It has been several years since I have taken ballet classes on a regular basis. I’ve wanted to get back in shape and dance again for quite a while, but until I graduated, I just haven’t had the time. Now that I’m finished with school, I’m lucky enough to have moved to an apartment only a few blocks away from a ballet studio, so if I wanted I could take class every day, several times a day.

As a ballet dancer, one of my greatest sources of stress is turnout. I have absolutely no natural turnout (unlike my non-ballet-dancing boyfriend, who has perfect turnout. Don’t you hate when that happens?!), so I have always looked for ways to help improve my turnout. For a while I was doing pretty well, but then I had to stop dancing for a couple of years and completely lost all my turnout. So how does one improve their turnout? Here are a few tips:

When you sew your pointe shoes, you typically cut your ribbons shorter so you don’t have a long tail when you tie your ribbons. Unfortunately, this causes most ribbons to begin to fray, which can be a huge problem if they fray too much. So what do you do?

Sometimes, your choreographer or whoever is in charge of choosing your costumes will want you to either wear skin color tights or have bare legs for a performance. While this works great for jazz dances because many dancers have tan jazz shoes anyways, what if this is for ballet performance? It’s a lot harder to find tan ballet shoes, especially if the dance is on pointe!

A lot of dancers stretch before class, when their bodies are cold. A better idea is to stretch in the middle of class or right after class when your body is all warmed up.

Typically when you have a hole in your jazz shoes, you go out and buy or order a new pair. But what if you don’t have time to buy new shoes, like if you have a performance or competition the next day?

Oftentimes, your teacher or artistic director will ask everyone to wear clear crystal earrings for an upcoming performance or competition. But what if you don’t have your ears pierced?

Although I have never had this problem, many of my friends have the problem of their pointe shoes slipping off of their heels while they are dancing. I pull my strings pretty tight, so I never have this problem, but I understand that many of you don’t like having your shoes so tight. So what to do?

You all have smelled it. And boy, you know how bad it can get! Yes, I’m talking about costumes… those costumes that just sit there in your dressing rooms, smelling like B.O. and goodness knows what else after you have danced in them. Unfortunately, a lot of them (especially tutus and men’s tunics) are pretty difficult to wash, so they just sit there between performances. Thank goodness there’s a solution for that! This is something I learned from my mom (resident costume lady), who learned it from I have no idea where.

You know how it is. It’s the day before your big performance, and you find a little run in your last pair of good tights! You don’t have time to go out and buy more tights, so you can’t afford for the run to get any bigger before your performance. So how do you keep the run from getting bigger?