"For myself, as a performer, I created the illusion, representing beauty external to my body, through real hard physical painful work. This work was often not at all beautiful or perfect" Claid, E. (2006). Performing Ballet: Real becoming illusion. In: Yes? No! Maybe... Seductive ambiguity in dance. Oxon: Routledge. p24
Technique classes are not the time to look pristine and perfect, it is the time to really push your body untill it sweats, make mistakes and take risks. If you do not push yourself in class then how do you know how much you can push yourself on stage? If you go off balance in class, fall over, look ridiculous then who cares it is in these moments of danger and exposure of ourselves that we find out how far out body will reach, jump, suspend, fall. As a choreographer I find these moments in work the most interesting, taking yourself out of your comfort zone and really letting you body go with the movement, some times it will look messy and ugly but in these times comes true beauty in the body. I found this article "Performing Ballet: Real becoming illusion."by Emilyn Claid an great offering as I reflect on my ballet technique classes and remminded me that no matter how graceful and perfect the prima ballerinas appear on stage, the amount of work their muscles are doing in that moment have come from years on training and thousands of hours and work and sweat, maybe after that much intense training I might be able to perform like that?
Ballet is the technique that I am least confident with as I had little experience in this area until last year so in this class it always takes me a about twenty minutes on the barre to really settle into the technique and gain confidence that my body can work in a balletic manner and it is then that I really start push myself. My goal for this semester in ballet class is to gain confidence in myself and not to feel self concious of how I look in the mirror and trust in my body as an intrsument that can be tuned into this style of movement. There are a few other goals I aim to work towrads that will help me build confidence, first of all I would like to improve my turned out posistion so in class I will be focusing on rotating the legs outwards from the tops of the thighs and hips rather than the knees, this will also help with my second goal of strenghthening my inner thighs, in particular my satorius muscle. Engaging this muscle to increase my rotation will give an intense work out through an hour and halfs class. On top of this I will do extra excerices at home such as inner leg raises where I lay on one side crossing the top leg in front onto the floor and then lifting, holding for five seconds and the lowering the bottom leg twenty times will help me strengthen these muscles quickly and effectively. This will give me a stronger support in turn out posistion balances and also allow me to lift the leg higher in extensions on and off the barre.
In todays class I spent time focusing on my feet and keeping my centre in line with the spine as opposed to a very bad habit of mine which is arching the back so the hips are rotated downward. By the time class was over the muscles in my feet were feeling weak and in particular my achiles tendon was feeling short and tighter than usual, this to me was a good sign that I had been pushing my feet through the lesson. At the barre, I was really concentrating on pushing down through the floor where my foot had to point to extend in to the tondus and battementes, during our warm up sequence for jumping I was really thinking about pushing through all of the foot and ensuring that the heel touched the ground between each jump to allow myself the best base to work from in the grande allegro sequence we had coming up.
Holding my pelvis in the correct posistion was a contstant issue I had through ballet technique last year and I am very conscious of the fact that during plie sequences and each week try and correct myself during these excercises to help stabilise my centre and create a more attractive straight line connecting my upper body to my lower body. Having my pelvis in the coreect posistion also allows me to pull up more from my centre creating the pull upwards through the body and the lengthening illusion that bellet dancers always seem to have.
