Ballerina

Related Content

• Subconscious Playground
  August 24, 2011
• Bowling For Chumps: How the Bowl System Robs U.S. Schools
  December 21, 2011
• Google Art Project Snubs Hometown SF Museums
  February 1, 2011
• Pick It Up
  January 13, 2010
• Ballerina
  March 25, 2009

More About

• Manuel Legris
• St. Petersburg
• Norman (Oklahoma)
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Dance

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Manuel Legris, a French dancer interviewed in Ballerina, Bertrand Norman’s involving study of the Russian ballet, insists that a Russian ballerina is easy to spot in a crush of tutus and fluttering hands. Beyond the severity of their posture and discipline, there is a maturity even in the youngest dancers that takes others years to develop. The women profiled here—ranging from a star student at St. Petersburg’s Vaganova Ballet Academy to several members of the Mariinsky Theatre (formerly the Kirov) at various stages of their careers—support that claim and its mysterious implications. In one of the strangest sequences, Norman gains access to the auditions that will either set a young girl on the course to a life in leg warmers or send her back to the drawing board: A roomful of topless 10-year-old girls leap and pointe for their lives, then each one is flexed and patted down, like a thoroughbred colt, before an affectless panel. It’s almost impossible to tell their identical thin, cold limbs and tiny heads apart. Yet watching these women perform is a striking lesson in ballet’s rigorous aesthetic alchemy—and the extreme, exquisite individualism that prevails.
March 27-April 2, 2009