The Importance of Ballet Technique for Dancers

Ballet Student at Barre (photo by Bruce Peter Photography)

I still have my mind a little on my previous post about "Dance Moms."  One of the things that bothers me is that the moms are convinced this woman will make their daughters "stars."  Yet all I see in the show is the girls practicing routines for competition after competition.  When are they learning technique?  To become a professional dancer (yet alone a star) takes a tremendous amount of training that is learned in the classroom not in rehearsal.  Performance is an important element and it teaches its own things, but technique is the foundation of everything.  And whether you want to be a jazz dancer or a tap dancer, on Broadway or the ballet stage, ballet training is what separates the wheat from the chaff.  Ballet training is the foundation for professional dancers.  In talking to Nan Giordano, the Artistic Director of Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago (one of the preeminent professional Jazz companies in the world), she told me that when she holds auditions for her company she will not even look at a dancer's jazz dance until they first audition in ballet and pointe.  She does most of her cuts in the ballet class and only those with the strongest ballet technique go onto the next round of auditions and get to show her what they can do in jazz dance.  Quite simply, if you don't have excellent ballet training, she doesn't want you in the company.

How does one get that kind of ballet training?  It isn't by taking one or two ballet classes per week.  Most dancers who aspire (and succeed!) to become professional begin taking ballet by the age of 7 or 8 (many start earlier, but it isn't necessary since real ballet training doesn't begin until about 7 anyway).  At the ages of 7 or 8 they take one class per week, then they progress to two.  By the age of 11 they are probably taking three classes, and it progresses from there as they get older, until they are dancing from 5 to 7 days per week, often taking more classes than just ballet (pas de deux, pointe, variations, modern, jazz, pilates, character dance etc).  In addition, ballet training doesn't just happen by repetition.  When I was younger, I used to think that somehow if you did enough developpes and grand battements that eventually you would turn into a great dancer!  How wrong I was!  Repeating something incorrectly only teaches you how to do it incorrectly and isn't going to produce a professional dancer.  It matters what quality of training you get.

Dancers who are serious about becoming professional find a school that is on par with the schools associated with professional ballet companies.   Something I often hear moms say is "well she's just taking it for fun so it doesn't matter."   Here is the thing, with dance you have to start young.  Do we ever know what a 5 year old is going to end up wanting to be?  If you wait until she's 16 and has decided she wants to be a professional dancer, it will be too late to go back and undo her lack of training up until that point.  If on the other hand, she decides she doesn't want to be a professional dancer, so she's had the best training available which has also, incidentally protected her from injury, which poor training can cause.    For the same reason, whenever a child enrolls in dance it is best to always include ballet classes and only include other types of dance as extras.

Ballet is the foundation of technique for everything else.  If a child chooses to major in dance at school or wants to audition for a part in a performance, do competitions, audition for companies they will have the edge if their ballet training is good.   That is what upsets me about places like that portrayed on "Dance Moms."  The kids have all the heart and dedication and quite a bit of talent that could take them far if they were in the right place with a good teacher.  But I feel they are being sold a bill of goods to think that  doing competition routine after competition routine with a teacher who doesn't put the health and safety of her students first will turn them into stars.  Technique, training, hard work and talent is what makes stars.