The Five Ballet Positions

Video Transcript

"Now I'm going to explain the five basic ballet positions. Every step you're doing to do in ballet is going to start from one of our five positions. Now, you want to remember when you're doing these positions to always keep your toes flat on the floor. You don't want to ball your toes up. You want to make sure they're not balled up like this. You want to make sure you're standing flat on them. Now put your feet together in front of you. And what you're going to want to do is using your bottom muscles, you're going to want to grip them a little bit and turn your feet out. This position right here is first position. Now you don't want to overcompensate to turn out to make your feet completely flat by using your knees. If you use your knees to turn out, you can get perfect turn out, however, it will eventually cause knee injuries. That's something I'm sure none of you want to deal with. So this is going to be your basic first position. Your arms that go with it are going to be out in front of you like so. Now you're going to do second position from here. You're going to point your foot to the side, you're just going to elongate your toes along the floor like so, and then you're going to put your foot down. It's going to be almost right under your hips. Then you're going to put your arms out to the side like I showed you earlier. That is second position. Now, from there you're going to point your foot to the side again, you're going to slide it in front of you until your heel is about where the middle part of your foot is, right by your arch, that's where you want your heel to be. You want to make sure your knees are straight and your feet are pressed flat against the floor. And you're going to want to bring your right arm in front of you, if it's your right foot in front, or your left arm in front of you if it's your left foot in front. This is third position. Now, you're going to point your foot to the front and you're going to want to flatten your toes against the floor and set it down. This is fourth position. Then you're going to want to put your other arm, opposite of the foot you put in front of you, up over your head. If you look up you can see the inside of your palms. This is fourth position. From there, you're going to point your foot forward, slide it in and what you're going to do when you're sliding it in is you're going to slide it in to where your heel is going to come in to right about here, where your toes are. So that way it's almost perfectly in front of the other foot, and you're going to make sure it's turned out using your bottom muscles and using your upper thighs. That's fifth position. And you're going to make sure both arms are over head in front of you. Again if you look up, you will be able to see the palms of your hand. Think about having little smiley faces on the palms of your hand, so when you look up, they're smiling at you. And that's fifth position. Every single step in ballet does start with these five positions, so they're definitely important to learn and remember."