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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 p