Plié in first

 Recently, I taught my first ballet class. I have taught all sorts of things in my time; I have been a certified ski instructor, a Red Cross swimming instructor, an SAT coach, a rowing coach, and, for the last twenty years, an art history teacher. Despite this, I did not go calmly into my first class as a ballet teacher.

The voice in my head kept saying, “Come on, who do you think you’re kidding? You were never even good enough to be a professional at the lowest level!”

I told the voice to shut up, reminding her that I was also not an Olympic-caliber skier (in fact, I never won a single race), or swimmer (I was always in the “slow lane”), and even my SAT scores weren’t perfect. Certainly, as an art historian, I do okay, but mine is not the name on everyone’s lips when asked to “name a famous art historian.” (But whose is, outside the little world that is art history? Probably the most famous art historian out there is that squid-faced guy, Zoidberg, from Futurama).

So, I steeled myself. I bought a new CD of ballet-class music (Ballet Divas – piano arrangements of pop-songs ranging from “Holding Out for a Hero” to “You’re Still the One”). I got a fresh notebook and wrote out the combinations and track choices I had made. I re-read most of Agrippina Vaganova’s Basic Principles of Classical Ballet. I made flyers and announced the class on social media.

And nobody showed up, except my fourteen-year-old daughter, whom I forced to come with me to that first class. After tendus, she was fed up with my corrections, and went off in a huff.

For two weeks, I had the studio to myself. That was okay; I used the time to work on a variation I am learning, and to practice things I’m so bad at that I don’t like to do them in class, with other people watching (brisé vole, anyone?). But I felt sad and rejected, all the same.

Then I decided to move the class an hour later, and last week, when I had basically given up on the idea, five whole students showed up. All of them were beginners, though some had a little ballet experience, or had danced as kids. All were actual adults and not just teenagers getting a late start. The whole reason I wanted to teach this class (which is free – I’m not experienced enough to charge for my instruction, in my view) was to give people curious about trying ballet but intimidated by even the relatively mellow atmosphere of the teen-adult classes offered by the ballet school in town. Older people, people who feel like they have the wrong body type for ballet, people who consider themselves awkward, people who do not want to wear pink tights EVER… these people are my target audience.

No thanks!

Ballet, it must be admitted, has a tendency to scare people. Whippet-thin women who actually look good in skin-tight white leotards and flesh-toned tights, heads held haughtily upon their long necks, swan-like arms and gazelle-like legs giving them a preternatural grace that makes the ordinary human feel lumpen and clumsy can be intimidating. The obscure, French vocabulary of the art form puts people on thin ice – many a well-trained dancer I know still struggles to say “développé” correctly (DEV-loh-pay being the most common American pronunciation). Also, ballet asks the body to do things that it just does not do, in the common choreography of most people’s lives; turnout is weird, walking toe-to-heel even weirder.

Understanding this, I want to open the door to ballet just a little wider and let the people who have been standing there at the threshold, hesitating, step inside, even if they never get much farther than one foot in the studio. Actually, I’d love it if I could also lure in some people who don’t even want to approach the threshold, but who might actually enjoy it if they gave it a try. But then I would have to trick them into coming by calling it something else, such as, say, “dancercise.” Euch.

The first question with beginners is how to begin. Something I read in Vaganova struck a chord with me; she says (here I paraphrase) that we begin with first position, and we call it first position, for a very good reason. It is not the easiest position (that would be second), nor is it the most difficult (a fully closed fifth), but it is the position in which we are most aware of the body’s relationship to the space in which we dance, up/down, left/right, forward/back, because it aligns the body symmetrically relative to these directions. With the legs rotating towards 180 degrees from the hip, the lateral axis enters the body. The head, neck, spine, and pelvis stacked above the heels manifest the vertical axis. The squaring of the hips and shoulders, the forward gaze, and the rotation of the inner planes of the legs towards the front engender an awareness of the third dimensional axis (front-back). The plié in first, Vaganova informs us, constitutes the fundamental building block of the whole art form. Everything else you will do, every tour en l’air, every grand jeté, begins here.

A whole hour-long class entirely devoted to the plié in first position would only interest a ballet-geek like myself. I very much doubt that it would seduce a group of adult beginners. So, while I did spend quite a bit of time playing around with the idea with my five brave students, I did not only do pliés in first. We did, however lie down on the floor, on our backs, let our extended legs fall into our natural degree of turnout, and do what I call “air pliés” – that is, pliés without any weight-bearing.

I learned this exercise from a somewhat zany, seventy-five-year-old former Martha Graham dancer last summer. At first I was annoyed to have dragged my tired ass all the way out to Bethesda just to lie on a dirty floor and do endless knee bends, but then as she began to talk about how we should not think of bending our knees, but rather of lifting the long muscles of the inner thighs up towards the ceiling and towards our heads, something clicked. The great thing about doing pliés while lying on one’s back on the floor is that all the stuff that gets wobbly and uncertain in the upright position goes away, and one’s brain can totally tune into the fundamental muscular process without a bunch of static.

In Inside Ballet Technique: Separating Anatomical Fact from Fiction in the Ballet Class, Valerie Grieg writes that two things – an understanding of the anatomy and kinesiology of specific dance movements, and an ability to visualize the correct muscular sequences – lie at the heart of the dancer’s discipline. This plié on the floor thing is a perfect illustration of that – once I’ve done it a few times, when I get up to plié at the barre, I feel hyperaware of the muscles that should be doing the active work, and I can see, in the mirror, that my whole form, meaning my alignment in the three axes, has vastly improved.

I wanted my adult beginners to feel this confidence in their first pliés, and I think it actually did work, because even the student who had never taken a single ballet or dance class in her life and who described herself as ungainly took her first pliés with remarkable aplomb (and I am using the term as it specifically applies in ballet – carriage, assurance of movement).

Alignment is of course fundamentally important – adults in particular can injure themselves so easily if they attempt to dance ballet steps in poor form. However, I want my students also to enjoy dance and to feel like real ballerinas (they were all women, no surprise). So the other thing we worked on (as we did tendus, degagés, ronds-de-jambe, and a little port-de-bras combination in center) was interpreting the music, and not being afraid to be a little schmaltzy. I mean, why not teach them that instead of just holding one’s arm rigidly à la seconde, one can breathe through the arm, let it flow a little, let the head follow the hand? They are grownups, after all, and they want to dance, not just perform a routine set of calisthenics.

In order to encourage them to let themselves go, expressively, I gave them the visualization that my fantastic teacher in Pasadena, Patricia, proposes. Imagine that in your hand you hold either a perfect latté, a dry martini, or a Platonically ideal glazed doughnut (whatever is your poison). You gaze upon it in rapture, never letting it out of your sight for a moment, except when in the allongé positions you pause to contemplate the perfect, sparkly diamonds you wear as rings upon every finger… This adoring absorption can of course be carried to extremes – in real-life dance situations, one sometimes looks at another dancer, or spots a turn, or even gives the audience a bold and saucy glance, but the adult beginners got it – I caught a few of them looking longingly at their own palms as they performed the final port-de-bras. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s ballet.