Feet in Paint

When I dance, I use images all the time to try to perfect my technique. One of the images I remember from when I first started dancing as a child was the image of my foot being a paint brush.

I was very pronated has a child – I had flat feet! When I danced, often my pinkie toe would lift off of the floor. My teacher would tell me I had to keep all of my toes on the floor and to imagine that my foot was a paint brush and that I needed to paint the floor when I danced.

Rond de Jambe in Paint

My teacher also told me that it was important that I get as much paint on the floor as possible so to really push down along the for every exercise.

This image helped me tremendously! I ended up with beautiful arches in my feet and have always been complemented on my foot work.

I became fascinated as I got older and started working with children of all abilities on how to use images and to produce better technique in my students.

It takes a lot of executive functioning for a dancer to be told an image and then to translate that into the body and then, further still, use that image to replicate the right movement. So, when I came up with The Schlachte Method, I developed visual tools to make this process more accessible to all children.

So now every ballet movement has a corresponding image, visual tool, and story to it. This helps all learners (whether they are visual, auditory, kinesthetic or imaginative) in access ballet technique!

Since my earliest recollection and arguably my most utilized image was the feet in paint, I thought it appropriate to have our logo in the image of a flower made up of all feet in paint.

All of the artwork in our studio is of ballet exercises done with feet in paint.

Tendus and Pique turns in paint

I often will pull down a piece of the art and use it as a teaching tool during class. I continue to find it such a helpful image and hope it will assist our students in learning good ballet technique as much as it as helped me!