CECCHETTI’S ‘DAYS OF THE WEEK’

THE PHYSICAL PRINCIPLES IN ACTION

Enrico Cecchetti, ballet master to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, creator of the Method which bears his name, was one of the most celebrated demi-caractère dancers and mimes of his day. Trained by his father Cesare - a pupil of Giovanni Lepri, the latter being a pupil of the great Carlo Blasis - Cecchetti exemplified the pre-eminent position that Italy had attained in pedagogy by the 1850s.

Italian schooling advanced virtuosic technique in both men and women. Thanks to improvements in the making of pointe shoes, ballerinas such as Carlotta Brianza, Virginia Zucchi and Pierina Legnina dazzled audiences with their daring turns, jumps and balances. But all was not razzle-dazzle: by the 1870s, the Italian school was acclaimed throughout Europe for purity of line, elegance in port-de-bras and a seemingly effortless agility, alongside the most vivid mime and art of gesture. What were the concepts underlying all this? However had it been achieved? For the answer to become intelligible, the world had to await the emergence of Enrico Cecchetti.

It was towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, whilst teaching at the Maryinskii School in St. Petersburg, that Enrico Cecchetti first developed his Method, which he noted down as a ‘Table of Daily Exercises for the Week’. Although when coaching privately disciples such as Anna Pavlova, Cecchetti would adapt the work to the specific problems before him, nevertheless, from his Maryinskii days until his death in 1928, he adhered rigidly to the ‘Days of the Week’ format.

And there was good reason for so doing. Cecchetti worked out the Method in order to build a well-rounded dancer, as confident and effective in allegro as in adagio technique. Across the Week’s six days of classes, it proceeds through the full range of steps, movement qualities, dynamics and spatial planes, leaving nothing to mood, chance or caprice on the teacher’s part. One may thus surmise that Cecchetti intended to “close all loop-holes” i.e. ward off the risk that another teacher, left to his own devices, ignore entire areas of technique that he might dislike or find boring.

By the early Twentieth Century, Cecchetti’s pupils - Pavlova, Nijinsky, Karsavina, Lopokhova, Dolin, Markova, Preobrazhenskaya, Spessivtseva, Kyasht, Idizkowski, Massine, Lifar, Nemchinova, Egorova, Rambert, de Valois and so many others – had won him the crown of one of the great teachers of all time.

At the outset, a misunderstanding should be cleared away. At no point was Cecchetti’s Method designed for children too young to be consciously aware of a principle. It was for the Maryinskii Theatre’s most gifted theatrical artists that Cecchetti originally invented these exercises. After the Soviet Revolution, when he opened his London school in 1918, he taught only advanced students and professionals who wished to perfect their already considerable skills. Consequently, his Method is neither gradual, nor suitable for casual drop-in classes. It came into the world all of a piece, a single, fully-formed concept, where all the parts – each Day of the Week – are intrinsic to and indispensable to the whole.

Now, over the past two decades, I had often wondered what Cecchetti’s reasoning had been in tabling the enchaînements into this or that ‘Day of the Week’. As it happens, each Day focuses on a particular family of steps and clearly, there is a theme at the core. Suddenly, whilst discussing with friends two basic but misunderstood, principles viz., aplomb and épaulement, it happened! A Eureka Moment! I realised that through the Week, in a definite sequence, Cecchetti had pinpointed certain physical principles that he intended his dancers to become aware of and straightaway apply.

Teaching through Poetry

As with any major art form, for something to work – for a statue to stand, for paint to remain on canvas and not slide off, for a dancer to move with ideal stability, balance and harmony – whatever is being done must correspond to a physical reality and to natural laws. And so Cecchetti’s enchaînements began to reveal themselves in a new light, his very practical purpose being the structure that makes sense of a cornucopia of the most wonderfully expressive and delightfully musical steps.

Here, is an outline of the principles at work as I currently understand them, proceeding in an obvious and logical development.

Monday – Assemblé: The Line of Aplomb
Tuesday – Les petits battements: Épaulement
Wednesday - Ronds de jambe: Épaulement as the limbs deploy farther away from the centre, in action both en-dehors and en-dedans
Thursday – Jetés: Weight transfer in the air
Friday – Batterie and pointe work: Suspension. Taking all the above principles and applying them to work above the floor
Saturday: Grand fouetté sauté. All the above principles are combined and apply dynamic, momentum and speed, in all directions and on all spatial planes.

This also explains why Cecchetti’s barre is a short warm-up, neither complicated nor choreographed. He was teaching professionals, who would already have been aware of his purpose. Purely functional, the barre prepares the dancer to move quickly into the centre. There, the dancer will repeat several of the barre exercises, but only after performing a series of ports de bras. Suffice it to say that these ports de bras are no mere arm-waving: they establish one’s position in space, affirm stability and balance, and restate the need to coordinate the arms and legs in fluid harmony at all times.

Monday: les assemblés

The Monday class is about establishing and maintaining the line of aplomb or ‘plumb line’, a phrase originally used by builders and architects to establish a vertical through the centre of gravity.

In assemblé, the dancer moves from two legs in 5th position, slides one leg away to jump into the air and assembles both legs together en l’air before landing in 5th - hence the term ‘assemblé’’. In Cecchetti’s day, and for the first generation thereafter of Maryinskii-trained dancers and teachers, standing in aplomb meant holding the centre of gravity directly over the line that runs down through the centre of the body, down the back of the front leg and the front of the back leg when in 5th position. When the dancer disengaged the gesture leg from the 5th position, he did not shift his body-weight towards the ball of the standing leg, but remained securely on the line of aplomb, as épaulement held the body in dynamic opposition. In this way, one might say that the dancer is not actually standing on the supporting leg, but is rather held « upwards » by the deep postural muscles between the standing and the gesture leg - on the line of aplomb.

It is easy to dismiss this notion of standing on the aplomb as a physical impossibility because, it is argued, how can one disengage the foot from 5th position without first shifting the weight onto the balls of the feet? Well, let us look at what the rest of the body is supposed to be doing whilst standing in the 5th position.

The torso is encouraged to hold the shapes in opposition, aided by training at the barre which, since childhood, accustoms the dancer to standing on his centre and in his body and not in his legs. Cecchetti would give several barre exercises au milieu, aplomb having been established at the barre. Throughout those simple and repeated exercises, little apparent action takes place in the arms and head. This is not to say that the body will remain stiff as a plank, without épaulement or emotional expression! Cecchetti’s dancers, stars of the Maryinskii Theatre, had already a command and facility of these aspects. His method was to get them warmed up quickly without fussing over the arms and head, since it is the body that needs to be prepared for the centre – not merely the legs and feet. Opposition is activated about the body, with the arms held en bas to restate the line of gravity and the support from the postural muscles, deep within the torso.

Schooled from childhood to stand and work in the line of aplomb, Cecchetti’s dancers knew how to use the ‘device’ of the barre. This knowledge has gone lost. Today, most classical dancers have been trained to shift the body-weight towards the ball of the foot, thereby forcing the leg muscles to hold the body upright. This makes bad bio-mechanical sense, since only the structural muscles of the torso, and not the leg-muscles, are designed to serve that purpose. Shifting the weight to the ball of the foot makes the barre work virtually useless; since weight is wrongly allowed to settle onto the standing leg, the resulting tension set up throughout the body will prevent the dancer from acquiring a stable, harmonious and « lifted » classical line.

Tuesday: les petits battements

The key to Tuesday is épaulement (also known as contrapposto, or opposition in the body). Moving outwards from a quiet centre, the dancer creates stable shapes with dynamic potential. This arises from an observation of a simple form, because the human being is designed to move in opposition: in walking, one swings the right arm backwards as the right leg steps forwards, and vice versa. The notion of opposition develops logically from standing in, and using the aplomb. On the Tuesday, Cecchetti focussed on enchaînements that skim the floor, for example jetés battements and a family of related steps with terre à terre quality.

Jetés battements in their simplest form begin in 5th position similar to assemblé. In this case, the dancer also slides the gesture leg away from the central axis en fondu, in preparation to jump but does not seek to gain height; instead, bringing the gesture leg back to centre, just off the floor, he lands upon it as the other leg beats back-front (when travelling en avant) or front-back (en arriere) and this leg, having completed the petit battement, then slides away to repeat the next jeté battement and so on down or up the room.

With the head held erect, eyes gazing straight out towards the audience, the dancer will often move forward along a straight line. The body oscillates gently about its central axis, whilst the legs and feet fly along the floor, in fleet counterpoint to the minimal – but always functional – épaulement in the upper body.

To Cecchetti, épaulement was no mere decorative turn of the head, perched on a stiff torso. Cecchetti makes use of the head’s natural function as the culminating point of a spiral. Ornamental as épaulement may appear, for Cecchetti it is above all functional, the natural opposition of the human machine in action.

Wednesday: les ronds de jambe

Here we find the shapes, held in opposition through épaulement, travelling out to their natural extremities. This in turn enables en-dehors and en-dedans rotation in the arms and legs, hands and feet, all as beautiful to look at as it is functional. Emotion will emerge: more extrovert in the en-dehors, more introspective, pensive, in the en-dedans.

Rond de jambe can take two forms. The first form is a circle traced from the knee down, whereby the leg points downwards at an angle of about 45°, the thigh being held quite still. Generally a quick movement, this rond de jambe flashes, brilliant and decorative, in a sequence of bouncing jumps requiring ballon, or en relevé where it will both ornament the gesture leg and help sustain the extension. The second use of rond de jambe is more often found in adage: the leg, raised to hip-level, traces a half-circle en l’air, whether outwards from the front to the back or inwards from the back to the front. As for the en-dehors and en-dedans rotations in the hand and wrist that Cecchetti gives here - rarely seen today, be it in the studio or on stage - the quality of these rotations, outwards or inwards, serves to amplify the mood initiated in the body.

Thursday: les jetés

Thanks to the opposition inherent to épaulement, stabilised by applying the principle of aplomb, the dancer shifts the shape from side to side, forwards and backwards. Whether amplified by using the en-dehors, or gathered for a return to centre using the en-dedans, jetés are about weight transfer in the air, a vaster and freer dimension of emotional expression.

To prepare a jeté, Cecchetti will commonly use this gathering inwards given by the en-dedans, either in landing from the previous jeté or in the preceding run-up step. The gathering inwards, which may be subtle, or more obvious, will determine the outcome of the jeté, both physically and in the emotional expression.

Friday: la batterie et les temps de pointe
Here, as with the jetés, the shapes are lifted onto another plane, that of the space above the dancer. For the ballerina, suspension is achieved by pointe work, invented by those pioneering women who sought to explore the farthest limits of movement and balance on the tip of the toe.

In the Nineteenth Century, pointe-shoe makers in Italy hardened the box and stiffened the shank to allow for multiple turns (fouettés), hops and sustained balances on one leg. Cecchetti’s Method includes dazzling displays of turns sur place, en diagonale and en manège, often with sudden floor-sweeping dips or a full- rotation of the torso upon itself (tombé/renversé). The Italian School insists upon a slight spring onto pointe, not a clambering or pushing up. Rather than sending the torso chasing after the foot, the latter leaves the floor for an instant to be placed directly under the torso and along the line of aplomb. Securely held upwards and along that line by strong postural muscles, using épaulement and en-dehors, the dancer gains complete complete control over the extremities. Nothing then hinders the torso from deploying its full expressive capabilities.

For both man and woman, the Friday class focuses on a scintillating display of batterie that allows a lengthier sojourn in the air than would otherwise be possible. The Friday class includes both petite batterie (floor-skimming, done as fast as possible with a relaxed knee, so as to lend the beat a truly sparkling quality) and grande batterie (using the whole leg, such as in a cabriole or temps de poisson). Batterie can be particularly brilliant in the man, who appears to hover in the air, a phenomenon unique to Western classical dancing. The artist strives to free himself from the confines of the flesh.

Saturday: les grands fouettés sautés

Here, in a veritable technical and artistic firestorm, Cecchetti unleashes all the principles studied earlier in the week, incorporating them into the most challenging and diverse combinations, which call for mastery of dynamics, speed, change of direction and use of all the spatial planes.

To perform these complex enchaînements that often explore unexpected spatial planes, the dancer must be aware of the purpose behind Friday’s work: sustaining the body en relevé or en l’air. Although the steps cover a vast expanse of floor and may twist, turn, swoop or soar, it is a fallacy to believe that the dancer must expend huge effort. The shapes, directions and spatial planes are revealed through the choreography and by assiduous practise of the individual steps, not by energetically hurtling oneself from one corner of the room to another.

Three Notions

Cecchetti seems to have operated on the basis of three pedagogical notions: returning in cycles, repetition and variation. Each family of steps returns in cycles - on the Monday for one, on the Tuesday for another and so forth. There is no question of a difficulty flitting by, never to be seen again! For it will return, ineluctably, at a week’s distance, and then at another week’s distance – until it is no longer a difficulty, but something to be mastered, explored and even rejoiced in.

Secondly, repetition at the barre of the fundamentals in the simplest, plainest form, is a procedure generally reserved in other schools to the teaching of children. Very likely, Cecchetti must have considered that accuracy and purity in the most basic and essential exercises wears away over time. So these must be repeated.

Thirdly, variation. It is no accident that variation form is, in a manner of speaking, the germ of all classical music, even the fugue being a variant of variation-form! Here, the question of deep artistic emotion is next the surface. Thanks to repetition and to these cyclic “returns”, the dancer acquires a mastery, a control, and thus an awareness of those variations on the original step-theme, the very details that make the difference between art, and gymnastics. He hones his ability to convey the subtlest shifts in musical colour, rhythm and phrasing, the smallest change in a linking step, a floor-pattern, or a port de bras that he will bring to the study of new choreography.

This was Company Class in 1912!

The Days of the Week are something else too: Cecchetti’s very specific answer to the question of how to take an exhausted group of professionals and get them on their feet for the evening’s performance. Indeed, it was the Maryinskii dancers themselves who demanded of Diaghilev that Cecchetti travel with them on tour! To Cecchetti, there was no contradiction between using company class to better a dancer’s technique throughout his career, and using it as a warm-up. Indeed, the Days of the Week are so well-constructed, that they chase away fatigue! This I have experimented myself, whilst putting together in early 2010 a Thursday Class on film for a lecture demonstration.

Having rehearsed and then filmed the Thursday Class over two two-hour sessions, I devoted a third two-hour session to filming a selection of Cecchetti’s exercises from other ’Days of the Week’ as a ‘taster’. How intriguing to find that I was neither physically nor emotionally exhausted from focusing on the “Thursday” in this way, quite the opposite! Whereas, on the following day, as I filmed the ‘taster’ to show hugely diverse enchaînements from across the Week, I found myself worn out.

Whether Cecchetti deliberately set out to have ‘The Days of the Week’ cover the physical principles as explicitly as set out above, we cannot say, but the outcome – his training of two generations of dancers of outstanding accomplishment – shows that he most certainly understood those principles, and acted upon them.

As one proceeds through the Days of the Week, all the exercises, difficult and taxing as they are, actually work. And if the dancer achieve that co-ordination throughout the body at all times that is fundamental to the Method, he will produce dancing that, as Fokine said, ‘appeals not merely to the eye but to the emotions and the imagination’, and he will dance naturally, without the strain and artificiality that has in recent years tended to obscure its intrinsic power and beauty.

Although I would certainly suggest neither that Cecchetti’s Method is the only viable approach, nor that a Cecchetti-trained dancer can afford to blithely ignore other systems, its merits, in my view, have, and will, withstand the test of time.

Did you say Old-fashioned?

By the time Cecchetti retired to Italy in the mid 1920’s, his Method, which is both extremely rigorous, and lacking in the spectacularly-athletic grand allegro forms that were beginning to take over the Soviet stage, had begun to be seen as out-dated. It was shortly to be superseded worldwide by the system Agrippina Vaganova elaborated in Soviet Russia. When poorly taught – i.e. as a mere style, tricked out with quaint gestures, rather than as a fundamental and very intelligent technique - Cecchetti’s Method may appear to be affected, and limited in range. But when taught as Cecchetti would have wished - a tightly structured class focused on the physical principles we have just examined – the dancer will develop the all-round exuberance of grand technique.

Fortunately for posterity, Cecchetti’s enchaînements and much of his Method were carefully noted by Cyril Beaumont and Stanislas Idzikowski in 1921, and his work continued to be taught with fervour by disciples such as Margaret Craske in New York, who kept his thought alive for our own generation.

My own conviction is that in our attempts to explore and apply the physical principles outlined above, we will come to appreciate Cecchetti’s Method afresh as a comprehensive, logical and majestic method of training in the art of ‘classical theatrical dancing’ as he called it, at opposite poles to the self-indulgent gymnastic posturing that now disfigures the profession.

Finally, give heed aspiring choreographers! Cecchetti’s work covers virtually the entire step-vocabulary, much of it otherwise lost or ignored. By touching the imagination, it fosters innovation and will surely prove a thing not of the past, but of the future.