I am a classical ballet dancer, and I’ve been very fortunate to have been exposed to other genres of dance through spring and summer ballet programs. While I’ve learned contemporary and character dance in the past, my favorite genre of dance is undoubtedly ballet.
Ballets, including variations (snippets of a ballet), have a continued storyline. Whether it be Coppelia, where the story between Swanhilda, Franz and Coppelia intensifies as the ballet continues, or Nutcracker, where Clara goes on an Alice-In-Wonderland type of adventure during Christmastime, ballets have story expositions, denouement, and morals of the story. I love that because aside from being a dancer, I also love reading and writing. The story being told is a large part of what gets me excited about performing ballets. With contemporary dance, the ‘story’ being told is usually about a feeling. When I was working on a contemporary piece to the soundtrack of ‘The Theory of Everything’, the feeling I was expressing was about learning movement and coming alive in the process almost like discovering the world around me. Pieces like these can definitely be powerful, but the Dying Swan variation from Swan Lake moves me more because the variation is part of an emotive and tragic story. For me, dancing the piece is like reliving a chapter from a favorite book that you’ve read many many times.
Balancing technicality and expression has been a constant method of improvement for me. While working on these two very important aspects of dance, I have found that with ballet, it was easier to track my progress than it was for contemporary. Tracking allows me to see exactly how much I have improved over the course of say, a month. I find this very helpful as it constantly motivates me to keep working on my goals, and it also allows me to see what exercises were effective, because I could reference the time I was practicing an exercise to the progress photo I had taken. For me, the difference in ability to track progress between contemporary and ballet really set the two forms apart. While working on the emotive aspect of ballet, it is harder to track your progress than it is to track progress of an exercise; you could see how much higher you are able to lift your leg after a period of time, but it’s hard to measure expressiveness. Also, there aren’t many exercises to practice expressiveness. It is more difficult to know if you’ve attained your goal in terms of expressing emotion through your dancing when dancing contemporary. It’s for these reasons that I enjoy a greater sense of satisfaction with my ballet practice, in particular when focusing on technique.
I love ballet and contemporary, but because of the storylines in ballet and the easier-to-track-progress aspect, ballet continues to hold a special place in my heart.
Dance Domain 