- I'm Joy Womack, a professional ballerina.
Today, we are gonna go
through the different levels of ballet.
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In the interest of time, we're gonna be focusing on turns.
The fouette sequence in Swan Lake.
It is seen as a step that shows your mastery
and your control.
I would pick Swan Lake as a representative
of the culminative challenges
of being a principal ballerina.
As a disclaimer, this is my interpretation of complexity.
Level one, plie.
A plie is a building block of our technique.
It basically means in French, to bend,
so it could be a bending of the knee,
a bending of the ankle, but in this case
we're gonna start in our five positions.
It's important for the plies
to keep your heels on the ground
and be able to feel your pinky toes pushing into the floor.
The plie is the foundation of ballet
because you can't jump, you can't turn,
and you can't move without being able to bend your knees
in an outward, turned out position.
Level two, tendu.
The tendu starts with their feet
in first position or in fifth position
and you brush along the floor moving through the demi-pointe
or bending of the toes, stretch the toes completely
and then back to the position from where you started.
Level three, alignment.
In any movement that we're gonna do next,
you're gonna always have to think about your hips
and your shoulders on the same line.
We are not only thinking of body alignment,
we wanna be able to dance so
that our audience can see all parts of our body
and we can use the space in a way that makes sense.
So we have what we call in ballet, efface or en face.
We also have ecarte,
and these are all the different movements
and different planes that we work in.
When I'm doing my passe, I like to really think
about the back of my thigh pressing to the back of the room,
and I feel like that keeps me stable
and helps me really rotate from the inner parts of my hip.
Lots of things can go wrong in the passe.
You can fall down towards your knee,
you have to keep it up high
and you can't let your foot cross over your knee as well.
You have to be able to stand on one leg instead
of two legs and be able to use your knee
and your feet joints to be able to then go
onto the more difficult steps that come after it.
Level five, attitude.
What it means is basically a bent leg.
I try to think about lifting the knee up
and trying to turn out the foot as much as I can
to keep it in that straight line.
In the world of classical ballet,
and this is definitely arguable,
we have three main schools of dance.
With the French school of the attitude,
the foot and the knee are almost perpendicular
to each other.
And in the American school it's slightly similar
but the leg is lifted higher.
And then the Russian school being the most extreme.
And the reason why I have it here is
because the things that you can do with turning
in an attitude position make it more complex
than some of the levels that we've had.
You need extreme balance control
in order to turn in this position of attitude.
Level six, arabesque.
This is the graduation of passe, tendu, attitude.
You have to be able to turn out your legs
and then you have to be able to hold that position.
There are officially four different arabesques.
So you have first arabesque, second arabesque,
third arabesque, and fourth arabesque.
Either second arabesque or fourth arabesque
can be the hardest because your body
is in such extreme twisting positions
and your eyes and your arms and your port de bras all has
to be connected to make this movement
that it seems so simple but is so complex.
Let's look at a sequence.
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Level seven, developpe.
Start from your fifth position.
You pull your foot up through the passe
and then you lift your heel forward
and then you're lifting your leg over 90 degrees.
You have to be so stable on your standing hip
and be able to bring your foot forward
while not letting your hips fall forward
which we're going back to our alignment.
And you can do this developpe at various levels and speed.
This is when you use your artistry to then be able
to go into the center and tell a story.
Level eight, grand battement.
Grand battement here is a huge throwing of the leg,
the 180 degrees or your maximum amount of strength.
So flexibility is imperative here,
certainly a hundred percent you need the splits
and then you also need a strong, stable, supporting leg.
You have to be able to move and use your body
and the grand battement helps you train for your jumps.
So I've placed it after the attitude and after the passe
on purpose because it's a very dynamic movement.
Level nine, en pointe.
Pointe is a very special skill
where you have to be able to hold all of your positions
to be able to dance, do your attitude,
do your tendus, on a platform that's this small.
So it is something that you really have to love
in order to commit to being en pointe
and it actually is destructive
to your body to be on pointe shoes.
So that is one of the reasons why I put it here.
Level 10, spotting.
This is the secret to balance
and the secret to dynamic momentum.
This is a technique where we use our eyes,
we face forward, we pick one place
and we turn our eyes as much as we can,
finding that spot, the same exact place
that we were just before.
Level 11, chaine turn.
Now we're really getting into the technique
of how to do turns.
It actually means chain,
so it means one thing after another.
We start a chaine turn with our legs in tendu
and one of our arms out.
Make a half turn where we go into a second position
and then we go back into a first position.
You do that in succession and you add speed
and then all of a sudden you have a sequence
of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Level 12, pirouette.
A pirouette is a full rotation
that you do from a fixed position,
either fifth position, fourth position, or second position.
You wanna take the space with the middle finger
and you wanna have the second arm push
and come and meet the first arm.
You wanna keep everything on the same plane,
keeping your arms strong,
and then your standing arms strong
and then you wanna spot and keep it
and then finish very nicely.
There are so many different ways to start a pirouette
depending on where you are in the world
and what school of dance that you're going through.
So the French, the Russian, and the American way,
they all have a different takeoff and landing position.
Let's look at a sequence.
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Level 13, expression.
Expression entails being able to convince and portray
to the audience the emotion that you have inside
and make that something that is physical and understandable.
The reason why I put it in this order
is it can be actually really difficult
to find the right expression for the right movement.
For example, Swan Lake, the save movement
with the arms can be either sad
or it can be sharp and contrasting and dynamic as well.
Some people argue that you can't teach expression.
I believe that you can.
It's something that is passed down
through a relationship between a teacher and a student.
And it's an ability to build trust
between your teacher and yourself to find something
that's inside of you and then be able to replicate that
and put that into your body and make it seem organic.
Level 14, glissade.
Now we're moving onto the jumps.
Now we're leaving the floor.
We have to go from our fifth position, use our tendu,
use our dynamic strength from the grand battement.
So the glissade has to be a sharp movement
and the feet have to leave the floor at the same time,
stay up in the air and then close at the same time.
Often the glissade, you turn out either the leg
that's going first or the leg that's coming in,
so then it looks very turned in or sickled.
Or you plie and you leave one leg
and then you leave the floor only for one second
and then the second leg comes up.
You really wanna be able to have a moment in the air
with two legs pointed and then two legs in fifth position.
The glissade is so important
for being able to have nice connecting steps.
So you have to be able to do your pambe pas de bra glissade.
So those are all different steps which are gonna lead
to our next level.
Petit allegro is super complicated
and you need a lot of coordination from your upper body,
your port de bras, and your lower legs
to be able to do this quick movement
and give the audience an impression
that it's super light and super easy.
You have to be able to keep your ribs in
and your body not going up and down
and you have to keep everything
in one place while using your arms
and making the movements that you're doing very quickly
with your feet, seem light and fast.
Level 16, entrechat or beats.
So now that we've talked about petite allegro
you can then complicate
that petite allegro by adding a beat.
So an example of some of those beats would be
an entrechat quatre or an entrechat six.
A few tips that I try to think about
when I do my entrechat quatre or my entrechat six
is trying to change the leg first
to really try to get that first beat
because the next beats will come easier.
If you're late to get the first beat,
oftentimes you don't arrive with the right foot
in the end in the position.
Level 17, cabriole.
Now we've talked about beats.
Now we've talked about petit allegro.
Now we've talked about quickness.
A cabriole is a larger jump
which you need your grand battement for.
You take off, you brush the leg up to a grand battement
and your bottom leg has to meet the top leg
and then come down back into fifth position.
It's a great example of a jump that can be a small jump,
a medium jump, or a large jump.
Level 18 is our tour en l'air.
It's a full rotation, it's an actual turn in the air,
tour en l'air, and then you land in fifth position.
For the men, that's often a double turn in the air.
For the woman, it's normally a single turn,
even though I've done it in Diana and Actaeon.
I've done it double assemble
and it takes extreme coordination that you have
from your pirouette to be able to get around.
It's really important to keep your alignment in line.
You have to have such quick coordination for it.
I would recommend
that dancers really use their spotting technique
for the tour en l'air.
If you lose your spot, it's very hard to make the rotation.
Level 19, pas de chat or saut de chat.
What I think of a grand pas de chat
is a big jump in a split.
You really want to try to get your knee up
as high as you can so that your back leg can get up
as high as it can.
You have several different iterations of a pas de chat
and that means different things to different people.
They call this jump the step of the cat
because you have to have a very nice and light landing.
If you've ever seen a cat try to jump onto something,
they jump and arrive there at the same time.
Level 28, grand allegro.
This is now all that we've done before,
put together to explosive music,
and it is very exciting to watch.
The grand allegro requires a ton of stamina
and a ton of musicality.
If you can't hear the music, you can be seen
as being heavy or behind, and you have to have coordination
with the music and with your body to be able
to give the impression that it's super light
and that it's super easy for you to do.
For me, it's a moment in the class
that I have time to dance for myself.
So often my expression shines through
whether I'm feeling funny or sad or excited.
All of those emotions can be showcased in a grand allegro.
Level 21 is our fouettes
So you start with a pirouette
and you're doing a rond de jambe out to the side
and then you're pulling in for a pirouette to your passe.
You have to have extreme stamina of your supporting leg,
extreme coordination, and then you have to use spot.
This is performed at the very culmination,
the very end of the pas de deux
to showcase the ballerina's prowess,
the ballerinas technical mastery.
It can go wrong so fast.
If you don't have a spot, you're gonna fly off to the side.
It's a culmination of not being able
to give in to feeling tired
and then also finishing with showing the audience that
that was just very easy for you.
Let's look at a sequence.
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I know that ballet can seem
like it's something otherworldly and unattainable,
but dance and ballet is actually for every single person
and I would challenge the audience members
who enjoy this video to go out
and find an adult beginner class.
It doesn't matter if you don't do things perfectly.
We all are on a constant search for perfection
but perfection doesn't exist,
so just be the best self you can be and enjoy dancing.
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