Turning Turnout Inside Out

Turnout is to ballet what grapes are to wine, butter is to paté brisée, and melisma is to Celine Dion. Fundamental. But what is it really? When I was a kid, one of my teachers, a nice man, really, used to come around and tap our skinny fannies with his stick (he was not pervy at all, thus the stick, rather than his hand, I guess), and tell us to “pull up tight, squeeze!” I have actually had a ballet teacher or two tell the class to imagine holding a quarter between their cheeks (those cheeks, yes). It seemed to me for many years that therefore, good ballet form must be all about the butt muscles being contracted… hard.

But you know, that never quite made sense. In ballet, when you want to get a really high extension on your arabesque, you cannot grip your glutes. Au contraire, the popo must get the heck out of the way, so that the back muscles can hoist that hefty mass of bone and muscle that is the leg, up toward the sky. And if you squeeze your derrière while doing, say, a grande ronde de jambe, it just is not going to be pretty. That big, heavy boulder (as one of my dance teachers likes to call the hardened muscles of the glutes or the quads) will squash all the life out of your extension. You can bet that the girl in the picture above is not gripping in her hips. Such as they are.

So imagine my gratification when I began to hear, in recent years, of a new way of thinking about turnout as coming not from the firm contraction of the caboose, but instead from the abdomen. The abdomen? you might ask… What has the abdomen got to do with the rotation of the femur in the hip socket? Well, as anyone who has ever taken a yoga class, or even sucked in their gut in order to impress a likely lad or lass knows, the contraction of the abdominal muscles, especially the deep muscles in the lower abdomen and pelvis (what my grandmother called, with great blushing, “the lower regions”) has a profound effect on the alignment of hips, spine, and legs. The core of the body, as it is called in contemporary physio-speak, is activated by this contraction of many small, subtle muscles, while the big brutes, the gluteals, the quads, and the hamstrings can ease off a little, and in their relaxed state, become more supple and responsive. 

Still, it is a little hard to wrap one’s body around this idea, that turnout is generated in what the yogic tradition calls the Mula Bandha, the “root lock,” described by Iyengar as “a posture where the body from the anus to the navel is contracted and lifted up and towards the spine.” Really? Ballet is so NOT about words like… anus. I would say it took me a week of standing there in first position, practicing just that – standing in first position with my root lock on – before it felt at all plausible. And probably, most of the time when I am actually in class, I forget all about it and go back to the old ways, my tush not at all cush, cranking that turnout from my lower back. 

Not optimal (see blog posts on FAI, or femoralacetabular impingement), but it is very, very hard to think about one’s abdomen while also executing complex or even not-so-complex choreography. It is simply not second nature to me, despite years of yoga. Translating that inner-body awareness to ballet is an ongoing process.

Gratuitous Alessandra Ferri photo

Last week, I took a class with a woman who has taken a couple of workshops from a guy called Philip Beamish, who has coached such luminaries as Alessandra Ferri and Polina Seminova; from him she has learned an approach to training the body for turnout and for pointework that is very much based in this whole idea of working from the core outwards and keeping those big muscle groups pliable and relaxed.

It was a fun class, quite unconventional. We exercised our feet on some spring-loaded devices called “archecizers” and we did tons of very simple tendu combinations at the barre.  Bizarrely enough, these seemingly mild routines had me sweating like a pig (I mean, I sweat easily, but this was ridiculous), and I was completely flattened by the end of 90 minutes. Needless to say I rushed right out and bought myself an archecizer. Though it would seem to have little to do with the core, the principle is the same for the foot as for the hips. Contracting the bottom of the foot, that is to say the muscles that attach heel to ball of foot, provides a similarly well-aligned and responsive center for balance and movement.

The language of this method (and others like it, as trawling the Internetosphere of ballet instruction videos has revealed), has strong resonance with the language of yoga and other forms of bodywork and it really gets at the issue of turnout from the inside out. Simply by naming different muscle groups and providing the mind with a different set of visual images for what’s going on deep in the pelvis, this approach feels to me a lot like that of certain yoga or pilates teachers who are really good at helping students find the heart of an asana, rather than just its outward appearance. And it makes sense that this would work just as well for ballet as for any other somatic discipline. 

An example. One of the videos I found on YouTube features the former Balanchine dancer Stephanie Saland coaching a dance student through a routine where she rises on demipointe on a pair of what are in effect lazy Susans, meaning that she cannot use the torque of her foot on the floor to “crank” her turnout from the bottom up. Instead, Saland cues the student in to the very fine, and very crucial, activation of the small muscles (piriformis, internal obturator) that rotate the thigh, suggesting that she “bring the back of the thigh forward, so that the inner thigh becomes the front,” meanwhile relating all this not to the tightening of the gluteal muscles, but instead to the contraction of the abdomen to draw the pelvis into position. 

Now, I did not have a set of heavyweight lazy Susans at home, but a pair of slippery socks and the hardwood floor make a good substitute, and I walked myself through Saland’s exercise a couple of times yesterday. It is ridiculously simple: relevé in a small second position, turned parallel, then slowly rotate first the left, then the right leg into a turned out position, without contracting the glutes. Plié while on demipointe, then tilt the pelvis, first back (that is, sticking out the behind), then forward into a neutral position, all without contracting the glutes and still maintaining turnout. Extend the legs into full relevé. Repeat ad infinitum. The advanced version seems to involve doing this on one foot, the other in coupé, but I am definitely not there yet, and this morning I have discovered a whole new way to be sore. 

Baryshnikov and Makarova making it look easy as breathing.

So, to answer the question with which I began, “What is turnout?” I would begin by saying that mechanically speaking, it is the activation of the muscles of the body core complemented by the spiraling forward of the inner thighs, aided by the activation of the sole of the foot. On a more conceptual plane, I am visualizing it as something like the opening of a bud into bloom, or the release of a fist into a spread hand, the front body spreading, the back growing soft and supple.

Like most beautiful things, turnout is effort that seems effortless, intention that seems incidental, labor that seems like ease, but in the business of seeming, I think that in some ways it actually becomes. That is what gives a truly great ballet dancer fluidity and weightlessness, and the ability to fully inhabit a character or concept even in the swirl of immensely technically difficult choreography.