So all these pirouette posts have given me the motivation to really work on mine. Turning has never been my strong suit. My old school never really taught pirouettes broken down...at least not to the adult classes. When I moved to my new school and entered the intermediate classes most people were already great at them and I have been trying to catch up. Spotting has been especially difficult for me.

I have improved. I can consistently turn pretty clean singles now, though I could use some improvement at the end. I want to start holding my passe at the end of the turn so I can start working on doubles. But I am not really sure how you are supposed to finish the pirouette. How do you stop turning in the right position? Right now I stop by dropping my heel. If it is best to hold your passe for a bit at the end, how do you stop at the right spot on demi? Is this something you just start getting a feel for or something that proper spotting will help with?

I apologize if these are silly questions, but I just want to get it right. I think I will be taking a couple beginner classes to make up time that I have missed when I was sick, but I don't know if they will be covering turns yet. I have thought about arrange a private session to work on them, but it is hard to find the time and arrange a babysitter, so I want to see what I can do on my own first.

There are two things that may help you:

1) You can practice finishing your turn by staying up on your demi-pointe, and lowering your passe to demi-pointe. This will train your body to think of the end of the turn as an "up" motion instead of a "down" motion in dropping your heel.

2) Practice doing a turn and staying up in passe as long as you can. Don't worry about if you finish in the "right spot" or not - you may be facing the wall, or the corner, or the back wall - don't worry about that. Just do a single turn, and stay pulled up in a good passe with your supporting leg nice and straight - it may be difficult to stay up there, but if you can, it will give you three indications:

a) that you can hold the passe longer than a single, which means you can do a double, or even a triple!
b) that you are on your centre, indicating that you aren't falling over - which means that you can do a double or even a triple!
c) that all you have to do to get your doubles (or triples!) is to push just a little bit harder on the take off

After practicing holding your passe, you can start by slowly pushing a little bit harder on your take off for a pirouette, and do the same thing - take note of where you land. You may only do a 1 and a quarter or a half turn - this is normal, and some people indeed just increase their turns by a quarter turn until they get a nice solid double.

Good luck!

We do the "1/4, 1/2, full turn" sequence that was mentioned in one of those threads to help with this as well. The idea being that you have to think about how much force (or lack thereof) you really need to get as far as you need to go, and the focus on really "being there" when you get where you're going. You might give that a try and see if it helps you at all.

At college we'd put on a long, slow music track and use the whole song, with these counts for the preps:

1 - degage to second
2 - plie/prepare into fifth
3 - up into the pirouette position and hold
4 - close in fifth
5-8 repeat on other side

Start with pirouettes from fifth position to get the closing as I'm about to explain:

When you start your pirouette from fifth, you're not just aiming to put your foot up under your knee. You want to think of keeping your foot in contact with the front of the leg at all times! Then when you come to land, it reverses back down your leg, again without breaking contact. Practice the preparation at this slow speed until you're comfortable that you're able to hold the balance long enough and that you're bringing the foot up and down without breaking contact.

Once you're able to do this you can always do a longer hold - degage on 1, prepare on 2, up and hold 3-7 and close on 8.

Then when you start to add a turn, use the same slow music. You can be sure you're not flinging yourself round or winding up to the turn, because you have to sustain it and turn slowly so you land just nicely on the fourth count.

Turning from fourth en dehor, it's mostly the same - you want to get your working foot onto the front of your leg as soon as you can and reverse it back down to fifth to land.

I hope this makes sense, I was struggling a bit to explain it without demonstrating! This idea helped so much with making our pirouettes clean and then once we had the technique, an idea from our jazz teacher helped us to get multiple turns. I went from a terrible, messy double turn to four clean turns in ballet and five in jazz with these!

(I could even send you the track we used if wanted, it's the perfect speed and timing)

mirrim wrote:


I want to start holding my passe at the end of the turn so I can start working on doubles. But I am not really sure how you are supposed to finish the pirouette. How do you stop turning in the right position? Right now I stop by dropping my heel. If it is best to hold your passe for a bit at the end, how do you stop at the right spot on demi? Is this something you just start getting a feel for or something that proper spotting will help with?

Mirrim -

The most insidious and arguably best way to learn to hold your passe position in a pirouette is to go immediately into a ala second developpe. So do a single pirouette (let's say to the right), do not let your right leg touch down. Unfold it into a developpe to second.

It'll make sure you're all the way on your supporting side, make sure you're on balance when you finish the turn, teach you to slow down by resisting with the side going into the turn. You do not only drag your heel (and by drag I am assuming you mean resist?), you resist on the side going into the turn. So again, if you're turning to your right, your right side (your entire back from heel upward), very gently slows the movement down. To feel this, try doing an adagio turn. Doing a slow-moving pirouette will force this side to activate. You can do it with your arms up in fifth as it's much easier and looks grand!

Once you get the single pirouette down into a developpe with a flat foot. Amp up the exercise by trying to land in ala second on demi pointe! Man, you want to see ballerinas falling over! Your body will eventually comply, but be prepared for a battle.

And, yes, when you finish a pirouette, you should be in a perfect passe. The reason for this is because it's (a) the correct way to do it; (b) the choreography may demand you go into an ala second or attitude or arabesque. To go immediately into a move like this, your hips have to be square, and you need to be balanced on your supporting side. Otherwise, how can you freely move that leg? You can't.

Another thing to check is your hips. Many, many people (myself included), do not completely finish the turn. By this I mean, that our hips do not full make the trip around to a a full 360. We sort of turn until we see our faces, and then bring our leg down I would say at about 320 degrees. Your hips and entire body should be squarely facing the mirror. Not just part of you can be facing it, all of you should be hence the exercise of going into a developpe.

You can also use a diagonal sequence of doing a pas de bouree into fourth - single pirouette landing in fourth, then a pas de bouree into a pirouette landing in attitude, the same into a pirouette landing in arabesque. Do singles at first, amp it up into doubles or triples when you get the hang of it. And don't wait for everything to be super perfect. That's subjective. People that aren't turners tend to do that single that they're sure of landing. If you were in a performance or audition, yes, do what you can do cleanly, but in class? It's for learning. You have to push to get better so if you're trying to improve, there's often a period of time where we're falling out of something or off balance. It doesn't look pretty, but our bodies really do have to learn to fail to know how to recover ... if that makes sense.

In terms of learning to use your body to resist, as stated in another thread, my absolutely favorite way to practice turning is to try them with your arms in second. Leaving you arms in second forces you to use your shoulders, back, core, etc. I was loving doing this. It feels so easy to incorporate arms after doing turns this way.

Oh, and another big problem for people that aren't natural turners, and for us that are not getting our hips around, is to make sure that there's weight in the foot that's in passe. The leg should be free, but there always has to be a toe to toe and heel to heel connection. That front foot in passe is going to anchor the body from flipping back. It stabilizes you, and remember everything is connected. Therefore, what you're doing is giving weight to your hands (your arches/feet are connected to palms/hands).

Just a few thousand things to remember!

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

If you are doing a pirouette en dehor to the right side -

You're right arm will stop you. Your left arm closes to first to bring you IN to the turn and to get you around, and at the end of the turn, your right arm holds strong and stops the turn from continuing. It is not only your right [upper] arm but actually your entire right side that will stop you.

You do not need a lot of momentum, especially for one single turn - you almost don't need any. Be sure that you are not giving yourself too much momentum because then you will either have to fight very hard to stop after a single turn, or you will have to continue on to more rotations - or, the other option, is that you will do an unsuccessful pirouette

Know how many turns you want to do and count them in your head, and see your eyes in the mirror for every rotation. Do not just go for a turn thinking, "Ok, I'm going to do a bunch and let's just see how many I do." Instead, you need to know: "I'm going to do 2 turns, 3 turns, 4 turns..." You specifically want to do one turn now - so count, "one," and STOP. Again - your right side (if you're doing a turn to the right) will stop you, and it should not be too difficult to stop the turn because you should not be taking much momentum at all in the first place.

Of course, making sure that you are on your highest demi pointe and that your knee is as straight as can get will help you maintain the balance.

Wow, thanks everyone! I have so much to think about and try now. I am actually working night shift and am trying hard not to run to the back room and try some of this out. I don't think my coworker would appreciate that It has taken me a couple reads to really absorb and picture it all.

I never thought about the side of my body/arm being what stops the rotation. I always figured it was just experience knowing exactly how much force to put in to the turn. I will really have to think about that in class tomorrow.

nycsylph wrote:


Oh, and another big problem for people that aren't natural turners, and for us that are not getting our hips around, is to make sure that there's weight in the foot that's in passe. The leg should be free, but there always has to be a toe to toe and heel to heel connection. That front foot in passe is going to anchor the body from flipping back. It stabilizes you, and remember everything is connected. Therefore, what you're doing is giving weight to your hands (your arches/feet are connected to palms/hands).

nycsylph - if you are still around...I don't really understand what you mean by having weight in the foot in passe. Do you mean having a strong connection between the foot and the support leg? I am not sure how to picture this.

mirrim wrote:

nycsylph wrote:


Oh, and another big problem for people that aren't natural turners, and for us that are not getting our hips around, is to make sure that there's weight in the foot that's in passe. The leg should be free, but there always has to be a toe to toe and heel to heel connection. That front foot in passe is going to anchor the body from flipping back. It stabilizes you, and remember everything is connected. Therefore, what you're doing is giving weight to your hands (your arches/feet are connected to palms/hands).

nycsylph - if you are still around...I don't really understand what you mean by having weight in the foot in passe. Do you mean having a strong connection between the foot and the support leg? I am not sure how to picture this.

Mirrim -

It's difficult to explain because it means just that. It's the same type of weighted foot that is needed in developpes. When doing a developpe incorrectly, the quad is targeted, the leg is heavy and the foot is pretty much non-existent in terms of guiding the movement. It's really feeling a light leg, and heavy foot, coming up underneath your body. Heel to heel, the hip open, and it comes underneath and unfolds out from underneath. My teacher helped me by grabbing my foot, and doing that underneath me and swinging it out. Until then, I was muscling the leg out and really struggling. I don't think I even felt anything below the knee, and I believe the knee was really getting jammed. Once I got the concept of the weighted foot, light leg, everything clicked in. Especially when required to do rond de jambe en l'air. How do you do it when your thigh feels like a solid block? Your psoasis is activated and your hips really come into play. And you can finally accomplish that "going beyond the toe" line that they tell you to have.

Perhaps you'll understand by using your hands/arms as an example. Has a teacher ever said to make sure to feel your hands? I've heard numerous teachers give this correction to various students. If they don't have weight in their hands, their arms creep back, and the chest opens.

The easiest way to feel this is to disengage the hip. It's an exercise to use to learn to find the proper way to do perform a developpe, but it'll help you feel what I mean.

Stand facing the barre in fifth - Left leg in front - right behind. Plie on your left leg, lift your right foot into a coupe. While in plie, push that right leg down, until you feel the leg release. Now move the foot up and down - from coupe into a semi-passe until you feel the leg light, the hip open and the foot articulated and weighted. (You should feel it in the arch area.) Now straighten the left leg, and hold the right foot in coupe. You should still have the same feeling and when you raise the foot to a passe, it's weighted and your hip is open. This is what I'm talking about.

Now try this with the working leg in front. Make sure to keep plieing and pushing that front foot down until it feels weighted and the most articulated it's ever been. Your foot should respond and you may be able to point it like you've never been able to do in the past if not doing this properly.

The thing is that the body is incredibly efficient and tends to try to balance itself. Mentally we throw this off by doing so many strange things. By understanding the synergistic way it works, it helps us. Therefore, when we weight and articulate the foot, our hands spring to life. Since hand weight is crucial to keeping our arms from getting stiff and our weight from being thrown backward, the foot will help us dig into the ground. As my old teacher Melissa Hayden used to say, "Down to go up, up to go down."

I've seen many people skittering across the floor without using the ground. You need to use it as a springboard and as a partner. Therefore, having a firm base that really digs into the ground is crucial. If you watch any good turner, there is an incredible sense of them screwing themselves into the ground. It's almost as if for a moment, they're tethered to the ground through that toe region going into the ground.

By weighting the foot, you actually help keep the hips even also. In a turn, and in ballet really, the action and technique from the knee to the floor is crucial to making it work.

Hope this helps. It's very difficult to explain. It's why teachers sometimes grab you so you can feel it. Once you feel it, you tend to get it.

I'm one of the people who was asking before about turns. One of the comments that I found was the most helpful was when someone suggested that, upon beginning the second turn in a double pirouette, you pull the to that's in pique ever-so-slightly higher up the knee. It sounds really random, but I tried it, and it REALLY improved my turns!