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  • I have with us today Yasmine Naghdi and Donald Thom.

  • They look like the typical ballet dancers of today at the beginning of the day,

  • they come in wrapped up in warm gear, they've got all sorts of torture instruments with them.

  • They use all these gadgets to warm up their muscles and get themselves ready to

  • start the ballet class. Then we have the classical era when all those lovely tutu

  • ballets came into being.

  • We have with us Fumi Kaneko and Tomas Mock. So as you can see we didn't have any

  • torture instruments at that time, they just brought themselves, they kept

  • themselves nice and warm because in those days they didn't have lycra or

  • really stretching garments so sometimes they even wore underwear, they'd use a

  • petticoat and just tuck it into their pants so that we could see the

  • legs better and they would start warming up by stretching themselves in a more

  • gentle way. As you can see Yasmine's got going there.

  • What you doing they are you doing there Yasmin? Why are you doing that?

  • I'm rolling out my muscles to get the blood circulation going in my legs.

  • Can you see these? I wish they'd had those in my day, keep your feet nice and warm.

  • And then we have, from the era of Blasis, to represent that era we've got Gemma Pitchley-Gale and Marcelino Sambé

  • Did you notice they came in and they curtseyed to me? Isn't it lovely?

  • And that's what they used to do, they used to come in

  • and they used to acknowledge the teacher before they went to their barre.

  • Can you show me first position? Second position. Third, fourth, fifth and sixth.

  • So what changed from here is that the turnout

  • has increased from 45 degrees to 90 degrees, which is actually a very

  • difficult thing to do because we have to do that by holding onto the muscles at

  • the top of the leg. However when all this turnout started it wasn't quite as well

  • thought out so they had a vice to turn out the feet, which of course must have

  • been excruciatingly painful but nowadays we've worked on things and they are able

  • to rotate from the top of the leg. We're going to start now by showing you the

  • first exercise to be done which is the plie, the knee bend, most important and we're going to see

  • side by side how they've got much more subtle and movement has got bigger, let's have a look:

  • So you can see these poor guys here, they just did two plies lasting sixteen counts each and they would have

  • continued with that in all the positions of course and then turned round and done it on the other side.

  • So exercises have got shorter. So now we're going to do on to battements. Battements are movements of one leg

  • whilst standing on the other. We have grand battement, we have petit battement, we have all sorts of different battements,

  • They're nearly finished but the exercise really was much longer.

  • Now they're going to do them really fast, one in each position.

  • Thank you. how did that feel?

  • Long!

  • Long? But does it feel good?

  • It feels like you get warm really fast, yeah it's good.

  • It's nice and lengthening because you have the time to think about...

  • ...where everything is placed. And what's really interesting is you say it makes you warm really quickly,

  • well the barre used to just last fifteen minutes because they just did two or

  • three exercises and that was it

  • while all this lot went a lot faster. They're doing more exercises

  • but of a shorter duration. So now let's move on to grand battement and see what happens.

  • They're already finished, look!

  • Now they've gone up onto their demi-pointe, they've gone really high. And they're only going to the side now.

  • They would go on now to the back.

  • We've got the petit battement sur le cou-de-pied. That's a really little beat

  • round the ankle of the foot. Now that's changed quite a lot too, can we see?

  • So this is really low round the ankle and by the way it was all very decent in those days

  • because as the legs went up we've come from the Baroque era where we had the floor length skirt

  • suddenly we have this, well if the leg goes up, we can't possibly be seeing the legs, so we had the bloomers.

  • So now this opens just from the knee, sideways, and it helps for all sorts of

  • little steps that we shall see later. As time goes on

  • they start doing it on demi-pointe and they wrap the foot around the ankle and then

  • as we do it now we have a fully pointed foot and we can even have them to the

  • front, petit battement du vent, that's it. So now we can go on to the stretching. They would do

  • stretching with the leg on the barre. In the day of Blasis they didn't do

  • any stretches because they did something called plastique poses. What are plastique poses?

  • Well we've got a picture of plastique poses. Gemma could you just take that lady's pose for me? Yes, and Marcelino.

  • They would do that for three to four minutes and then having practiced various

  • poses they would put little mime sequences together, so I'm just going to say Marcelino could you please

  • say to Gemma, 'I, you, love'? And Gemma, you can react.

  • And then I'll leave it up to Marcelino what you can do, ok? Here we go, let's have a little practise.

I have with us today Yasmine Naghdi and Donald Thom.

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