What Alternative Ideas Can Apply to Ballet Dancers?
Classical Ballet — is a traditional, formal style of dance. It is known for its aesthetics and rigorous technique (such as pointe work, turnout of the legs, and high extensions). Classical ballet is not without its dignity. However, it should be allowed to be creative and innovative. I believe it’s possible while it’s still preserving its worth and dignity. Charles “Lil Buck” Riley and Natalia Osipova are two world’s famous and greatest dancers in different dance fields; Riley specializes in street dance, and Osipova is a former ballet dancer. The common these two share is that they both have classical ballet training experience, and they apply the ballet’s methods to their dances which makes them extraordinary dancers with extremely great skills they’ve got.
There are 5 skills that dancers will need to make them improve: physical strength, flexibility, musicality, creativity, and vulnerability. Physical abilities — strength and flexibility — are the most necessary skills for dancers to train first, in order to be able to dance without getting injured. It takes years of training to get where you finally can feel that you have got enough muscle to be a dancer. These are obvious to focus on because you can actually see the progress of your body. But what you can’t ignore but significantly important are the other 3 skills — musicality, creativity, and vulnerability — which are as important as the first two, but not often focused on as much. Great dancers can manipulate the music, at least it seems like they do. It’s called musicality, the skill that you fit in the music and the music falls into the dancers’ body. Creativity is necessary for all kinds of artists. Without imagination, nothing great can be created. The last thing but the most important skill; the key that differentiates good dancers and extraordinary dancers, is vulnerability. Dancers are exposed, physically and emotionally on the stage. It’s scary and frightening, but that’s where the quality of art gets to be shown in front of the audience.
Charles “Lil Buck” Riley (born May 25, 1988) is an American dancer, actor, choreographer, and model from Memphis, Tennessee. He is a street dancer who has classical ballet training experience. He choreographed his piece called The Swan with music by Saint-Saëns. This music is originally used in The Dying Swan — a classical ballet piece choreographed by Mikhail Fokine, which he choreographed for the ballerina Anna Pavlova first presented in Russia in 1905.
Riley’s choreography is very different from the original, classical ballet piece; first of all, he is not a ballet dancer. His performance is non-ballet-based — more of street dance style — yet still, he successes to dance the dying swan beautifully, and delicately in street dance style and using the techniques from it, without losing the sense of the original, classical ballet piece. He has great flexibility that adds to his performance greatness that has strength, musicality, creativeness, and vulnerability. His movements are smooth, absolutely beautiful, playful that entertaining the audience, and sometimes scary that makes the audience think he is going to fall, and yet somehow, breathtaking and touching.
Natalia Petrovna Osipova (Russian: Ната́лья Петро́вна О́сипова; born 18 May 1986) is one of the world’s great ballet dancers. She is currently a principal ballerina with The Royal Ballet in London. She has a different way of approaching as a female ballet dancer; She has extreme gymnastic strength that can apply to technical ballet jumps and turns; extreme high jumps and great stability and many pirouettes — a ballet technique of turn — that she can jump as high as a male dancer do. With her big jumps and turns, she literally runs through the stage, and it seems the stage isn’t big enough for her.
Gymnastic strength is not only her greatness. Her expression of emotion is breathtaking, too. She has also performed the original version of The Dying Swan. Obviously, it has a different quality of dance as a ballet dancer, from Riley’s piece. It has ballet-based arm techniques, she wears pointe, and she uses her entire body, starting with her arms, expandingly. It’s the story of a dying swan of the last 3 minutes of life before it dies, and the dancer has to tell the story using only the basic ballet steps. There are no dynamic movements such as jumps and turns. If the swan was too energetic, it won’t look like dying, and if it was too simple, it tells nothing. It is amazing how she has become a dancer who can perform both physically and emotionally at the greatest on any character, and I think that is what makes her extraordinary. It proves that she is not just an outrageous gymnastic-sided ballet dancer, but actually, a ballet dancer who is dedicated to dance classical ballet.
Riley and Osipova, both are thrilling to watch— because they are the risk-takers on their performance — they don’t play safe to perform beautifully, which is, I believe, what differentiates them from other dancers. Once they appear on the stage, the audience can’t help but just watch them. Sometimes even the greatest dancers fall and make mistakes, which makes the audience scared, too. But they don’t hold back. They don’t seem to be afraid of making a mistake or performing. Because they know what they are capable of and they know how to show their abilities at the most, with combining different ways of approaching to perform at their best. There must have been struggles and spending time groping to find their own best ways to perform, which turned out, to be different from others. But eventually, it is one of the skills dancers need as well; knowing how to apply skills they have to their performance, even within the dance method such as classical ballet. Which also brings them to dance with confidence. Peter Wright — a British ballet teacher, choreographer, director, and former professional dancer — once said about Osipova:
“Osipova makes classical ballet look natural.”
Classical ballet could be awkward form of movement because all those balletic technical movements mostly do not make sense. They didn’t come from the way human beings move naturally. It’s a chain of formed movements. That’s the reason why it has a mathematical beauty in it. But a ballet company can’t be just a group of dancers who dance robotically, dance exactly the same as the way they are trained. It is not art — classical ballet always has to be art. In order to succeed that, each of the dancers needs to reach the highest point where they can get. They have to keep improving and always be at the top of themselves. It’s not easy, it’s extremely hard to maintain the level of where they are, but that’s how makes ballet look so special, exclusive, dreamy, and sparkly on the stage.
Passion is a huge part of a dancer. Without it, dancers are not able to keep dancing. It will break them even before they decide to quit. There is no single day dancers don’t look at the mirrors when they go to the studio. They face themselves, physically and mentally, and be scared of a small change of the body or get excited about the slight improvement they discover in themselves. In order to be a great dancer, it requires strong mental health as much as physical health. Dancers need to be smart and balance out everything and make time to take good care of themselves. That will eventually apply them to be better dancers as well. They may discover something new on a way to the studio. They may find something they didn’t see yesterday. The point is, every moment of life, whether dance-related or not, can be alternative ideas, that will add some new qualities for dancers to be even better. This is the interesting part of art; it is fathomless, and there are indefinite possibilities to discover something that didn’t exist until now. So I would say — “Keep open your eyes. The answers that will change your dance life could be right in front of you.”
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