Colman

Three of us here like the Wear Moi ones, so a good place to start. They're better padded than the quilted ones too which pretty much no one here liked after they started to hit adolescence - whether a 12 year old needs padding or not depends very much on the 12 year old, believe me. Go for a thong at his age - and the Wear Moi beats the capezio for comfort there, with a wider more comfortable thong.

I don't think we've ever had a Bloch dance belt.

Diverso make some nice ones too, and they're a good source for more interesting dance wear too.

This is going well off-topic …

I think it's important to distinguish between imagery and literal directions - "lift with your hamstrings" being a particular bugbear - but imagery is useful if you can find images that work for you. You can hardly give specific instructions to each muscle you need to activate, and it wouldn't be helpful if you could.

This is why I say a different teacher could be useful, because they'll use different cues - my normal teacher is great, but some of the cues she uses make no sense to me (see above) and cues based around  energy management - feeling an extension or energy flow around the back of the leg and out the foot for instance - from a different teacher work much better for me.

Being told to activate a particular set of hip flexors and core muscles in a complicated sequence is far too much to think about and almost nobody has that much conscious control anyway.

26 minutes ago, Minniewilder said:

You mean the lower body 12cm longer than upper body ? 

I've never investigated the details. 

13 hours ago, dance5678 said:

I'd say the % was the same, I had friends of very talented boys who were not accepted to RBS for the first or second year but were for yr5 for one and yr6 for the other. It seems they don't just take any boys they can get.

We've had plenty of rejections when younger - my son didn't meet the body shape requirements pre-adolescence, which seems to me to be the primary basis for selection for RBS.

2 minutes ago, Shaithedancer said:

I’m 17 and my teacher has been telling me to just keep working at it and to keep doing exercises but I’m not seeing improvement 

In that case I think I'd try a couple of things: maybe getting a few classes - online or otherwise depending where you're based, though preferably in person - with someone else expert. It's possible you're not using your body properly - mentioning your calf does makes me wonder if you're depending too much on those muscles - and your teacher's explanations just aren't working for you. A different teacher might explain something in a way that clicks, or recognise an issue your teacher hasn't seen. I'm sure people here can recommend teachers.

I'd also get a new fitting, preferably a couple of different opinions. If the shoe isn't right then you're doomed and if you're inexperienced you may not recognise that. 

Lisa Howell's stuff comes widely recommended by teachers I trust but I think you need new feedback and guidance. 

Two immediate questions: how old are you, and what does your teacher say? 

The Travelodge next door to the RAD is generally pretty economical, though there really aren't any really cheap options in London at that time of year. Bus to Victoria from pretty much outside the door was the most convenient way of getting into the tube network we found - we've spent a couple of weeks there over the years with boys doing intensives in the area. Clapham Junction is a ten minute or so walk if I remember properly. There's a heliport nearby too, if that helps. 🙂

15 hours ago, Doing Dance 1 said:

These might seem obvious but the reference pages may point you where you want. 
 

https://iadms.org/media/3597/iadms-resource-paper-turnout-anatomy.pdf

 

https://iadms.org/media/3601/iadms-resource-paper-turnout-supplemental-exercises.pdf
 

https://iadms.org/education-resources/blog/posts/2015/february/approaching-turnout-with-young-dancers-muscles-that-rotate-the-leg/

https://www.citraining.com/pdfs/Effective-Use-of-Turnout.pdf

 

The huge resource list for these slides might also prove useful.
https://shrs.uq.edu.au/files/15706/Kiely_Sarah_Turnout in the Dancer.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you very much. 

Thinking about steps/learning choreography is a different skill to learning steps, and an important one to learn unless you're interested in ballet as a purely academic pursuit where you have lots of time to learn a curriculum. As you can tell, I'd encourage you to step outside that comfort zone and explore the other stuff on offer, a lot of which is going to feel a bit overwhelming if you haven't done it before. (I started as an absolute beginner about 10 years ago now, and learning rep quickly took me ages to learn at all. I'm getting better, though reproducing it at full speed is another matter.)

4 minutes ago, Angela Essex said:

Oh I think it may be too hard for me then since I’ve not completed grade 6 yet

Contact teachers, discuss with them, is generally the best plan if you think you might be borderline. 

20 minutes ago, drdance said:

No, just check/ use more recent studies - anything older than 2000 is probably best to avoid.

Thanks,

6 hours ago, taxi4ballet said:

My husband has never done a ballet class in his entire life, yet he has flat turnout.

Likewise (well, when I started a decade ago) - all three boys in my house just have flat turnout available, even if using it is a different matter.

7 hours ago, drdance said:

Be wary of older articles which have since been disproven through more modern understanding and research.

I was pretty much expecting you to pop up with this sort of reply! Any particular key words or concepts I should be wary of? 

There is a common bit of wisdom that says something like that you need to train early to develop things like turnout and flexibility, that by doing so before adolescence you adapt the body to allow more of both. (Which leads to the corollary that adult beginners, as opposed to returners, shouldn't expect to develop good turnout.)

Does anyone have any pointers to studies on this? 

To me it looks suspiciously like there's at lot of survivorship bias in it - the dancers that make it are chosen in part because they have good turnout, and many dancers train from very young and the ones who don't develop good turnout are discarded early.

6 minutes ago, Peanut68 said:

Colman - you, your wife & son are clearly all in sync to share interest in watching/doing ballet…

 

Both sons!

2 hours ago, MissEmily said:

The other thing I’ve enjoyed doing is building my own Summer School by taking a week and attending multiple lessons a day at Danceworks.

My wife does that when my son is doing London intensives and needs an accompanying adult. She'll work a few hours a day and then wander around the studios (Danceworks, Pineapple, Central, etc) and do a couple of classes a day and attend what shows she can find. It's normally summer time, so the selection can be a bit restricted  though.

22 minutes ago, academicdancer said:

I was interested in London Ballet Classes, as it's not a full week, but it clashes with my ballet group's shows.

This is a big plus, especially if you're a little bit older or injured or both (me recently) and need a little bit more recovery time. They're a friendly lot and the atmosphere is good. [Not doing it this year because the content doesn't really match my interests - no PDD this year, and too much girlie rep (I mean, fair enough, I was only boy for most classes), I've used up my travel budget doing PDD workshops anyway and I want to focus on rebuilding strength for a few months. ]

11 hours ago, Angela Essex said:

I’m not bothered about learning lots of choreography or variations, I’d just like to improve my basic technique. 

I will say that if that's your focus - and honestly I don't think it should be for an intensive - you'll get some different corrections and new images you can apply in your normal classes but I'm not sure an intensive is the most efficient way to do it. Some coaching might be better.

I'd strongly recommend intensives/workshops to expand your horizons. Some (most?) of the most valuable single classes I've had have been at workshops and intensives - an acting for ballet one with Brodie Donougher at the LBC winter intensive, and some character work with Benn Gartside and Kristin McNally for instance: the sort of non-academic stuff there's exactly zero chance of getting locally. 

35 minutes ago, academicdancer said:

I'm happy to report back if people are interested!

Do please: there's something about her online presence that rubs me the wrong way, so I'd definitely be interested in reviews. 

I enjoyed London Ballet Classes summer intensive last year, the Ballet Retreat is popular, and there are a few others aimed at adult dancers around your level - I’m blanking on names at the moment.

It’s good to get classes from other teachers and with other students, especially if you’re a bit isolated out in the sticks.
 

Different corrections and stuff you wouldn’t cover in the normal run of things - mime, acting, rep, choreography, PDD and so on.

11 hours ago, Garnier said:

read an interview with a former AD, who said that the ballet world (in his opinion of course) was less « cultured » than other artistic communities (e.g opera).

I’ve always had the impression that almost all the top principals I’ve done workshops with were extremely cultured and extremely sharp - and my reference for sharpness is maths departments. 
 

Whether they accumulated that before or after they got into companies is another matter, I suppose. 

1 hour ago, Ruby Foo said:

Well, considering this, there seems to no shortage of new groundbreaking talent around in all areas, literature, music, dance, film, all given the thumbs up by the general public. Maybe students have found new ways to work and be inspired.

You'd probably need to check which group is producing the "groundbreaking" talent.

2 minutes ago, Ruby Foo said:

I had a stock of dvds, blast from the past) that students could borrow ranging from Balanchine, Bournenville, Ashton.

We end up lending our stock of DVDs to teachers. 

1 minute ago, Neverdancedjustamum said:

Sadly, due to where we live, our family’s timetable and financial priorities, work, school, it is virtually impossible for us to watch live ballets.

Sure, and, based in Dublin, I rather doubt our boys would have been in the ROH or Paris Opera at young ages if we weren't all insane as a family but there's a difference between students taking the opportunities that come up when you can - which is the best anyone can do, even if for some of us that's easier than for others - and the students and teachers who don't seem to think that seeing ballets is part of training, which is the perplexing part for me. 

I'm always confused by dancers at any age who aren't interested in seeing performances of their art. We see a lot of adult dancers - and more than one teacher - who have no idea who or what we're talking about when we mention companies or dancers or even ballets, and plenty of kids who have never seen a ballet live, not even the local Irish touring or youth companies who aren't that expensive to see. I'm reasonably certain that for most of the ones I know it's not because of financial constraints. 

Do students in other arts succeed without understanding the context of what they're doing, without references to build their performances on beyond academic exercise? Without being able to have a sensible conversation about the corpus of work in their field? How can they even know what they're meant to be aspiring to be? (And that's before you get to adults who are apparently seriously studying a performance art and don't want to perform*, which is another thing I fail to understand.) 

(* As opposed to being terrified of performances, which I understand perfectly!)

20 minutes ago, EverHopeful said:

Well done Colman, fingers crossed for the results. Are you doing Coppelia or Giselle next?

Coppelia, so Franz variation for me.

19 minutes ago, TYR said:

Well, congratulations anyway!

It is what is, I’ll have passed and I can spend the next few months working on regaining strength and flexibility and do the interesting variation unit next year. (The class unit is sort of weird.)

We’re doing this for “fun” among all the other chaos of adult life. Sometimes that means prep is suboptimal.

Partnering workshop with McRae and Lamb to look forward to this weekend, so onwards …