2 3 Technical Tuesday Port de Corps | Ballet Webb

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Technical Tuesday Port de Corps



Technical Tuesday Port de Corps

I once studied with a teacher who always said “port de corps forward, and cambré back” whenever we did a standard port de bras that stretched forward and back. I've never heard anyone else use the term port de corps, before or since.

In researching it, I found this definition for port-de-corps: “Carriage of the body. Basically, port-de-bras action supplemented with flexion, lateral flexion, or hyperextension movement of the spine. http://www.orthopt.org/downloads/PAglossary.pdf

The word “cambré” means arched, so it makes sense that this teacher said what she did. You would arch going back, but not going forward.

From the Big Blue Book of Ballet Secrets:

Ballet Secret #6gg:  
“Port de corps means carriage of the body.”

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2 comments:

  1. Ballet being international aquired a lot of influences

    . We are often no longer Russian or French or Vaganova versus Kirov, etc. Port de corps and port de bras have become one and the same. Semantics, the proof is in the execution!

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  2. When I started ballet in 1963, my teacher used the term port de corps as something separate from port de bras (though they are used together, of course).

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