Get down

Ballet is all about up. In just about any ballet class, you'll hear the instructor mention at least once how you should lift here, stretch up there, and look up! A Google image search of "ballet " pulls up pictures of women on pointe and men looking up to the balcony. Ballet has taken up to an extreme by having women dance around on their toes. Bent legs are a real no-no in ballet; if you're on relevé, your leg damn well better be straight unless you're doing hops en pointe. There are for the most part two levels in ballet, middle and up. Down is rarely used; sure, you plie for just about everything, but the plie isn't the end, it's the means. The most obvious exception is lunges, but those are usually only done as part of an adagio. All this is why my thighs always hurt the day after taking jazz, which could be seen as the complement to ballet as it's mostly done middle and down.

You know all that time you spent in ballet class mastering the "up?" Forget about it when you enter a ballroom studio. Ballroom uses all three levels equally in a manner unlike any other dance system I've studied. (Modern can be anything, of course, but I haven't studied much of any particular modern technique, except enough Horton to know that I'm not made for it.) When you're down, you need to be down, not just "below middle." This is something I tend to forget when my mind is focused on other things, like remembering what comes next. In the absence of conscious command, my body reverts to ballet technique. Just about anything my teacher tells me I'm doing wrong I can attribute to the fact that I'm doing it like a ballet dancer would do it. When I go "up" I straighten my legs, which is a real no-no in ballroom. It's actually hard for me not to straighten them, but I think I see the point: it's darned near impossible to maintain the correct hip placement with straight legs. I suppose, in this respect at least, I would be better off with less dance experience, as one of the more difficult things for beginning dancers to master is keeping their legs straight in relevé.