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.