Steps: State of the Art

Where is ballet today? Where did it come from? And where is it going? New York City Ballet principal dancer Damian Woetzel offers some ideas in his Aspen Ideas 2006 talk. Discussing and demonstrating ballet technique and repertory, Woetzel lucidly articulates the state of ballet today.

Go to the Fora.tv website to find a higher resolution video that's also downloadable to your iPod.

Steps: Good feet

Hang around balletomanes long enough, and you might wonder if they all have a foot fetish problem. It seems no ballet dancer can escape having their feet judged and commented upon by knowledgeable fans.

And can how we blame them? Great ballet dancers have feet that are as expressive as their hands, and fans have been known to rhapsodize at considerable length about their favorite dancers' feet. So what makes a good ballet foot, and how can we recognize it?

According to this post on Ballet Alert's very interesting and worthwhile Details blog, there are three important factors for a good foot:

1. A high arch
2. A high instep
3. A flexible ankle

While the Details post does an admirable job describing these factors, a picture is worth a thousand words. We've marked up a photo of a very nice foot to better illustrate these points.

In the first picture, the red curve under the foot shows the arch, and the arrow shows the height of the arch from the bottom of the foot if the foot was standing flat against the floor:

The foot's arch

In the dance world, the instep of the foot refers to the top of the foot. The curve following the top of the foot shows the instep, and the arrow shows the height of the instep from the foot's unpointed, flat position:

The foot's instep

Ankle flexibility is the angular range of the foot from the ankle. In the following picture, the angle the foot makes with the leg is compared with the bottom of the heel:

The ankle's flexibility

However, as we hinted earlier, and as the Details post we linked very carefully points out, having a good foot isn't enough. Dancers must also possess the experience, coaching, good taste, physical strength, and about a million other things in order to use their feet to best serve their performance. A good-looking foot is a useful, desirable tool, but it is only a tool.

Dancers on stage are trying to express and project something in their mind to the audience, and it's the dancers' job to figure out how to do that with the tools (ie. the various parts of their body) they have, whether the tools are good, just adequate, or even sometimes unavailable, like when they're dancing with an injury. The best dancers always find a way to do this despite their body, because, with perhaps one exception, no one has a perfect body for ballet.

So now you know what makes a good-looking foot, and you may find yourself watching your next ballet performance from a new perspective as you try to spot the nice feet on-stage and how they're used. And there are still plenty of summer performances left if you're impatient to apply this new knowledge!

Steps: écarté

SSB dancer Alyson Mattoon mentioned below that one of her favorite ballet steps is écarté. Écarté, pronounced "ay-kar-TAY", is a position in which the dancer is lined up on a diagonal of the stage, stands on one leg and extends the other leg to the side. The arm on the same side as the extended leg is held above the head, while the other arm is held to the side.

Two famous ballet excerpts display écarté in its full glory. The first is the beginning of the Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty where Princess Aurora, danced here by Royal Ballet principal Alina Cojocaru, balances en pointe, or on her toes, several times in an écarté position.

The second is the beginning of Giselle's Act II pas de deux in which Giselle unfolds into an écarté position. Bolshoi Ballet principal Svetlana Zakharova demonstrates the position, albeit with a different use of the arms.

Gustafson School of Dance's Assistant Director Nicole Comella likes to go back to écarté's original French meaning of "thrown away" to explain the feeling of the position. For students, she likes to see the upper body stretched and not crunched, as if the various extremities of the dancer are being thrown apart or pulled away in opposite directions.

For the audience, Nicole points out that écarté presents a very flattering view of the dancer, since écarté is aligned with the diagonals of the stage, and lends a three-dimensional texture to the dancer's body. The dancer isn't facing directly front, which can flatten the dancer. Being at a slight angle to the audience, the contours and lines of the dancer's body become better delineated.