Deep Dives, Not Overwhelm

Ballet dancers love a clean answer. Artistry doesn't have one. Here's why the best way to develop it is to stop looking for the right fix and start asking better questions.

Most dancers already know the Lilac Fairy is from The Sleeping Beauty. What far fewer people know is that the Prologue variation dancers perform today almost certainly isn't identical to Petipa's original staging. In 1890, the role was created as a mime part for Petipa's own daughter, Marie Petipa, a dancer of real elegance and stage authority, but not the company's strongest technician. The original Lilac Fairy wasn't built to be hard. It was built to be regal.

I've worked with more than one dancer chasing a very specific look for their feet and extension (and arabesque, and, and, and). More than once, that quest has come with a nagging injury that took months to quiet down, and the flexibility they wanted never showed up either. Every one of these dancers had "good" bodies for ballet. What they wanted, though, wasn't their own good body. It was someone else's, seen through a screen.

The first week of Level 4 is one of my favorites. Dancers dedicate time in their pliés to inhale and allongé, exhale and lower the arm, and the impact is stunning: chronically-lifted shoulders relax, someone stands an inch taller, another dancer seems to transform from mechanical to sylph-like in an instant. It's as if they'd been wearing heavy overcoats, and now you can see their ball gowns underneath. So if breath makes that much of a difference, why wait until age twelve t