Turnout Happens

Dance training is a gift that keeps on giving. There are the immediate visceral joys of a body engaged, what with the pumping blood and extended muscles and sweating and all, and then there's the surprises, like today.

As per the usual, I went to ballet class and stood at the bar in first position. You know, some plies, tendue, port de bras. Keeping it nice and easy to warm up. I've spent the last couple weeks in ballet trying to focus on turnout. Turnout is what you do in your hip joint, knee, and ankle to create that goofy ballet image, what with the knees pointing to side, the toes pulling backwards and the heel forwards. My latest tactic in this maddeningly futile struggle has just been to spend like five minutes before class pumping myself up: "Oh man your turnout is so awesome!" "Yeah, I know, it just comes naturally" and so on and so forth. We finish the warm-up and there I am facing the bar, looking into the mirror, in first position (which means legs like in the picture). Then I had a moment, my head and body in unison saying something along the lines of "let it happen," and all the tension, all the effort I'd been exerting to turn my damn legs out disappeared. They just went. In all my worry, all the times I've been told "turn out turn out turn out," I was working with superficial muscles in your ass that wrap around your waist and are actually for extension of the leg. I just let it go and suddenly the most basic movements, your plie, your tendue, were aligned in ways that made sense. Awesome. So the feeling is "let it go," but when I finished class my real turnout muscles, the internal ones, were spasming from the exhaustion of actually doing the entirety (more or less) of the work they're supposed to for the very first time.

A good ballet teacher notices stuff like that too, when a student gets a position in a way they didn't before, and they're there to line you back up, firm up the newness of the thing. Next for me to tackle is the connection between shoulder blade and the crest of the pelvis, which is good for keeping the length in the side of your torso which is money for balances.

I've been dancing for long enough to know that this surprise is just the start. Tomorrow I will have to fight and focus once again to find my turnout, and I'll have to rework old habits in movement I'm familiar with, and then maybe three vigilant months from now I'll have it firmly in my both my mental and physical repertory. Because really it's never just one moment, it's part of the process of stretching, every day, of standing at a bar sensitive to what's going on in your body, almost every day, then dreaming about it.

Ballet class reminded me of another movementy thing today--a movement generally doesn't start where it LOOKS like it starts. That's why it's so funny to watch people who haven't been trained in ballet (read, me just a few months ago) actually start to learn. You watch and see, oh sure you kick the leg up high and keep your torso straight, oh sure you balance on one leg and bring the other toe up to the standing knee. But it's just not how it works. The organization, especially in ballet which is so concerned with looking effortless, comes first. To balance with one leg on demi-pointe (that means standing on the ball of your foot) and the other in passe, first you have to arrange the ankle joint, adductors of the leg (inner thigh muscles), oblique and straight abdominals and pretty much everything else into a powerful line of support extending all the way from the floor to the top of your spine. THEN the other leg can come off the floor without disturbing the body.

Aight gonna go try and figure some stuff out about my lower legs and feet.