Has it really been six months?

After some gaps due to spikes in the pandemic, I've settled into a regular routine of two to three classes a week. My school's records say I've taken almost 50 classes thus far this calendar year.

Like many who have taken up ballet as adults, the instruction I've received has been anything but well-structured. Adult ballet classes often include students ranging from years of dancing to those with no experience at all. If an instructor spends too much time teaching basic steps to the newbies, the more experienced students will get bored and stop attending. So the newbies generally learn by jumping in and hoping desperately that they can figure it out.

The skill levels of the instructors also vary. I learned the basics back in the mid 1980s, and I have no idea what our instructor's qualifications were. When I returned to ballet in 2011 (11 years ago? gulp!) our instructor had just graduated from university with a degree in dance education, but her primary dance style was not ballet (I discovered she was clueless about pointe work when one of the students showed up with a pair that fortunately didn't fit). The result of this is that I feel like I got short-changed on many of the fundamentals.

My current instructors are top-notch, and do their best to address the shortcomings in my training. I've made it clear to all of them that I want whatever corrections they can give, but there's only so much they can do in the context of a class with 20 other students. To address this, I made inquiries about getting some individual instruction. While supportive of my interest, no one at my current school has time in their schedules for private lessons. Finally, I arranged to take some classes with a retired professional dancer who also manages a different ballet school.

One of my problem areas is petit allegro. In the normal sequence of a ballet class this comes near the end, just before grand allegro. By this point I'm usually tired and mentally overloaded, which is not the ideal time to be learning something physical. So for my first private lesson I asked to concentrate on glissades, petit jetés, and other small jumps. It was exhausting but I think it helped, especially with linking phrases together without the mental hard-stop between phrases I'd found myself doing.

Another of my problems has been turns. I've been fighting with some postural issues I blame on spending 40 years sitting at a desk, slaving over a hot keyboard. This, I believe, has been causing me to stand with a posterior pelvic tilt, which throws off my balance. A classmate friend recommended her chiropractor, whose practice has included some big-name ballet dancers. He's done an amazing job in a very short time, though there has been some vile cursing of his lineage involved.

The thing is, when one part of your posture is wrong, other parts of your body compensates. Fixing one problem means the compensations have to be unlearned, and for several weeks my attempts at pirouettes and other turns were inconsistent, to say the least. My second private lesson added some work on pirouettes en dehors which helped somewhat.

 A couple of weeks ago, one of my instructors commented that I was holding my arms too close to my body in first, especially in my turns. Correcting this also brought my upper body a tiny bit further forward. Suddenly, unexpectedly, my pirouette problems seemed to go away. For several classes in a row, I was as balanced at the end of a turn as I was at the beginning. Left or right, en dedans or en dehors, from fourth or fifth, landing in fourth or fifth, it didn't matter. I even managed a slightly sloppy double before class today, marred mostly by not spotting very well.

Yay?

Then came the turns combination part of today's class. Somehow, during the pirouette en dedans to the right (clockwise), my left foot got caught on my right calf as I brought it up to retiré, and I nearly fell on my face. I can't remember the last time I tripped over my own feet. The other three turns were clean. What happened? I figured it was a fluke.

We repeated the combination, and to my shock I did it again, on the same turn, though I caught myself earlier. Again, the other three turns (both en dehor, and the en dedans to the left) were clean. Great, I've broken my one of my turns again.

Onward to the petit allegro combination! Today was the "real" Beginner II class, so the combinations were relatively simple: glissade, petit jeté, coupé, temps levé, pas de bourée, glissade, assemblé, échappé and back to fifth, and rest. Then repeat the other way. Before I started working on linking phrases I would often get stuck part way through, often with my weight on the foot I needed to move next. Today, though, I got all the way through fairly cleanly. I recognized points where I could greatly improve, but I'm definitely happy with my progress.