Most people are natural right-turners, whereas very very few turn best to the left. It has something to do with the brain, and is not correlated with handedness (I am a left-handed right-turner, for example). I wrote about it here.

Sorry, but on this one, you’ve got bupkis.

Putting the hands up does not quicken the turn, because there aren’t “slow moving hands” that are not “pulled in” otherwise. The reason is that turns are usually done, not with the arms out to the sides or dangling in some way as drag, but with the arms and the hands pulled in fairly tight and relatively close to the torso at about waist or shoulder height.

Watch the women doing it the regular way in the video, or in other videos.

When a dancer has to put the arms up, it throws her off with drag and also makes the body much less compact. Compact is always, always good for turns. Arms up also throws you more off your center, your straight line around which you are turning, because it’s harder to get them balanced. Arms up is also more tiring to the body, requires much more effect and depletes you faster. There’s a host of ways in which it’s harder.

I’ve done all kinds of turns both ways, with arms in many different positions. Anything other than arms pulled in towards the center of the body makes it harder.

Why is that so difficult? A dancer usually pulls his/her arms closer to the body order to reduce what I think would be called air resistance while turning, as well as to make the turner smaller and more compact and more like a ball and less likely to be thrown off-center.

I make the following comments with zero knowledge, really, of ballet or the experience of dancing it.

But probably pulling the arms UP while doing the double actually may make it easier, in the sense that it almost certainly speeds up the turn, perhaps enabling the double to take place with similar timing as the single… I don’t have the kind of dancer’s sense of timing to see how the two “take”, but it certainly shortens — speeds up — the double turn considerably because it pulls in the “slow” moving hands which makes the entire turn speed up.

BTW, on the same topic, “sort of”, the 20th episode of Forever, “Best Foot Forward” centers on the ballet. I’d warn you it’s a bit grisly and probably not overly concerned with the ballet (it’s a sort of dramatic semi-police-procedural not unlike Castle with a different “Macguffin” to center the series around), the ballet IS the mise en scé¨ne of this episode.

We mostly do Opera and Broadway and Theater. Just did a week there to see five operas, three museums, two plays and one musical.

We are going back to see this guy sing in two operas at the Met.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85kFY4D55oE

Congrats on communicating such enthusiasm for ballet that you’ve managed to get lugs like me (and others, I’m sure), who have little knowledge or appreciation for the art to read these posts, watch the videos and try to fathom what it’s all about. (Watched the Carla Fracci video and FWIW, liked her light-as-a-feather, liquid quality.)

Like most steps in ballet, the technique required of dancers performing the fouette has become more extreme. … [This extreme technical ability is now] required in order to satisfy the jaded palates of the dance consumers, used to gymnastics rather than finesse, athleticism rather than art, tricks rather than sublimity.

I’ve seen an analogous thing in other arts, like musicians who play stuff that, I’m told, is very, very difficult–but which doesn’t sound very good. They get mesmerized by technique (and ego) and forget that beauty is the goal.

So ballet is a most physically demanding, grueling and stressful pursuit. And yet you did this for many years, some of which were quite intense, right? What motivated you, the “sublime,” evanescent glimpses of something splendid and perfect? What did it teach you?