Arabesque allongée

Extended or outstretched arabesque.  See Arabesque à la Hauteur.

What's a Lyre?

The next Arabesque is Arabesque à la Lyre.  Which literally translates as "Arabesque with the lyre".  Its basically a Cecchetti Method Third Arabesque but with the palms facing up as if the dancer was holding a lyre.  Dusting off my Greek musical history, a lyre is basically a hand held harp.  I looked everywhere for a picture of this, and all I came up with were some stick figures from Zazzle.com.  This posting made me finalize my decision to have a photo shoot with some of my students so that I can have accurate pictures of all of these positions of dance.  I will post those soon...

Arabesque à la Hauteur

Arabesque at the height (90 degrees).  A term in the French School.  Also see Arabesque Allongée.

Arabesque à la Demi-hauteur

Arabesque at half-height (45 degrees).  A term of the French School.

Arabesque à Deux Bras

Arabesque with two arms is from my understanding is also a Third Arabesque in the Cecchetti Method.

En Arabesque

So I guess we get to start things off with an easy one.  En Arabesque means in Arabesque.  The example given is Pirouette en Arabesque.

I tried to find a clip of anything done En Arabesque, and came across this very nice video of an assortment of Arabesques performed by a Royal Ballet Dancer.

Varied to Infinity

I knew there were a lot of Arabesque listings in the Ballet Dictionary, but when the description said that  "The forms of arabesque are varied to infinity" I became concerned.  There are 23 different listings of Arabesques in this book, many of which mean the same thing, but just said differently based on which method you are studying.  The actual definition is:  "One of the basic poses in ballet, Arabesque takes its name from a form of Moorish ornament".

I thought long and hard how I was going to tackle this element of dance, and so I will go through each of the versions of an arabesque, but will combine the ones that are essentially the same thing.  So here we go...