Counter-intuitive assemblés

Start: right foot back
assemblé, glissade
assemblé, glissade
assemblé, assemblé, glissade, assemblé.

"It sounds simple, but be careful, it's counter-intuitive!"

This is one of the petit allegros that we've been working on in the week-long summer intermediate ballet course that I'm taking at Dancebase in Edinburgh, taught by Lewis Normand. I'm finding petit allegros so different in the U.K. so far. Instead of being the mind-busting complex chain of different steps that we get in the classes I'm used to in the US, most of the petit allegros I've done here practice just one step at a time, over and over, with several petit allegro exercises per class: e.g., one for assemblés, one for jetés, one for sissones. It's great for really getting into one step, but I know I'm going to be so mentally out of shape when I show up back in the US.

This assemblé petit allegro, though, has been a bit of a brain buster, because--as Lewis warned us--it's counter-intuitive! Thankfully, Robert's drilled assemblés into us back in my home studio--brush through the foot out, forward, immediately brush through the other foot out, forward. So in theory, I know all the mechanics. But I often find that if a petit allegro doesn't actually start with a glissade, I end up tripping all over myself. The changes in direction on this one are quite tricky!