You're Already Late: Inside a Balanchine Class
A young dancer from San Francisco, visiting New York, took a class at the School of American Ballet. Near the end came a fast combination of entrechat quatre, the small jump in which the legs cross and beat twice in the air before the dancer lands. George Balanchine was watching. The dancer was Suki Schorer, and that combination ended with a contract at New York City Ballet. Decades later, writing the book in which she set down everything he had taught her, she called it "the turning point of my life" 1,2.
It is a good story to tell a ballet student, because it says that the small, fast steps at the end of class can matter as much as anything else in a dancer's life. But the entrechat that caught his eye did not begin at the end of class. It began at the very first plié, in a habit of mind that Balanchine built into every minute of the hour. Schorer, who joined the School's permanent faculty in 1972 and spent the rest of her career teaching what she had learned 2, left a detailed record of that hour. So did the dancers around her. Read together, their memories let us walk through a Balanchine class from the barre to the last jump.
What follows is mostly the company class Balanchine taught his own dancers, as they remember it. The School teaches children through a syllabus built level by level, written down by one of his former dancers 15, so not every exercise here belongs to every age. But the ideas run through every level, and so, very often, do the words. They still do, in studios Balanchine never saw, including ours in Williamsville.
The first plié
The class begins with the hand on the barre and the knees bending. In most studios this is a warm-up, a few slow, comfortable minutes to wake the body. Balanchine would not allow it. "You don't do plié to warm yourself up," Schorer remembers him saying. "It is a special step that has to be developed. Everything comes from it" 3.
He had an engineer's image for it. "The knee and the ankle bend together. It is not just one bend, it is two. Double force like double engine with two pieces working for you" 3. The plié was not a sinking but a gathering of energy, done against resistance, the dancer turning out further as she rose. Joan Acocella, describing photographs of Balanchine teaching in 1961, quotes Schorer on the feeling: the dancer "pulls up to go down," and as the knees bend "the arms come, like a parachute ... the hands resisting, holding onto the air" 5.
It was also fast. His grand pliés at the barre took about two seconds down and two seconds up, quicker than in most schools, and the music he asked for was never sentimental, because, Schorer writes, the dancer "should not melt into the floor full of feeling or to search for her soul" 3. And it began on the beat. Dancers who drifted into the first plié a fraction late, not quite awake yet, heard him clap the music to a stop. "You're already late!" he told them. Schorer adds, "We had barely begun the first exercise at the barre, and already we were behind" 3.
That clap explains a great deal about everything that follows. Susan Pilarre, who danced for Balanchine for sixteen years and later taught at the School, says it in a kitchen image: "every step is a sandwich on plié bread." She sings the counts to her students, the "ands" as well as the numbers, because, as she remembers, "Mr. B said you should see the music and hear the dance, but he also said the most important thing is to be on time" 4.
The tick of the clock
Then come the tendus, and anyone who has watched a Balanchine-style class notices how many there are 6. "For Mr. B and his company," Schorer writes, "the saying was, the more tendus, the better" 6. Sixteen or thirty-two in each direction at a moderate tempo, then eight at a faster one, then perhaps thirty-two to the side faster still 6.
He had a practical way of keeping the leg fresh. Instead of finishing all the directions on one side before turning around, the class often did the front with one leg, turned to do the front with the other, then side and side, back and back 6. He also saw no reason to repeat the side at the end, as the traditional order does. "We don't need side again," he would say. "Front and back only got sixteen. Why should second get an extra set?" 6 Schorer points out that the old pattern serves the shape of the music more than the logic of the body 6.
The tendu itself he wanted done "in the ankle," with the toes caressing the floor and the foot placed back into fifth, "never banged or slammed" 6. The foot points on the "and" and closes on the beat, which he compared to "the even tick-tock of the clock." In tendu front the toes finish on the center line of the body, directly in front of the face, which gave him an excuse for a pun: "Your nose knows" 6. He told his dancers to practice tendus on their own, every day, alone 6.
Speed was always waiting at the end of these exercises. Patricia Wilde, one of the stars of his company, remembered that "Mr. Balanchine gave a million and one dégagés at the barre—very fast" 7. Pilarre still builds her tendu combinations so that each one is faster than the last, for "maximum attack" later on, and puts the goal plainly: "The feet should point so fast no one even sees them go out there" 4. Even the slower barre steps had their own rhythm. His fondu, Schorer explains, goes down more slowly than it comes up; his frappé is accented outward 8. "Be in time and on time," she says. "That's the most important thing" 8.
A cheek offered to the audience
In the center the dancer leaves the barre and acquires a face, a front, an audience. Balanchine wanted each dancer to know her own front, side, and back, and he set exercises with exact angles of the body and head so that the positions would settle into the body's memory 9. He did not number the corners of the room the way many schools do. He simply showed what he wanted 9.
The effect, in Schorer's words, was "to multiply the available looks, making the dancer and the dancing more interesting and more beautiful" 9. In croisé the neck curves and the head slants so that the cheek comes forward, presented to the audience; his image for it was "Ask for a kiss" 9. In effacé the dancer was to "offer the cheek." Écarté he called regal. It was "a position, not a place on the floor," and a very flat one, and if a dancer in écarté could see herself in the mirror, he told her, "You are already wrong!" Schorer gives her own students the picture of a queen in a high ruff 9. Even facing straight front, the plainest position of all, had its own drama: en face, she writes, "the dancer is most fully revealed... There is no camouflage" 9.
Slower than seemed possible
People who know Balanchine mainly for speed are often surprised by the adagio. Schorer says he "developed dancers who could move more slowly than most thought possible, and do it exquisitely," and that slow exercises were an important part of his classes 10. The leg did not rest on the way up and did not jam against the supporting knee. When it reached its full extension the dancer was to keep "growing" in the held position so it never looked lifeless. And the foot was to be "served" to the audience, presented the way a dish is presented, at whatever height 10.
He wanted the height planned, not hoped for. "You must know where your foot is going," Schorer remembers him saying, "without looking at it" 10. He certainly wanted "more" in extensions, she writes, as he wanted more of everything, but never at the cost of the movement's quality 10.
Two beautiful turns
The turns bring back the urgency. A dancer winding up her arms for a big pirouette was likely to hear, "Too much force! ... enough for a hundred turns. We need two beautiful turns, right and left" 11. He preferred the preparation hidden, so the turn appeared without warning. Teresa Reichlen, a principal of a later generation, puts it simply: "He disguised all his preparations... He tried to make the in-between stuff look just as fantastic as the bigger steps" 8.
Like a mother bird
The jumps come last, and here every habit of the barre comes due. Balanchine said a dancer should come down from a jump "like a mother bird landing on her eggs": she knows where she will land, and she lowers her weight softly, toes first, through the foot 1. A good landing, Schorer writes, makes only a "muffled 'taaah'" on the floor, "certainly no percussive knock or bang" 1.
For strength he gave slow jumps on two feet with long, deep pliés, and he summed up the gathering of power in an image no student forgets: "Collect your dirty laundry off the floor!" 1 Dancers who cut their pliés short heard, "Don't be stingy with plié... make it big, make it juicy" 1. When arms went flying in a bid for height, he would sometimes have the class jump with the arms held low until the legs did the work, then let the arms back in. "We use the arms for beauty and for help," he said. "It can be twice as easy with two arms" 1.
What he asked for in the air was frankly impossible. He wanted dancers to stay up as long as they had spent in the plié, and he told them, "Force gravity!" 1 Nobody can. The point was the trying. Schorer quotes one of his sentences that a student might copy into a notebook: "The effort comes first, the result comes later." And she adds, "Sometimes Mr. B made us believe that we could do the impossible" 1.
A second skin
For the women, much of this was done on pointe. Barbara Walczak and Una Kai, who reconstructed his classes in Balanchine the Teacher, record that in the 1960s the women did the entire class in pointe shoes 13. The School keeps the tradition for its advanced students, barre included. "Mr. Balanchine wanted our pointe shoes to feel like a second skin," Kay Mazzo, who had danced for him and later taught at the School for decades, told Pointe magazine. "Dancing in them should never feel foreign." The aim is the same quiet foot as in the tendu: "We work on gently caressing the floor rather than letting the shoe hit the floor with a bang" 12.
The turning point
Seen whole, the class has a shape. It starts on the beat and refuses to start a moment late. It builds the plié into an engine, sends the foot out and back like a clock, gives the dancer a face and a cheek and a queen's neck, slows her down until she can hold the air, then lets her into it. Acocella once described the style that came out of all this as "both 'packed'—full of complication, gradation, variation—and yet extraordinarily clean, quick, and natural-looking" 14. None of that is visible in a single step. It accumulates, one tendu at a time.
In 1978, at nine, Donatella Accardi moved from Palermo to New York on a full merit scholarship to the School of American Ballet 16. She took class from the faculty of those years, and the images in this essay were the working language of that building: the plié that gathers its force, the beat you are already late for, the jump that forces gravity.
She carried that language through careers at Tulsa Ballet Theatre and Boston Ballet, and then to Buffalo, to a school whose founder, Maris Battaglia, had trained at Balanchine's school too 16. Today Donatella Oppenheimer directs American Academy of Ballet, and the sentences that once echoed off the studio walls at Lincoln Center travel, teacher to student, into a studio on Klein Road. Nobody there is filming. The music starts, the knees bend on the beat, and a child who has never heard of Balanchine begins, without knowing it, the same hour Schorer did.
None of them is about a single great moment. They are about the first plié, on the beat, every day. That is what Schorer's entrechat quatre was made of, long before Balanchine happened to be watching, and it is why, in a class taught in this lineage, the first plié is never a warm-up. The turning point of a dancer's life does not announce itself. It arrives in an ordinary class, and the dancer has already been preparing for it for years.
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Sources
School of American Ballet, "Suki Says: Part 8 – Jumps," Sept 20, 2022 (excerpt from Schorer 1999, pp. 290-294; text verified 2026-10-30). https://sab.org/scenes/suki-says-part-8-jumps/
School of American Ballet, "Suki Says – Excerpts from Suki Schorer on Balanchine Technique," Feb 10, 2022 (Schorer's career: San Francisco Ballet, NYCB 1959, SAB permanent faculty 1972; "I wrote this book to pass along what I learned from George Balanchine"). https://sab.org/scenes/suki-says-excerpts-from-suki-schorer-on-balanchine-technique/ ; book: Suki Schorer with Russell Lee and Carol Rosegg, Suki Schorer on Balanchine Technique (Knopf, 1999).
School of American Ballet, "Suki Says: Part 4 – Pliés" (excerpt from Schorer 1999; text verified 2026-10-30). https://sab.org/scenes/suki-says-part-4-plies/
Gavin Larsen, "Susan Pilarre Explains 5 Balanchine Essential Elements," Dance Teacher, Feb 18, 2020. https://dance-teacher.com/susan-pilarre-explains-5-balanchine-essential-elements/
Joan Acocella, "Balanchine Teaching," The New Yorker (Culture Desk), Jan 11, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/balanchine-teaching
School of American Ballet, "Suki Says: Part 5 – Battement Tendu," Apr 28, 2022 (excerpt from Schorer 1999, pp. 62-67; text verified 2026-10-30). https://sab.org/scenes/suki-says-part-5-tendus/
Joseph Carman, "In Praise of Beats," Dance Magazine, Apr 30, 2013 (Patricia Wilde). https://dancemagazine.com/in_praise_of_beats/
"Dancing Balanchine," Dance Spirit, Aug 31, 2013 (Suki Schorer, Teresa Reichlen). https://dancespirit.com/dancing-balanchine/
School of American Ballet, "Suki Says: Part 3 – Épaulement/Orientation of the Body to the Front," Mar 24, 2022 (excerpt from Schorer 1999). https://sab.org/scenes/suki-says-part-3-epaulementorientation-of-the-body-to-the-front/
School of American Ballet, "Suki Says: Part 6 – Adagio and Développé," May 11, 2022 (excerpt from Schorer 1999). https://sab.org/scenes/suki-says-part-6-adagio-and-developpe/
School of American Ballet, "Suki Says: Part 7 – Pirouettes and Other Turns" (excerpt from Schorer 1999). https://sab.org/scenes/suki-says-part-7-pirouettes/
Kathryn Holmes, "The Great Pointe Debate," Pointe, Feb/Mar 2015 (Kay Mazzo). https://pointemagazine.com/approaches-to-pointe-training/
Barbara Walczak and Una Kai, Balanchine the Teacher: Fundamentals That Shaped the First Generation of New York City Ballet Dancers (University Press of Florida, 2008), chapter "Classes from the 1960s" (abstract). https://doi.org/10.5744/florida/9780813032528.003.0011 ; https://floridapress.org/9780813032528/balanchine-the-teacher/
Joan Acocella, "Dancing for Balanchine," New York Review of Books, Oct 11, 1990. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/10/11/dancing-for-balanchine/
Garielle Whittle, "About" (SAB faculty 1983-2012; transcribed and annotated the early years of SAB's syllabus). https://gariellewhittle.com/about/
American Academy of Ballet, "Meet Our Expert Ballet and Dance Faculty" (Donatella Oppenheimer, née Accardi: born in Palermo, full merit scholarship to SAB at age nine, Tulsa Ballet Theatre and Boston Ballet, AAB faculty since 2007, now Director; Maris Battaglia, founder, trained at SAB; text verified 2026-10-31). https://www.aab-buffalo.com/aabfaculty
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