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:

1. Vocabulary - what the ballet steps are

2. The grammar of how the steps fit together

3. Picking combinations up quickly in class

4. 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.

1. Never heard of it

2. Know of it / remember seeing it

3. The mind knows it but the body doesn’t always cooperate

4. Pretty good with it, and can put it together within a combination without too much effort

5. 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