Ballet for Standard dancers

I am considering taking a beginning ballet class to improve posture, allignment, flexibility, balance, and foot strength. The ballet dancers I know believe ballet will surely be beneficial; however, the ballroom dancers I talked to have suggested that they were able to benefit more from using their time to develop ballroom technique than they did from ballet. A few even told me that they found ballet to be detrimental (because of poise, turnout, etc.) to their ballroom dancing. Would ballet be a useful adjunct for a male Standard dancer or should I spend my time on ballroom technique, specifically?

vcolfari said:

I am considering taking a beginning ballet class to improve posture, allignment, flexibility, balance, and foot strength. The ballet dancers I know believe ballet will surely be beneficial; however, the ballroom dancers I talked to have suggested that they were able to benefit more from using their time to develop ballroom technique than they did from ballet. A few even told me that they found ballet to be detrimental (because of poise, turnout, etc.) to their ballroom dancing. Would ballet be a useful adjunct for a male Standard dancer or should I spend my time on ballroom technique, specifically?

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I also want to know the answer.

I would not suggest doing ballet, if you are doing standard and are a female. First of all, in ballet they try to always be on one foot or the other, in standard a lady should always dance between feet. Second in ballet they work against gravity and standard you should work with gravity. Depending on what school of thought you follow there might also be a problem with the use of muscles. If you follow the Square or the Body system, you should have the muscles be as relaxed as possible. The Traditional and the Round system does use similar muscle tone as ballet. The final problem with ballet is the turn out of the legs and feet. That kind of action is not used often in Standard. I would suggest doing pilates for all the schools of thought and
Tai Chi for the Square and Body Schools.

Happy dancing

Dancepro, what are the Square & Body systems vs the Traditional & Round systems? It sounds like I'm being taught one of the former, and I've noticed others have a different orienation.

Where are these defined and detailed?

As a male dancer you should stay away from ballet as the posture of a male standard dancer is totally different then a ballet dancer. The way you should carry the upper back and your arms are very, very different. If you do want to get some basic information and technique of basic posture you could do some Alexander Technique classes. It is good to look at other ways to get information and clarity. Don't get obsessive about it though, you want to be a good standard dancer so focus you main attention on that.

There was two articles written about the different schools of though in "Dance Notes" of November/December and again in the March/April issue (It think). It was Christine Zona interviewing Maja Serve.

dancepro said:

First of all, in ballet they try to always be on one foot or the other, in standard a lady should always dance between feet.

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I strongly disagree about the transfer of weight in standard. Achieving the full character of the dances requires learning to aim the movements with precision, so that when you go onto a foot you can go cleanly and completely onto it without reservation. If you have to use partial weight on your moving foot to control your body movement or timing, then there's something more fundamentally wrong with the habits of body movement that will need to be fixed first.

It's true that there shouldn't be any visible "bump" as you come onto a step, but that's achieved by perfectly timing when you have to commit the body weight to a foot so that you can land softly, not by indistinctly blurring the weight from one foot to the other. Also just because you've moved your weight off a foot doesn't mean that you should retract the foot yet - there's a time to commit to the new foot, and a different time to start withdrawing the old one. The delay between leaving a foot and moving it often creates an important part of the body position - stretching away from that departed leg inflecting the shape of the upper body in a small but important way. But it's still a leg that has been departed.

It's so much easier to dance with a partner when you can tell exactly where their weight balance is. Even if it's not where you hoped it would have gone, knowing the truth gives you something you can work with. In fact, it's important to be able to feel the instant when your partner's balance has moved beyond their standing foot - to know when they are irrevocably committed to movement. One might think that by staying between the feet you preserve options, but standard isn't about preserving options - it's about clearly declaring an intent, fully going for it with both your body weight and your partners, and then working forward from whatever you actually got.

I took ballet for a number of years while dancing Standard, and so long as you can keep straight what is appropriate for each discipline I think it's helpful. It helped to strengthen my feet, ankles, and knees -- all very important for dancing in general. It also gave me a place to experiment with feeling and using my core. In fact, I've been thinking for a while about going back to ballet because I feel my feet and ankles were stronger when I was going to ballet class twice a week.

The main potential problem to watch out for would be the turnout, which is desirable in ballet - and to some extent in latin - but generally not in ballroom.

I think that for a beginner, ballet classes could help with posture. I don't see the desired posture as that much different - or rather, I see the range of postures that different people use as having a lot of overlap. I agree that carriage of the arms is different, but that shouldn't be too hard to keep straight.

Laura has a point that ballet instruction seems to recognize the importance of foot and leg strength; this tends to be neglected in ballroom instruction, perhaps because there is so much more technique to learn.

I have a suspicion that the reason ballet is kind of the foundation technique for most formal study of performance dance isn't that it's necessarily the most suitable set of techniques (and actually, I'm guessing there's probably a lot of departure from ballet technique as each dance form gains its own legitimacy), but instead simply because ballet posses a complete and fully developed language and tradition of structured study.

So what I see Warren or Laura recommended from ballet is ultimately to take advantage of the fact that people expect ballet to be about drilling details of body usage in front of a mirror, while they don't expect that in ballroom. But if you could get that kind of rigorous body training focused on ballroom, that would probably be better than borrowing it from a different dance that will do some key things differently.

There is a big difference between the man's technique and the lady's technique. A famous teacher by the name Benny Tolmeyer always said "The man dances from foot to foot and the lady dances between feet". There will be a conflict between the man and the lady if they do the same. It would be the same as if you were two people serving at the same time in tennis. In tennis there is one person serving (in dancing the man) and one person receiving (in dancing the lady). As the man has the right to change the timing, direction and the step at any time it would not be good for the lady to be on one foot or the other. Of course if she knows the step and he never changes the timing, direction and step it would be possible to be on one or the other foot. My partner never danced routines. He would dance whatever he felt like at that movement. We would never have made it if I had been on one foot or the other.

dancepro said:

There is a big difference between the man's technique and the lady's technique. A famous teacher by the name Benny Tolmeyer always said "The man dances from foot to foot and the lady dances between feet". There will be a conflict between the man and the lady if they do the same.

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True, but sometimes I will send her to arrive before me, and sometimes I will send me to arrive before her. In either case, whoever comes second has to adapt to the foot position that their partner has committed to. Forward half of turn- she has to match me. Backward half, I have to match her - not perhaps to the same dramatic degree, but I still must accomodate my partner.

As the man has the right to change the timing, direction and the step at any time it would not be good for the lady to be on one foot or the other.

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I would disagree that I have the right to make fundamental changes at 'any' time. Instead, I found that learning to lead well was largely about learning to recognize the opportunities when I could change something, and that once these had passed I then had to live with the results of my decision and my partner's interpretation of it. It's true that I will sometimes give up on a particular try at executing something because the pre-requisite doesn't seem to have been achieved, even when I probably could still "muscle" us through to the desired result. But instead I'd rather change to an alternate figure that is naturally suggested by where we've ended up.

The idea of specific opportunities to inflect the movement, and then having to go with the results, also ties in quite closely with the structure of the characteristic figures of the swing dances. Typically, CBM on one (decision point) produces new line of movement on three. Yes, there's some ability to fine-tune things once they are under way, and for the more skilled dancers, possibilities to entrain the movement in a more continuous change (like driving the CBM around a curve in the actual CBM step rather that taking it in the pre-existing direction). But still, as a general guideline, I find the kind of setup and then follow through structure of the characteristic figures to suggest a very sound fundamental habit of how to move.

Obviously any reserve capacity to patch up differences in foot placement is a great asset, but I prefer to aim the movements in a way that's going to minimize the need for this. It's kind of like saying, if I have a bowling bowling ball on a string, and I launch it into this swing, then if I want to stay with it I'll have to move my own body this way. Obviously my partner has a lot more skill than that, but if I send her in such a way that her center follows the path that the bowling ball would have, and am prepared to accomodate that in my body, then she's going to have an easier time of things than if I launch us with less decisive clarity of intent and expect her to make up the difference in flight.

My partner never danced routines. He would dance whatever he felt like at that movement. We would never have made it if I had been on one foot or the other.

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Until quite recently, I did not compete fixed routines either, instead preferring a dance that evolved more naturally, one figure connected to another in the moment rather than on paper. I've moved away from that to expand the variety of my repertoire, and do stick to the plan to a greater degree even if it no longer seems the best choice from the current situation, but ultimately, when quality of dance rather than competitiveness of presentation is at issue, I'd go back to the idea of committing to decisions and accepting the consequences by developing the variations that they suggest as they unfold. In short, I suggest a lot when leading, but I also do a *lot* of following in order to work with what I get.

I think we are getting a little side track here. The question was whether ballet was good for standard dancers. I will still keep to my points that it is not the best as many things can't be brought across. This is just my opinion and my advise. You can take it how ever you want. Just writing from a little bit of experience.

dancepro said:

posture of a male standard dancer is totally different then a ballet dancer.

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Really?

The way you should carry the upper back and your arms are very, very different.

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Really???

Maybe you can explain what you mean by posture and by carrying your upper back and arms, because most things I've ever heard in both ballroom and ballet transfers very well from one to the other: use of the core to hold yourself up, use of the back to hold up the arms, use of legs and feet, grounding, epaulement as a good model of the poise, etc., etc., etc.

Everything on DF gets sidetracked. It looked to me as if everyone was pretty much in agreement that ballet was not the ideal source of training. Even if there are some interesting differences of opinion as to exactly why, the common message would probably be "because it's not targeted to the particular needs of ballroom".

The more interesting question might then be, what opportunities for ballroom-targeted body training of comparable rigor to the ballet tradition exist? There seems to be very little of this consistently offered in the kind of accessible, habitual, announced manner that would be needed to make a large scale difference in the ballroom community - instead, when the key ideas get effectively communicated, it's from a notable teacher to a handful of students, or even one idea every few months from a visiting teacher to a local community.