Revolutionary Tendu Tip | Pro Tip from Elizabeth Marlin

Our current School of Ballet 5:8 Featured Guest, Elizabeth Marlin, is a Company Artist with Ballet 5:8. We asked her to share some of her favorite pro tips with us over the coming weeks. Today's tendu tip was a game-changer for Elizabeth when she first heard it.

Elizabeth says:

We’ve all heard that we should 'go through' our feet during tendus but what does that really mean?

I had a really difficult time with this concept until I had a teacher give me one of the most groundbreaking corrections I ever received: go through relevé on your working foot.

Now this doesn’t mean that you should transfer any weight to the working foot, but it does mean that your foot should go through the same shape that it has on relevé (the highest demi-pointe you have) both on the way out and the way in. I find that this way of thinking totally relaxes my foot, allowing the intrinsic muscles to warm up and start working correctly. You can practice this by slowly lowering to tendu from relevé and then drawing back up, or by slow tendus focusing on the relevé shape of the working foot as an intermediate position.