Beginner Ballet Lesson 12: How to Spot, Detourné, & Pre-Pirouette Foundations | Free Ballet Class

Hello and welcome to Song Life Lifestyle. My name is Olivia and I'm a lifelong ballerina and classical musician here to teach you how to dance ballet for free with no experience needed. Let's go ahead and get our dancing gear on and get started. Hello everyone, welcome to class. If you're a first time viewer on my channel, I'm so glad that you're here. Just a quick note that this video is part of a large series of videos and each one builds off of one another, so I wouldn't want you to get lost and I recommend that you go ahead and check out my playlist above so you can start from the very beginning and get caught up to this point. Now if you are a returning student, welcome back. I'm so glad that you're here. So today you will be learning some really great concepts. You will be learning how to spot, how to do a detourne, and also how to balance when you spring up from a position in fourth to a passe releve. For those of you who might have some ballet background, you might be getting a little bit excited because all of these motions that we're learning really come into play when it comes to learning how to do a pirouette. Now we won't be learning how to do a pirouette in this episode of this module, but you will be learning how to do one rather soon and these motions are just the absolute foundations that you really truly need in order to execute a pirouette properly and safely. So I'm very excited to teach you how to do these things. So let's go ahead and get started on how to spot. Spotting in ballet is just the absolute foundation needed for any type of turn. It's very important. Whether you're doing chaine turns or you're doing a pirouette or any other type of turn, you need to know how to spot. Now when you spot, what you do is you look at a point either on a corner or a wall. We'll go ahead and use a wall for now. And you know, just stare at one point on the wall. When I was younger learning in ballet, what my teachers would do is they would put a sticker on the wall and tell you to look at that sticker. Keep looking at it and walk your feet around. Keep looking at the sticker until you literally you can't look at anymore and then you're going to quickly whip your head around to look right back at that sticker. Okay? So we'll go ahead and demonstrate that one more time. You're going to be looking at a point on the wall. Pretend there's a sticker there or a butterfly or something that you want to look at. You keep looking at it. You keep looking at it and then you whip your head right back around to that same spot. Okay? Now again, because we're talking about turns in ballet, we have a very strong focus on things being even. You shouldn't practice doing that to just one side. I was spotting to the right. You should also practice spotting to the left. So we will go ahead and do that. So we're looking at a point in front of us. We're looking, we're looking, we're looking and then turn your head around. We'll go ahead and do that one more time. Looking at a point, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, turning your head around. Okay? Now this will probably get some, take some getting used to. Again, be patient with yourself. This is, you know, getting a little bit further along in dance techniques and as beginners, I don't want you to be frustrated if you're having trouble with something. Again, go at your own pace and I know that you'll be able to get, get where you need to be eventually with practice as with all things. So that is how you do a spot in ballet. Let's go ahead and talk about detourne. Now I'm so glad that we get to finally talk about this motion because it's one of the reasons why I've been trying to get you into the habit of turning into the bar whenever we go from a right to left combination. So let's go ahead and learn how to do detourne. So when you do a detourne, what you do is you spring up into a sous sous, you look off to the side and what you're going to do is you're going to spot out to the side. Okay? You're going to be in your sous sous and then you're going to switch your feet. You're going to kind of like swivel your feet. Okay? And you're going to spot, you're going to keep your spot there. So this isn't like a full complete turn, how a pirouette happens, but this is an example of a spot used, um, just at the bar when changing your direction. Okay? So if it's easier for you to start off with, we can practice just with our feet flat, looking off to the side and practice transferring your weight like this. Okay? So keep looking at your spot at the wall. And what we're doing is we're using our arms to stabilize ourselves. That's why we have our arms on second position and you kind of out a little bit and bring it to the first, open back to the second. Okay? And then you can go ahead and practice that in the full out sous sous, so in the relevé. So let's say we go relevé, sous sous, we're looking out, transfer the weight, transfer the weight. You can just practice that. Okay? So now we will practice how to go, um, from a fourth position on flat into a passe relevé and balance. And again, this is a very important part of, um, learning how to get the foundations down for a pirouette. So typically pirouettes will start in a fourth position plie. Now there are many ways to start a pirouette. Um, sometimes from a fifth position, you can start from a fourth, or sorry, from a second and go to a pirouette. There are a lot of different ways to get to a pirouette, but the most, I don't want to say basic, but the, one of the most common ways and the ways that people typically learn starting out is from a fourth position, um, with your foot to the back, the working foot to the back. So we will go ahead and be practicing that motion of starting in a fourth position plie. Okay. And going up into a passe relevé. Okay. And the reason why we're doing that is again, when you do, when you do a pirouette, that's what you're doing mid rotation is you're going from your, your plie in fourth position into your passe and you're rotating and coming down. So that's why we were at the bar. We want to practice going from our fourth position up into a passe relevé. Okay. So let's go ahead and practice that. Let's have our arm out in a second position. We're having our feet in fourth position plie, and we are going to transfer the weight to the standing leg in a relevé, go back down, and then we can try it with the arm. So we can go arm out to the first, out to the first. Now, contrary to popular belief, your body isn't what turns you in a pirouette. It's actually your arms. So that's why practicing your arm going from a second to the first is very important because your arms are what carry you through the turn. Okay. Let's go ahead and we can practice our detourne here. Okay. Let's do one more into a passe relevé, closed fit, detourne, and let's go ahead and go to a fourth position here. So again, we'll go out from the second to the passe relevé. Make sure that you keep your standing leg as straight as possible because if you're in a pirouette and your standing leg is bent, it's going to be very, very hard to turn. You want to practice keeping your core engaged and your head held high. Again, envisioning that you have a string running through your head, down through your whole body, keeping you all the way straight. We'll go ahead and close fit, detourne, and close. So that's actually everything that we need to learn for this episode. I'm very excited to go ahead and get into our performance combination. So I will mark that for you now. So what we will do is we will do a tendu plié en croix, and then we will go, we will open out to the second, do kind of like a half rond de jaune par terre, end up in our fourth position plié, practice going to a passe relevé, closing in fifth, doing a detourne, and then starting to the next side. So I'll go ahead and mark that real quick. We'll keep our hands, and I'm sorry, we'll keep our arms and our heads fairly simple for this because I know that we are kind of touching on a few more slightly advanced concepts here, and I just really want you to focus getting that spot down and focusing on the proper legs and turn out and everything. So we'll keep it a little simpler for the arms and the head. So we've learned everything that we need to for this lesson so far, and I'm very excited to go ahead and teach you our end of class performance combination. Let's go ahead and get started. So we will do, start off with an en croix from first position, just tendu plié. So we will do our preparation, tendu plié, tendu side plié, tendu back plié, tendu side plié, tendu to the side, rond to the back, so we're like a half rond de jaune par terre, get to your fourth position plié, practice springing up to your passé relevé, then we're going to close in fifth on relevé, detourné, plié, and use a tendu to go back to the first. Then we will go ahead and try to the left. We'll do tendu plié, tendu plié, tendu plié, tendu half rond, plié in fourth, go to the passé relevé, close in fifth, detourné, and then tendu, close first, and end. Okay? So I'm very excited to try this first combination with you in which we aren't just, you know, kind of closing and like turning around to the other side. We will actually be doing our detournés, which is what you typically do in a ballet class. This is like, this is very exciting for me because this is really, you guys, you're really leveling up here. I'm so excited for you. So let's go ahead and get started on and continuing your dance journey. If you would like to, please comment, like, subscribe, turn on the notifications so that you can stay in the loop for all my future videos. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day and schedule to come dance with me. So here's my regrants to you. Thank you very much for joining me today, and I'll catch you again in the next video. Take care.