This week we focused on port de bras or "the carraige of the arms." What connections did you make this week between your arms and your dancing?
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About Me
- Louis
- My efforts toward enlightenment through creativity and physicality are what my dances and my teaching are all about.
24 comments:
This week I attempted to coincide my arms with particular moves at the bar and across the floor... but I notice I failed at executing my arms especially when I couldn't get the rhythm down on just the feet alone.
For example during the combo across the floor, when we did the sissone back and then put our leg to the side, I failed on putting my arms in fourth and fifth. I wanted to but I couldn't grasp the timing on the legs, hence i couldn't focus on arms. I guess things weren't exactly clicking together for me as quickly as i wanted them to. But I do look forward to today and the challenges I will encounter.
I found that it is hard to coordinate the legs and arms at the same time, and especially when i actually tried to do the arms correctly and not some floppy version! It did get easier by Friday, so I'll keep working on it and being conscious of it. I am glad we did do it as arms seem to have generally overlooked in previous classes I have taken.
Nicole Boutillier
I had really never thought that much about my arms, so this was a real challenge for me. I have always thought more about my feet and my arms were just kind of there.
I found it most difficult to coincide my arms quickly with leg movements. I agree with Rachel that our combo with the sissones across the floor. I understood the arms when we stood there and said the combo, however, I had a really tough time doing the combo with my legs. I was a little frusterated with myself.
However, I am very thankful for this week of study on port de bras, and hope to work more on these coordinations between my arms and my legs. I can't wait to work more and focus on this important aspect of my dancing. : )
Nicole Boutillier
By the way, that's a great picture to illistrate how terrible it looks when you don't have the right arms. It really gives me a perspective on how different the shape of your arms look, and what a difference this can make. I also see how much more expansive and open posture looks when your arms are correctly position. I will most def aspire to this beautiful expansiveness.
I tried to think about how my arms felt, to give them that natural position feeling like we did with our side diagonal. But I found when we did things across the floor, I was must more focused on getting my footing right and understanding my travel.
I actually really liked the dance we did that focused on arms. It gave me a great chance, much like the bars, to practice what you had said about arms, positioning of them, etc.
While I feel like my arms are now part of my thoughts when I analyze how well I'm doing a dance or exercise, I think they definitely have a lot of work ahead of them in order to be in an organized, beautiful manor.
It's nice to have the arms working when you are using your legs, and I feel like the arms are there to extend the movement from just your legs to your entire body, so the dancing can be better experienced and enjoyed. I find that I feel like the arms are somewhat of your own interpretation of your dance as well, as they are not specifically bound to any specific pose or position for the leg movements of a dance. I take that within reason though, as I won't be doing any of my floppy modern arms with my stiff ballet legs. :)
I have been thinking about my arms since the very fist day of class. One of my bad habits in ballet is letting my arms "die." In second position especially I let my elbow droup. But since we've been talking about port de bras and doing just arm transitions for three days I found more positions that need attention. I tend to not worry about what the arms do for exercises and just go with what ever they do for themselves. But now I am more focused on the experience of my whole upper body proforming.
I'm definitely more conscious of how my arms look now, especially in comparison to how my legs are moving. I really worked hard to get the opposite leg in a rond de jambe on the floor. The only thing that I'm not sure how to fix yet is that when I look at my arms in the mirror especially in first it still looks too sharp and my elbows aren't quite round enough.
It was great to really focus on moving the arms last week because I discovered that up until that point I was just dancing with part of my body--mostly my legs. It's a lot to think about but, I can't wait till I can get everything working together--my arms, legs, head...
I think something wrong with my brain ... When we first practiced only arms, I could at least follow people. However, when we started combing with legs, I got lost the movement of arms. If I pay attention to my arms, my legs will stop, and if I care about my legs, my arms cannot follow my legs. I felt like my brain is missing some part...
Therefore, I actually started training my brain using my imagination. Besides practicing in front of the mirror, I have been trying to make a picture of myself dancing with arms and legs before classes. Because I tend to think too much about a little things, sometimes my brain gets confused to do two things at the same time. Thus, just to imagine myself dancing well helps me to dance more smoothly and fun.
I was surprised at how much trouble I had at trying to focus on both my feet and arms at the same time, while standing straight and actually following the routine. I could do them seperatly, but I don't think my coordination is good enough to do both at the same time yet.
I really like focusing on my arms though. It brings more attention to accuracy and feeling the movements which is a lot of fun. It also helped me get at least a little better at holding my arms in the positions and feeling more comfortable with them there. Second always feels especially awkward for me, but after practicing in the mirror for awhile I think I have figured out some things I was doing wrong.
port de bras was an excellent thing to focus on and I would love to have had it as a focus for more of the class.
I found to hard to concentrate on my arms and legs at the same time, which seems like that is the general theme of what everyone has writen so far. I can do it if I think about it less and it is a movement I am used to, but there are alot of movements where I just don't know what I am suppose to do with my arms. This week helped me concentrate on what my arms are suppose to be doing, so maybe sometime in the future they will feel natural and I will be able to do them.
Actually, the act of honing in on the port de bras has been immensely helpful. Taking some time to isolate that action and pay attention to it has, I think helped the overall technique, and I think this is the first dance class that I've had where we've really taken the time to examine port de bras--I think it is sort of overlooked sometimes! As a result of this, I have found that if my arms are in a stronger position, energized, etc. (kind of like remembering to visualize the rolling spheres) it keeps the rest of my body running well, and really aids in the feeling of dancing with the entire body: energizing the entire body.
It was really helpful to work on my port de bras. I felt like I cleaned up my arms. Although I still struggle with it as we do a certain combination, but I tend to remind myself more about it. It was also challenging to learn new position such as third and fourth arm. When we were doing our adagio, I was able to focus better on my position of each arm. I think it was a good time to work on our port de bras.
I am so glad that we spent some time just focusing on arms. One of my problems is that I can completely make a mess of an easy combination by having to think about arms at the same time. Working specifically on port de bras helped it to feel a little more natural and get it 'downloaded' :) into muscle memory. Now, if I'm struggling with the port de bras in an exercise, I remind myself to let go of my conscious control of my arms and let my body do what it knows is right.
I've definitely noticed that I'm more aware of when I'm holding my arms right, or rather, when I'm NOT holding them right. It's starting to feel unnatural to hold them incorrectly and it draws my attention to them. That is simply wonderful. I love the moments when you realize that you've internalized something that used to take all of your concentration. I'm not there with port de bras yet, but I'm making progress.
I have been waiting to work on port de bras! Most of the time I tend to leave my arms in second and focus on my feet, especially when the moves become more complicated. I am so glad that we worked on the arms alone because trying to place my arms in the most energetic and long position while focusing on my feet is really HARD!! Also, I felt very warm in my upper half afterward. I think that if I went home and did 10-15 minutes of perfect port de bras practice 3 times a week (outside of dance class) my arm muscles would have the memory and strength to go straight to that position so that I can focus on expressing myself in my dancing... Work THEM Arms Baby!
I am very glad that we started working on Port de bras this week. I feel as though one of my weakest points is combining arms with the legs and even remembering to do arms. I even looked at old pictures from dance when I was a little kid and noticed that even then I was awful with the arms. I just never got it.
It was difficult but a well needed week for me.
port des bras and steps we already learned simultaneously is very difficult! i find myself getting kind of jerky, timeslicing between focusing on my legs and my arms. it really shows how much the brain gets taken up when focused on getting one thing right. i wonder if it might be better to learn port des bras early on, together with the legs, as a way of getting the brain used to doing both at the same time early on.
In focusing on our arms, I realize that I'm rarely aware that I need to be using them. I'm usually concentrating on my feet and the steps that we learned to the extent that I forget to use them. It was really helpful to have a day where we focused completely on arms. I also found that it was really difficult to put the arms and legs together unless it was a movement that was very natural. For this reason, I thought it was really productive to spend a class period completely focused on arm movements.
I'm sorry - I forgot to put my name with what I said. The above comment is from Shaina Whittlesey.
I feel that getting the arms right makes my dancing look so much cleaner and in control. There is also a strong connection between the positions of my arms and the carriage from my middle, in a way they support each other. In the beginning of the class I had problems with my second position arms because I let my elbows drop too low, but now I remember it most of the time. My port de bras have become pretty "automated", which feels really nice because that lets me concentrate more on my feet (and gets me a feeling I've learned something!) and my arms just sort of top off the dance.
Katrina Hamilton:
I had to sit out a lot this week because of injury (though now that I think about it I would have probably been sitting out a lot earlier if we hadn't focused on our arms so much. It gave my knees a nice break!) I think what I enjoyed the most was getting to do just the arms first. Well, maybe enjoyed isn't the right word. Usually it was exceptionally difficult.
Never in my ballet training has anyone ever flat out said which position of the arms (generally) goes with which direction. After a while you just pick it up because everybody keeps having you do the same ones. So it becomes a sort of muscle reflex: when your foot goes back your hand goes front, when your foot goes front your hand goes up, etc. You don't think, it just happens. That's great if you're training your muscles right, but I was just sort of pointing them places.
When you take the feet out of a barre combinations, the arms take on a whole new level of difficulty. I can't just set them to default. I had to think about the combinations in terms of the arm vocabulary that I usually just ignore or hope fixes itself. As a result, when we added the feet my arm transitions were much clearer because they weren't just a side effect of my feet.
I think that incorporating arm movements into exercises is one of the great coordination puzzles that ballet presents for our brains. Like a lot of other people have said, I think it's way harder to coordinate the arms when I don't have the footing quite right, but I did think that the exercises in which we did the arms by themselves before adding the feet helped to at least get the arm movement into my muscle memory so that I didn't have to think really hard about the feet and really hard about the arms at the same time. Port de bras is definitely one of the many areas that I have bad habits in, but for the most part those have been the ones that I've ignored so that I could focus on improving others. Working on arms this week, however, has made me realize that having clear and precise arms carriage is just as important to the aesthetic of ballet as all of the other things that we work on.
The connection I made between my arms and my dancing is that the arms flows and engaged the dance. The constant remindering of first, second, third, fourth and fifth position all have a specific placement of the arms. It helps to remember that.
The biggest problem for me is my hand on third position. I am still practicing, so don't lose hope and never fear, Oscar will come through ... one day.
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