Beginner Ballet Profile: Lionel

This week’s profile is another of Susan Attfield‘s ballet studio students, Lionel–who first started to take ballet in October 2012 after seeing So You Think You Can Dance. 

LionelDid you ever take lessons as a kid?

No, never took any lessons as a kid, I grew up in a small town and my interest was mainly athletics.

Why did you decide to take ballet as an adult?

There are a few reasons, I have always loved watching ballet, I was always an active individual but since I left school it gradually got replaced by work, deadlines and the idea that one day my busy schedule will get better.  It was the infamous series So you think you can dance which made me look for adult ballet classes in my area.

Where do you take classes?

In Centurion, Gauteng, South Africa.

What is your favorite part about ballet?

When after 3 months you finally start doing something right…lol, just kidding for me it’s that one hour when all the troubles in the world disappear.

What is your least favorite part?

To be honest…. when the classes are over 🙁

Who/What is your ballet inspiration?

I’m not yet familiar with the great names in ballet, but at this stage watching anyone who can really dance, you don’t realise how hard these dancers have to train to dance at that level, when you see them you think to yourself o that’s good, but you don’t even begin to realise that there is a reason they train for years…

What motivates you to keep dancing?

To dance makes me happy, if I had discovered this at an earlier stage in my life things might have been different, but I like the feeling I have when I leave the class and that makes me want to come back.

Do you take any other dance classes?

No not at this stage.

What are your hobbies outside of ballet?

Gardening, Cleaning, Swimming.

What advice would you like to give to those who want to start ballet or have just started?

I have started the class about 4 months ago, and in every class I see new faces, if you like ballet just keep going, with every class it gets better just persevere.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I wish to thank the teachers and owner of the DANCE HUB group for dedicating their time to beginner adult dancers, even though I will not become a professional what your classes do for my soul is far more fulfilling than anything money can buy.  You guys are awesome.

Beginner Ballet Tips: How to Improve Jumps

Now that my legs finally seem to be getting back in shape, it’s finally time that I start to work on my jumps a little bit more, which, honestly are pretty pathetic. I’m not a jumping person AT ALL. In fact…it’s probably my least favorite part of ballet. But, I am ever so jealous of pretty professional ballerinas and their perfect grand jetes.  So I did some research into what I could possibly to do improve them and found out the key was:

Plies, Plies, Plies!

Plies are one of the keys to  jumps (and  turns as well).

The Ballet Dancer’s Guide says:

Your plie is crucial to every single jump, for both the landing and the take off. Without your plie you simply can not jump, but more importantly, without the right use of the plie you won’t be give full value to each jump.

Other tips from Dance Advantage (which also mentions plies!) include strengthening your core and proper alignment (my dance instructor is always reminding us of this). I know I need to work on proper alignment more, as its one of the things I’m likely to forget as I’m focused on something else. It also mentions working on strengthening your feet as well through exercises in class (tendu, degage, releve) as well as through theraband at home exercises.

Dance Advantage also has some pretty great tips for doing grand jetes.

What do you do to improve your jumps?

 

Back En Pointe!

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It’s taken me forever to get there…but yesterday I took my first pointe class again!

I hadn’t been in a pointe class after my first one in January when the pain in my shin started to get super intense and I had to take a fair amount of time off.

Yesterday I decided it was about time to try pointe again.

I don’t know whether it’s the running or all the stretching I’ve committed myself to over the past week (or something else entirely), but my nagging shin pain has finally started to disappear. While running hasn’t been 100% pain free, it’s been more manageable once I decided to adopt a better training plan. The pain usually disappears after running and I feel great afterwards. Ballet was a different story for a while–but this past week has been great!

Class went relatively well–except for the moment when I accidentally jumped onto pointe–OUCH! Not what you are supposed to do, I know. I was super worried that the rest of the class was going to be too advanced (pointe classes started in December, I think….) but my ballet instructor gave me different things to do when the exercises were too challenging.

I can’t wait for this super busy semester to be over so I can start going to more ballet classes!

What ballet or fitness-related accomplishments have you made recently?

#AdultBallerinas TweetChat November 9th, 6pm EST

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Image via CrunchBase

Hey Ballerinas,

Don’t forget that we’re holding a TweetChat tomorrow at 6:00 PM EST. It’ll probably go for at least an hour, so if you can’t join us right away, feel free to jump in whenever you can.

We’ll be using the hashtag #adultballerinas to keep track of each other and reply to each other. Using TweetChat.com is an awesome way to easily follow just our conversation and not lose track of whose saying what to who in our conversation.

My twitter is @kristengillette and if you’re looking to get other adult ballerinas to follow you before we get to chatting, comment below with your Twitter handle and I’ll tweet out the names of everyone when the TweetChat starts!

Look forward to talking to all of you!

Facebook and our next TweetChat!

Update: The (hopefully) correct link for Facebook has now been added.

If you haven’t already, make sure you like Adult Ballerina Project on Facebook and take our poll about the next TweetChat (or let me know if Sunday, December 9th, at 6pm EST works for you in the comments if you don’t have Facebook).