Ballet hair

A ballet bun with net and pins

The New York Times
June 17, 2011
Bob or Bun? A Ballerina’s Tough Choice
By GIA KOURLAS

EVERYONE has bad hair days, but just consider the plight of the ballerina: her locks are teased, sprayed and shellacked into submission. For dancers split ends or an unruly cowlick are first-world problems. What about receding hairlines caused by scraping the hair, day in and day out, into a bun?

“Your teachers say that they don’t want frizzies — they want it tight,” said Wendy Whelan, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet. “So you pull your hair really tight. For years. You start getting thinner hair, and it’s actually really sick.”

Seriously long hair would seem to be as much a part of ballet as seriously long limbs, but as far as length is concerned, there are some nonconformists out there. Ashley Bouder of City Ballet and Simone Messmer of American Ballet Theater are two prominent dancers with short hair.

“Most dancers, from a young age, have long hair,” Ms. Messmer said. “And it’s great except it’s such a cookie-cutter mold. It makes you look like everybody else, and at some point you’ve got to decide who you are.” Her body stiffened. “I will never go back to long hair.”

Her light-brown hair skims the nape of her elegant neck, and her overgrown bangs are just long enough to tuck behind her ears. Every little bit helps. Along with Ms. Bouder she is putting off a proper haircut until the end of ballet season.

Going from long to short marks a drastic change in any woman’s life, but for ballet dancers it’s almost a political act. Long hair means femininity and a certain degree of submissiveness; cutting it all off flies in the face of tradition and of how a ballerina is perceived.

She is no longer seen as demure. In other words, she’s a modern woman. There are no policies at City Ballet or Ballet Theater regarding hair length, and most dancers still keep their hair long, especially those in the corps de ballet who are provided with less backstage assistance than soloists and principals. But there is also the psychological security that long hair affords. For the few who opt out, the reason is often linked to self-identity.

Jenifer Ringer, a principal at City Ballet, has sported a bob for years. “When I leave the theater, I feel a little more like a regular person,” she said. “It gives me a mental break from having to always feel that all I am is a dancer.” Jeffrey Rebelo, Ballet Theater’s wigs and makeup supervisor, considers Ms. Messmer something of a muse because of her short hair. “With every ballet we get to be a little creative with her,” he said. “But hopefully it doesn’t become a trend.” He laughed. “Or else we would be there all day.”

For her transformation into the courtesan Prudence Duvernoy in “Lady of the Camellias” Ms. Messmer sat in a chair at the Metropolitan Opera House as Mr. Rebelo pinned her hair up in the back and gave it an aggressive spray. There were two pieces — a bun and a cascade of curls — to attach to her baby ponytail. Mr. Rebelo said, “She probably has a pound of pins in her hair by the end.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. Hairpins afford dancers the security of leaping through the air without leaving behind — horrors — a flyaway bun. They’re worth the headaches. And as far as dancers are concerned, short hair is more than manageable thanks to the tools of the trade — falls (half-wigs), switches (pieces for ponytails) and full wigs — that make it possible to turn a bob into a bun. There are also cases in which real hair poses problems.

“I feel much more secure with a piece of fake hair on,” Ms. Bouder said. “My hair is very fine and slippery, and if it’s really clean, it’ll come right out of my bun.”

For ballets that require the hair to be worn down, like “Serenade,” Ms. Bouder wears a fall, which she said features three or four tiers of hair. “It attaches to a kind of comb,” she said. “Two sides come together and clip into your hair very tightly. It feels like little piranhas are eating your head when you first put it in, and then you forget that it’s there.”

Miranda Weese, a former principal at both City Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet, experimented with different lengths and layers to lighten the bulk of her hair. “I had to learn ways to put it up so that I didn’t pull it so tight, because I was literally balding in the front,” she said.

Ms. Weese eventually added bangs; her reasoning was that she could pull them back more gently after the rest of her hair was up. Once, she recalled, a concerned Rosemary Dunleavy, the company’s balletmistress, approached her backstage and said: “You’re not going to wear the bangs are you? Because I think it would make you look like a little dog.”

Obviously, for dancers, hair insecurities are magnified. But as Ms. Whelan pointed out, each dancer’s experience is different. As soon as she was promoted to principal dancer in 1991, she cut her hair to a chin-length bob, a style she kept for five years.

“It gave me a real individuality and a strength of character, so I really liked that, but at the same time I couldn’t do the long-hair ballets as easily,” Ms. Whelan said. “And if I did, it was unnatural, which I hated. I was sick of adding something on that should be a part of me.”

She has since grown her hair and added highlights, which she said has changed her into a more romantic dancer. “It’s a lot softer,” she said. “I actually love my hair now. But it took a long time to evolve.”

In Russia short hair — or at least shorter hair — is becoming more common. Along with Uliana Lopatkina of the Mariinsky Ballet, there is Natalia Osipova, who cut her hair off in 2007, inspired by Audrey Tautou’s gamine hairstyle in the French film “Amélie.” A principal with the Bolshoi as well as a guest artist with Ballet Theater, Ms. Osipova spoke through a translator at the Metropolitan Opera House. Her eyes sparkled: “In one moment, I said, ‘I’m cutting my hair. That’s it.’ ”

Reaction at the Bolshoi Theater was a fiery mix of shock and dismay. (She said that several dancers there have since followed her lead.)

Ms. Osipova’s voice broke into laughter as she recalled her coach’s reaction. “She said: ‘Disaster! You look like a boy! What are we going to do?’ The hairdresser in the company was looking at me and saying, ‘Oh my God, how can I handle this?’ ”

Her mother doesn’t approve either. But Ms. Osipova is the sort of ballerina who needs a little rebellion in her life. “I’m probably the person,” she said with a smile, “who’s always trying to break the rules.”

Personal comment: I have written several times about long hair and the problems with it while diving or when worn under a rubber hood, but I’ve not written about ballet hair. This is the best article I’ve seen recently on the subject of hair problems – associated with particular ‘long hair’ roles -experienced by ballerinas with long or short hair and the hair devices used to fix them.

Breaking barriers

The mystique of the ballerina

The New York Times
September 16, 2010
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Hark! They speak!

Ballerinas Take a New Approach: Talking

Those ethereal creatures at New York City Ballet, who communicate solely with physical grace and train their whole lives to perform in silence, are now talking to the audience from the stage.

This week, the opening of the company’s fall season, principal dancers have been stepping out to say a few words about themselves and the coming programs.

The unusual move is part of a broader effort by City Ballet to humanize dance, connect better with the audience and, ultimately, sell more tickets.

“Ballet has always had this stigma, this mystique, this standoffish art form that you couldn’t touch,” Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief, said in an interview this week.

The new approach, he added, is “about breaking barriers.”

But more than just ballet’s mystique is on the table. Conversational dancers fit in to a larger endeavor at City Ballet, the result of a round of strategic planning that led to several changes meant to turn ballet into a less formal experience.

At Tuesday and Wednesday performances, for instance, the number of intermissions will generally drop from two to one and the shows will start a half-hour earlier.

The preshow talking goes against a subtle tradition. For generations the culture of ballet has involved hiding the pain of dancing, keeping personal lives behind the curtain and suppressing the mundane aspects of the art form so that when the baton goes down, audiences enter a world apart — one of beauty and form and pure movement.

Dancers are trained to land softly and keep any sounds inside them as they move with vigor around the stage. Even the stages are designed to suppress sound. And forget about Dale Carnegies in tutus: public speaking courses have no place at ballet schools.

So it is no surprise that the move has failed to catch on with some of City Ballet’s 24 principals. Mr. Martins said that he wanted to institute the practice for the whole four-week fall segment of the season, but could not muster enough enthusiasm. “A number said, ‘Please don’t make me,’ ” Mr. Martins recounted.

Sara Mearns, who danced on opening night Tuesday, was one. “I’m not good with huge crowds,” she said in an interview.

Mr. Martins left open the possibility that preperformance addresses could be extended past Sunday, the end of the first week, depending on how audiences, and the dancers, receive them.

He said the idea was based on audience research, which included focus groups, surveys and individual interviews. But even he had reservations.

“I’m of two minds, truthfully,” he said. “I grew up in a world where we were told: ‘You guys dance. Just dance, don’t talk.’ But on the other hand, we live in a different world. The public really wants to know people.”

That desire has not escaped other institutions. More and more, orchestra members are being asked to speak to audiences from the stage or mingle with them before and after concerts. Microphones are making new inroads in sports, finding their way into boxing corners, locker rooms, race cars and dugouts during events. Artists are increasingly aware of the need to explicate their work.

Making dancers more accessible to balletgoers can be a good step, said Charles L. Reinhart, director of the American Dance Festival, but risks reducing the critical faculties of the audience. “If you go too far, then it takes away from the art,” he said. “You’re kind of influenced a bit in looking at the work — ‘that’s my kid up there.’ ”

Dancers, of course, have been talking in public in various ways — at special fund-raising performances, educational events and children’s programs. Very occasionally, dancers are given lines to speak or sing, as in George Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” and Jerome Robbins’s “West Side Story Suite.”

Less well-known is that dancers often talk to one another during performances — sotto voce or turned away from the audience. Sometimes it is a “sorry” for a wrong hand clasp or a reminder of an about-to-be-forgotten step or guidance for a last-minute substitute performer.

“You’re not supposed to know that,” said Ashley Bouder, a City Ballet principal who will be introducing Saturday night’s program. “I’ve been talked through some pas de deux before.” Ms. Bouder is also one of a growing number of dancers who regularly give insight into their lives on Facebook and Twitter.

But audiences rarely experienced what was on display Wednesday evening at the David H. Koch Theater, when Tyler Angle hopped out sideways from the curtain and addressed the 2,500 people in the house.

Charming and self-deprecating in black jeans, an Austrian-style short-waisted jacket and sockless wingtips, he apologized for his “rehearsal hair” and joked that with Fashion Week taking place in Lincoln Center, the dancers were feeling self-conscious. “We’re used to being the thinnest, most fashionable people” in the area, he said.

Mr. Angle called that evening’s program one of “interesting things, small gems and a slam-bang finish.” He dropped a little gossip — two principals that evening, Megan Fairchild and Andrew Veyette, were engaged — made a comment about each work and hurried off to the wings.

Backstage, during the opening work, several colleagues, sweaty and panting after exits, congratulated him. “You were really good,” said Tiler Peck, who embraced him. Mr. Angle said he felt completely comfortable, helped by the proportions of the theater. “The audience doesn’t feel worlds away,” he said.

At intermission, several balletgoers praised his appearance. “It makes it a little less formal, and a little closer to the audience,” said Kathleen Leslie of Portland, Me.

The new strategy includes meet-the-dancer talks before performances the first week. On Wednesday Ms. Mearns and Joaquin De Luz answered questions in front of about 75 people in the first ring. These listeners learned that Ms. Mearns was shown little appreciation by her teachers at the School of American Ballet and that she has a puppy, and that Mr. De Luz studied bullfighting, paints and calls his mother before every performance.

A new marketing campaign was also set in motion that features portraits of the principals as people — not in costume or stage makeup. The photographs appear in advertisements, brochures and an exhibition on the theater promenade. Some are also projected on buildings around town. City Ballet has even created a mini-Web site, nycballet.com/dancers, dedicated to each principal.

Ms. Bouder said that she was a “little apprehensive” about speaking on Saturday. But, she added, “I really like our new campaign pushing our dancers out there and making us friendlier and more accessible.” She acknowledged that the loss of distance between viewer and dancer could potentially dampen the experience.

“But to be honest, in the time we are living in, with all the technology and how everything is accessible with so many outlets, we’ve fallen a little behind,” she said. But, she added, “there’s still mystique at the ballet.”

Personal comment: I hope that Peter Martins goes slowly with making his dancers available. It’s not clear at this point if he understands (though his “being of two minds” about it is a hopeful sign) that if dancers lose their mystique it would be a major problem. We are already seeing that celebrities are withdrawing from Twitter and other Social Media because of its intrusive nature. I’m not suggestion that a ballerina’s occasional pre-performance chat with ballet-goers before a performance is as personally invasive as Twitter can be, but familiarity really can breed contempt, or at least disinterest, and disinterest in a performer is deadly.

Natalia Osipova – her back story

Bolshoi Principal Natalia Osipova

The New York Times
June 17, 2010
By ROSLYN SULCAS

A Determined Ballerina, Propelled to the Top

THE Bolshoi ballerina Natalia Osipova smiled brightly, theatrically, projecting outward as she danced the solo that Princess Aurora performs moments after arriving on stage in Act I of “The Sleeping Beauty.”

In a plain black leotard and a shabby practice tutu, Ms. Osipova was working before a single ballet mistress, Irina Kolpakova, in a rehearsal studio many floors under the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. There, on Saturday night, she will dance this role with American Ballet Theater, with which she is spending a second season as a guest artist.

Ms. Osipova was suffering from a throat sore enough to warrant a doctor’s appointment immediately after the rehearsal. Later she would cry, feeling ill and frustrated at her inability to perform the steps as she would like. And a week later she would be the victim of a mugging that would leave her bruised and shaken. But for the moment she was Aurora, shy and curious, looking tentatively at the four suitors with whom she will dance the Rose Adagio.

Ms. Osipova’s single-minded focus in rehearsal comes as no surprise to anyone who has seen her perform. Since she burst on to the international dance scene in show-stopping performances of Kitri in “Don Quixote,” during a 2007 Bolshoi tour to London, the sheer energy and intensity of her stage presence has been as remarkable as her improbable floating jump and astounding technical prowess.

“Resistance is futile; you adore her on sight,” Luke Jennings wrote in The Observer. “Let us not exaggerate, but six stars seem to be in order,” Clement Crisp began in The Financial Times, adding, “Not since Plisetskaya and Maximova have we seen so adorable a Kitri and never one so divinely destined to claim the role as her own.”

Ms. Osipova, just 24, is now in demand by major ballet companies all over the world, and in Moscow she is an acknowledged star with a devoted following. But that wasn’t always a predictable fate for her, said Alexei Ratmansky, Ballet Theater’s artist in residence, who invited Ms. Osipova to join the Bolshoi during his tenure as the artistic director there.

“I watched the final exams at the Bolshoi school,” Mr. Ratmansky said, speaking on the phone from Jackson, Miss., where he was on the jury of the USA International Ballet Competition. “She got a lot of criticism from the examiners — not classical enough, no aesthetic, almost vulgar, just wrong,” he said. “But I felt you could see the physical talent and the openness, so I hired her.”

He gave her solo roles right from the outset. “There was a big division about her among the audience, and also among the dancers and coaches,” he said. “I don’t remember any dancer in my experience causing as much difference of opinion.”

Ms. Osipova’s extreme flexibility and steel-sprung jump — watching her hover in the air makes you realize how people felt when they saw Nijinsky — are quite possibly the legacy of her early training as a gymnast, which she began at 5 in Moscow, where she was born.

“I was very, very serious,” she said last week, speaking through a translator during an interview backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House. “I saw myself at the Olympics. When I seriously injured my back at 8 or 9, and my teachers recommended I stop, this was a tragedy for me.”

Her parents took her to audition at the Bolshoi academy, hoping ballet would distract her. She was accepted but remained, she said, indifferent to dance for several years and wanted to return to gymnastics. Then she was given a solo to perform during a school show at the Bolshoi.

“Afterward the audience was applauding, and I understood that this is incredible,” she said. “In that moment I realized, yes, I want to dance.”

Offstage Ms. Osipova is wiry and feisty looking, with pale skin, wide-set eyes and jet-black tresses. (She dyes her light brown hair to correspond to her ballerina ideals: Margot Fonteyn, with whom she shares a birthday, May 18, and Diana Vishneva, also a Ballet Theater guest artist.) Onstage she is a theater animal for whom the presence and attention of the public is the oxygen that she needs to come fully alive.

It seems unsurprising that one of her heroes is the similarly avid Rudolf Nureyev, whose “Romeo and Juliet” with Fonteyn is, she said, the single performance she would most like to have seen. Ms. Osipova described Juliet as her “dream role”; next month, she will dance it with David Hallberg and Ballet Theater.

“I am a very emotional person, and those emotions have to go somewhere,” she said. “So I am always happy when I have a role where my feelings can come into play. Of course sometimes I scare people. They say, Natasha” — Ms. Osipova’s nickname — “you’re crazy. But I have to go out onstage and give everything I have.”

Mr. Hallberg, who has danced with Ms. Osipova at the Bolshoi as well as in New York, said their performances together had been among the greatest experiences of his career.

“She doesn’t care what people think,” he said. “She is so artistically involved in each role that she is continually questioning, validating every moment. She taught me to release a lot of my inhibitions, just through our physical communication.”

Ms. Osipova, who was invited to perform with Ballet Theater by its artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, after he saw her on tape, said that she was extremely happy at the Bolshoi, where she was promoted to principal in May. But a ballerina in the 21st century, she added, has the opportunity to travel and experience the repertory and schooling of different companies.

The crime of different countries is an unpleasant extra; after the mugging, close to her rented apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she said she was simply relieved that only her face had been bruised. “It was so quick that I think I felt more shock the next day,” she said. “But now I am thinking only about my first performance of ‘The Sleeping Beauty.’ ”

After just a few performances with Ballet Theater, it seems clear that Ms. Osipova’s technical gifts have raised the bar several notches higher for every other ballerina.

“If someone that talented comes out, it influences the dancers around her, and the younger ones,” Mr. Ratmansky said. “After her there was a wave of physical talent coming from the Bolshoi school. It’s an interesting phenomenon.”

Asked if he would like Ms. Osipova to join Ballet Theater’s roster of principal dancers, Mr. McKenzie said in an e-mail message that he “had that objective in mind.” Ms. Osipova said that while she would love to have a more permanent link to the company, her home was at the Bolshoi, where, she said, she felt she hadn’t yet fulfilled her potential. But she sounded touchingly girlish when talking of Ballet Theater.

“As little kids in school we were just thrilled looking at the stars of A.B.T.,” she said. “And now I’m walking next to them. It’s phenomenal.”

Natalia Osipova performs in “The Sleeping Beauty” on Saturday and “Romeo and Juliet” on July 10 with American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000, abt.org.

Natalia Osipova

Natalia Osipova as Kitri in a Bolshoi production of Don Q

The New York Times
Dance Review
Sending an Old Dreamer Airborne
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: June 4, 2010

“Dancing as Kitri in “Don Quixote” on Tuesday night at the Metropolitan Opera House, Natalia Osipova proved herself the most sensational ballerina now before the public. Kitri was the first major role for which Ms. Osipova — a Russian star of the Bolshoi Ballet, now in her second spring season as guest artist with American Ballet Theater —earned international acclaim. It’s clear why. She has a gamine quality; you can imagine this Kitri as the most riveting of street urchins. And she’s a theater animal. …”

The complete review can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/arts/dance/05osipova.html?scp=2&sq=Natalia%20Osipova&st=cse

The New York Times
Arts Briefly
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
June 15, 2010

Star Ballerina Attacked Near Lincoln Center

Two muggers attacked Natalia Osipova, right, a major international ballet star, as she left an American Ballet Theater performance early Tuesday morning, striking her in the nose and stealing her bag, her agent said. Ms. Osipova had attended a performance of Ballet Theater’s “Sleeping Beauty,” in which she is scheduled to dance on Saturday night, at the Metropolitan Opera House and was crossing Amsterdam Avenue on her way home when she was mugged, said the agent, Sergei Danilian. “Two guys just came from her back and they hit her and they took her bag,” he said. “She was so brave and so smart — she didn’t scream,” he said of the 5-foot-4 ballerina. Ms. Osipova had left her money at home and her computer at the Met, but the muggers got away with her point shoes and a small hammer used to shape them. The Met doctor was to examine her on Tuesday, Mr. Danilian said, and would determine whether she could dance full-out during an afternoon rehearsal or would just walk through it. She will “absolutely, no doubt,” perform on Saturday, he said. The police also interviewed her at the Met, he said. Ms. Osipova, who is Russian, is a star of the Bolshoi Ballet and in her second season as a guest artist with Ballet Theater.

Personal Comment: The good news is she wasn’t hurt and only lost some pointe shoes. If Sal had still been living on the upper west side that wouldn’t have happened! No dancers or other performers at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall would have been dissed like that in Sal’s territory. The Don who is responsible for that area should be ashamed of himself!