How To Dance Ballet
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How To Dance Ballet
Ballet can be a fun and graceful way to keep fit. Take your first baby steps with this instructional video on the basic positions of this extraordinary dance art.
Okay, today, I'm going to show you how to do some ballet steps. I'm going to take you back to your basics and foundations that you need to start any form of ballet technique or training. Hopefully, we have a bar to use.
If not, you can use a chair or a kitchen table in your living room at home. First thing that we need to think about in ballet is turnout. We have generally our feet and our legs in parallel, facing the front this way.
In ballet, we rotate and turn out our legs. The rotation comes from our thighs and they rotate here. So, to find your first position, ballet first position with the feet, we put our legs together in parallel here and we rotate our thighs as you turn out your legs.
From here, the first thing that you ever do in ballet would be a plie, which is a bend and stretch of the legs. So, plie means to bend and we just softly bend and stretch. The other most important thing in ballet that you will learn apart from your plie would be your tendu.
So if I show you with your feet in first position here, a tendu is brushing the foot along the floor to a stretch position and then bringing it back again. So, that's battement tendu and close. And you can do tendus in any position, out to the side and also to the back.
Other positions that you'll start to learn, as well your plies and tendus, would be the arms. The arms are very important here. So, you want to take your arms to a first position which would be opposite your belly button here and a nice curved arm.
Imagine you're holding a big beach ball. You could take your arms to second position, so a little bit wider, not quite out to the sides here and you want a slope from the shoulder down to the forefinger there, and that's second position. Third position with the arms is one on first and one on second.
From there, we can go to fourth position, so we take one arm up and one out to the side and then finally, we have fifth position where both our arms are just in front of our heads there with the palms facing back. And those are your basic positions of the arms in ballet. .