Ballet Culture
A great way to take a short break from your studies during the week and learn relaxation techniques, strengthen your muscles, and endurance is by participating in ballet classes. Most ballet studios have classes for adults and college students can participate in the classes. Also, some liberal arts colleges offer introductory ballet courses to their students to earn an extra half a credit or so for physical exercise. Ballet helps you become a more successful individual and achiever in a multiplicity of subjects, since both your mind and body work at once when performing. The soothing classical music also helps your brain to think on a more advanced level while your body is working. Since modern culture does not possess the features of the past, ballet is one way to help you become a more accomplished and educated individual in a modern world. Modern culture is inculcated in technological advancements that do not promote the drive for individual success because the new devices think for us, as opposed to the specificity and quality of art, intellect, and talent shown as the main dynamic in the past culture’s focus on art. You become acquainted with French words, which not only increase your vocabulary, but also you attain a more complex understanding of a foreign culture and language.
Bar Exercises in Class
Participating in ballet class helps your endurance, determination, and focus as you have to perform intricate moves and steps and piece them together. Class begins with exercises at the bar. During this time you complete a round of plies in various positions, rond de jambs, and arabesques. There are usually other bar stretching exercises to help you become limber before performing the main routines. At this time, you are warming up to complete more rigorous moves. You must keep your head raised and slightly tilted, your shoulders aligned, your back straight, hold your arms throughout the exercises slightly bent, your toes pointed at the correct angle, your legs turned out, and your fingers slightly separated and curved while doing the bar exercises. It is especially important to do this when beginning the bar exercises because you must start the lesson with technique. You are required to think about this technique all at once while executing the precision of the exercise, which helps you to learn to multitask. Multitasking is often required to succeed in college- so you’re training yourself.
Floor Exercises in Class
After warming up at the bar, there are floor exercises. The dance instructor begins to work through routines beginning with less strenuous ones that progress into more complex performances by the end of the class. You have to learn to transition from the bar to the floor and keep your balance by tightening up and thinking even more about the technique at the bar. Usually the instructor starts with a series of simpler exercises such as pot de bourrees, piques, glissades, and pas de chats that lead into more complicated jumps and turns. These exercises teach you how to progressively think in more complex terms, and such thinking is necessary to succeed in most areas of life.
Final Performance in Class
By the end of the class, you learn to put the ballet routines together in a more complex sequence and perform them. Each class is more of a new learning experience than others because each class has new and varied combinations to learn, which makes the art of ballet more intriguing than other forms of athletics. You have to constantly be thinking as you are on your toes when you take ballet to improve your technique, which makes it a worthwhile challenge.
To sum it up, ballet can be an extremely rewarding hobby for a college student. You will increase your vocabulary, learn to multitask and train yourself to think quicker and more complexly. Go ahead, give it a twirl. Find a dance studio near you.
Comment below with your thoughts and experiences of ballet.