In ballet, a series of quick turns performed while traveling across the stage, where the dancer rotates on the balls of the feet.
From French 'chaîne' (meaning chain), borrowed directly from ballet terminology. The term was adopted because the turns create a chain-like effect of continuous rotation across space.
The word 'chaîne' is one of the rare cases where we use a French ballet term unchanged in English, showing how ballet culture shaped our vocabulary of graceful movement.
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