Ballet for Dummies

View other editions of Ballet for Dummies.
View books by Scott Speck, Evelyn Cisneros.

Great information - Rated
Will this book teach you how to do ballet? No. No book would be able to teach such a complex skill. What this book does, is go through various aspects of ballet technique, terminolgy and conventions (eg dress, class structure) It is a great all round guide to ballet, and a good support to someone starting ballet classes, or looking to start. It breaks through the mysterious cliques that many percieve there are in the ballet world, and make ballet an approachable and attainable form of excercise and entertainment.

BALLET FOR DUMMIES FOR FUN - Rated
This is a highly amusing book, written in a very original way.

However, as an aide to me actually learning Ballet it quickly lost its usefulness.

You actually have to READ great chunks of text to get anything from it, and the wit can become tiresome when you just want to know whether to put this foot into 3rd or 5th, etc. So hard book to use whilst you are actually trying out the steps.

The illustrations are too small and not clear enough for me, and once again not easy to use whilst practising because you need to keep the book close to you in order to read the small pictures.

I also found the pictures hard to follow, the caption and numbering was confusing. Often you seemed to get a couple of pictures to cover a step in 4parts, so you could sometimes be left wondering what happened in the "missing" two pictures. For example, how did that forward foot in 3rd get behind into coup de pied.

Large illustrations, perhaps with arrows to indicate the move into or out of a position would be more useful to me. Also helpful would have been a CD with the book to accompany your exercises instead of telling you to go and find a certain piece.

Finally, my own classes taught different positions, different sequences, different exercises so I quickly had to choose between the live class or the funny but not too helpful book.

Genuinely accessible to Dummies - Rated
I really found this book helpful. I have to admit having had a couple of ballet lessons in the past but those were very poor and well over 20 years ago, so I was probably starting from the very beginning. The layout was good and you could in theory skip over to the chapters you are interested in, although the book goes to some trouble to emphasise the progressive nature of the techniques - you could find yourself unable to understand the instructions if you have skipped over the bits about what "low fifth" and "cou de pied" actually are.

The one downside I found was that the book almost never gives you information on how to get OUT of any positions, for example the "developpe" bringing your leg out in front/side/back and then the instructions end with you balanced on one leg with the other stuck out in the air. There is no information on how you might then proceed to the next step in a sequence. The pictures can sometimes be a couple of pages away from the text too, I guess to save on pages, but in a real "Dummies" situation I would prefer them to describe step 1 and then have the picture right there not over a couple of pages. On the whole instructions are really clear, although one box near the beginning of the book asks us to place feet broadly and keep the ankles from gripping - not, I hazard, terms that the beginner will be able to relate to.

If you are thinking about a beginners' class but don't want to show up knowing nothing at all then this is an excellent starting point.