Before trying a grand jeté en tournant, there are a couple of things you should know. First, forget about starting your turn in midair, as some ballet teachers might instruct you. To turn your body you must apply a torque, or twisting force, to it, and once you are in the air you have nothing to apply a torque with. If, on the other hand, you begin twisting from the ground up, clasping your legs together at the apex of your leap while raising your arms above your head, you will do a rapid 180-degree turn, which is the object of the exercise. “That’s physics,” says Ken Laws.
Laws is a professor emeritus of physics at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He also has a very serious case of balletomania. Thirty-two years ago, when Laws’s daughter, Virginia, was 5-and-a-half, she expressed an interest—not so unusual in a little girl—in learning ballet. Her 7-year-old brother, Kevin, announced that he wanted to learn too. Whereupon Laws, then age 40 and perhaps due for a pirouette, decided not to be left out. He signed up with his kids for a class at the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet. “The next-tallest person in the room was as high as my waist,” he recalls. Kevin dropped out after a year and a half, and Virginia stuck with it for seven, but Laws was hooked. “It turned my life upside down,” he says.
