Picking Up Counts and Choreography | Pro Tip from Melody Staples Hammell

Our current School of Ballet 5:8 Featured Guest, Melody Staples Hammell, is a former principal dancer with Charleston Ballet Theater. During her extensive career, she discovered some helpful ways to pick up choreography with counts.

Melody says:

One of the first ballets I learned at Charleston Ballet Theater was The Great Gatsby. During a rather difficult part, I had finally gotten the steps when I asked the ballet mistress if she would then go over the counts, and she said, “I just gave you the counts while I was teaching you the steps.” Ouch. I needed to figure out a better way to learn counts while learning choreography.

Over the years since then, I have fleshed out one way to do that. I call this strategy the 1, 5 method. Basically, instead of matching every count with every step, the dancer focuses on attaching steps to counts one and five specifically. Almost always the movement on the other 6 counts is self-explanatory. Even in choreography where the dancer really does need to know every single count, it still helps to initially focus on learning just one and five and then going back and adding the other counts.