Guys, my feet hurt D:
Pointe shoes may be pretty, but they hurt a lot and are dangerous. It’s important to have the right technique in order to not get hurt.
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| Ouchies |
This past week has been filled with choreographing and marking steps (doing the steps with the music but not full out), but not much actually dancing. At first I was inclined to just put my pointe shoes on and start turning and jumping, but then I realized how dangerous that is. The original song is 150 beats per minute (bpm). That comes out to 2.5 beats per second. Fast beat + not warming up = recipe for disaster.
One of the things that I always forget to do, especially when the song is fast, is roll down from en pointe. Every week in class, my ballet teacher with her cute little Hungarian accent can be heard yelling, "Roll down!" (She rolls her r's too and it's the cutest thing ever.)
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| Rolling up and down from pointe |
These little nuances are easy to pick out to a trained dancer’s eye. There’s no way a random person off the street could ever pose as a ballerina and expect to sneak one past trained professionals. Unfortunately, this actually happened in Free People’s recent advertisement.
Watch here how she has completely the wrong technique. She doesn’t have the ankle strength to even get up on her box, and she tries to compensate and save her balance by pushing her hips forward. Again, recipe for disaster.
However, Under Armour did it right. They hired professional dancer and ballet prodigy Misty Copeland to do their ad. She looked amazing and impressed the audience, all while being safe and not breaking her ankles. Watch the video here.
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| My scanner broke oops |
Basically, my main point(e) is DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Although professionals make it look easy, it is not and you could get seriously injured. Besides, who would want to buy a $100 pair of shoes just to play around in them?
And now back to the choreography. I’m pretty much done the song (30 seconds left), and my notation makes sense and is readable (at least to me). Stay tuned for a video of it next week!
~Nicole
Resources:
www.theballetblog.com
www.weheartit.com/entry/69593715
Ouch! You are very brave. There is no way i would be able to tolerate that kind of pain, and still look good while doing it. I see now that ballet seems to be a mixture of art and sport. Just like in lacrosse which i play it is important to warm up to avoid injuries. While i was reading i was unsure what en pointe was. You mentioned that 150bpm was way too fast what is a more suitable tempo for someone just starting out.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jay! Dancing en pointe is a form of ballet that usually only advanced female ballerinas do. Dancers wear special shoes that enable them to stand all the way on the tips of their toes instead of standing on the balls of their feet (so basically pointe shoes allow dancers to stand higher than tippy-toes). Usually in dance we don't talk about bpm, but I knew it from my musical history and because I had to transcribe the piece. Most of the songs we dance to in class range from adagio to allegro (about 66 to 168 bpm). However, songs that fall in the allegro range are usually only used for exercises and aren't performed on a stage, since dancing that fast for a long time could really leave you winded.
DeleteFirst of all: it amazes me just how much vocabulary a dancer must know (from your choreography notes. Second: I didn't know how much there was to dancing en pointe. I knew you have to wait until you are at a certain level, but I always forget how dangerous they can actually be! Hope your feet don't suffer too much from this project!
ReplyDeleteLuckily for me, most of the ballet vocab is in French, and I take French. Later in the dance, there are more steps with English names. These tend to be on the jazzier side (Jazz the dance, not the music. They're completely different). Even if I don't know the name, I can just sorta make it up because nobody really needs to read them but me :) As for my feet... my little toes are currently wrapped up in so much tape (to prevent blisters) that they look like mummies!
DeleteI see that I get a little sneak peak into your dance from reading your notes - sometimes I forget that ballet terms are all in French and therefore are a different language...after a while, you just know immediately what a chasse or releve is! I think it might interesting for readers to see how much time goes into a simple two-three minute dance. All the way from sewing your pointe shoes, to warming up, marking, and rehearsing over and over again. Dance is similar to music, in that so much work (and pain!) goes into making something look beautiful and effortless. A glimpse into the process might help non-dancers appreciate just how much work you put into your craft :)
ReplyDeleteI love that ballet is in French because that makes learning vocab for French class that much easier ;) I've been filming the steps of my process for the past couple weeks, and I plan on editing it together for my vlog once everything is completed. I want to be able to tell the full story of choreographing a piece instead of telling it in pieces. Thanks for the suggestion!
DeleteKudos to you for doing this! Like a lot of things, a lot of us don't realize how much work goes into something to create a sort of product. (I can definitely relate!) I honestly can't even imagine the amount of pain you guys go through, that must be so tough to want to practice doing something but for it to hurt so much.
ReplyDeleteAlso, we've talked about this before, but people acting like they know what they're doing in advertisements and things when they really don't are quite funny. I love coming across stock photos of people playing violins that don't have strings or bridges on them!
Thanks Catelyn! Those stock photos are the funniest things ever! They're funny when it comes to dance too, but not when the dancer is wearing pointe shoes. There are plenty of serious injuries that could result from the improper use of pointe shoes.
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