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Thứ Tư, 16 tháng 3, 2016

Become professional dancer

As a professional instructor of ballet who has been either the primary teacher of or directly involved with the training of students who have gained much success with ballet up to and including becoming professional dancers, I have discovered that there are a few key things which must be done and a couple of things that absolutely should not be done if the goal of the student is to become a professional dancer.

Whether it is gaining acceptance to the School of American Ballet/New York City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet or Boston Ballet summer dance programs, earning full scholarships to college for ballet, or getting contracts to dance professionally with Boston Ballet or San Francisco Ballet there are common denominators which are always present in the training of the student that lead to these types of successes. There are also two things which should never ever be allowed to happen that are guaranteed to short circuit a student's progress.

The things that should always happen:

1) Regularly taking good, thorough ballet class. There is no substitute for this. If you are at a studio which cannot give you at least 4 days each week of good dedicated ballet classes, you need to find a different studio because the place you are at just won't be able to get you the technical underpinnings you have to have.

2) A good ballet class must have a complete barre from plies to adagio and you simply must do a challenging fondu sequence, preferably on releve, in the center, every time you take class. Bare bones minimum - without these aspects, even a 2-hour long ballet class is ultimately just a hard work out but is a waste of time for getting you to advance technically. Everyone wants to work on big turns and big jumps because they are fun but ballet also has to look right; the barre work and challenging, balance-creating center sequences are how you mold your body to look good when you are spinning around or leaping through the air. All the leaps and turns in the world are again a very good workout, but mean nothing relative to ballet unless they look correct. And, at the end of class, make sure a thorough stretch including all the splits positions are done.

3) NEVER try to stretch before warming up at the barre, ever.
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