Understanding Body Positions

 The terms croise (crossed), efface (shaded), en face (facing), and ecartee (separated) are used in ballet to describe how your body and legs are positioned, relative to the audience.  You start hearing these terms when doing center combinations, because that is when your "point of reference" stops being the barre and starts being the audience.  (In class, "the audience" is the front of the room.)

These four terms can be confusing, especially when they are combined with terms describing the direction your working leg is moving: devant (front), derrier (rear), a la second (to the second position), a la quatrieme (to the fourth position). 

But don't despair!  Yelena, at Ballet for All, has an excellent video, in which she explains and demonstrates the four positions, with variations for leg positions.  Check it out!

Here are some tricks I use for remembering the four terms:

En Face:  This one is pretty straight forward (pun intended).  I think of "en face" as meaning "in your face" or facing the audience directly.

Croise:  For this one, I think about how my upper thighs appear to the audience.  In a croise (crossed) position, the upper thigh one leg is crossing in front the other thigh.

Efface:  The French meaning for this term (shaded) isn't terribly intuitive, so instead, I think of the English meaning (e.g. to make indistinct).  In an efface position, my thighs are "open" to each other, making the line between the two "indistinct."  But, if this is too difficult to remember, just think of efface as being the opposite of croise.

Ecarte:  The word ecarte means "separated" or "thrown apart."  Since it sounds like the English word "cart," I think of an apple cart... and of upsetting an apple cart... and of seeing the apples get thrown in all different directions.  Then I visualize my legs going in different directions.

Here's a chart that helped me all the ballet body positions:

For yet more information on these positions, you can also check out The Body Positions of Ballet, page at the A Ballet Education (ABE) website.