My Second "First Class"

Bet you weren't expecting to hear from me again so soon eh?

Well, regardless, I'm back, with a post inspired by another adult ballet blogger, Dave Tries Ballet who also wrote about his second "first class".

I took my first ballet class waaaay back in January, did two terms of Classical Ballet Beginners and then had a hiatus for a couple of months while my ballet school was closed for the summer holidays and then the Edinburgh Festival. And now term has started again and I have moved up a class - I'm now an Improver, and not a Beginner. Although I still feel extremely beginnery. My teacher and I both noticed that I wasn't being fully challenged by the beginner level class towards the end of the last term. By no means was I perfect, or even that good, but my extra term had put me enough above the level of a lot of the others that I felt a wee bit out of place.

So now I've moved up and the class is much more challenging. We only did pirouttes en dehors (I don't know who thought those up but I'd dearly LOVE to give them a piece of my mind). If you don't know what's so bad about them, check this post here for my thoughts on my first encounter with the things.

Apart from that the rest of the class was all things I felt able to do, although many things I'm not that great at. Apart from balancing. I can't balance on the ball of either foot. I can barely balance on the whole of one foot when in arabesque. Or on the balls of both feet. Or just, like ever. That's probably why pirouette are so hard - because I wobble like a wind sock in a storm.

But I did spend the whole time smiling to myself. I'm just that glad to be back.

The other thing that's different about improvers is the class "style". In beginners, everyone was all about hiding bums and legs with skirts and shorts and joggers. In improvers, it's all leotards with slouchy t-shirts and no skirts.

All very Flashdance.

I also really want a pair of thigh high legwarmers. Probably because most of the girls I've seen wearing them are really skinny.
You can get them for less than £5. I'm SO tempted!

Love and hugs

Scottish Ballet at the Playhouse

Last night, I had an absolute treat! I 'splashed out' on a student ticket for the Scottish Ballet's programme at the Playhouse, part of the Edinburgh Festival. It's the first time since I started studying ballet and taking a firm interest in it that I've seen any live ballet, so don't expect an expert's opinion! Not that you would of course, you know me too well for that dear reader.

The first piece was a brand new piece called Kings 2 Ends, which was choreographed by Jorma Elo, specifically for the company. Set to music by Mozart and Steve Reich, this is a beautiful work of art, and although not a narrative piece, tells a different story to each individual who sees it. I adored the pas de trois in the third section, and the pas de deux sections danced by Noellie Conjeaud and Teun van Roosmalen (above) were incredibly fluid and well co-ordinated, although all the couples were beautiful.


The second piece, Song of the Earth, was choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan in 1965 and explores the idea of mortality as a young man struggles with it in his life and in his relationships - the link above the McMillan's website explains the whole thing a lot better than I could! I have to admit, I didn't read the narrative description before I watched the piece - I had no money for the programme - so my own interpretation whilst I was watching it was somewhat different - I saw two best friends and a beloved sister. However, I don't think that detracted anything at all from my enjoyment of the piece, which showcased some excellent dancing from the male danseurs, and some incredible pas de trois from the three soloists, Erik Cavallri, Adam Blyde and Sophie Martin. The music was Mahler's Das Leid von der Erde (the Song from the Earth), which is a beautiful song-cycle, translated from eighth century Chinese poetry into German. The music was performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, led by Sian Edwards, with Katrina Karneus and Peter Wedd as the soloists.


All pictures are from the Scottish Ballet website, taken by Andrew Ross. They have a few more production photos of these two pieces in their gallery there and also on their flikr photostream.

Love and hugs

Pirouette en dedans and en dehors

You'll have noticed by now that regularly posting on my blog is not my strong point. Largely this is because I am not really interesting enough to tell the internet things about my life. Everyone else is more interesting than me it seems, and someone else has always already said what I was going to say, but more eloquently.

But despite that fact, I shall keep my blog, and every now and again, write the odd post (and I mean odd), just to catch you out.

Today's is because we learnt something brand new in ballet yesterday, which I wasn't expecting to happen since I'm retaking the beginner level course.

We did pirouettes en dehors. Usually we do them en dedans, which is FAR easier. You would never believe it. It's difficult to explain the difference to the uninitiated. I know this, because I had to read a whole bunch of things myself before I really understood.

To do a pirouette en dedans, you are spinning away from the working leg. This means if you are standing on your right foot (on your toes of course), with your left leg raised in passe (left toes just under right knee), then you should be turning to the right, with your right elbow leading, in a clockwise direction. En dedans means "inwards". Your left knee, the raised one, is coming inwards, towards your body, in order to turn. When you do a pirouette en dehors, it is different. If are turning to the right, you stand on your left foot with your right leg in passe, so that your right knee is leading - you are trying to push your leg outwards and away from you in order to turn. En dehors means "outwards" hence the different names for the pirouettes. Another difference is that en dedans, the working foot starts behind and winds up in front, while en dehors, it starts in front and ends up behind.

We've been doing our en dedans pirouettes from a lunge-type stance in fourth, so that you have the momentum of your left leg coming forward to passe as well as your left arm coming from second to first to help you go round. This means that although you might not turn very elegantly, and you might over balance part way round, you nearly always have the momentum to go a full turn. However, en dehors, you start in fifth, so the only momentum you have is the arm coming from second to first. The first couple of times I barely managed a quarter turn. It was horrible. I just didn't get it. Pirouettes en dehors are all in the mind guys. You need to use every muscle on the left side of your body to turn. Its just that you don't get to move any of them very far. It's strange. But yes, the fact that I worked this out, means I managed a rightwards pirouetted en dehors! And then I did another one! They were by no means brilliant examples, but I went all the way round and put my foot down behind and didn't fall. Then I tried a third one and came down of demi pointe a bit funny and hurt my ankle and scared it away. Turning leftwards was never better than a quarter turn at the moment, which is hugely frustrating. But its like a whole bunch of things, you have to learn it separately for the left side and the right side. Hopefully I'll get there. We'll see how it goes :)

Swan Lake

Found this online today.

It's the whole of Swan Lake in one YouTube video :D so if you have a spare 2 hours 15 minutes where you don't need your eyes for something else, feast them on this!

We have Svetlana Zakharova as our Odette/Odile, and Roberto Bolle as our Siegfried, and the rest of the Teatro alla Scala, an Italian company based in Milan. I really enjoyed it but was slightly disappointed that they used the happy ending, rather than the traditional tragic one. But the dancing is still beautiful so I'll let them away with it!

Love and kisses

The Red Shoes

This evening I watched, courtesy of BBC iPlayer, a film about ballet called The Red Shoes. Starring Marius Goring, Anton Walbrook, and the stunning Moira Shearer, and produced in 1948, this film was quite different to nearly anything I've seen before. It got off to a bit of a slow start, I have to say, without much ballet, and the little that was there didn't seem very good (in my inexperienced eyes), and I nearly turned it off.I'm glad I didn't though, because it was a really great film, and included an abridged, film-rather-than-stage version of the title ballet, which I really enjoyed. The films and tv programmes I have watched about ballet never seem to show you much of the ballet that they're featuring, and so I really enjoyed getting the whole picture of what the ballet was about, which made it much easier to see the parallels with the main storyline of the film.

Speaking of the story line, the film focuses on a ballet company, whose artistic director is man named Boris Lermontov. His abrupt, angry, controlling manner make him an impossible character to like, and his moustache is awful, but it suits the role so I'll let him away with it.

In the initial scenes, we are in the theatre watching a ballet put on by this company, with both Vicky Page, and Julian Cramer. Lermontov meets Vicky that evening at a party, and refuses to watch her dancing, but hires her to his company anyway. Cramer writes to Lermontov the next day and explains that he wrote the music for the ballet we've just watched, but it was stolen from him by his professor, who gave it to Lermontov. Cramer is given a job as an orchestra coach.

Both of the young characters are initially well treated by Lermontov, in his own way. Vicky is made a principle dancer, and Cramer composes a new ballet for her to dance, and it is over this that they fall in love. This makes Lermontov very angry, when he eventually finds out, as he is besotted by Vicky, and plans to make her famous. Its hard to blame him, she's talented, classy, and extremely gorgeous.

So Lermontov fires Cramer, and Vicky is upset and leaves the company, goes with him and they get married. But she stops dancing, because her husband is focussing on his career. Its very romantic, but this is a girl who has said that dancing is her life, and that she dances because she must. She apparently goes to class every day, and always keeps up her form - you can tell she still wants to dance, and its heart breaking for her that she cannot.

Lermontov meets Vicky again later, almost by chance, and brings all this up, and begs her to dance again, promising he will make her an amazing dancer and a massive star. Cramer is in London, at the premier of his opera, but he leaves to come and find Vicky, and is gutted to find her in a dressing room, minutes away from the opening scene of the Red Shoes. She says she loves him, he says she loves dancing more. She realises he's right. Cramer leaves, Lermontov does a victory dance. Then she realises she was wrong, and jumps off a cliff into the path of a train. Funnily enough she is not instantly killed but survives long enough to tell her beloved to take off her red shoes.

The three leads were all very well done - each character made sense, and their interactions were not predictable but they were believable (apart from the train thing, and the one moment where Vicky gets up in the middle of the night and her slippers have high heels - or maybe that was just a fashion thing...) I love films from this era as everyone is so elegant and charming, and I adore the way everyone talks to each other.

The ballet in this film is very different to modern ballet. They do all the same steps and things, but here it seems less extreme, and tortuous. Here, all the ballet dancers look like they are having fun. In other ballets and ballet films that I have seen, which were more modern, it always seemed like a chore. The dancers spend every second minute telling you its all worth it because they love dancing, but usually I'm not sure I believe them. In this, however, Vicky really does seem to love what she does, and in the end, its not the pressure of dancing that causes her problem. No one ever tells her she's not doing well enough or that she's easily replaceable. The problems in this film stem from the relationships among her and Craster and Lermontov. All in all, I would have to say that anyone who wants to watch a film about ballet, to be encouraged to do it, then they should watch this, and not Black Swan. It might be older, but there's more dancing in this, Moira Shearer is a professional dancer, the story line is nicer, and the leading lady is a red-head.

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

Feeling It Again

So today I'm not such a big fan of ballet stretch as I was yesterday. Today I am suffering the ache of stretched muscles. All of them. We did full body stretching so now I have full body aching. The effort involved in getting out of bed this morning was too great. So I put it off to this afternoon, and still feel achy. Warm bath for me this evening I think!!

One of the reasons I have started blogging about my ballet classes is because I have found a few other blogs from adult ballet beginners and they've been informative and encouraging :) But there's only a few of the. It's nice to read that other people are doing I'm doing and achieving a good degree of success, and they say lots of useful things about how to make progress as an adult beginner, how to talk to people about what you do, why you should wear a leotard and pink tights to class, and many other useful things.

So if you are interested, here are some linkies!

Adult Beginner is a woman in her 30s in America who has been taking classes for well over a year now. She still can't do a pirouette, even though she takes 2 classes a week at open level. This is a source of great relief. I thought I was a weirdo for being so bad at them, turns out I'd be a weirdo if I was doing it right after 6 weeks! She chatters like she's talking to a non-ballet friend. She likes to pass on crazy metaphors from her teacher (nicknamed Smirnoff, because he is Russian!) and she posts photos and sometimes cartoons. She also reviews books. She's hilarious, and I love her :)

David, of Dave Tries Ballet is another interesting character. He's 23, and has been doing ballet for a few months, but is ALREADY of a level to be performing on stage! Jeals. He's doing a small part in Coppelia with his dance school in Princeton. And he takes 6.5 hours of class a week! I wish I could take that many classes. Maybe then I would make as much progress. Or maybe I would just ache all the time! He tells us about his classes, about ballet more generally, and about ballets he goes to see. He also has some advice for brand new beginners as well. I like how much of a ballet nerd he is. It makes me feel a bit less crazy!

Henrik, who posts on Tights and Tiaras, is not a beginner at all, but I love the way he writes. He's not condescending at all and has a lot of really interesting information, including a series on the tools of the trade, and he's just posted the first part of a collaboration on partnering, which is really interesting.

There are a couple of others on my blog roll too, but these ones are my three favourites.

Love and Kisses

an Excellent Start to the Week

How does getting up at 6am to go to an 8am ballet class before a full day at uni, trip to the cinema, and then heading to the pub quiz and out dancing sound for a Monday? Like crazy? I know right.

I've never done such an early class before. Even at school we only had to be in by 8.35am! But this ballet thing has really caught my attention (as you may have noticed from yesterday's enormous post). I'm genuinely loving it, and I decided that I wanted to do *more ballet* than just the one hour a week. But I didn't want to tell you I was going to go to the early class, in case I failed to get up and then had to come and admit it to you.

But I did make it, so now I can tell you! In fact, I made it a whole 35 minutes early. Unlike all the normal people who kept it to a fairly sensible 10 or 15 minutes. I just wasn't sure exactly what the protocol was. So I thought I'd be too early rather than too late. Sitting in a changing room on your own for a while is far less embarassing that being the last one into class and not really prepared to begin!

But it wasn't like that at all. It wasn't even a ballet class, it's a stretching class using ballet style. So we did some things in first position, and second position, and we did plies, tendues and port de bras, and we held our arms in first, second and fifth positons. But we also did a lot of stuff not turned out, and there was no particular focus on ballet technique, it was just stylistic.

Anyway, as you would expect from a class named ballet stretch, we stretched a lot. My legs feel so long. I never understood the concept of feel the burn in stretching before now. I've felt the dull, pleasant ache of gentle stretching. But for example, we were sitting on the floor, legs out to the side as far as slits will go (I'm about 60 degrees tops. I'm pathetic at side splits) and then stretch forward as far as you can. Again this is about 60 degrees for me, and I can really feel it in the tendons in my legs. But then she was like breathe in, and as you breathe out slowly, push further down. So I did. And I was like streeeeeeetch. And then again, and then a third time. And then hold, but keep breathing and sink lower if you can. And the she came round the whole class one at a time, and gently pushed us from the shoulders and waist. Like, not shoving, just pressure, and I was a whole new world of bent over. It burns. But then when we stopped, it stopped burning. No pain. Just stretch. My legs really do feel long.
We also did front-back splits, and turns out what I thought was a pretty mediocre front-back split that I can do is actually kind of alright. I was by no means the lowest in the class, but also not the highest.

I worked really hard in class, came out sweating slightly, again, but had never moved faster than a gentle jog, and that was just at the start to get us warmed up.
And although I've only walked from the studio to uni, about 10 minutes, I feel taller, composed, well held. Quite frankly I feel gorgeous and leggy, which is not something I very often feel at 10 in the morning when I'm not wearing make up.

Ballet stretch is about to become a regular on my schedule :)

love and kisses

Adult Ballet Beginner

Hi everyone!

I am now an adult ballet beginner! How exciting is that! I've had six classes now and am starting to get the hang of some things! My balance is improving, my hands are becoming more graceful, and when I come out of class I'm ever so slightly sweaty! Nice.

I realised I wanted to learn to dance maybe five years ago now. I'm in an amateur variety show which is really good fun, and we have a dance cast within the main cast. It seemed like they got the cooler costumes, and they were more impressive. Plus if you could sing AND dance properly, at the same time, then it seemed you were nearly guaranteed a solo and a dance number. So I auditioned. Probably one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. I had no idea how to dance, really struggled to pick up the steps because I was so unfamiliar with everything, plus everyone else seemed to have at least done some dance classes, so they had a vague idea of how to move around. After that I was totally put off wanting to dance, and was quite happy just being in the regular cast. Until the next year, when the directors decided to have the entire cast doing dance numbers. Obviously, not quite to the same standard as the "proper" dancers, but more than just the glorified actions we were doing before. And even though it was hard and I didn't always get it right off and it made me totally exhausted, the dance number was the highlight of that show! And now every year we do at least two main cast dance numbers, and they're always my favourite to perform. I've even started being put near the front sometimes, like where people can see me, which must mean I've been doing some things right.

Then last year my dressing room of 7 girls had 5 dancers in it, me, and this other girl, who'd also gone to that audition I had and hated the whole thing. And all week, I was just really envious of their costumes and how pretty they looked on stage, especially when they were doing ballet.

So I decided, right, that's it. I'm taking a ballet class. So now I'm taking a ballet class, and I absolutely adore it! I'm doing it with a friend, and unfortunately she's had to miss a couple of classes, so I'm not sure she's enjoying at as much because she feels behind everyone else. But I love it. I look forward to it all week. I used to practise the barre exercises at home every time I had a minute, although I have recently discovered that practising on your own as a beginner is a sure fire way to learn really bad technique, so now I've stopped. Instead I've been practising balancing, on one foot flat in passe (anyone know how to get accents on my e's?) and also on releve in first, second and fifth positions, and in passe.

I know right, get me!

Passe is when you have one foot (supporting leg) on the floor, turned out of course, and the other foot (working leg) is raised, out to the side again, and your foot is pointed so that your toes are just under your knee, like this.

This dancer is obviously en pointe, which is not something I do. No no. That takes a good few years of training, doing up to 10 hours of class a week and some exercises every day and stuff. But this is passe, and its the posture you typically use in pirrouettes (you know those, the twirly things), which I suck at. Practising the posture without turning builds the strength in your legs so that you can hold the pose better whilst turning, and therefore not wobble, flail and fall over.

Now, what about releve? That's easy, it's just standing on tip toes. Not pointe, like in the picture, but on the balls of your feet with your heels up. Like when you reach for something high up need to be a little taller. So I practise balancing on releve in first position, which is with both feet turned out to the side (from the HIPS, not the knees or ankles), and heels together, if you were standing flat. I also practise in second position, which is with the feet about a foot apart when flat, but still turned out, heels pointing towards each other. Fifth position is with the feet crossed over, so that (in theory) you make an = sight, with heels touching toes. Lots of people find they can do this, but they are often rolling out their ankles. This is how to injure yourself in ballet. As a beginner, I'm good with my fifth position looking more like > or <, with the heel of the front foot touching the toe of the back foot. As the turnout muscles in my thighs and bum get stronger, my turn out will improve without the risk of injury! To do a proper fifth position releve, our teacher tells us to bring our toes towards each other as we lift up, so that our heels are crossed over. We do this at the end of our barre sequences, raising the outer arm to fifth (just forward, but above the head, gently curved like the dancer above), and when we have balance, we have to bring the barre arm up as well, and hold for 8 counts.

So, that was a bit of a ramble, I hope you'll forgive me! But I am finding ballet very absorbing, and extremely exciting! I'm considering, now that my weekly uni classes have stopped (for ever! I have no more before I graduate) I might try fitting in an extra class - the studio I go to has drop in classes - ballet stretch on a Monday at 8am, or gentle ballet, which is an hour and half, on Fridays mid morning, which seems much less offensive. But my regular class is on a Friday night, so I feel it might be better to embrace Monday mornings, and get my week off to a good start! lol

Love and Kisses