Saturday 5 March 2011

Real Ballet!

Class today was verrry exciting! We did a few new things today, rond de jambes at the barre, and grande battements, and we did a new centre sequence with lots of port de bras and something called a chasse. I didn't quite catch all the French, but I'm sure when we do it again I'll remember!

Anyway, the exciting part was that instead of the usual things we've been working on in centre - sequences with pirouettes, soutenous and waltzing, and corner-to-corner things with temps levees and grand jetes, we learned real ballet! I know right! :D
We started learning the Spanish Dance from Coppelia, which is just a very short part, of course, and not too complex.



Here's a video I found on youtube of Lisa Pavane dancing the role of Swanhilda in Coppelia with the Australian Ballet. This particular clip begins with the Spanish dance, which is convenient because I don't have 8 minutes to spend watching the whole thing as well as writing a blog post for you! The proper choreography part that we learned begins at 0:14 and finishes at 0:44, although the whole dance is a bit longer than that. We did the arms a little different, and only one chaines (the turns in the second bit eg 0:32) instead of two, but its the same stuff. I'm really excited to be able to show you what I'm learning, although I don't imagine ever being at this sort of standard!!

The story of Coppelia is interesting - wikipedia can explain better than I can with such a rushed post! Have a look at it here. At the point of the Spanish dance, Swanhilda has gone into an inventor's workshop and pretended to be his mechanical doll, called Coppelia (after the inventor who's name is Doctor Coppelius) come to life (bit of imagination required of course). The Spanish dance, and the Scottish dance which follows (and is also in the clip) are just showing off really - no story, but very entertaining.

Anyway, that's all for now. Massive deadlines looming so very little time to write. My writing will improve when I have more time to draft posts! Sorry about it for now :(

Hugs and kisses

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