Name: 「バレエ」の技を21のレベルで実演 | Levels | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-03-12T09:50:40.000Z
Duration: 13 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm Joy Womack, a professional ballerina.

Today, we are going to go through the different levels of ballet.

Future continuous

In the interest of time, we're going to be focusing on turns.

The fouetté sequence in Swan Lake, it is seen as a step that shows your mastery and your control.

I would pick Swan Lake as a representative of the culmative challenges of being a principal ballerina.

As a disclaimer, this is my interpretation of complexity.

A plié is a building block of our technique.

So it could be a bending of the knee, a bending of the ankle, but in this case, we're going to start in our five positions.

It's important for the pliés to keep your heels on the ground and be able to feel your pinky toes pushing into the floor.

The plié is the foundation of ballet because you can't jump, you can't turn, and you can't move without being able to bend your knees in an outward, turned-out position.

The tendu starts with your feet in first position or in fifth position, and you brush along the floor, moving through the demi-pointe or bending of the toes to stretch the toes completely, and then back to the position from where you started.

In any movement that we're going to do next, you're going to always have to think about your hips and your shoulders on the same line.

We are not only thinking of body alignment, we want to be able to dance so that our audience can see all parts of our body and we can use the space in a way that makes sense.

So we have what we call in ballet a passé, or en face.

We also have a quartet, and these are all the different movements and different planes that we work in.

I like to really think about the back of my thigh pressing to the back of the room, and I feel like that keeps me stable and helps me really rotate from the inner parts of my hip.

Lots of things can go wrong in the passé.

You have to keep it up high, and you can't let your foot cross over your knee as well.

You have to be able to stand on one leg instead of two legs and be able to use your knee and your feet joints to be able to then go on to the more difficult steps that come after it.

I try to think about lifting the knee up and trying to turn out the foot as much as I can to keep it in that straight line.

In the world of classical ballet, and this is definitely arguable, we have three main schools of dance with the French school of the attitude.

The foot and the knee are almost perpendicular to each other, and in the American school, it's slightly similar, but the leg is lifted higher, and then the Russian school being the most extreme.

And the reason why I have it here is because the things that you can do with turning in an attitude position make it more complex than some of the levels that we've had.

You need extreme balance control in order to turn in this position of attitude.

This is the graduation of passe, tendu, attitude.

You have to be able to turn out your legs, and then you have to be able to hold that position.

There are officially four different arabesques.

So you have first arabesque, second arabesque, third arabesque, and fourth arabesque.

Either second arabesque or fourth arabesque can be the hardest because your body is in such extreme twisting positions, and your eyes and your arms and your port de bras all has to be connected to make this movement that it seems so simple, but it's so complex.

["Petite Chanson Nocturne No. 1 in A minor"] ["Petite Chanson Nocturne No. 1 in A minor"]

You pull your foot up through the passe, and then you lift your heel forward, and then you're lifting your leg over 90 degrees.

You have to be so stable on your standing hip and be able to bring your foot forward while not letting your hips fall forward, which we're going back to our alignment.

And you can do this développé at various levels and speed.

This is when you use your artistry to then be able to go into the center and tell a story.

Grand battement here is a huge throwing of the leg, the 180 degrees, or your maximum amount of strength.

And then you also need a strong, stable, supporting leg.

You have to be able to move and use your body, and the grand battement helps you train for your jumps.

So I've placed it after the attitude and after the passe on purpose because it's a very dynamic movement.

Pointe is a very special skill where you have to be able to hold all of your positions to be able to dance, do your attitude, do your tendus on a platform that's this small.

So it is something that you really have to love in order to commit to being en pointe.

And it actually is destructive to your body to be en pointe shoes.

So that is one of the reasons why I put it here.

This is the secret to balance and the secret to dynamic momentum.

This is a technique where we use our eyes.

We face forward, we pick one place, and we turn our eyes as much as we can, finding that spot, the same exact place that we were just before.

Now we're really getting into the technique of how to do turns.

We start a chaine turn with our legs in tendu and one of our arms out.

Make a half turn where we go into a second position and then we go back into a first position.

You do that in succession and you add speed.

And then all of a sudden you have a sequence of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

A pirouette is a full rotation that you do from a fixed position, either fifth position, fourth position, or second position.

You want to take the space with the middle finger and you want to have the second arm push and come and meet the first arm.

You want to keep everything on the same plane, keeping your arm strong and then your standing arm strong.

And then you want to spot and keep it and then finish very nicely.

There are so many different ways to start a pirouette depending on where you are in the world and what school of dance that you're going through.

So the French, the Russian, and the American way, they all have a different takeoff and landing position.

Expression entails being able to convince and portray to the audience the emotion that you have inside and make that something that is physical and understandable.

The reason why I put it in this order is it can be actually really difficult to find the right expression for the right movement.

For example, Swan Lake, the save movement with the arms can be either sad or it can be sharp and contrasting and dynamic as well.

Some people argue that you can't teach expression.

It's something that is passed down through a relationship between a teacher and a student.

And it's an ability to build trust between your teacher and yourself to find something that's inside of you and then be able to replicate that and put that into your body and make it seem organic.

We have to go from our fifth position, use our tendu, use our dynamic strength from the grand battement.

So the glissade has to be a sharp movement and the feet have to leave the floor at the same time, stay up in the air, and then close at the same time.

Often the glissade, you turn out either the leg that's going first or the leg that's coming in.

So then it looks very turned in or sickled.

Or you plie and you leave one leg and then you leave the floor only for one second and then the second leg comes up.

You really wanna be able to have a moment in the air with two legs pointed and then two legs in fifth position.

The glissade is so important for being able to have nice connecting steps.

So you have to be able to do your pombe, pas de bourree, glissade.

So those are all different steps which are gonna lead to our next level.

Petite allegro is super complicated and you need a lot of coordination from your upper body, your port de bras, and your lower legs to be able to do this quick movement and give the audience an impression that it's super light and super easy.

You have to be able to keep your ribs in and your body not going up and down and you have to keep everything in one place while using your arms and making the movements that you're doing very quickly with your feet seem light and fast.