21 Levels of Ballet: Easy to Complex

I'm Joy Womack, a professional ballerina.

Today, we are gonna go

through the different levels of ballet.

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In the interest of time, we're gonna be focusing on turns.

The fouette sequence in Swan Lake.

It is seen as a step that shows your mastery

and your control.

I would pick Swan Lake as a representative

of the culminative challenges

of being a principal ballerina.

As a disclaimer, this is my interpretation of complexity.

Level one, plie.

A plie is a building block of our technique.

It basically means in French, to bend,

so it could be a bending of the knee,

a bending of the ankle, but in this case

we're gonna start in our five positions.

It's important for the plies

to keep your heels on the ground

and be able to feel your pinky toes pushing into the floor.

The plie is the foundation of ballet

because you can't jump, you can't turn,

and you can't move without being able to bend your knees

in an outward, turned out position.

Level two, tendu.

The tendu starts with their feet

in first position or in fifth position

and you brush along the floor moving through the demi-pointe

or bending of the toes, stretch the toes completely

and then back to the position from where you started.

Level three, alignment.

In any movement that we're gonna do next,

you're gonna always have to think about your hips

and your shoulders on the same line.

We are not only thinking of body alignment,

we wanna be able to dance so

that our audience can see all parts of our body

and we can use the space in a way that makes sense.

So we have what we call in ballet, efface or en face.

We also have ecarte,

and these are all the different movements

and different planes that we work in.

When I'm doing my passe, I like to really think

about the back of my thigh pressing to the back of the room,

and I feel like that keeps me stable

and helps me really rotate from the inner parts of my hip.

Lots of things can go wrong in the passe.

You can fall down towards your knee,

you have to keep it up high

and you can't let your foot cross over your knee as well.

You have to be able to stand on one leg instead

of two legs and be able to use your knee

and your feet joints to be able to then go

onto the more difficult steps that come after it.

Level five, attitude.

What it means is basically a bent leg.

I try to think about lifting the knee up

and trying to turn out the foot as much as I can

to keep it in that straight line.

In the world of classical ballet,

and this is definitely arguable,

we have three main schools of dance.

With the French school of the attitude,

the foot and the knee are almost perpendicular

to each other.

And in the American school it's slightly similar

but the leg is lifted higher.

And then the Russian school being the most extreme.

And the reason why I have it here is

because the things that you can do with turning

in an attitude position make it more complex

than some of the levels that we've had.

You need extreme balance control

in order to turn in this position of attitude.

Level six, arabesque.

This is the graduation of passe, tendu, attitude.

You have to be able to turn out your legs

and then you have to be able to hold that position.

There are officially four different arabesques.

So you have first arabesque, second arabesque,

third arabesque, and fourth arabesque.

Either second arabesque or fourth arabesque

can be the hardest because your body

is in such extreme twisting positions

and your eyes and your arms and your port de bras all has

to be connected to make this movement

that it seems so simple but is so complex.

Let's look at a sequence.

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Level seven, developpe.

Start from your fifth position.

You pull your foot up through the passe

and then you lift your heel forward

and then you're lifting your leg over 90 degrees.

You have to be so stable on your standing hip

and be able to bring your foot forward

while not letting your hips fall forward

which we're going back to our alignment.

And you can do this developpe at various levels and speed.

This is when you use your artistry to then be able

to go into the center and tell a story.

Level eight, grand battement.

Grand battement here is a huge throwing of the leg,

the 180 degrees or your maximum amount of strength.

So flexibility is imperative here,

certainly a hundred percent you need the splits

and then you also need a strong, stable, supporting leg.

You have to be able to move and use your body

and the grand battement helps you train for your jumps.

So I've placed it after the attitude and after the passe

on purpose because it's a very dynamic movement.

Level nine, en pointe.

Pointe is a very special skill

where you have to be able to hold all of your positions

to be able to dance, do your attitude,

do your tendus, on a platform that's this small.

So it is something that you really have to love

in order to commit to being en pointe

and it actually is destructive

to your body to be on pointe shoes.

So that is one of the reasons why I put it here.

Level 10, spotting.

This is the secret to balance

and the secret to dynamic momentum.

This is a technique where we use our eyes,

we face forward, we pick one place

and we turn our eyes as much as we can,

finding that spot, the same exact place

that we were just before.

Level 11, chaine turn.

Now we're really getting into the technique

of how to do turns.

It actually means chain,

so it means one thing after another.

We start a chaine turn with our legs in tendu

and one of our arms out.

Make a half turn where we go into a second position

and then we go back into a first position.

You do that in succession and you add speed

and then all of a sudden you have a sequence

of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Level 12, pirouette.

A pirouette is a full rotation

that you do from a fixed position,

either fifth position, fourth position, or second position.

You wanna take the space with the middle finger

and you wanna have the second arm push

and come and meet the first arm.

You wanna keep everything on the same plane,

keeping your arms strong,

and then your standing arms strong

and then you wanna spot and keep it

and then finish very nicely.

There are so many different ways to start a pirouette

depending on where you are in the world

and what school of dance that you're going through.

So the French, the Russian, and the American way,

they all have a different takeoff and landing position.

Let's look at a sequence.

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Level 13, expression.

Expression entails being able to convince and portray

to the audience the emotion that you have inside

and make that something that is physical and understandable.

The reason why I put it in this order

is it can be actually really difficult

to find the right expression for the right movement.

For example, Swan Lake, the save movement

with the arms can be either sad

or it can be sharp and contrasting and dynamic as well.

Some people argue that you can't teach expression.

I believe that you can.

It's something that is passed down

through a relationship between a teacher and a student.

And it's an ability to build trust

between your teacher and yourself to find something

that's inside of you and then be able to replicate that

and put that into your body and make it seem organic.

Level 14, glissade.

Now we're moving onto the jumps.

Now we're leaving the floor.

We have to go from our fifth position, use our tendu,

use our dynamic strength from the grand battement.

So the glissade has to be a sharp movement

and the feet have to leave the floor at the same time,

stay up in the air and then close at the same time.

Often the glissade, you turn out either the leg

that's going first or the leg that's coming in,

so then it looks very turned in or sickled.

Or you plie and you leave one leg

and then you leave the floor only for one second

and then the second leg comes up.

You really wanna be able to have a moment in the air

with two legs pointed and then two legs in fifth position.

The glissade is so important

for being able to have nice connecting steps.

So you have to be able to do your pambe pas de bra glissade.

So those are all different steps which are gonna lead

to our next level.

Petit allegro is super complicated

and you need a lot of coordination from your upper body,

your port de bras, and your lower legs

to be able to do this quick movement

and give the audience an impression

that it's super light and super easy.

You have to be able to keep your ribs in

and your body not going up and down

and you have to keep everything

in one place while using your arms

and making the movements that you're doing very quickly

with your feet, seem light and fast.

Level 16, entrechat or beats.

So now that we've talked about petite allegro

you can then complicate

that petite allegro by adding a beat.

So an example of some of those beats would be

an entrechat quatre or an entrechat six.

A few tips that I try to think about

when I do my entrechat quatre or my entrechat six

is trying to change the leg first

to really try to get that first beat

because the next beats will come easier.

If you're late to get the first beat,

oftentimes you don't arrive with the right foot

in the end in the position.

Level 17, cabriole.

Now we've talked about beats.

Now we've talked about petit allegro.

Now we've talked about quickness.

A cabriole is a larger jump

which you need your grand battement for.

You take off, you brush the leg up to a grand battement

and your bottom leg has to meet the top leg

and then come down back into fifth position.

It's a great example of a jump that can be a small jump,

a medium jump, or a large jump.

Level 18 is our tour en l'air.

It's a full rotation, it's an actual turn in the air,

tour en l'air, and then you land in fifth position.

For the men, that's often a double turn in the air.

For the woman, it's normally a single turn,

even though I've done it in Diana and Actaeon.

I've done it double assemble

and it takes extreme coordination that you have

from your pirouette to be able to get around.

It's really important to keep your alignment in line.

You have to have such quick coordination for it.

I would recommend

that dancers really use their spotting technique

for the tour en l'air.

If you lose your spot, it's very hard to make the rotation.

Level 19, pas de chat or saut de chat.

What I think of a grand pas de chat

is a big jump in a split.

You really want to try to get your knee up

as high as you can so that your back leg can get up

as high as it can.

You have several different iterations of a pas de chat

and that means different things to different people.

They call this jump the step of the cat

because you have to have a very nice and light landing.

If you've ever seen a cat try to jump onto something,

they jump and arrive there at the same time.

Level 28, grand allegro.

This is now all that we've done before,

put together to explosive music,

and it is very exciting to watch.

The grand allegro requires a ton of stamina

and a ton of musicality.

If you can't hear the music, you can be seen

as being heavy or behind, and you have to have coordination

with the music and with your body to be able

to give the impression that it's super light

and that it's super easy for you to do.

For me, it's a moment in the class

that I have time to dance for myself.

So often my expression shines through

whether I'm feeling funny or sad or excited.

All of those emotions can be showcased in a grand allegro.

Level 21 is our fouettes

So you start with a pirouette

and you're doing a rond de jambe out to the side

and then you're pulling in for a pirouette to your passe.

You have to have extreme stamina of your supporting leg,

extreme coordination, and then you have to use spot.

This is performed at the very culmination,

the very end of the pas de deux

to showcase the ballerina's prowess,

the ballerinas technical mastery.

It can go wrong so fast.

If you don't have a spot, you're gonna fly off to the side.

It's a culmination of not being able

to give in to feeling tired

and then also finishing with showing the audience that

that was just very easy for you.

Let's look at a sequence.

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I know that ballet can seem

like it's something otherworldly and unattainable,

but dance and ballet is actually for every single person

and I would challenge the audience members

who enjoy this video to go out

and find an adult beginner class.

It doesn't matter if you don't do things perfectly.

We all are on a constant search for perfection

but perfection doesn't exist,

so just be the best self you can be and enjoy dancing.

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