3rd adult ballet class (workshop 2) + working in the U.S. as a non-native English speaker

Today’s class is very similar to last one, in which we again practiced tendu and plié in great detail. Thus the royal ballet morning class again:

Some key takeaways:

Extending your calf:

In today’s class, our teacher asked us to try extending our calves and plant our feet deeply into the ground, shifting our weight to the ball of our feet as much as possible. While maintaining our turnout. This posture should be maintained no matter what you do as long as your legs are straightened - tendu, standing, etc.

Tendu:

Thus, while doing tendu with extending your calf, you need to think about firing up your inner thigh all the time. Push your leg out, and then use your inner thigh to do most of the work pulling your leg back, while still extending your calf. Your foot should also be pushing into the floor the whole time while pulling your leg back.

Grand Plié:

While you are doing grand plié, especially if you are putting your weight forward to the balls of your feet, it is especially easy to push your butt backwards in a squat position. An imagery I find helpful is imagine your pelvis as a bowl full of water. When you plié down, shifting your upper body downward, you need to imagine that water in the bowl should not spill to the outside. It is as if you are holding a bowl filled with water with your hands, and you are shifting that bowl up and down. Although this time the two joints connecting your legs and pelvis are holding that bowl, and is shifting that bowl up and down without spilling water. And voila, there you go, a perfect grand plié!

Port de bras:

While you are doing port de bras and bending your back backwards and arm raised, it is notable that the arm should actually be more backward than what is natural for you. It is normally placed around your ear, because your need to show your face while doing the movement.

Basically, the flow of movements should be as followed:

First position - raise your arms to rib cage level while tilting your head to the left while eyes looking at the right hand - transform into second position by expanding the two arms like pushing a door, stop when the arms reached the corners of the square of space that you occupies - keep moving arms to the side, eyes looking at right arm - allongé while looking at your pinkie finger - move your arms down (notice that there is a delay movement starting from shoulder -upper arm - lower arm). You freeze your higher upper arm first while still moving your mid upper arm lower, and then freeze your mid upper arm, keep moving your lower arm lower, and so on. Normally, you would lose the grip on all arm and let it relax and swing inward, and then adjust back to the first/zero position where you keep a space between your armpit and your upper arm. That natural swing is wrong - you need to lift your arm all the time, not even when you transition from allongé to first position!

Yes, ballet is hard!

P.S. Life/work thoughts:

Perks on being international in a U.S. office

There is a small , close-knit group of Chinese employees in my firm - about 10-15 people in all levels and ages (We have almost a thousand people in total in our new york office) . We organized a lunch today, and during the lunch, we as juniors had a small peek into what it is like to be in a middle management position, as one of the colleagues talked about their management off-site in our London headquarter. And then, other director-level colleagues discussed the difficulties in execution facing the re-organization and the purposes behind it. Very big picture stuff but very interesting! I never thought being international gives me an opportunity to expand my network in my company, but here I am - while my other American colleagues only know people in their team, I am able to befriend people across departments and in all seniorities, just because I am Chinese! This is pretty cool.

On navigating being a non-native English speaker in a U.S. office

Ever since I came to the U.S. 6 years ago, I have been working on overcoming my shyness when talking to people. Chinese people tend to lower their voice in business environments or when talking to strangers, as a gesture to show politeness, but American people would interpret it as lack of confidence. This cultural tendency, plus my actual lack of confidence in my language skills relative to other native English speakers, makes my voice even lower when I speak up, which turns my words into mumbling.

This tendency is sometimes a challenge in my job, as I conduct bi-weekly calls with clients, who are investor relations officers at public companies. They are all middle-aged men and women very established in their careers - some of them are pretty chill, and some of them are pretty intimidating. At first I would sweat during every single call and sometimes just read off of a script, but as I progress I learned to turn a presentation into a conversation, gaining feedback from clients on how their meetings went with investors, and what problems/issues are they trying to solve with the current shareholder base. Still, sometimes when I was trying to convey an abstract idea, I run into difficulties as I search my brain for words to deliver a compelling speech, and I am still working on it via observing my directors on the call. This year, I am going to try to speak more loudly and reduce filler words like “ummm”. Hopefully one day I can be 99% close to being able to speak like an eloquent native English speaker.