Perhaps this comes as no surprise to most of you, but my budding little tai chi group includes not one but three ballerinas!
One of them, the most experienced (decades!) is also a modern dancer (decades!) and she is having fun but really struggling with the form.
ChatGPT offers:
That said, the big challenge is letting go of tension and performance instinct. Ballet is upright, lifted, and often externally shaped. Tai Chi is sunk, internal, and driven by sensation over appearance. Some dancers struggle to release that top-down control—but when they do, the affinity often clicks.
Her ballet muscle memory certainly troubles her, partly because the ballet movements are so close to tai chi. She is persisting but discouraged. And I see reason for hope.
Where did that question come from?
More than once our ballerina has blurted out mid-form a very astute question or observation. One time she asked about a precise part of one movement that comes quite late in the form. I found that to be a great sign, so I gifted her a copy of Master Chen’s fundamental work, The Brain Aerobics of Tai Chi Chuan.
Today she went even deeper. I had them do the form on their own. Our prima ballerina had to follow, because she has not mastered even this early section, but at some point, after I had stepped in to demonstrate the precise components of a movement, she surprised me with an observation.
“This movement is really hard,” she said.
And though I had forgotten, she was right, and in the past I have emphasized the same because of one specific aspect to one step of the movement.
I quickly recalled the complication, and was happy to confirm our dancer’s insight. Let us look at the complexity she spotted, thanks I think to her deep experience in dance.
Step Up, Intercept, Deflect, and Punch
Just look at the name!
This is movement #15 in Master Chen’s version of the tai chi chuan short form. He breaks it down into six steps, altogether consisting of twenty or so individual actions. The challenge comes in the first action (an empty step!) required in the fifth step.
“Move left foot one step forward, as body turns 90° to the right.”
The fifth step also includes two significant arm actions, dropping the right fist to the waist and sweeping the left palm forward, but the killer is combining an empty step with a 90° turn of the waist, from southeast to northeast. And what makes that hard is that the left leg is behind the right leg when we start, so we must swing this heavy limb around the right leg and out to the west where we will step emptily.
Of course, if we step heavily onto the left foot everything is easy, but then we get clobbered by a counterpunch if one is thrown while we are falling into the step.
So did our dancer really spot something unique? First, let us look at the first big empty step in the form, the one I had to practice for hours to perfect, an experience so impressive and productive that I named our group “Empty Step”.
Ward Off Left
Here is the matching step in Ward Off Left:
“Move left foot one step forward. Turn body 45° to the left.”
Looks about the same, but in Ward Off our feet are already shoulder width apart and facing the fnal direction, North.
There is no need for the left leg to swing around the right leg to get to a new direction.
What about the rest of the form? Is anything else as challenging as Step Up?
Single Whip?
Single whip comes close to being as challenging as Step Up, but two things make me think Step Up still earns our dancer’s uniqueness award.
The first is a cheat: we do Single Whip early and often, maybe four times. So it may be as hard, just less practiced. But then we have the second thing: the extended right arm.
The empty step in Single Whip is indeed to an awkward direction, behind and to the left, but that is precisely what the arm extended forward to the right counter-balances! And the leg is merely extending back, tricky but nothing like swinging around from behind one leg to in front.
Take a révérence
Our ballerina may be struggling, but once again her long dance experience has made possible a deeply astute observation. She may be teaching me tai chi some day.