Starts with a plié
Fouettés rond de jambe en tournant, en dehors.*
*Series of turns propelled by a whipping action of the working leg, turning away from the supporting leg.
See Gail Grant, Technical Manual and Dictionary of Classical Ballet, p. 57, for step-by-step instructions. (Illustration courtesy of the brilliant xkcd.com)
I’ve always suspected that the fact that symmetry is fundamentally broken in nature:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2008/press.html
Is why dancers often have a favorite side.. pirouette better clockwise than counter-clockwise, say…
Ooh, I just read it: “The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level… These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe… It is this broken symmetry that seems to have caused our cosmos to survive.” Ver-r-y interesting. Though it doesn’t quite explain why on some days I can pirouette to one side and not the other, and on other days the reverse is true. I used to think it was because of what I had for breakfast…!
oh, I wish that I understood the modern theories. One lifetime is not enough..
In original groundbreaking 1957 experiment
(headed by a woman physicist Wu Chien-Shiung, notable because especially back then there were so few),
the measured the essentially the pirouette side of some products of particle decay. If the universe were symmetrical, like our minds would like it to be, then the pirouettes would show up equally left and right, but they DON’T. Nature prefers one side over the other, just like dancers 🙂
http://ccreweb.org/documents/parity/parity.html#The%20Proposed%20Experiment
We see evidence of nature’s preference around us everyday. All we see around us is matter. If the universe were symmetrical then there should be as much anti-matter as there is matter, but we don’t see anti-matter (good thing or we’d all be anihillated (sp)).
Life is puzzling…
I fled the world of science a long time ago, but just the fact that the earth rotates solely in a counter-clockwise direction seems to me like good enough evidence for why pirouettes are not symmetrical! I mean, if the earth CHANGED its rotation periodically (say, it spun clockwise every other year) then you’d expect more symmetry in the universe, wouldn’t you?
And time runs slower near gravity wells – that is, closer to the center of the earth and faster out in space.
True.
That’s why I never sit in the upper back balcony – not just because you can’t see, but because then the show is over too fast.
Peter, this is why we go to see dance, because dancers – especially ballet dancers – possess the secret code that enables them to mess with gravity 😉
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