About those fouettes
I’ve written about the ballet step known as the fouette before, and so I’ll quote myself:
The turn…is known as the fouette—a word that means “whip.”…The trajectory of the leg as it quickly unfolds leads the body into the turn with a whipping force that isn’t easy to control, to say the least.
But you know what? I don’t care much for any of it. And this isn’t only because I was never all that good at fouettes, especially when on pointe.
Like most steps in ballet, the technique required of dancers performing the fouette has become more extreme. It used to be enough just to do them; the step itself elicited oohs and ahs. Now, multiple turns embedded within the fouettes (as you see in this video at the beginning and end) have become required in order to satisfy the jaded palates of the dance consumers, used to gymnastics rather than finesse, athleticism rather than art, tricks rather than sublimity.
I have searched You Tube for an example of fouettes that would partake of artistry. I couldn’t find any, even in older clips featuring dancers I admire greatly. It seems it doesn’t matter who does them, or how well or how poorly; they’re a trick that doesn’t interest me at all, although I admire the strength and balance required because I know how exceptionally difficult it is.
Here is an illustration of the genre, by a German dancer named Adeline Pastor. A phenomenal turner, she begins the sequence with something I guess would be called an octuple turn (as opposed to a double or triple or quadruple). It’s something I’ve never seen before from a woman en pointe, although occasionally it’s done by a man in soft ballet slippers, which although not easy is certainly a lot easier (fouettes are never done by men). Pastor then proceeds to do something else that’s exceptionally difficult; she changes her focus with succeeding fouettes, eventually coming back to face the audience:
It’s an astounding trick. But again, it’s in the nature of a circus or gymnast’s feat. Interesting and extraordinarily difficult, but not what I think is unique to ballet.
Here’s a set of fouettes I found that’s also good, but quite different. What’s so hard about this one is that the dancer manages a double revolution every third fouette, even as the series goes on and as one would expect she begins to tire. She doesn’t falter, though. What’s more, she adds something subtle that the casual watcher wouldn’t know is fiendishly difficult: she puts her arms up as she does the doubles.
Why is that so difficult? A dancer usually pulls his/her arms closer to the body order to reduce what I think would be called air resistance while turning, as well as to make the turner smaller and more compact and more like a ball and less likely to be thrown off-center. Our teachers used to sometimes make us turn with arms up, and believe me it doesn’t take but one experience to illustrate the principle:
The dancer in the following clip throws in doubles every other fouette, but notice two things that make her achievement, impressive thought it is, less impressive than the one above it: her arms are on her hips rather than in the air, and as she tires she eliminates the doubles and the fancy arms:
Hey, I couldn’t do anything of the sort even when I was in my prime. And my prime (at least where fouettes are concerned), unlike that of Miss Jean Brodie, seems to have passed.
Oh my goodness.
http://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5zvccn4TG1r0z1h8o1_500.gif
I adore fouettes. All the years my daughter danced, I would watch the girls and marvel at this skill. We once had an amazing talent – a young lady who went on to the NY City Ballet. She could go round and round and never move from her spot. Amazing.
Svetlana is a human stringbean, for sure, no body mass to provide resistance LOL
She has a very pretty face.
Who knew? Certainly not me. Amazing and interesting, at least for me.
Neo,
Congrats on communicating such enthusiasm for ballet that you’ve managed to get lugs like me (and others, I’m sure), who have little knowledge or appreciation for the art to read these posts, watch the videos and try to fathom what it’s all about. (Watched the Carla Fracci video and FWIW, liked her light-as-a-feather, liquid quality.)
Like most steps in ballet, the technique required of dancers performing the fouette has become more extreme. … [This extreme technical ability is now] required in order to satisfy the jaded palates of the dance consumers, used to gymnastics rather than finesse, athleticism rather than art, tricks rather than sublimity.
I’ve seen an analogous thing in other arts, like musicians who play stuff that, I’m told, is very, very difficult–but which doesn’t sound very good. They get mesmerized by technique (and ego) and forget that beauty is the goal.
So ballet is a most physically demanding, grueling and stressful pursuit. And yet you did this for many years, some of which were quite intense, right? What motivated you, the “sublime,” evanescent glimpses of something splendid and perfect? What did it teach you?
Neo, if you have time to look, I would love to know what you think of Natalia Osipova’s fouettes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arVnNSCFAME
Conservation of angular momentum is awesome!
Looking at the first one, I was thinking, “Okay, you can stop now.’
If we’re showing off or competing n fouettes, that’s one thing. Interrupting the performance to stack up the fouettes without any connection to the theme is silly.
But, as has been seen in many endeavors, if some is good, more is better and too much is terrific.
The aspect ration on that clip was off. She really looked like Spider Woman. But thank you for inspiring us to explore the world of ballet on YouTube. Click your video and a vast universe opens up.
We mostly do Opera and Broadway and Theater. Just did a week there to see five operas, three museums, two plays and one musical.
We are going back to see this guy sing in two operas at the Met.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85kFY4D55oE
I make the following comments with zero knowledge, really, of ballet or the experience of dancing it.
But probably pulling the arms UP while doing the double actually may make it easier, in the sense that it almost certainly speeds up the turn, perhaps enabling the double to take place with similar timing as the single… I don’t have the kind of dancer’s sense of timing to see how the two “take”, but it certainly shortens — speeds up — the double turn considerably because it pulls in the “slow” moving hands which makes the entire turn speed up.
BTW, on the same topic, “sort of”, the 20th episode of Forever, “Best Foot Forward” centers on the ballet. I’d warn you it’s a bit grisly and probably not overly concerned with the ballet (it’s a sort of dramatic semi-police-procedural not unlike Castle with a different “Macguffin” to center the series around), the ballet IS the mise en scé¨ne of this episode.
IGotBupkis,
Sorry, but on this one, you’ve got bupkis.
Putting the hands up does not quicken the turn, because there aren’t “slow moving hands” that are not “pulled in” otherwise. The reason is that turns are usually done, not with the arms out to the sides or dangling in some way as drag, but with the arms and the hands pulled in fairly tight and relatively close to the torso at about waist or shoulder height.
Watch the women doing it the regular way in the video, or in other videos.
When a dancer has to put the arms up, it throws her off with drag and also makes the body much less compact. Compact is always, always good for turns. Arms up also throws you more off your center, your straight line around which you are turning, because it’s harder to get them balanced. Arms up is also more tiring to the body, requires much more effect and depletes you faster. There’s a host of ways in which it’s harder.
I’ve done all kinds of turns both ways, with arms in many different positions. Anything other than arms pulled in towards the center of the body makes it harder.
I know nothing about this, but they all seem to be turning in the same direction. Is that correct, or can they turn in the opposite direction as well? Maybe I should watch them all again.
Francesca:
Most people are natural right-turners, whereas very very few turn best to the left. It has something to do with the brain, and is not correlated with handedness (I am a left-handed right-turner, for example). I wrote about it here.