Pliés: prophecy or life sentence?

 

Photography, Santiago Carregui for the Ballet de la Generalitat Valenciana. 

Dancers: Marine Sánchez, Cristina Reolid, Elizabeth Taberner, Ismael Turel, Diana Huertas, Joan Crespo, Gianluca Battaglia, Laura Bruña, Esaul LLopis, Fátima Sanlés, Jon López y Marta Toledo. 

«Every day of your life you will have to hold on to the barre to perform pliés». 

When you are told this as a student you are not yet aware of what this means, or the task that lies ahead of you to fulfil this prophecy. Although in reality, in my opinion, it is more of a life sentence. 

Finding the motivation to hold on to the barre every day of your life can be a difficult task. When you are a student, often pliés are not considered important enough, they are simply passed over- done to slow music at the beginning of class, when you’re barely concentrating and yet to warm your body. It is not the most pleasant thing in the world. To be honest, there are even students who use this first exercise to check their outfit of the day in the mirror, because let's not fool ourselves, the exercise of pliés is easy to copy and predict. 

If we talk about the professional period of a dancers life it becomes harder to generalise as interpretations can be quite diverse. There are dancers who continue with a student like mentality; arrive a minute before class, click a couple of bones and get down to business (lucky now, unlucky in the future). The most common type of dancers are those who arrive a little earlier, chat with their colleagues while they adapt to the space in the room and their place at the barre. These begin concentrated, the exercise the finest of the ballet barre, not all of them do the exercise exactly as it was set as they add little things of their own harvest. I remember that as a dancer I did not like to listen to the teacher's voice. For me it was a moment of reflection and recognition for my own body. A chance to know what was hurting and what wasn’t. It was a time to concentrate, get into the bubble of class and forget about everything that was happening outside. 

Now, as a ballet mistress, the plié exercise is the most complex to set for professionals. Perhaps, it is the exercise that is the most precarious for a teacher to lead. In pliés the body and soul should connect, and thus provide the dancer with a moment of freedom within a closed ritual, but with so many variables, for each individual no one can understand what their own body feels and needs better than oneself. What are the pliés if not the bedrock of the dancer? I must confess that at the moment the formula of "free pliés" works very well for me. This freedom allows me the chance to observe where each dancer is and to see their individual needs on a physical and spiritual level. Recognising the energy of the class as a whole is essential to harmonise and focus the group before their long day of rehearsals. The 3 minutes that I have saved by not having to set the pliés, I take advantage of by using them for the final circus of fouettés, and manèges, but the "circus time" we shall leave it  for another occasion.