Thanks to those of you who joined me for my super impromptu IG live the other day! It was shaky and quiet, but I’m enouraged by the experience nonetheless. It served as a test run for using IG’s platform to deliver this series, and I think we can make it work!
It’s July. So let’s decolonize.
Having grown up in the States and Canada, there’s definitely a… specific narrative I’ve been surrounded by during this month each year. Regardless of what Canada Day or the 4th of July might represent to people individually (trust me, I can appreciate that not every white person’s 4th of July is a jingoistic ritual of ‘murrikan nationalism…), it is impossible to separate them from their colonial origins, especially because those basic structures are still in place today. None of this is archaic – there’s still an enormous disconnect between the settlers for whom these ‘holidays’ were created to celebrate, and the Indigenous communities still displaced and disadvantaged by anti-Indigenous structures at all levels of government, anti-Indigenous attitudes in education, law enforcement, and healthcare systems, and anti-Indigenous discrimination pervasive in the community at large.
This month’s highlights:
Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre: doing tremendous work to provide meals, clothing, essential services, and community programming in Vancouver’s DTES. They also amplify Indigenous leadership, and you can read about Red Women Rising to learn more.
Urban Native Youth Association: empowering Indigenous youth through community, health and wellness resources, housing and transition support, and education.
If you access my classes this month and are financially able, please consider dropping a donation at one or both of these organizations, and checking out their work and listed partners!
Tomorrow is a statutory holiday for me. So let’s get some movement in. See you there!
Playlist for my July offerings if you want to explore and support some Indigenous artists whose music I’ve been moving to!
tl;dr weekly online classes by donation, except the proceeds are being passed on to cool and good orgs I like
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Recent influence.
2020 is a new one. I’d never taught classes online until I (and pretty much everyone else) *had* to start teaching online this spring. After I adjusted to delivering my own material online, I started to get really inspired by it!
It’s been super cool to reconnect with past students, and to be able to reach people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to join in. We’re crushing distance, transportation, cost, commitment, and, so crucially, personal mental barriers like fear, shyness, imposter syndrome, or just a lack of spoons. I’ve had so many opportunities to reinvest in my own learning thanks to the increased access to high quality dance education, and am trying to take advantage of as much of this as I can while we’re teetering between in-person and online delivery. To be honest, I’ve been stressed about the inevitable drop-off in virtual programming as studios start to reopen. Access is /everything/.
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Older influence.
Some of you know I’ve loosely daydreamed for years about creating safe, sliding scale classes for my own lgbtqia2s+ community, as your resident incognito queer baby that just doesn’t want to be asked to explain their whole identity. My embarrassing university essays can confirm…
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This has developed over time beyond just queer guds, but has stayed a daydream because I just don’t have the resources.
But bro, we’re on the World Wide Web now.
Big takeaways.
Access if everything. Safe spaces are also everything, and so is being able to control whether you feel safe or well served in a space. Both of these are important to me.
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Virtual spaces are:
• more accessible
• easy to share as much or as little of yourself as you’re comfortable in
• easy to leave if you don’t feel safe/served
• best
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I like the virtual spaces that I’m teaching in now, but here’s an opportunity to create my own space too.
This is self care™ or something. And community care. Classes will be free, but with suggsted donations to organizations I’m vibing with. I’m looking at gentle formats that will probably change week to week.
Happy Friday! Because I’m not coordinated enough to talk about Tendu on a Tuesday. Vocab list first, then naming conventions, then technique talk and common errors. LET’S GO.
Quick lil vocab list (these are crude translations used for ballet!):
battement = “beat”
tendu = “stretch”
dégagé = “disengage”
glissé = “glide”
jeté = “throw”
grand battement = “big beat”
GIF demonstrating tendu, dégagé, jeté, and grand battement.
Collectively, the movements of the working leg away from and (in many cases) back to the supporting leg are called ‘battements‘. The extended battements highlighted here, with no knee bend, are essentially the same basic movement reaching different heights (i.e. different sized angles between the working and supporting thigh). Since their basic technique is also essentially the same, if you want to achieve a “good” grand battement (D), you can start by working on a good tendu (A).
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Across all school of ballet, movements A and D have common naming.
A. Tendu (to stretch) is an extension of the working leg away from the supporting leg, where the tip of the toe remains on the floor in the most open position. The leg is straight with the knee fully extended, ankle pointed (pantarflexed), and toes stretched long and pointed.
A. Battement tendu
D. On the opposite end, grand battement (big beat) (also called grand battement jeté) is a large toss of the working leg typically above 90°. The working leg is fully stretched as described above.
D. Grand battement
B, C. In the mid range (i.e. between tendu and grand battement) the naming begins to differ, and various schools will use (battement) dégagé, glissé, and jeté (disengage, glide, or throw, respectively) to describe battements in this range.
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Do the different names have different heights?
Most simply: ‘battement glissé‘ is the French term, ‘battement dégagé‘ is the R.A.D. (English) and Cecchetti (Italian) term, and ‘battement tendu jeté‘ is the Vaganova (Russian) term. The height can be specified by the instructor.
In R.A.D. and Cecchetti, however, a height distinction is often made:
dégagé/glissé refer to a movement that reaches a height of 1-2 inches off the floor
jeté refers to a leg toss at around 45°
This is the distinction I make between dégagé and jeté in my classes as well!
In my classes, you will hear me use dégagé (low) and jeté (45°) because I am most accustomed to R.A.D. and Cechetti ballet!
n.b. In some schools, ‘dégagé’ is used to describe an extended battement on OR off the floor, where the working leg does NOT subsequently return to a closed position.
For example:
a tendu out and back in would be referred to as ‘tendu’
a tendu out to an open lunge to prepare for a pirouette would be referred to as ‘dégagé’
recall that ‘dégagé’ means to ‘disengage’ i.e. to leave a closed position
In any case, these distinctions are less important than the technique for our purposes. As a general rule, in my classes, which are most influenced by R.A.D. and Cecchetti ballet:
(A) tendu = stays on the floor
(B) dégagé = 2″ off the floor
(C) jeté = ~45°
(D) grand battement = ~90°+
Battement tendu, battement degagé, battement jeté, grand battement.
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So what is the correct technique?
1.
Before you start: stand on both feet! It seems obvious, but the number one mistake is releasing the working leg too early or too much. PRESS DOWN INTO THE FLOOR WITH BOTH FEET!
Rather than thinking of lifting your foot up to move it, think of all the space your foot might occupy as a sphere, so that your leg radiates out from an imaginary central point in the bowl of your pelvis. The energy radiates OUT from this point at any height.
2.
While still pressing firmly down through your legs, begin to slide your working foot out so that the angle between your inner thighs gradually increases.
3.
To maintain your base of support fully over your supporting leg, you will have to start to peel your working heel off the floor. Then your midfoot. Then the ball of your foot. Finally pointing the toes so that only the tip of your toe is touching the floor in the final tendu position. DON’T SKIP THIS RANGE OF MOTION IN YOUR FOOT! IT’S JUICY AND GOOD! Imagine you’re squishing your foot through superglue or molasses on the floor.
4.
Reverse these steps to close. First your toes flatten. The ball of your foot comes down. The midfoot comes down. The heel comes down and pulls in. Scrape back through your sticky substance, and keep your leg extended out from that central point.
Notice that your knee never bends – your leg moves as one discrete unit, and only the joint angles on either end change (at the hip to open and at the ankle to lift your heel while keeping your toes planted).
There’s your tendu.
So far so good? Take a bit of time to unpack tendu technique and make it make sense for you!!
Here are the rest:
For dégagé: the movement is more forceful, ending with a ‘flick’ of the toe off the floor. The STRONG push through the midfoot lifts your leg, not any discernible extra effort at the hip.
For jeté: like dégagé. For added lift, imagine the force curving down and out, from your bum, down your leg, and sweeping up against the floor, instead of trying to lift with your quads.
For grand battement: like jeté. Again imagine the force spiraling out from the centre, down, brushing against the floor, and arcing out. The supporting leg stays engaged and lifted under the bum, the weight stays over the supporting foot, the torso doesn’t move (ABS ENGAGED!).
Hopefully you’re starting to see that to get to dégagé, YOU MUST GO THROUGH TENDU! To get to grand battement, YOU MUST GO THROUGH DÉGAGÉ AND TENDU!
Shortcuts just…??? Never heard of ’em.
And finally some general considerations:
Note that you are trying not to let the hips move in space! (They will shift a little bit with your weight because physics, BUT they’ll shift a heck of a lot less with proper technique!!)
Torso also doesn’t move! Keep lifting yourself UP under your bum and upward through your waist and along the back of your neck! ALWAYS!
Remember that even though all my images show battements to the side, they can also be performed to the front and back!!!
note that the height of the leg doesn’t cause much of a change in hip and torso position!
Aaand that’s about as much as I can expound on tendu and related battements. MAJOR props if you’ve made it this far. You’re approaching expert level and therefore need to be challenged. QUIZ BELOW!
Thanks for reading. 🙂
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Common errors:
Can you identify what needs fixing in these (greatly exaggerated!) examples? Answers under the cut!
Across all schools of ballet, there are five base foot/leg positions that you will return to again and again at the start and end of most every movement. These are numbered first through fifth positions, and you’ll likely recognize them right away within the plié exercise done at the start of most any ballet class.
Here they are at a glance:
A word on turnout:
Note that all five of these base positions in ballet are “turned out” – i.e. with the hip joints in external rotation, knees and toes pointing away from the centre line.
You will see many experienced and professional dancers with so-called “180 degree turnout” – i.e. where their hips are so externally rotated in first position that their feet form one straight line from end to end. This is often seen as a desirable technical achievement, and it is true that with training your turnout will increase. BUT there is also a tendency for student dancers to unsafely force their turnout, often by rotating at the knee and pronating and everting at the ankle, allowing the feet to roll inward. This will result in injury down the line, as well as poor technique!
Without going too much into it – your turnout should be at a comfortable angle from the centre line, and should be initiated at the top of the leg, not by cranking the toes outward. While dancing, turnout is maintained by activating the intrinsic muscls in the hip joint without overdoing it with the big prime movers in the area – without squeezing your bum super hard, try to get the backs of your thighs right under the curve of your bum to pull in toward each other!
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Safety disclamer aside, here is a closer look at each position:
First Position
Heels are together, unless your knees hyperextend quite a bit and cause your lower legs to bow away from each other when turned out. Make every effort to squeeze your legs tightly together along their entire length!
Second Position
Heels are typically hip- or shoulder-width apart. Inner thighs are still active – it should feel like they’re trying to pull in toward each other.
Third, Fourth, and Fifth position can be taken with either leg in front!
Third Position
Heel of front foot touches at about the midpoint of the back foot. In all crossed positions (3rd, 4th, 5th) be mindful of whether your knees are still stretched and pulled up!
Fourth Position
The distance between your two feet is typically roughly 1-1.5 times the length of one of your feet.
Fifth Position
Similar to third position, but more crossed, with the front foot’s heel touching the back foot’s toe.
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Is there a significant difference between third and fifth position?
You will almost never see a deliberate 3rd position in a professional setting, but for the purposes of training, it is an excellent transition to 5th position.
You might notice that in my Back to Ballet classes I typically teach in 3rd, and give experienced dancers the option to use 5th. As your technique improves and you are more able to maintain your turnout, straight legs, and posture, you will have no problem transitioning to 5th. However, early on, 5th position opens you up to potentially bent knees, over-crossed jump landings, and backward hip sway, which might hinder your overall technical progress!
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In all positions:
quads (front of thigh) are actively pulling your kneecaps up (see the frowny knees in the images above!)
both hips are facing directly forward
turnout muscles are working
In addition, your weight should be evenly centered between the feet. This is particularly difficult in 4th position. Try this:
Take 4th position with your Right leg front
At the outset, chances are your weight is more toward your back (Left) foot. Shift your weight forward to centre it.
Now consider your hips. Is your Left hip further back than your Right so that the line between your hips is no longer perpendicular to your line of sight?
Adjust your Left hip forward carefully
You can use your fingers to press into and locate your hip bones to get a better sense of their alignment
How is your Left knee? It might be twisted uncomfortably after the hip adjustment, so reduce the amount of turnout to protect your knees (slide your left toes forward a bit, “closing” them inward slightly). When you plié (bend), your knees should track pretty closely over your toes.
Are you still making an effort to squeeze underneath your bum as described above? This is the squeeze that will maintain your turnout and pull your knees away from the centre line when you plié (bend).
GIF: 4th position. Notice two hips facing directly front.
ALWAYS consider whether you are able to maintain the amount of turnout you have in any position – especially an open one where you have less of a sense of your limits. Turnout is never passive; it is always hard work at the top of the thigh.
And that’s that! Five core positions we build everything else on top of, and that are constant across the world. In upcoming posts I’ll get to arm positions (fun and confusing since the names are different across various schools! yikes), start to dissect specific core movements we do every class, and will hopefully reprise a chat on turnout anatomy, safety, and conditioning!
