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.

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.