<p>I just saw this:</p>
<p>on.msnbc.com/1AVA0bF</p>
<p>She doesn’t have the typical ballet body, but she is stunning. She started very late but this is what she was doing after only two years of training:</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saMB0Mr1qdE”>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saMB0Mr1qdE</a></p>
<p>I don’t get why people say she doesn’t have the typical ballet body. I see long slender legs and long slender arms; what am I NOT seeing?</p>
<p>And if that’s her after only two years of studying ballet, she’s truly a prodigy!</p>
<p>Yes, she really was a prodigy, absolutely incredible. This is the classic ballet body:</p>
<p><a href=“- YouTube”>- YouTube;
<p>MC is more muscular and more curvy. </p>
<p>From interviews, she’s said that she is more muscular, has bigger breasts, feet, head, and has a more athletic/curvy body than the typical ballerina. It’s unfortunate others saw that as a deterrent, because she’s absolutely fantastic. Many companies require their dancers to have trained in their schools and have the same body type, as opposed to ABT where everyone has had different schooling and different bodies. </p>
<p>Balachine wrecks dancers.</p>
<p>Balanchine wrecks dancers? Really? I think Balanchine dancers can do extraordinary things. Yes, it is true that the company grew to strongly prefer a certain body type, but in what way does that wreck anyone?</p>
<p>Haha, NYMomof2–I knew it would be Svetlana before I even clicked the link. She’s not my favorite ballerina but I agree about her body.</p>
<p>katlia, that is not Misty after two years of dancing. She is in her early 30s now.</p>
The video I linked was Misty at age 15, after only two year of training. Here’s a recent video:
I read her autobiography. She had a very interesting upbringing and has done wonderful things.
I’ve been reading a number of pieces about rap and hip-hop music and white privilege. These bloomed in great number last year after Macklemore won, with article after article talking about how he’s not authentic (he’s white) and white people like him and his award is emblematic of the way whites exercise their privilege to take over this black art form. And on Salon now there’s an incoherent piece which talks about black artists’ perfectionism and other racist crap. And here is Misty Copeland. Rather than say something snide like by the same logic she shouldn’t be a ballet dancer, I’d rather say she makes those people look like idiots.
Ballet is a very brutal world, and there is a system that makes someone like Misty Copeland even that much more extraordinary. The normal process to get into ballet is brutal, the kids start very, very young, and basically by the time you are in your late teens, if you haven’t hooked on with a company, you pretty much have no chance (there was an excellent article in the Times several years ago, profiling several girls working at making it in ballet). Being at Juilliard on Saturdays a lot, when my S was in their pre college music program, we saw the kids from SAB, and you could see not only how competitive it is, but also just how rigid the rules are. A lot of the ballet kids, for example, start smoking early, because they hear it helps keep down the weight, and when you see them in the cafeteria and what they eat, it is like watching someone starve themselves to death. And if you are ‘too tall’, ‘too curvy’, ‘too much butt’, you name it, you will find yourself out of the program, they have rigid ideas of what makes a ballerina, and that is that (it wasn’t all that many years ago as time goes, that many schools would not admit black ballet students, claiming they would ‘pull the eye’ and so forth, be a distraction).
There are some exceptions, Peter Maartens, the ballet chief of the NYC Ballet, is out there, he is very tall and pretty muscular, but he is a rarity when he was still dancing.
Not to mention the physical toll on the girls, I wonder how many of them end up with all kinds of physical problems, given how much they have gone through at such a young age.