Big Strike

So, there is a movement in ballet called grande battement, in which one leg kicks as high as possible to the front, to the side, or backwards. Turned out and straight with the foot pointed, of course. The rest of the body, to the audience, looks entirely undisturbed. For the dancer this means a shitload of work in organizing the weight and supporting musculature over the standing leg. I am a big fan of grande battement.

Basically what is happening (when performed to the front or the side) is there are a lot muscles in and around the hip joint going into intense flexion. Dancers of the classical/modern tradition invariably have a lot of tension in this area (hip flexors and their compatriots). Abdominals, both straight and oblique, are somewhat tensed to maintain the length of the torso on both sides and to cushion the impact to the hip joint of the standing leg.

Now, the body is structured for efficiency. It knows that when one joint goes into flexion, probably there are more joints that need to go into flexion. Think squatting, or cowering, or shielding yourself from the rain, crouching, crawling, sitting, etc. So when you start learning grande battement, your body suggests to your shoulders, your hands, your other leg, elbow joints dot dot dot that they contract. This is contrary to the dancer's goals. This is also where I talk again about the surprising utility of imagery.

Whenever a teacher talks about movement related to grand battement, they focus on the muscles paired opposite the hip flexors, which necessarily become relaxed so the leg can stretch high. You talk about energy being sent downwards, instead of focusing on the upwards movement of the leg. You imagine length of the lower spine, weightlessness of the leg, and the shoulders falling downwards. It's like trying to forget that the iliapsoas is working like hell to pick the leg up, that the quadraceps are flexed to extend the knee joint, the calves to extend the ankle joint. All these things, your mind molds into the sensation of an airy arc extending out from your strongly grounded center so you can keep your port de bras (carriage of the arms) and neck relaxed, extended, and effortless-looking.

Dance training sometimes feels like one of those metal puzzles with lots of pieces linked together. You adjust one part and it prevents three other parts from moving, but then you adjust this other way and two parts are free and rotatable but still stuck to the whole. You learn to isolate and organize, when to be gentle and careful with a muscle group, when you need to throw force abruptly. And things are tangled up to an absolutely unbelievable extent, and everybody's different. Flexing my toes upwards, for example, tends to make me perform the analogous movement with my right hand, while my Polish friend can't swing his arms in backwards circles without pulling the muscles on the side of his nose up.

So, whether you're aware of it or not, every waking moment you are orchestrating a massively complicated operation with alarming connections and potentials. Yee-haw.