9 Tips for Improving Pirouettes

5. “Connect” your arms to your back – you should feel and imagine width across the back and shoulder blades and the arms should maintain their position (don’t “wind-up” for a turn)
6. Take off from a properly placed and expansive plié for power in the turn.
7. Strengthen your ankles supporting the relevé – if you are wobbly, sickled, or pronated, this will ruin your turn.
8. Mentally, make a choice to come down from the turn, don’t “let” gravity make the choice for you.

All In The Family: Battement

Battements, as they are practiced at the barre and in centre, are the foundation of many other movements in ballet (jumps and travelling steps such as assemblé, tour jeté, grand jeté, and so many more) and in other dance forms. It is necessary to have a solid grasp on the simplest forms in order to perform the others correctly.

Relearning and Reinforcing Body Integration

Movement is a layered experience. We develop movement patterns and then continue to relearn them as we get older. Babies learn to crawl, developing the spiral and then relearn and master it as they walk and then run.

Developpé Dilemma: Deb Vogel Addresses a Reader Question

When I received Amy’s question about pain in developpé below, my instinct was to help yet, I was not confident that I was fully equipped to assess what might be happening with Amy. So, I did what I would have for any student who had a problem I could not work out – I took her question to someone more knowledgeable than I – Deb Vogel, a neuromuscular educator and movement analyst who has been working with dancers for years.

Lifting Your Leg From Underneath and Other Impossible Feats

In classes, I’ve heard teachers talk about a grand battement “coming from underneath.” This can sometimes lead to confusion about which muscles do the work in grand battement.

Introducing the Iliopsoas

The iliopsoas is the only muscle (well, technically group of muscles) that attaches to the spine, pelvis, and femur (or, thigh). The three muscles which make up the iliopsoas are deep, running very near the spine and beneath other major muscle groups. Therefore, awareness of the iliopsoas must come through visualization.

How Low Can You Go?

There are a number of codified floor barre techniques that are taught throughout the world. Most of the most well-known methods were developed during the mid-20th Century. Discover resources for adding floor barre to your repertoire.

How to do a Proper “Crunch”

Learn to work and strengthen you abdominal muscles effectively and in a way that will support you most in your dancing.

Defining and Dissecting a Piqué Turn

What is a Piqué Turn?
Generally when a dancer is asked to perform a piqué turn in class, he/she understands that it is likely they are being asked to perform a traveling turn that begins with a step onto a straight leg, as demonstrated at the start of this combination (note: this video is an ad [...]

A Jeté That’s Truly Grand

A Grand Jeté is…
a type of of leap. The term comes from classical ballet. However, many dance forms utilize or have adapted this movement. The grand jeté is just one of an entire family of movements in which the working leg is “thrown.” In grand jeté the initiating leg is thrown to 90º and is [...]

Two Heads Are Better Than One

two women from opposite sides of the world who have a similar vision and purpose- that is to educate dancers and teachers, arming them with information to improve the quality of health and understanding of the body in dance education and practice.

Talking Technique

There are several posts here at Dance Advantage that offer understanding and tips on certain technical elements of dance. So far, I’ve offered a smattering of the basics. More recent posts have received quite a few hits but some older posts have gotten buried along the way. Because I think all of these posts could [...]

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