The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Hello everybody and welcome back to the casual dance teachers podcast. I'm your host Maia, and i'm a little scared today i'm not gonna lie we are gonna be talking about pirouettes i'm gonna be going over a few technical things and that's a little intimidating for me because i'm certainly not the forefront expert by any means on pirouettes i am just a casual dance teacher but i would love to hear your feedback and see if maybe i can share anything that might help you teach pirouettes to your own students so let's talk about it hey guys excuse me for one quick second while i interrupt myself to tell you about the casual dance Teachers' podcast first sponsor: The brand new Dance Teacher Directory!

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Welcome back, everybody. I'm excited to be talking about pirouettes today. I know not all dance teachers will be teaching pirouettes in their classes, but I think it's going to be a lot of us. So if you're interested in learning more about pirouettes, I think it's universal enough that this can apply to a lot of us. And I think maybe my intimidation and my little bit of imposter syndrome with pirouettes might also be reflected in some of you, especially if you look on YouTube or TikTok, these dangerous places we go and we see young dancers doing like 17 turns and think, oh my gosh, am I completely failing as a dance teacher? Now, hopefully, you don't take it to that extreme and get too influenced by these crazy videos and things out there and the students that are training hours and hours and hours a week from a very young age.

But we kind of have to start with this philosophical question of when should we start teaching our students pirouettes? When are they ready? What are the benchmarks we should be looking for? And is it too early or too late to start depending on when your students start dancing? So many questions that go into this. So my primary goal with today's episode is to talk a little bit about that when to know when your students are ready to start doing full turns, how you can get them to be ready. And then what are a few tips and tools that you can use to get them to make a smooth transition into making those turns. So I'm not here to teach you how to do a pirouette.

I'm not here really to give a whole lot of technique advice. It's really just about the structure and the pedagogy behind the idea of pirouettes. So let's start by talking about when your students are ready to do pirouettes. Keep in mind, again, I'm talking about casual dance teachers and casual dance students. So if you have students that started when they were two, three years old and are dancing for hours every week, that's amazing. I don't know if what I'm saying is necessarily going to apply to you because I am coming at this through the lens of primarily being a ballet teacher for casual students that tend to start around maybe five or six. I might be getting them anywhere between that age and when they're 10 or 11. That's just my angle.

That's not the only age group that I'm going to be talking about, but that's where I am right now in my teaching career. And these students only do ballet for one, maybe two hours a week. So I do constantly have these questions in my head: Like, of course, I could work for that full hour every week on very, very, very basic technique. But a 10 year old that is just starting out with ballet might benefit from doing hours and hours of relevés and pliés and tendus, but she's going to get bored and not stick with it. So I'm going to talk about that in a little bit. So let's get started. The first thing that I will say about this topic is even if you're scared and you're resistant because you feel like they need to improve their technique more, it's okay to let your students try something that's actually a little bit above their skill level, because it will motivate them to try harder, work harder, and they will see what can happen when they really work hard towards a new skill. So yes, I do let students try for pirouettes probably before my class, but I do let classical teachers would really recommend it. When I was growing up studying dance, one of the things that I heard from my ballet teacher was that she does not let anyone go for a pirouette until they can balance in retiré for eight counts. That's not my total philosophy, but I think that's a fantastic rule of thumb, actually, for a couple of reasons. First of all, of course, it's a great indicator of ankle strength and placement and all of that. So it's not a rule of thumb, but it's a rule of thumb. So if you're a ballet teacher, not a bad rule to have. But second of all, it takes some of the onus off of me. So if you're teaching again a class full of casual students, they're not all going to be exactly cookie-cutter the same, because you probably don't have 17 different levels of ballet that you can place them in to make sure that everyone's on the same page. You might have a few different levels, and you just get students into the closest fit for them. So I'm not then saying, okay, you're allowed to turn because, I think you can turn, or you're not allowed to turn because I think you need more work. You put the onus on the dancer.

If you want to work, and you want to be able to balance in retiré for eight counts, and you can show me that you can consistently do that, then you're allowed to go for your pirouette. I then am not the bad guy. I'm not playing favorites. I'm not saying who can and can't do certain things, but I'm giving them an incentive and something to work for at home and in the classroom. And they're going to be constantly trying to balance and to show me that they can balance that they have proper placement and all of that. So I do kind of like that rule of thumb. It doesn't have to be that. But if you have some sort of external motivator to say, once you do this, I'm going to let you go for the turn, that probably will help your students be motivated, because I guarantee they are also seeing these videos of kids their age doing multiple turns and all these things.

And it might not be the healthiest thing for them. But if that's what they're motivated by, and they're saying, Miss Maia, why can't we do that? Why aren't we doing multiple turns and you keep making me do plié relevé? What the heck? Then you can say, well, those kids can balance in retiré for eight counts or more. Why don't you do that? And then we'll talk. Just an idea. Now I have a modern dance background in my own training. I've done ballet longer than modern. I've done it my whole life, but my passion, my love, and what I really got into studying heavily when I was in college was modern dance. So when I'm teaching pirouettes in any style, I have this more sort of somatic or kinesthetic approach that I take to teaching all styles of dance and to understanding when a student is ready to start going for turns.

One tool that I have found unbelievably helpful is this exercise called Brain Dance. It's created by Anne Green Gilbert. This exercise was actually created really just to work on the brain, the neural connections. And she found movement that in the earliest stages of life helps babies develop their own brains and found that these same movements repeated in a certain sequence help students score better on standardized tests and do better in school and have better focus. And I have started implementing the Brain Dance movement in my own practice. And I have learned a lot about the brain dance movement in my own practice. And I have learned a lot about or elements of the brain dance in all of my classes, any style, you will find that if you make some adjustments, it can be used in any style of dance.

And it really truly does help. It helps your students understand, for example, head-tail connection, body-half, it gives them some tactile input on their own bodies to really center themselves and ground themselves in their own body. So they're not just thinking about whirling around in space, which is what a lot of younger students think of when they think of a pirouette. So I would recommend that you check out Brain Dance by Anne Green Gilbert. I also like to incorporate a floor bar or exercises lying flat on the floor to help my students understand their spinal alignment, again, the body half idea being able to press down into the floor and isolate just one part of their body versus the other. And also to be able to feel their turnout a lot better, from the hips.

And even if they can look in the mirror and see, okay, my knee is pointing towards the ceiling and not towards the wall when they're flat on the floor. That's another motivator and another external way to show them that they need to work on their turnout. And then of course, there's so many different exercises that you can do for turnout. Depending on what my students needs are, I do like to bring tools into the classroom, such as TheraBands, balance balls, turning discs, sometimes it can be a little bit of a challenge, but I do like to bring tools into the classroom. But giving the students the opportunity to work with them and to recommend exercises that they can do at home is another motivating factor for students that really want to work on these things and get better themselves independently.

And it's just fun, it changes it up a little bit, it shows them the full range of tools that they have available to build up their strength and to get more in touch with their own body awareness. So let's say that you've done all sorts of exercises teaching the students how to understand their body half, their alignment, their head-tail connection, strengthening their ankles, their legs, their core strength, and you see that the student is physically ready to start doing turns. I am a huge proponent of doing the four quarter turns up to two half turns, and then up to full turns, and then multiples. I just find with the students that they're able to do a lot of any student, this is going to help them focus on their position in the turn, more so than focusing on trying to get around in the turn.

So no matter what the age is, and oftentimes even what the level is. So even with students that are very capable of doing a single or multiple turns, I will still have them do the four quarter turns. So they're focusing purely on their technique. The other nice thing, about doing it this way, though, is that if you do have mixed levels in a casual class, you might have a student that can already do multiple turns, and another student that's just working on getting into a nice clean single, you can give them different variations of the combination. So they'll all have the same preparation. You'll have some students do four quarter turns, two half turns, and one full turn. And other students, you might say, do your four quarter turns, but then you're going to do two singles and two doubles.

Or a single and then as many as you can, whatever it is that you need to do for your class. But again, I know as casual dance teachers are not always going to have a class that is completely uniform, and every student is at the same exact level. So it's okay to throw different things at different students, depending on their own technical skills. For any of us that have taught turns before, I'm sure you know that students can have a hard time discerning one day or turns from day to day. That's one of the biggest struggles that we have. And I find that no matter what the age, this can be a struggle because it's just not something that students have to think about outside of the dance classroom.

It's not a familiar body concept. For me personally, I really have just stuck to repetition and to doing quarter or half turns where the students are focusing on which foot they're picking up and which way they're turning. And that has worked the best for me personally. But I have heard from a number of students that they've had to do a number of other teachers that they will use some kind of visual aid to try and help the students visualize which way they're turning and which leg they are picking up into retirement when the students are still not fully familiar with one day or versus one day don't turns. So I've heard putting a scrunchie on the wrist of the arm that you're turning towards, putting a sticker on the leg, or wrapping something around the leg that you pick up and saying, 'turn towards that', even putting matching colors on one side of the body versus the other.

So the students are thinking, okay, I turn towards the red side, for example, and I'm standing on the green side, something like that. Again, I haven't used that a whole lot in my classroom. I just try and be very, very consistent and make them do it over and over again in small increments until they get it. But that might work for you. A couple of common technique issues that I see when students are starting to do pirouette is that they will not pick up their foot all the way to the inside of the knee for retiré. Now this needs to be nipped in the bud before they even start turning, obviously. So if a student cannot get their toe up to the inside of their knee, when they're doing combinations at the bar, they're not going to get it in a pirouette.

So start there. But a lot of times when we make that transition, they'll have beautiful, beautiful retiré. And they go into the turn, and they're just thinking about other things, and they're not getting their foot up all the way. So putting a little sticker on the inside of the standing knee, and saying you have to hit that with your toe, or even obviously, you can't draw a line on their tights, or probably not, you might get in trouble. But having them pretend to draw a line with their hand physically touching their leg from their ankle all the way up to their knee on the inside of the calf, have them repeat that, having that kinesthetic reminder, that tactile, touch of that line going up their leg and saying that's what your toe has to do, can really help them versus just telling them that that's what they have to do.

Arms often get so crazy, even when the students have shown you that they can do proper arms in a number of different combinations. When they start to go into the turn, then the arms all of a sudden start to flail and get crazy, right? So I do also like to have the students hold a ball or something that has some mass to it. To keep their arms on either side of their body. So you know, making sure that the right arm doesn't cross into the left plane of the body, and making sure that they hold it away from them. So the ball doesn't come in and touch their chest or their stomach, but that they are holding it away and that they are squeezing the arms together.

That's why a nice big rubber ball is really good for this because they have to kind of squeeze into it. So it's making sure that they don't pull their shoulders back too much, or twist the shoulders side to side. So that's why I like to have the arms on either side of the body. So, that's why I like to have the arms on either side of the body. The final thing I want to mention is that once the students are consistently doing correct en dehors turns with a consistent preparation, I think if you're ballet jazz, most likely you start with a preparation of tendu side, and then rond de jambe to the back or tendu back go into fourth position, and then turn. That's what I was kind of raised learning.

And that's what I see most consistently in the studios that I teach. And I think that's great. I think that's a wonderful preparation for students that are learning how to turn. But as soon as they are able to do a correct en dehors turn fairly consistently, I would recommend that you immediately start changing up your preparations. And boy, howdy, there are so many ways that teachers teach the preparation into pirouette. I do not want to touch that discussion with a 10 foot pole. I mean, we can get into it. But that would be a whole nother episode. There's plenty of heated debate between how why should your fourth position preparation be? Do you bend the back leg before you come up to retiré right? Or does it need to stay straight?

What's the distribution of the weight between the front and the back leg? And exactly where should your hips be? So here's what I do. I'm not even going to tell you technically what I do. I'm going to just tell you that I have a certain way that I have the students execute the preparation to their turn when it's that conventional fourth position, preparation, and how they distribute their weight and what they do with their legs in the preparation. And I tell the students, this is my recommendation. This is what I've found works. And this is what I was trained to do by my own ballet teachers. There are other philosophies. And if you go into another classroom, and they tell you to do it differently, just take the recommendation and do it differently.

Again, as casual dance teachers, I am not going to have them do different approaches, because there's just not time, I am not going to have them do pirouettes for the entire hour that I'm with them every week either. So I'm not going to say, okay, now we're going to do it with the bent back leg. Now we're going to do a straight back leg. That way, if you're ever with another teacher, you know what to do, because the chance of them being with another teacher in the future, if they're just a casual student that has been dancing for a couple years for an hour a week, not super high, it's not our top priority. We want them to have fun, we want them to learn a huge variety of skills, pirouette is one.

So keep that in mind. It's not the end all be all of your classes by any means. So I just say, there's lots of different approaches. This is mine. This is what you need to do in my classroom. If you hear something different from another teacher, then respect their approach and do what they say to do. For yourself internally, you need to know approach your teaching and you need to be consistent with that and make sure that your students are consistent with that. So again, not at all within the scope of what I'm trying to do here with this podcast. But if you find that you don't know exactly what distribution of weight you're teaching, you don't know if your students are bending their back leg before they pop up to retire, I shouldn't say pop up, that in itself is like, not, not how I would teach it to my students.

But hopefully, you're, you're with me here. Before they press up into their retiré position for the turn. If you don't know what they're doing there, wrap your head around it, make sure that you know what it is that you're doing what it is that you're teaching and stay really consistent with that. So what I was saying before I went off on that little tangent about the different approaches and different preparations and all of that is that tendu, forth, passe, is just the teeny tiniest little tip of the iceberg of what a pirouette is. Especially if you look at classical ballets, contemporary ballets, and of course, other styles of dance, how often are you seeing that preparation for pirouette? Very, very seldom. Yet that is what gets taught most frequently in the classroom.

So even with casual dancers, although you might say, they still need to work on the preparation, though, they're not fully prepared. It's okay. Remember that you are still working with limited time. And it's okay to push the students to the next level. Even if you know that they need more technical work, you continue to put in the technical work, don't just leave it behind and say, 'Oh, it's good enough.' But it's okay to push them to that next level while they're still working on the basics. It really is. So start to incorporate preparation from fifth landing in fifth pirouettes. Second, pirouettes transitioning out of other steps. You know this, I'm not telling you anything new. But I still think that some teachers get stuck on doing the pirouettes as like their own combination.

They're their own separate part of the class. They always do them the exact same way. And I totally understand the philosophy behind that. I'm very on board with consistency. But again, I don't know why pirouettes get all of the glory. And as casual teachers that don't have the luxury of maybe having like a separate turns class, leaps and turns class, I know a lot of studios implement things like that. If you have a one hour ballet class, that's for all of ballet, pirouette should not be a third of that class, it needs to just be kind of integrated, just like anything else would be. So don't give the pirouette more attention than it deserves. It's okay to work on other things. If pirouette is not your wheelhouse, as far as teaching goes, don't feel bad, work on other things.

It's okay, your students will be fine. Man, I feel like there's so much more that I could say about this. But I'm going to be like beating a dead horse. You guys are going to be really bored with me. So let's move this conversation over to the casual dance teachers network on Facebook, we can chat more about it there. As far as takeaways from this particular episode, just remember, don't be scared. If you're scared to let students go for it, if they're casual students, and they're not quite ready technically, but they really, really want to go for the turns, find a way to incorporate it into your class at their level, just for fun, just to motivate them and let them know that they have this really fun skill that they can work towards.

Also, don't make it the end all be all. If your dancers can't do 14 turns, it's okay. Everyone has their own skills and their own things that they can do. If you have a really strong turner, and you don't have a really strong turner, then you feel like they've gotten beyond the point where you can teach them to do more turns or make their turns better. Find some other resources that you can turn them to. But don't get down on yourself; don't feel like doing multiple turns or doing pirouettes is going to define you as a teacher. Just find your groove and what works for you. And be honest with yourself and your students about what that is. And, like I said, come share with us on the Casual Dance Teachers Network on Facebook.

Of course, I would love to hear from you. If you would also leave a review here for the podcast, let me know how I'm doing; what other concepts you might like to hear about or see from me. And don't forget to acknowledge the wonderful work of GB Mystical who wrote my theme music and all of my teachers who have helped me learn all of these little tricks and skills for pirouettes. I appreciate it so much. And I would not at all be able to do this without many, many teachers that have worked with me over the years. So thank you to all of you. And I'll see you in the next video. Bye. All of them, and to all of you for listening. And I thought I'd close with this great quote by Misty Copeland. I may not be there yet, but I am closer than I was yesterday.