How Ballet Can Change Your Life

Chronic pain can become so routine that you hardly notice it after a time. Any change to that routine, however small, can be so dynamically exciting that you feel like a beam of sunshine radiates through your bones, instilling warmth and hope where before there was a grim acceptance slowly spiraling into futility.

Sometimes all you need is a great dance class to (literally) lift your spirits.

Faced with having to leave dance behind forever, my determination has kicked into hyperdrive. Looking to people like my mother and my dancer friends - who have overcome seemingly impossible odds to keep doing what they love - I've found inspiration to work my way back into ballet, painstakingly reshaping my muscles, sinew by sinew. Through the grace of a few classes of smaller size, combined with particularly attentive instructors, I've realized that my back and hip injuries are not as dauntingly untreatable as western medicine considered them to be. By breaking some very bad dance habits, the injuries keeping me from auditions can actually be avoided by others and perhaps even resolved in my case.

Courtesy of Wesley at Steps, and Koppel at BDC, these critical tips have given me new agency, and I urge other dancers to employ them as soon as possible to avoid injury!

• In posse, pull the heel up toward the nose (this focus helps you to engage the hamstring and to prevent over engaging the quads)
• Lead with the heel for almost every movement in ballet. Do NOT grip the quad or the hip flexor, because this causes grinding and forces an unnatural turn out.
• Improve turn out by working to connect the backs of the heels. Squeeze the inner thighs together.
• Pull up out of the hip with the upper body, pull away from the pelvis with the lower body. Initiate every movement (plie, degage, grand plie, tendue, developpe, etc) from the heels
• In fifth position, the weight needs to be slightly forward, and distributed equally in the balls of the feet without gripping the toes (this guy can improve the way you walk for ever!). **One should be able to releve by lifting the heels easily from fifth if this balance is attained**
• To attain the perfect plie: do NOT lead with the knees. Instead, press the heels down into the floor, engaging the dorsal muscles of the leg. Press down into the ground with the heels to return from plie, the rest of the leg will follow!

Anyone who, like me, has been taught to tuck their pelvis probably has some extensive gripping in the hip tendons. Or extreme flexibility that is not healthfully supported by adequate muscle tone. These pearls of wisdom from my teachers have revolutionized the way I stand, move, and dance. Here's hoping that the addition of Alexander Technique to my regimen will make the lasting change I need.

Alvin Ailey auditions are in two weekends!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XezU_P7vGx4