Improving Alignment: Facilitating Change by Understanding Hindrances Caused by the First Person Experience
This presentation focuses on various factors that inhibit well-intentioned dancers’ abilities to improve alignment in ballet technique. Ballet educators are adept at identifying students’ weaknesses and faults, but the field lacks a collective understanding about underlying hindrances caused by first-person experiences that stand in the way of a dancer’s progress and capacity to produce change. In my ongoing efforts to make ballet education a transparent practice, this presentation aims to build constructs for better understanding the ballet dancer’s first person training experiences and to aid those of us who are challenged with teaching ballet to a diverse body of well-intentioned learners.
