II. INJURIES, PREVENTION AND CURE

Chapter 5. The Hip and Back

The hip joint as such is peculiarly free from trouble in spite of the abnormal work that falls upon it in ballet, but the lower back may have its quota. One does not meet complaints of pain in this region until well on in the teens, providing the structure of the body is nor­mal and well proportioned. Those most prone to aches or pains are those with long backs and the tight hips which often go with them, as was pointed out in the previous chapter. Boys of this build may find lifts responsible for some discomfort if not definite pain, and in both girls and boys of an earlier age the effort to achieve a high arabesque or long holdings in adagio, arabesques, attitudes and their variants may be the starting point of pressure between the lumbar vertebrae. The strain may be transferred to the sacro-iliac joints, that meeting place of the last lumbar vertebrae and the pelvic bone known as the ilium, (figure 30.) Unless the pain is disabling a few days' rest can be allowed to see if it will disappear, and then any fault in the "placing" of the body carefully checked. It may be that the dancer is holding the upper part too vertical in grands battements derriere at the bane and in other exercises in fourth position derriere en Vair, or striving for greater flexibility than the type of back will allow. Boys may need some special strengthening exercises for the shoulders before continuing with "lifts". Or it may be that the dancer is overtired and needs rest. The spine is apt to register this need more quickly than any other part of the body.

Treatment for any pain in the back which does not recover quickly must be left to doctor, osteopath or physiotherapist, as the case may be. It is not wise to ignore it, but very necessary to correct any technical faults that may have produced it.

We have covered some of the aches and pains that are typical in the training of the dancer. That there will always be others is inevitable in combining the complexity of the human body with the complexity of ballet technique. But as has already been stressed, the closer the physique conforms to the ideal, the less the hazard of strain in any part. Thorough warming up, perfect execution of barre work and good food rank high amongst insurance against injuries. All three are sometimes neglected. Nothing starts the circulation of the whole body more quickly than pliés at the barre, performed with meticulous care and concentration, yet it is not unknown for the boredom of endless repetition to creep in as the years go by, and for these most fundamental exercises to be done with the

Figure 30.
Back view of pelvis and site of sacro-iliac pain

mini­mum instead of the maximum effort. It is also not unknown for a late comer to the class to do a few perfunctory exercises at the barre and then join in at a stage when the body ought to be thoroughly warm; and to perform the simplest limbering or stretching from cold is begging for trouble.

Correct execution, the second safeguard, can only come by degrees, but certain subtle errors can be checked from the very begin­ning. The troubles that may arise from the rolling or sickling foot have already been mentioned, as those also from the inturned hip, the straining for height rather than line in adage and so on. There is another technical fault which is common and often overlooked, viz. the habit of keeping the weight entirely on the supporting foot during the barre exercises. The failure to relax the muscles by trans­ferring the weight on to both feet in that momentary pause between one movement and the next is a factor in muscles becoming bulky, hard and inelastic—and so liable to injury—and it is one of the nuances in the teaching that can easily be overlooked. The alter­nation of stretching and relaxing in muscular action is the greatest of all safeguards against strain and it is beautifully exemplified in ballet technique when correctly performed. Apart from increasing the bulk, it is possible that the bad habit of omitting the momentary relaxation between movements may also be the cause of cramp to which some pupils are prone—in the foot muscles and in the thighs. For them especially it is worth checking up on this point.

Tension and anxiety also play their part in muscle contraction, and perhaps the first essential here is to make sure that both are absent in the teacher. Nothing is more contagious than tension, except perhaps a relaxed yet authoritative presence in the person conducting the class.

Good food, the third on our list of preventives, raises the problem of the teen-ager who puts on weight and girth, to combat which she is afraid of her naturally good appetite and begins to diet. To tell her at this stage that she will thin down again later is no comfort. She persists in her fasting, loses weight and energy and finds she is not as strong on her pointes as she used to be, or that her back aches or that she has a pain here and another one there and goes off for various treatments when what she is needing is nourishment (It may be noted that this state of affairs is not confined to teen-agers). Naturally the diet for a dancer must be arranged with certain reser­vations, stodgy puddings eliminated in favour of fruit and salads, the intake of sugar, starches and fats modified, but any serious dieting should only be undertaken under medical supervision, and it is rarely necessary. A sudden and definite increase of bulk in the early teens may often be counteracted by cutting off one or even two classes a week, giving muscles which are overloaded with fatigue products the opportunity to eliminate them. Indeed, for more reasons than one it might possibly be of advantage if the training could be slowed down during the years between say fourteen and sixteen, when the changes of adolescence and the pressure of general education are making great demands on the physical and nervous system of the child. The increase of energy and vitality after this age is very noticeable in the ballet classroom and one wonders whether any­thing would ultimately be lost if a somewhat less intensive training were to precede it. The long slow building up of the body until it attains the strength, endurance, flexibility, speed, the refinement and the beauty which we almost take for granted in the tremendous technique of the ballet dancer is both a science and an art. It cannot be hurried—and it is never finished. The work for per­fection has no ending even for the greatest ballerina—nor for that background figure, the teacher. Neither is the quest for knowledge ever completed for those who are called upon to make the momen­tous decision as to whether or no a child of ten should start out on that long road from classroom to stage. Of this nobody is more conscious than the author of this book.