it, then you can make a plan to get there, or at least take the first step. You can begin to feel, physically, what is keeping you from achieving perfection in a movement. Is it muscular strength, flexibility, a certain inner feeling? Sometimes you'll find that it's an amazingly small detail that you need to work on. Sometimes, even if there's a physical impediment that keeps you from capturing the movement, you can feel your way through it. You can forget that you don't have strong enough balance to get through the adagio, but just get there anyway with your heart.
- Trying too hard. Contrary to the feeling of my early teachers, I think that trying too hard is good in the beginning. If I hadn't locked into ballet in total stubbornness, and gritted my way through my first two years, I don't think I would have stuck it out. I don't think there's any shake-and-bake way to start ballet as an adult and get anywhere with it unless you're driven. Unless the student is also practicing at home, one or two classes a week don't seem to do anything. I've watched students who have been taking a couple ballet classes a week for ten years, and they still look like complete beginners. Don't misunderstand: If they're doing it purely to move to music and to relax after work, then they're already rewarded by it. Yet, I think even those students become a little aggravated over time by their inability to get better. It's not that they're no good at ballet; they just need greater immersion in the art -- and a lot more grunting, groaning, exasperation, and sweat.
- Learning to let go. For me, this has been the toughest one. I grunted and bitched my way to a certain level of proficiency and flexibility, and then saw I couldn't go any farther. I freaked. After all, I'd been working as hard as I possibly could just to get to the intermediate level. My new teachers kept telling me to let go. One said that at the rate I was going, I'd never make it to the end of the barre without passing out. I was stuck on a plateau, so of course I was going to work even harder than before, so I'm sure veins were standing out on my forehead and my eyes were bugging out. My solution was that I went back to yoga class to focus on breathing, and brought that deep breathing with me into dance class. And then to let the movement originate from deep in the center -- the tailbone, and the 'guts' under the navel. That is, not letting the tension grip me in the upper body (you know, veins standing out in the neck, shoulders hunched up). I didn't think I would ever get that feeling, and be able to relax muscles that were so used to hanging on for dear life that they couldn't stop. But within a couple of weeks, I was starting to get a sense of it. And immediately, I began to feel for the first time muscles in the pelvic area loosening up. I'm still in this process of learning what to control, and what to let go.
