A plie is a bend of the knees. More specifically, you put your heels together and bend your knees while keeping your back straight up and down. A tendu is when you put your heels together and then stretch one foot out all the way. We do them to strengthen our muscles and improve how far our feet turn out.
At every technique class, we learn a new move or work on one we've already learned. Lately, we have been doing pirouettes. A Pirouette is a type of turn. You put one foot on the knee of the other leg, go up on the balls of your feet, and turn all the way around. When our teacher taught us, she had us do the turn in fourths. We turned all the way around, but we did it in four segments. To the side, to the back, to the other side, then to the front.
Last of all, we do across the floor dances. These dances are very short, only about eight beats. They have whatever new thing we just learned in them, so we can practice it. We do the combinations in small groups. The group does it one time with the teacher and then by themselves. When one group is dancing, the other groups are expected to watch the dancing group and applaud them when they are done.
My favorite part of dance class is when we do plies and tendus. Our teacher says we don't breathe enough while we dance, so she's making us memorize a song to sing while we do plies and tendus so we'll breathe.
Dancing is a lot of fun.