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Kate practicing 4th Port de Bras with Épaulement By Kate Feinberg Robins Back to Basics A Surprise Beginner Class This year, I took advantage of the first week of school to head over to the  School of International Ballet , a local studio here in Redlands, California that I'd recently discovered.  The Wednesday Adult Ballet class was taught by Ms. Barbara, a founding member of Ballet West (and retired psychologist, according to my classmate, Jennifer).  It was a lovely class, with only one other student that day, and it was nice to be back in a studio with space to move and a bit of an audience, both of which always motivate me. Jennifer and Barbara both warned me before class began that it was intended for beginners. I suppose they could tell by how I carried myself and walked confidently to the barre that this was not my first time in a ballet studio. They encouraged me  to come back on Thursday or Fr...

By Kate Feinberg Robins, PhD Embrace Your Ballet "Accent" I know as a linguistic anthropologist that languages are not made up simply of words, but of grammar, sounds, and cultural understandings. The same is true for ballet.  Ballet is not about what steps we can do. It’s about how we move.  If we know a few words (steps) and understand the principles behind them, we can communicate. If we know lots of words but don’t understand how they fit together grammatically, what they mean culturally, or how to pronounce them, communication is difficult at best. There is a myth that both ballet and languages must be learned in childhood.  Children’s brains and bodies do have greater plasticity. Children can speak new languages without a foreign-sounding accent. Their bodies can be shaped to the aesthetics of ballet. But anyone at any age is capable of learning.  Adults have a lifetime of experience that we can use to learn deliberately and purposefully. Whether learning a la...