An Army of Artists

From today's New York Times:

If all the professional dancers in the United States stood shoulder to shoulder to form a single chorus line, it would stretch from 42nd Street for nearly the entire length of Manhattan. If every artist in America’s work force banded together, their ranks would be double the size of the United States Army. More Americans identify their primary occupation as artist than as lawyer, doctor, police officer or farm worker.

It’s easy to talk about artists in lofty and spiritual terms,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “Without denying the higher purposes of the artistic vocation, it’s also important to remember that artists play an important role in America’s cultural vitality and economic prosperity. Artists have immense financial and social impact as well as cultural impact.”

Well, there you have it!

The Rosin Box

I thought it'd be cool to incorporate some photos of our "language" as Gavin calls it. And it really is a language. I forget this until I have a conversation with a dancer in front of a non-dancer.

Here is Yuka Iino rosining up before a rehearsal of Raymonda. The Rosin Box is kind of the equivalent of the water cooler in an office. Kind of like a home base for ballerinas and danseurs.

top ten

Mia recently asked me if I had seen the Late Show with David Letterman years ago when artists from the New York City Ballet aided Dave in the delivery of his famous Top Ten List. I hadn’t seen the episode, but I was able to find the list in the Late Show archives. It’s from April 8, 1996.

The Top Ten Things a Ballerina Would Never Say:

10) You gonna finish those cheese fries?

9) I can’t get the chewing tobacco stains out of my unitard

8) I’m loopy from all the spinning

7) My dream is to do a ballet version of “Smokey and the Bandit”

6) Baseball players can scratch themselves. Why can’t we?

5) I don’t know which I love more – “Swan Lake” or “Ricki Lake”

4) When I have to jump really high, I pretend there’s a ferret biting me in the butt

3) I love the Quizstar 5000!

2) Hey girls – let’s go beat the heck out of some opera singers

1) I’ll have what Rush is having

Some of these are rather dated, but enjoyable still.

A Resource for Dance Vocabulary

One of our readers mentioned that this blog was throwing around a lot of ballet terms that are probably unfamiliar to most people, such as the names of steps and positions. Here's a good place to look up what they mean:

http://www.abt.org/education/dictionary/index.html

This site gives you the translations of the French terms for many common ballet steps along with a photo or video demonstration of a dancer executing them. There's a lovely picture of Susan Jaffe performing an arabesque and a penche, so you can see what I was trying to describe a couple of days ago.

Arabesques and Tights

Questions from a reader:

For those of us who don't dance, what's an arabesque?
It's harder to explain than it is to demonstrate, unfortunately, but I'll try. An arabesque is one of the most familiar ballet positions to the general public--- it's the pose you'll see over and over again in pictures, posters, artwork, and on stage. The dancer is standing on one leg with the other extended out behind. The joke is that women spend at least 75% of their career in first arabesque, so they'd better get comfortable with it! (Although there are slight variances according to different traditions of technique, there are four different classical arabesque positions that are defined by the angle of the body and position of the arms. They're just named first, second, third and fourth arabesques).


You mentioned in preset that you'd have quick costume changes. I may not have seen it correctly in performances, but some of the dancers look like they've got different tights/leotards as well as tutus/costumes. Are you literally completely changing each time or is there layering that you usually do to cut down on the time it takes to be ready?
During any given ballet performance, you will likely see several different costumes appear on stage. If a dancer is performing in more than one ballet on the program, they will have to change costumes in between ballets (or in between acts if it is an evening-length work such as Swan Lake), usually during intermission. Sometimes, however, a particular role requires the dancer to wear more than one costume during a single ballet, so they will have to change during the piece at some point. These costume changes are figured into the choreography so that there is enough time for the dancer to get out of one outfit and into the other one, but they're often pretty quick and therefore the dancer will change in what we call a "quick-change booth", which is basically a couple of curtains hung up in some corner backstage. There are dozens and dozens of ballets with quick changes, some of them legendary for their elaborate-ness and quickness! I have some stories about that... but I'll save them for the next post. But no, the only time we will "layer" any costumes is if the bottom layer is a unitard or leotard that can fit easily under something else. We generally hate to dance in costumes that are too bulky, heavy, hot, or restricting, so the fewer layers the better.


With the elephant knees, how long (I know it's likely somewhat different based on the dancer) do tights last? Are they like dress socks where you wear them a couple times and after a few washes the elasticity combined with wear produces the elephant knees?
Tights can last a really long time! They may end up with holes, but we don't tend to care too much about that and will keep wearing them anyway. They fade with time and can turn odd shades of gray (from the original pink), but since they are also oddly expensive (the ones that are my particular favorite are at least $15 a pair) we (or maybe just I) get thrifty and wear them for years. Eventually they reach a point of ridiculousness (scratchy and zero elasticity), and then the most lovely feeling in the world is a brand-new pair of tights on your legs.
Not to elaborate on a mundane topic, but wearing comfortable tights is really a big deal, for the women especially. An uncomfortable pair (or leotard, or any article of dancewear) can be so distracting that I swear I can't dance as well.

Our Language

Someone (my mother, actually) suggested that it would be interesting for the blog-reading public to get a little tutorial on some of the lingo that we sling around the ballet studio. She's gotten pretty good at knowing what I mean when I talk about class, dress rehearsal, Jet Glue, merdes, a tech rehearsal, etc. etc., because of having raised a budding ballet dancer. But every so often something will come up in conversation that sounds completely foreign to her, which makes me realize how much of what dancers talk about amongst ourselves makes no sense to anyone else. So here's a partial list of our jargon (because it IS so familiar to me, it's hard to think of what to include, so I'm soliciting suggestions from my collegues, which are trickling in):

In no particular order:

• Elephant Knees: The state of a pair of tights when you've had them on so long that they've stretched out and lost elasticity. The knees get all baggy and look like... elephant's knees, I guess.
• Rosin Box: The shallow wooden box in the corner of the studio (and off stage in the wings) filled with powdered rosin. We step in the box and rub the tips and soles in the rosin for extra traction if the floor is at all slippery, and the women sometimes dip their feet in the rosin before putting their pointe shoes on to be extra sure the heels won't slip off. The men sometimes rosin their hands so they're more secure on their partner's costume for partnering.
• Preset: If you've got a quick costume change or are using a prop of any sort in a particular ballet, it's the dancer's responsibility to make sure those things are set up where they need them to be before the show starts. That way, the dancer knows exactly where their things are and can't blame anyone else if they're not ready!
• Marathon Show (aka Triple Whammy or Quadruple Whammy): This is just what it sounds like--- a performance that is so long and hard it feels like you are running a marathon. During Nutcracker, it's common for some of the women to have three or four roles in one performance (party scene, snow, marzipan; or party, snow, Spanish, flowers), hence the triple or quad "whammy".
• Six o'clock Penche: A penche is a ballet step that is essentially an arabesque taken a lot further. From an arabesque, the dancer tips forward with their torso while raising their leg behind them in equal dimension. The line to strive for is to have your leg so high it's pointing straight at the ceiling. In this case, your two legs look like they're hands on a clock at six and twelve. Six o'clock!

More terms and definitions to come. If you've heard words or phrases and always wondered exactly what they meant, just ask!

Ballet is ?

As a comment on my last post balletfan asked if I thought that the famous George Balanchine quote "ballet is woman" was true. I did some looking around the internet and found what seems to be the full quote: "Ballet is Woman. In sports, it's Mickey Mantle. In politics, it's Eisenhower. In ballet, it's woman. Women are lighter, more flexible. They move more beautifully. He is not the King, but she's the Queen"

I think that to Balanchine this was completely true. But, he was an artist, and contrary to popular belief, he is not the end-all be-all of ballet (my friend are going to laugh so hard at this, I'm a die-hard Balanchine fan). There are many choreographers who don't agree with Balanchine's philosophy, most famously, Maurice Bejart. I actually think at one point, in response to Balanchine's "ballet is woman" comment, Bejart said "Ballet is Man." For him, the male physique was ideal for the type of ballets he wanted to create. I think it just depends on what the choreographer is most inspired by, and for Balanchine, that was women.

Also, a thought that just occurred to me: Balanchine was born in 1904, and it seems like growing up in Russia at that time there were probably some pretty strict gender roles in play. In the quote he says men are the epitome of politics and sports, and I can't help but wonder if the thought of women being ballerinas and men being politicians and sports players didn't somehow stem from being a child in the early 20th century.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts. What do you all think?

Off to work now!

~Steven