Ballet Dance Critique

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The beauty and elegance of a ballet dancer is achieved with years of technical training. Like with any sport, to be great, a ballet dancer must train with the expectation that his or her efforts will help one to achieve excellence. Ballet dance is competitive. Without proper technical training, the odds of making it as a professional dancer are little to none. It is due to this small window of opportunity that ballet dancers are willing to put their bodies through strenuous and often dangerous practices. Studies have been conducted to determine what kind of dance related injuries are the most common.
Ballet Dancer’s Turnout and its Relationship to Self-Reported Injury is a retrospective cohort study in which Coplan compares
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Coplan’s review of epidemiological studies indicates that many professional and student ballet dancers sustained at minimum one dance-related injury during their ballet career (579). Coplan further states that her review of available literature indicated that dancers attributed most of their injuries to “training errors and biomechanical imbalances cause by technique flaws” (579). It was for this reason that Coplan conducted the study, hoping to determine whether some of the injuries could in fact be attributed to “the degree of association between the degree of dancer turnout and injury” (579). Coplan defines turnout as an “external rotation of the ballet dancer’s legs and feet” (580). At present, the most advantageous and appealing turnout measures at 180˚. According to a study by …show more content…
The participants completed a questionnaire in which they recorded demographic information and self-reported injury history due to dance (Coplan 581.) After reviewing the questionnaires, the participants were placed into two groups. One group for those with a self-reported injury and a second group for those without a self-reported injury (Coplan 581). Upon placement into groups, the amount of motion for passive hip internal rotation was measured in the neutral position for each dancer (Coplan 581). Coplan’s examiners used a goniometer in which the axis was placed at manually palpated and bisection of the knee, and the arm with the manually palpated and marked bisection of the tibia (581). According to Coplan the “total passive internal rotation range of motion of the hip was obtained by adding the measurement for right and left hip internal rotation” (582). Examiners then traced the feet of the dancers in first position to measure the angle of the functional turnout (Coplan 582). The examiners then calculated the difference in the typical first position versus the total passive hip external rotation range of motion (Coplan 582). As stated by Coplan, the turnout was being compensated if the functional turnout measurement was greater than the total hip external rotation range of motion

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