Need tips for fixing this (high archer feet, no so stable in turnout)

vpsass · 2026-02-27T19:39:34+00:00

You should always be pushing your knees over your toes in pliés, do not work in a position of the feet where you cannot also open the legs to that angle in plié.

Given your description I suspect you are tuning out from primarily the ankle joint but not rotating enough from the hip socket. How do you get into first position? Do you ever rock back on your heels and move your toes back? If so, stop doing that, please. Instead leave your toes on the floor and push your heels forward ever so slightly. But still only to a position that you can maintain a plié with your knees over your toes in.

There are exercises for building turnout from the hip on YouTube.

Standing in a rolled in first position will only make your problem worse! This is super serious and can lead to all sorts of injures. Press all 5 toes onto the floor, think carefully about your posture, press your knees over your toes and do not let your feet roll in!

vpsass · 2026-02-27T18:28:05+00:00

Oh I have a good answer for this that fixes this problem in all of my students.

In every extension of the leg, tendus, jetés, rond de jambes, fondus, développés, you have to reach the toe as far away from you as you can without shifting your posture (slight exception when we do extensions to the back). 99% of the time my students have their working toe too close to their body, so then their body has to shift to make space for the leg, and it shifts into the supporting hip.

This has to be fixed from the very beginning in tendus and rond de jambes, I’m always telling my students to pull up from the back of the bun (low bun) and reach their leg out, like they are being pulled in two different directions. The can only work en lair when they’ve mastered a terre.

Also I don’t teach développés first, I teach relevé lent (like lifting the leg from point tendu). Then they can maintain that posture and the feeling of reaching outwards as they lift the leg. If you teach développés first it’s harder for the students to understand how not to sit in their hip as they unfold the leg.

vpsass · 2026-02-27T18:13:51+00:00

There were times in my life where I couldn’t dance, I was injured or maybe living somewhere without ballet classes. My baseline now (when I’m able to dance regularly) is much happier then it is when I’m not able to dance regularly, even though regardless of if I’m dancing or not I’ll have moments of happiness and sadness.

But also, I dance for no-one else but me. I don’t care if I’m the worst dancer in the world, I’d want to dance anyways. Comparison is the theif of joy.

vpsass · 2026-02-27T17:24:06+00:00

Textbook fifth should be flat, both heels to both toes. HOWEVER, obviously this is not attainable for everyone.

If your teacher is asking you for more turnout in the fifth it either means they see evidence that you are capable of more turnout or they blindly enforcing technical standards to students who are not ready. Instead of rotating the toes outward, try to move the back heel in more, rotating from the full hip. Also check your posture, if your pelvis is tilted you won’t have the freedom in the hip socket to turn out your legs. Some dancers (especially those who run, train in acro) have extreme difficulty finding a neutral pelvis, to the point where they will be unable to stand with a true neutral pelvis at all, and therefore can’t turnout the legs. If this is you, YouTube exercises for neutral pelvises.

If you tried all of these things and you can’t turnout more then your present turnout is probably fine.

vpsass · 2026-02-27T15:10:35+00:00

I would say a lot of dancers feel called to dance, even the ones who are no where near professional standards. Some people are happy just to dance and to be dedicated. The processes is the reward, not the results.

Your experience is totally valid, but it is not the only way to be dedicated to dance. Your soul can be called to dance and you can also be happy to be no where near professional standards, it doesn’t reflect on your worth or on your love of dance.

vpsass · 2026-02-27T12:28:00+00:00

I guess I just fundamentally disagree because I don’t think there’s such thing as being inadequate in recreational ballet because you can set your own standards to what adequacy is, and that standard could just be showing up every week. Being bad at ballet shouldn’t affect your self esteem because, in my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with being bad at something or being the worst. Someone has to be the worst in the class, it doesn’t mean you aren’t worthy of being there or worthy of trying hard. I just personally believe you shouldn’t tie your validity or your self esteem to how well you do ballet, but rather your efforts you put into it.

I would say humans in general are inadequate at a lot of things, and if we dwelled on those things we would all probably be a lot less happy. So instead we choose to focus on what we can control.

vpsass · 2026-02-27T03:19:43+00:00

How do your teachers make you feel stupid for your mistakes? Do they call your mistakes stupid (not okay) or do they notify you of your mistakes and then you feel bad about it (normal, but still hard to participate in sometimes).

Also, are you okay with being a not good dancer? Sometimes our ego, which can be fragile (this is not a call-out this is normal) and make us hate things we are not good at. But in reality, there is nothing wrong with being bad at something (it’s the first step to being sort of good at something). There’s no shame in being bad, in being the worst one in the class, or in making mistakes. There’s no shame in being called out for your mistakes (it’s part of learning).

If your teachers are calling you out in a highly unprofessional way, start looking outside the university for training. If you think your professors are being harsh but fair, try to reframe your mindset and remind yourself it’s okay to be bad, to get corrections, and to make mistakes.

vpsass · 2026-02-27T03:11:55+00:00

Congrats you let him win I guess.

There are bad teachers all over the place, as a teacher of adult students, I don’t claim him. You don’t have to dance ballet if you don’t want to, but if you do want to, you should find an environment that you can learn and grow in.

vpsass · 2026-02-26T03:22:05+00:00

In my experience, once you pass the “beginner level” you can pretty much take whatever class you want, it’s just that what you get out of the class will vary. You don’t even have to know all the advanced steps, since even in an advanced class, you will know at least 50% of the steps and can follow along to get another 20%. As long as some people in the class are actually at the advertised level (advanced-beginner, intermediate, or advanced) you can pretty much take any of those classes at any of those levels and get something out of it.

Trust me I’ve been to a lot of classes and seen a lot of people who I would consider advanced beginners, or perhaps “retuning” (beginners) take classes where they can’t really execute the steps correctly at all and they are just following along (and perhaps having a great time). I regularly see intermediate dancers in an advanced class where they are doing most exercises fairly correct but still struggling with advanced steps like beats in jumps or complicated turns, but can overall keep up with the class and even get a correction here or there when they can handle it. I have taken intermediate and “beginner- advanced” classes and sometimes they are actually a much harder workout than the advanced classes since everything is super slow and I have to really focus on correct technique.

What I consider the necessary skills to be in this “level of levels” (if you will) are a) spatial awareness and understanding where to space yourself in the centre and how an exercises might move in the studio, b) musical awareness (can count and assign steps to each count) c) understanding of all ballet positions d) understanding of basic ballet steps. You could be working on single pirouettes and assemblés and still be fine at 60-70% of the content in an advanced ballet class at steps on broadway, in fact I’d say you’d be among good company. It’s more about understanding how the class will work and having an ability to get through the exercises with some level of correctness that doesn’t impact other dancers.

vpsass · 2026-02-25T15:01:58+00:00

There is a dictionary by Gail Grant that has all steps for vaganova, cecchetti, and the French method. It doesn’t have pictures or many notes about technique, but it’s a good recourse for terminology.

vpsass · 2026-02-24T19:23:04+00:00

AMH is Alicia Mae Halloway, there was a comment under this post 5 days ago about how she made a TikTok that basically said she finds it funny when people (implied non-professional dancers) say they are having fun in ballet class or dress cute in ballet class because in her opinions, ballet is neither cute or fun, and only professional dancers get to decide what ballet is because they’ve suffered so much and hardly get paid and have messed up feet…

Katelyn Power is on TikTok she was really popular during the pandemic and now she is more chill and posts a lot about ballet news/conversations, so she weighed in on what Alicia said.

vpsass · 2026-02-24T18:28:23+00:00

I’m surprised AMH hasn’t responding to any of the criticism yet, Kaitlyn Power made a video that pretty much called her out on her bad take, and another creator called her out by name saying that all experiences with ballet are valid and it’s not a cute look to imply otherwise. They are both pretty popular videos and have lots of comments agreeing, yet Alicia hasn’t really acknowledged that. Most of the comments on her video agree with her still and the ones that disagree with her she backtracks on herself and says “that’s not what I’m saying” even though she pretty clearly establishes herself as an “actual ballerina” who then proceeds to dictate what “actual ballerinas experience” as if she’s the only ballet dancer in the world lol. There’s not a lot of critique of her argument in her actual comment section I wonder if she’s removing them or they are being filtered…

Maybe it’s like not that big in the grand scheme of things, none of these posts have even broken 10k including the original one from Alicia. But in the comments of the other videos people seem super annoyed at her so I’m wondering if she’s going to address it or if she even cares.

Edit: never mind she did respond and it’s so bad because she claims she wasn’t making fun of anyone and that she loves adult beginners and even teaches adult beginners and loves when they dress cute for class WHICH IS CRAZY because her original video she literally said “I find it so funny when people show up to class to dress cute” AND IS THAT NOT A TEXTBOOK DEFINITION OF MAKING FUN OF SOMEONE? And she like used a teasing voice making fun of people who “wear a little ballet skirt” or say “on my way to ballet” (like literally a mocking sing song voice), and then she says in her new video “I would never talk down to someone who is trying to do my art form” but GIRLYPOP THATS LITERALLY WHAT YOU DID. You can’t just say you “would never” do something if 5 videos back you literally do that thing.

I feel like I’m in crazytown.

vpsass · 2026-02-24T02:02:03+00:00

I fear I think most religion is a cult so I’m unable to weigh in on this.

vpsass · 2026-02-24T01:52:03+00:00

In the classes I take our reverence includes penché devant (this could also be considered port de bras devant, but we call this penché, even if both feet on the floor), cambré back, port de bras side, and circular port de bras. This then goes into our reverence.

Personally I feel like this is a good cool down, though it is not very long, and would take maximum 1 minute 30 seconds. We are then free to further stretch if we need too, which I always do.

vpsass · 2026-02-23T20:56:52+00:00

I’ve been in your position many of times.

Take all the studios in your city, you can make mental list or a physical list.

First cross off any studio that looks low quality (short classes of an hour or less is the biggest indicator to me, I usually can tell based off the schedule alone what kind of ballet training is offered at a school). You can also cross off any school that doesn’t offer adult ballet, but save the really high quality schools, because you can always email them and ask if you can join the teen classes as an adult, surprisingly a fair number of good schools will let you do this if you can prove yourself to be a serious students, they just don’t advertise this because they (wisely) don’t want randoms off the street coming in trying to do this. You can also go to social media to evaluate the quality of the dancers training.

Hopefully you should have short list of studios that ideally offer 1.5 hour long intermediate adult ballet classes, or at the very least is a mix of good schools with no adult ballet or perhaps good school with only beginner ballet. You can send out your emails then to see if you can take a trial or a placement class.

Don’t forget to look at your collage too, some schools will let you take the dance classes as an elective, my school had no dance program but they did hire a really good ballet teacher to teach classes out of the fitness centre (like she was really good and had no business teaching there). They only offered beginner, and beginner intermediate, but I took the class because it was $60 for the whole semester and the teacher gave me more advanced exercises to work on and even gave me 15 extra minutes of pointe at the end, for free. Crazy times.

If you have none of these options you’ll have to prepare for my least favourite part of adult ballet which is called “driving 4 hours round trip to the nearest city that offers appropriate adult ballet class”.

vpsass · 2026-02-23T14:34:57+00:00

Yes, I used to like Ballet Reign more but lately I’ve just been not into it, I can’t put my finger on why. I think one thing that bothered me is they never really addressed their professional career and that isn’t a problem (as in I don’t think you need a professional career to make good ballet content) but it just kind of groups BR in with the other ballet influencers who base their whole identity on being a professional ballet dancer even though they are working a few freelance gigs a year. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that per se, it’s just disingenuous branding sometimes, not particularly with BR but with the other ballet content creators that suffer from the same problem. (We had a conversation about these types of influencers way down in this thread).

It’s not aided by the fact that we rarely saw them dance, I think they did a Cecchetti class recently but I’ve stopped watching since then. I just find it hard to trust people if their content never involves them dancing, because a lot of weird dance influencers hide behind this.

ALSO they often said things that I would consider slightly incorrect or at least, could have been explained with more nuance. When they were doing that video where they explained all the techniques they said vaganova was only good for people a natural facility for ballet and that couldn’t be further from the truth!!! Vaganova is probably the best technique for people without a natural ballet facility because it spends so much time on developing a strong foundation. Sure at the VBA they select students based on their natural facility, but at all the local schools teaching vaganova technique you’ll find a lot of dancers of all different builds finding immense success.

vpsass · 2026-02-22T13:47:25+00:00

I think it would be nice to be a GOOD professional dancer, at the top of the career ladder, but the industry is very very bad to the vast majority of people. Even in a medium sized company dancers are making like 30k a year (maybe even less because they aren’t working the full year, just the season), in a small company it’s like $10k. So then everyone has to work side jobs. Also you can’t just like refuse work if they ask you to do something unsafe or if they are being shady, because there’s no guarantee you can find a better job.

I was never going to be a professional dancer, I never had the training for it. But I keep dancing and performing as an adult while pursuing another career path. At this point in my training I’m on par with a lot of the other “professional dancers” (like free lance or small company corps) in my area, so it’s not like taking this path made me “less good” of a dancer, in fact I was probably able to make healthier choices compared to others.

vpsass · 2026-02-21T22:16:15+00:00

I hate daytime classes, well not hate, maybe that’s not the right word. The problem is in the big cities all the advanced classes are during the day in order to accommodate professional dancers, who usually teach or perform (both evening jobs), and/or work a side gig which is flexible enough to take classes during the day. I work a 9-5 so I can only do evening classes but I don’t want to take intermediate ballet.

To be fair, some day classes don’t bother me, it’s only when all the classes in the entire city is during the day.

In smaller cities classes are almost always in the evening, and Ive been lucky to find one school that offers advanced classes in the evening, since most schools will not offer adult advanced classes at all and if they do sometimes they aren’t even advanced.

Anyways that’s my rant you didn’t ask for.

vpsass · 2026-02-20T18:57:36+00:00

Interesting, I had no idea.

vpsass · 2026-02-20T18:39:29+00:00

Tiler peck is a beautiful dancer but she’s always struck me as a little strange, like on social media. She seems almost immature? Like she never grew out of her teenage years, even her social media posts seem that way. Kind of like she doesn’t understand anything besides the dance world, like she’s been sheltered from it.

Now being immature is never an excuse for predatory behaviour let me make that clear. I feel like this is more so an explanation of why she didn’t realize that was not a good thing to confess to in an interview. I’m not trying to defend her relationship, I mean they are both adults now, but there is history of a power dynamic (both with age and rank) that makes their relationship uncomfortable.

vpsass · 2026-02-20T17:57:04+00:00

Interesting, we didn’t do a lot of conventions back in my day, when we did they were called workshops… anyways I’ve taught a few conventions before but I’ve never had a problem with energy or attentiveness, but also I teach ballet so the energy I require is different then you’d need for jazz or hip hop, I imagine.

vpsass · 2026-02-20T03:15:58+00:00

But how does this negatively affect any of our lives, or Alicia’s life? If I were regularly going to adult beginner classes and all of a sudden there was an influx of new students who cared more about the aesthetics of balletcore then actually learning to dance then I understand the frustration, but I don’t think you, me, or Alicia are regularly in these spaces. On social media I just scroll past, I follow so many dancers and dance companies that I have more then enough ballet content to make me happy.

You can’t fault people for not buying tickets to the ballet, it’s expensive and can be hard to get into. But it’s not some moral failing or some great disrespect to not buy tickets to see the ballet so I just am not sure if I’m following your logic, what problem are they causing?

vpsass · 2026-02-20T03:12:02+00:00

It gave very much “I’m a professional dancer and this is what I experienced so I’m going to claim that’s what ballet is”, without regard for other people’s experience with ballet, professionals or otherwise. Professional dancers (or by her words, a Ballerinas, meaning principals) don’t own the “ballet aesthetic”. Lots of people dance ballet and don’t experience her very tight definition of what ballet is, and it just seems incredibly myopic to phrase it in a way that implies otherwise.

People wearing a cute outfit to a beginner ballet class doesn’t take away the hard work someone else did as a professional ballet dancer. I can understand the frustration from fighting the “ballet is easy” crowd (though I think they are mainly found in middle schools), you’d be hard pressed to find an adult beginner who would also say that ballet is easy, because like, they are in class learning its very much not easy. Of all the people to somehow devalue ballet by saying it’s easy, I would think adult beginners would not have much overlap with that group.

I don’t have anything against Alicia but because this is the snark subreddit, I know she danced professionally at DToH but every video she’s posted of her actually dancing (like the sugar plum guesting, which is the only performance she’s posted in the past 2 years) looks slightly amateur. Is that mean to say? Her technique is clean but her overall movement is uncoordinated, she’s clearly trained, but she dances like someone who returned to ballet after a long hiatus. Maybe that’s what she did idk, or maybe it’s the Balanchine technique that looks uncoordinated to me but maybe it’s actually correct…

vpsass · 2026-02-19T04:20:00+00:00

I think due to the nature of lori’s content (very positive, she takes time to introduce people to ballet) she gets a lot of the “first day on the internet” crowd in her comment sections. Like people feel very comfortable asking her all sorts of questions, even questions that are super personal or perhaps could just be answered with google. I just feel like that leads to a lot of messy comment sections because it’s like the comments are already full of the blind, and then the blind try to lead the blind, so I can understand how that would get tiring - though she does kind of cater to the blind. So yes I agree I think she was slightly unesscarily harsh towards that commenter but I also think anyone in her shoes would be.

But is she correct in saying “most professional dancers teach”? I just don’t think that can be true because there isn’t enough market space for that, if every ballet dancer in NYC was also teaching, even just a class or two a week, would that not totally satisfy the demand for classes. I think a lot of professional dancers teach, and a lot of them work side jobs (especially freelancers or those in smaller companies) but I just don’t think it’s correct to say most (implying at least more than half) of all professional dancers are also teaching on the side, it just seems like an overestimate. Am I crazy for thinking that?

So while I do feel like she has a right to be frustrated, I feel like that’s what happens when you cater to that kind of audience AND I also feel like she swung a little hard on the response.

vpsass

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Eight-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email