Ballerinas and body image

NYCB - Jenifer Ringer partnered by Jared Angle in George Balanchine's The Nutcracker

The New York Times
December 3, 2010

Judging The Bodies In Ballet
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Go to any gallery and you see how painters and sculptors for centuries have made fat an issue. The nudes of Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Renoir show women with curves that are no longer part of any fashionable idea of beauty. Venus or Diana had a belly like that? I love most of them myself, but I have friends who object. Either way, all of us acknowledge that weight plays a part in our response.

Which art requires more exposure of the human form than the nude in painting, photography or sculpture? Ballet, of course. Dancers — even when sheathed in tights, tunics, tutus — open their bodies up in the geometrical shapes and academic movements that ballet has codified, and so they make their bodies subject to the most intense scrutiny.

The issue of scrutiny came up this week in a review of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” at New York City Ballet. I wrote that Jenifer Ringer, cast as the Sugar Plum Fairy, “looked as if she’d eaten one sugarplum too many,” and that Jared Angle, as her Cavalier, “seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm.” (The performance took place the night after Thanksgiving.) This has caused a certain brouhaha online, and a minor deluge of reader e-mails, in many cases obscene and abusive. The general feeling was that my characterizations went beyond the pale of civilized discourse. One reader wrote that the review was “appalling,” “heartbreaking,” “childish, “hurtful” and “incompetent.”

Notably, the fuss has been about Ms. Ringer’s appearance. No one took issue with what might be considered a much more severe criticism, that the two danced “without adult depth or complexity.” And though I was much harder on Mr. Angle’s appearance, scarcely a reader objected. When I described Nilas Martins as “portly” in The New York Times and Mark Morris as “obese” in the Times Literary Supplement, those remarks were also greeted with silence. Fat, apparently, is not so much a feminist issue as a sexist one. Sauce for the goose? Scandal. Sauce for the gander? No problem.

Ballet demands sacrifice in its pursuit of widely accepted ideals of beauty. To several readers that struggle is, regrettably but demonstrably and historically in the case of many women, concomitant with anorexia. (For the record, I have sometimes observed in print that certain dancers of either sex look too thin.)

Ms. Ringer has spoken in the past about coping with eating disorders. Some of my correspondents feel I should know this history of hers, just as others have on occasion written to explain which ballerinas have histories of scoliosis. I think otherwise. Dancers do not ask to be considered victims. When I’ve praised Ms. Ringer, I’ve applied the standards I’ve applied to Suzanne Farrell, Natalia Makarova and Kyra Nichols.

My own history makes me intimately aware of what it is like to have a physique considerably less ideal than any of those I have mentioned. Acute asthma in childhood gave me a chest deformity that often made me miserable into my adolescence. (It was ameliorated by major thoracic surgery at age 20.) On my doctor’s advice, I lost 20 pounds last year.

When a dancer has surplus weight, there can be no more ruthless way to demonstrate it than to dance in a tutu with shoulders bare. Some steps (notably, traveling across the stage on point with arms outstretched) open the upper body to maximum legibility, others the lower. If Ms. Ringer performed flamenco or Bharatanatyam or most forms of contemporary dance, she would look extremely slim. In most of her recent ballet roles, she has actually looked slender.

To be overweight is not to be a bad dancer. Mr. Morris at his largest has often been a sensational performer. I have heard an audience snort with laughter as he arrived onstage and then be awestruck by the brilliance of his dancing.

In the 1970s Lynn Seymour’s weight was more pronounced, and her physique more curvaceous, than Ms. Ringer’s. And her upper arms wobbled considerably more than Ms. Ringer’s did last week. But they were like the wobble on certain notes in Maria Callas’s voice — unfortunate, controversial, but entirely mentionable in an artist who transcended her flaws. Ms. Seymour was one of the greatest ballerinas I ever saw, probably the plumpest and certainly the most original.

Size in ballet is not only a modern obsession. In the mid-18th century at the Paris Opera, the ballerina Marie Allard was dismissed for her inability to lose weight (and the frequency of her pregnancies), while her contemporary Marie-Madeleine Guimard was nicknamed “the skeleton of the graces.” History remembers both, however, as exceptional artists. And it enshrines Marie Taglioni, the archetypal Romantic ballerina of the 19th century. Yet Taglioni as a student was derided by her classmates as a “hunchback.” In due course she became “Marie full of grace” (the echo of the Virgin Mary was intentional), the supreme sylph.

In our own time many other female dancers with obvious physical imperfections have made impressions far greater than those whose bodies were ballet-perfect. But that’s their task: in an Apollonian art that requires purity of line, precision of execution and harmony of appearance, dancers with less than ideal shapes must bring other qualities to bear. Many have, and Ms. Ringer does, too, with several roles. This particular Sugar Plum Fairy — one of her rare tutu parts these days — was not one of them.

Some correspondents have argued that the body in ballet is “irrelevant.” Sorry, but the opposite is true. If you want to make your appearance irrelevant to criticism, do not choose ballet as a career. The body in ballet becomes a subject of the keenest observation and the most intense discussion. I am severe — but ballet, as dancers know, is more so.

Personal comment: I’m blessed with a high metabolism rate and a slim body so I can eat nearly anything I want and since I’m lactating I have to consume an additional 500 calories a day or lose weight. I need to make sure I have foods high in calcium to keep my bones strong and enough iron to offset losses during my periods, but other than that – well I take L-dopa to limit my milk production (an off label use) so I can maintain firm B-cup breasts regardless of how much breast feeding I do. Of course that disappoints thirsty men who find they can easily empty my breasts, but I need to retain my classical figure and B-cup breasts under a compression top is about as busty as I want to get.

In escort training and at St Lucy’s we teach nutritious eating habits and most of the girls are compliant, eating healthy diets. We do have a few who are underweight and won’t listen and those we send for psychological counseling and we suspend them from training as loss of bone mass makes it unsafe for them to dance or participate in very intense sexual encounters, not to mention making them unattractive to men unless they have a concentration camp fetish.

Ballet costumiers challenges

NYCB seamstress copying a costume

The New York Times
June 14, 2010
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO

The Fresh Tutu Brigade

“If there is a heaven for people in the costume industry, it surely includes an infinite walk-in closet: one-stop shopping no matter the fabric, historical period or one-of-a-kind button needed.

For Marc Happel, director of New York City Ballet’s costume shop, reality is somewhat more challenging. He and his staff are charged with rebuilding costumes made years or decades ago, sometimes with materials that have long since gone out of style or production. Meanwhile, shrinking budgets, rising costs and an imperiled garment district make it increasingly difficult to keep City Ballet’s vast repertory looking fresh.

With seven costume-intense premieres this season, Mr. Happel and his staff have been on creation overdrive. But the work of maintaining existing ballets never ends. Audiences will see one of the shop’s major rebuilds this week in Balanchine’s “Scotch Symphony” (1952), the costumes’ lush black bodices, originally designed by the illustrious Barbara Karinska, remade after years of wear and tear.

“Different variations of the velvet have been used to alter them,” Mr. Happel said, the repairs leading to a mishmash of not-quite-right fabrics. But replacing the bodices meant the sleeves and handmade trim had to be redone too, with special attention paid to Karinska’s detail work. “It just became a much bigger project than initially we thought,” Mr. Happel said.

In the best of times, securing the right materials is quite a task, and shoppers like Tracey Herman, Mr. Happel’s assistant, delight in the thrill of the hunt. But over the last 15 years or so, as clothing manufacturing has shifted overseas and rising Manhattan rents have forced small businesses out, she and her colleagues have had fewer places to look.

“It used to be there were 10 button stores you would go to, and now there are two,” she said. “What the stores are selling more of tends to be mass produced, imported, not as high quality, and maybe catering to a different fashion sensibility.”

You might think that the Internet would be a paradise for costume makers and that new technologies would yield ingenious ways to recreate extinct patterns and dyes. Digital printing does allow for the cost-effective replication of old hand-painted patterns on fabric, sites like eBay occasionally yield finds, and authentic specialty items can be found on the Web. But the industry remains a largely local, personal one.

“It’s a very 19th-century art form,” said Jared Aswegan, owner of Barbara Matera, which makes costumes for performing arts groups ranging from circuses to American Ballet Theater. There’s no substitute, he said, for holding material in your hands. “Actually being able to see it and feel it and understand what it is that you’re getting, you really can’t get a sense of that on the Internet.”

What you see online isn’t always what you get in person, which leads to further delays. And time is a luxury costumiers seldom have, especially midseason. Mr. Happel mentioned one business, on the brink of folding, that sells his shop many everyday supplies.

“We are a little freaked out by that, because that means now what we have to do is get stuff shipped from California,” he said. No more sending a staff member down to 36th Street.

Of course, resourceful shoppers have their secret stashes. Ms. Herman remains in touch with many of the merchants who closed their doors permanently, no longer able to afford Manhattan. Some of them keep stock at home. (Only a very few moved to other boroughs.)

“Now we just call them, and we either get a box in the mail or we don’t,” she explained, but only as long as those supplies last. And then? “That’s a good question,” she said, laughing. “Certainly you can always get things made, but it becomes at what price and are the tools and the material even available anymore?”

Trades go out of style too. Marcia Ceppos, who runs Tinsel Trading, which her grandfather started in 1933, said that younger generations aren’t particularly interested in running family businesses. (Ms. Ceppos has no children and is unsure of Tinsel’s future.) And Mr. Aswegan is beginning an internship program for skills like sewing and embroidery, which he says are “heading onto the endangered species list” as people look to more lucrative careers.

The sour economy has only exacerbated these trends. Many remaining garment district stores are reinventing themselves to stay afloat: Tinsel Trading has diversified its stock, while Mood Fabrics has benefited from its association with the television show “Project Runway” and started its own production company, Preview Textile Group, to better cater to the needs of small, belt-tightening designers.

The strategy, said Eric Sauma, one of the owners of the family-run Mood, is to focus “on our smaller designers, who just need small yardages, and be able to grow with them.” He noted that many of his smallest customers were bringing production back to the United States — cause for hope, he said.

Costume shop budgets are shrinking too. Ballet Theater, which outsources all of its costume work, started the Costume Fund in 2003 for restoration purposes. Mr. Happel said he was hoping for big donors for ambitious rebuilding projects like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which still has its original 1962 Karinska-designed costumes.

Meanwhile, the show must go on, and costumiers have many masters to please. Beyond designers and choreographers, balletomanes have long memories and strong ideas about what a costume should look like. And dancers often become attached to, and even slightly superstitious about, old costumes, preferring to deal with disrepair and sweat stains than to break in new versions.

Yet they can see the difference. On a recent Thursday morning the corps member Faye Arthurs, who was being fitted for a new “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet” costume, exclaimed with pleasure over the subtle range of colors in her new tutu.

Mr. Happel nodded in somewhat harried agreement before hurrying off to a storage closet, where row upon row of diaphanous, bejeweled costume hung.

“I walk through here a lot by myself,” he said. “It’s exciting, you see the history of this company in all its costumes. It’s also frustrating, because I see all there is to do.””

Personal comment: Our costumiers have a lot of the same problems with sweat and wear, but we have only had a ballet Co for 8 years and for most of that time rented costumes. It’s been only in the last three years that we opened our own costume shop to make costumes rather than to do minor repairs on rental ones. We have some really talented costumiers we lured away from Hollywood because they wanted a more stable career and the big studios were shedding most of their costume shop capacity. Even with the dip in revenue from the recent recession I’ve been able to hold on to the talent and not had to skimp on the materials for costumes, though many of the showgirl costumes themselves are pretty skimpy. Only rarely do we have a costume disaster where a girl bleeds through her tights and tutu. One nice thing about a strippers costume is that the outer costume; coats, skirts, tops etc come off early in the performance so there isn’t really that much wear and the performance lingerie that gets soaked in sweat - or ripped off if the girl is working the house - isn’t that expensive to repair or replace.

A pit-bottom drysuit encounter

A Mistral twin-hose regulator set

Girls in heavy rubber: I need some help here guys, ok? What is it about a woman being encased in rubber dive gear? Is it that she seems so unattainable – like a ballerina in the four-Ts; tights, tutu, toeshoes and tiara? Is it an imprisonment thing with the woman being ‘helpless’ while encased? Is it about domination, where the man first encases her and then removes a woman’s protective equipment and carnally takes her w/o her permission simply because he is stronger than she and can dominate her? Is it that he likes to listen to her respiration increase as she sucks gas through her demand valve while he takes her to orgasm? Or is it something darker where he can easily kill her by shutting off her air during sex? You’d be surprised at how many ‘accidents’ happen to women during breath play in dive equipment while having sex. Most women don’t have the strength to fight off a larger stronger man especially while wearing a restrictive rubber suit. Or, sometimes it’s that she was too trusting and finds he’s suffocating her when it’s too late to do anything to save herself. Is that the turn-on? Or is it something else entirely? I’m hoping male readers will share their thoughts about the male sexual obsession with women in heavy rubber because I had a really kinky experience in heavy rubber on Thanksgiving Day, which I enjoyed immensely. But afterward the man involved, Jacques, as fluent in English as he is seemed unable to explain why he took me the way he did. Or perhaps he was too embarrassed to tell me how base the reasons for his urges were. I’m all for catering to men’s animalistic urges - well, most of them anyway - I’d just like to know what they are thinking during our encounters.

A pit-bottom drysuit encounter: As I posted in an earlier entry, Thanksgiving morning turned out to be a bit different, and far more exciting, than I expected! I have a new DUI drysuit that I was practicing with in the pit. I was practicing getting out of inversions and I’ll admit I was showing off a bit because Jacques was my dive buddy. If the diver is using a drysuit to provide buoyancy control and accidentally becomes inverted s/he loses the ability to control buoyancy. If the diver can’t get out of the inverted position (her booties pointing toward the surface and her head down) she can end up with an uncontrolled ascent which can cause decompression sickness (DCS) and death. I’ve had a DUI drysuit before, when I was back east so had practiced righting myself from inversions in it but the weight and feel of the suits is different and I needed to practice righting myself in the new one. Since Jacques was in the pool with me one thing led to another as it often will with a man and it ended up with him helping me get out of a perfectly good fully functioning drysuit for dive-sex at the bottom of the pit. It was a first for us both!

My new DUI: I got a custom Diving Unlimited International DUI TLS350 ‘special production’ drysuit custom sized for me. It is made of a trilaminate material made of tough Nylon/Butyl Rubber/Nylon and has a diagonal front entry zipper and ‘QuickZip’ design so I can get in to and out of it by myself. I got the zip-seal option so torn neck and wrist seals can be replaced in a few minutes on site rather than having to send the suit to a shop for repair. My suit colors are blue with a yellow overlay for easy visibility by other divers. I got it because Pirate and Robin are going quarry diving around Reno and asked if I would like to go. I haven’t been quarry diving since I lived in Virginia and there was this huge flooded pit a few miles from my place.

I had originally planned, without giving it too much thought, that I would use a DESCO FF-FFM but I had forgotten that Desco recommends a depth limit not to exceed 30 feet. I need to think of it as a ‘diaphragm mask’, It’s only safe to use a diaphragm as a gas guard no deeper than that depth so like a diaphragm a Desco can’t be used at the bottom of the pit (68ft) or with a drysuit, because there is no low pressure hose connection for providing constant pressure in the drysuit. Not only that, but if I had practiced getting out of inversions in a surface supplied mask I could have twisted the umbilical and that wouldn’t have been a good idea either. So I decided to go with my Aqua-Lung Mistral twin-hose with a 130 cu ft Worthington HP steel tank. When full it has a negative buoyancy of about 12 lbs and when empty it’s a negative 2 lbs. With the DUI 350 drysuit I had all the lift I needed to control my buoyancy. I figured worst case I needed about 35 lb of lift; the 10 pounds of butyl rubber and fabric of the suit as well as the 12 lb full weight of the Worthington HP130 and a 50% margin for unknowns.

I had dived my new TLS350 briefly several times before in my swimming pool more for practice getting it on correctly making sure all the zippers worked easily and sealed properly and the neck and wrist seals fit well. You can never be sure what you have until you test dive something as complicated as a drysuit a few times to make sure you understand how it works and that all the bits and pieces are working as they should. If I am using only the suit for buoyancy control and the suit floods or I lose pressure I’m stuck inside a suit weighing 10 pounds (or more) plus the 10 pounds of the tank. I can drop a weight belt but am stuck with a negative 20 pounds of weight which in a shallow pool I might be able to push myself off the bottom hard enough to catch the edge of the pool but in a deep pool or in open water I’d be screwed. That is why I always carry a small lift bag in a suit pocket. That way if I have any air left I can get myself to the surface even in a flooded suit.

The encounter: So there I was practicing getting out of inversions, which is basically doing curls drawing my knees up and then doing a sit-up like maneuver to get my head and chest above my feet. At that point the air bubble in the suit fills the chest and arms and rights me. It’s not difficult and the exercise is good, but if you’ve peed in your suit and forgotten to wear a diaper you get bathed in urine during the inversions. I had stopped to catch my breath and flirt with Jacques who was wearing a similar Worthington HP130 in a buoyancy control vest and an octopus with a buddy regulator. I was puzzled as to why he thought he would need a spare regulator, but it never hurts to have a spare so I put it out of my mind as I fondled his package through the mesh of his slingshot. He was already aroused and actually I was too because I’d been showing off my flexibility and abdominals for him, though the suit hid my curves.

As I teased him by fondling his package I was watching his face and not where he was putting his hands. I suddenly felt him unfasten the low pressure hose feeding constant pressure air to my suit then grab the pull-tab of the entry zipper across my chest unfasten the latch and before I realized what was happening he pulled the entry zipper open several inches! There was a huge rush of air as the entire suit flooded and I started sinking toward the bottom of the pit! Inside the suit I was sweating from my righting exercises so the 85° water rushing in felt cold. We were only ten feet or so off the bottom so the additional depth didn’t matter except to tell me what I already knew I was too heavy to get to the surface with my suit flooded. For a moment I was terrified! I’d never had a suit flood and I thought about the escort I wrote about whose Avon drysuit was intentional flooded and then had her air cut off and suffocated. [For more about that see my entry for October 24, 2009.] Jacques backed off a bit and pointed at me and laughed. Then he asked if I was ok and I nodded yes. By then it dawned on me what was going on and I was all for it! He closed the distance between us and finished unzipping the entry zipper. He showed me his pressure gage which showed that he had 7/8ths of his air left and helped me out of the sleeves of the suit. Getting the neck seal over my head was the tricky part because I had to remove my mask (which I slipped over my wrist so I wouldn’t lose it) and my regulator mouthpiece and pull the tight latex collar over my smooth black neoprene helmet. Jacques held the shoulders and I pulled my head through. I thought for a moment the seal was going to stick on my neoprene hood but I got it off w/o tearing, then reinserted my twin-hose mouthpiece cleared it and put my mask back on.

Then Jacques helped me step out of the legs of the suit. I had worn pool-pointes (because I feel more comfortable with something tight on my feet) and a sheer nude back zip Nylon-Lycra unitard as a rash guard. I was still breathing off my Mistral twin-hose which was sitting on the bottom of the pit along side the drysuit which reminded me of a molted snakeskin. Jacques motioned for me to turn around and when I did he unzipped and helped me peel off my unitard then reached between my legs and slipped a finger under the release tab of my Penetrator plug lying flat against my perineum and expertly pushed forward and down so the anti-expulsion ridge slipped under my pubic bone. I squeezed my vaginals and the plug slid out into his hand. He put my rash guard and plug in a mesh specimen bag then removed a lift bag from a pocket of his BCD and attached it to my twin-hose SCUBA set, my drysuit and the specimen bag. Then he had me switch to his Scubapro S600 buddy regulator before he filled the lift bag with the low pressure hose on his octopus and sent most of my equipment to the surface leaving me protected only by the Oves sucking on my ripe cervix (I was CD7 and fertile), the black neoprene helmet protecting my hair and my facemask. I helped him strip out of his Speedo slingshot and stuffed it into a pocket of his BCD. We were ready to rock-and-roll!

Penetration: He felt marvelous, so thick and hard pushing his way inside me until he was up against my ripe cervix and my fertile fluid on the other side of that tiny bit of transparent silicone rubber protecting me from pregnancy and the perils of dive-sex! Jacques is an expert lover and he gave me my pleasure first before satisfying himself. Then we went together and after that he gave me a long series of unbelievably intense orgasms where I just couldn’t get enough air. The multiples experience seemed like it lasted hours when I was trying to breathe and only seconds when it was over though it left me totally drained. He said later that when I was in orgasm and my vaginals were spasming I was the tightest woman he’d ever had! Afterward I kept looking at the amount of air we had left. Dive-sex, if it’s good, doesn’t give the participants much opportunity to conserve air. It’s typical at least for women close to and during orgasm that we can’t suck air fast enough. So with two of us breathing off one tank I didn’t want to find that we needed a stop at 15 feet and had no air to do it. We had about 20% of his air left when we began our ascent. I was so relaxed that I was glad I wasn’t wearing my own dive rig as I would have had to be helped out of it. As it was I was rubber legged when Jacques helped me out of the pool and I managed to slip into a bikini and had a 2 hour nap in one of the chairs beside the pool. It was a wonderful start to a memorable Thanksgiving and an encounter to be truly thankful for.