Thank you so much for posting this! I agree completely that we as teachers have a responsibility to help our students achieve their dancing goals in a healthy and safe way so that (hopefully) they will be able to dance as long as they wish!

Here is an exercise I have found quite useful for finding that elusive active neutral pelvic alignment we want our dancers to discover and adopt: have the dancer face the barre in a natural first position (this is important – make sure the dancer isn’t forcing turnout) and then have the dancer place her hands on the barre for support and rise to demi pointe. Have the dancer then pull her hips back to achieve a rather pronounced anterior pelvic tilt (ie. I ask the dancer to arch her back, or stick her tutu out, etc.) so that she feels a nice openness in the front of the hips. Now here’ is the crucial part – I then ask her to bring her pelvis back from that position to align underneath her WITHOUT tucking her pelvis to do so. To accomplish this, the dancer must lengthen her body up, and use her abdominals and the sides of her hips and her gluteal muscles to do so. When correctly aligned, she should be able to let go of the barre and be perfectly on balance. Also, most often, when the dancer lowers her heels back down to the floor, she will see she has achieved a better first position. I didn’t invent this very useful exercise – the credit should go to Arturo Fernandez from Lines Ballet based in San Francisco.

I should add that this exercise works best with dancers who are not really really young – I have ussed it successfully with my 8 year olds. With younger dancers, we work in the parallel alignment and then switch to the turned out position when working on say, plié or sautés, etc. quite frequently during class, to hopefully teach the idea that the pelvis should remain in that neutral alignment even when the legs are laterally rotated. We will do our sautés in the parallel alignment and talk about what they feel like, how easy it is to do them, how springy we can be, and then we see how they feel when our legs are laterally rotated.

Thanks again Deborah – this stuff is vitally important.

Another one that I often use is “using your ab muscles, lift the front hip bones until the tail bone goes down.” This helps prevent them from trying to achieve hip placement using their buttock muscles.

Some very young students try to test me, by overdoing this idea of straightening the lower back, tucking under fairly drastically, really trying my patience! In those cases, I go for the simplest approach of all: “Do it till it looks good!” Then I’ll imitate what they’re doing, and ask: “Does this look good?”

It’s really amazing — every student, from beginner on up, seems to know, instinctively, what looks good!