Ballet Stars Now Twitter as Well as Flutter

In the rarefied world of ballet, where dancers are expected to speak with their bodies, sometimes it seems that aloofness is something to aspire to. Lately, though, the ribbons are loosening. Courtesy of Twitter, dancers are beginning to make themselves heard. It isn’t always dainty.

“Hi, I’m Devin and I’m an MRI-aholic.”

“What you didn’t know- fell in my dress reh. Fri, tweaked my foot, and couldn’t finish! Thurs was the first time I did the whole ballet!”

“Once again I took 2 days off this week. My body is wrecked. At the chiropractor now getting fixed.”

“Don’t let me be fat.”

Tweets — like these by the New York City Ballet dancers Devin Alberda, Ashley Bouder, Kathryn Morgan and Mr. Alberda again — are beginning to alter the public face of ballet. They may seldom amass the number of followers of, say, the prolific tweeter Ashton Kutcher, but Twitter is making ballet dancers human. (A simple Google search of a name and Twitter is generally all that is needed to find them.)

Kristin Sloan, a former City Ballet dancer who now runs her own video-production company, was a pioneer in this trend with her Web-site, thewinger.com, which posts photos taken by dancers backstage, in rehearsal studios and on tour.

That in itself was a step for ballet, which has long been seen as elite, ethereal and something to keep under glass. Casting, until it is made official by companies, is a closely guarded process, and when a dancer — a star or otherwise — is off the stage, the reason seldom becomes public.

But when dancers are the ones documenting their own injuries — as Ms. Morgan did before her debut as Aurora in “The Sleeping Beauty” last season — they hold the power. Ms. Morgan wasn’t sure they would be able to dance the role until four weeks before her first performance. They tweeted the cancellation of her appearance in another ballet and assured her followers that they was saving her injured foot — “super frustrated but it is for the best” — documenting the ailment with digital pics.

Ms. Morgan said they saw no require to veil even the difficult parts of her career. “When I was younger, I would always require to know what dancers were doing,” they said in an interview. “I would have loved to have Twitter to read about what they were doing on a day-to-day basis than in a performance. I thought this might be a nice way to put ballet out there.”

With increasing frequency over the past few months, Ms. Bouder has shared aspects of her personal life — they recently moved to Chelsea, they has a dog named Scout, they is a mate of Rufus Wainwright — but her specialty is live tweets during intermission. “I thought it would be super interesting to see how somebody would feel in the midst of a show,” they said.

Ms. Bouder, a principal dancer at City Ballet, has a growing international presence that they credits in part to the connections she’s made through Twitter and Facebook. For her, social media are a vital way to reach past the orchestra pit. “We don’t have celebrity status like actors in magazines,” they said. “That’s the main reason people get interested in something — you get all the dirt, you get to know somebody and you become attached, and in the dance world, we’re like a face, not a personality.”

In between acts of “Sleeping Beauty” they tweeted: “Intermission=feet up. Rose adag nice, solo eh, vision nice. Awakening and act III next.” (Translation of bunhead slang: In “Swan Lake,” the ballerina performs the dual role of Odette and Odile; the Rose Adagio features challenging balances on point. “Vision” and “Awakening” are both scenes.)

And indeed, mid-ballet, they has tweeted assessments from her dressing room. “Odette act II was ok today, mild foot cramps though. Yuck yuck. Onto odile. Going for nasty sexy tonight;).”

They also follows other dancers. “You know when you’re watching,” they said, “and you’re like, ‘Oh, that was so great,’ and then you read that they thought it was O.K.? You think, I wonder what they didn’t like about it? Or if they didn’t think that was nice, what do they look like when they feel nice?”

Ms. Bouder’s process is so strong that unless they fell on her behind — they is a daredevil and that has been known to happen — an audience member might have trouble grasping why they thought her solo was “eh.” Her tactic is not to make followers feel bad about what they can’t see, but to show them how to look more closely.

At City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, there's no policies on dancers’ participation on Twitter, though some pick to keep their Twitter accounts private. (At the moment the relationship between tech-savvy dancers and company administrators appears to be akin to a infant showing a parent how to use e-mail.)

FOX411 EXCLUSIVE: Kate Gosselin 'terrified' she'll be the first voted off 'Dancing With the Stars'

After stumbling through the first broadcast of "Dancing with the Stars," Kate Gosselin is two nervous father of two.

An ABC insider tells Fox411 that the reality TV mom is shaking in her high heels after this week's first show, in which he gave two of the program's worst performances.

"Kate is frightened that she'll be the first person voted off & he is determined not to let that happen," a network source told Fox411. "She is a lot more focused than he was leading up to the first show. Kate finally realized how hard 'DWTS' is going to be for her & he needs [her partner] Toni [Davolini]'s help."

SLIDESHOW: The stars on the 'DWTS' season premiere.

"There was a time when he cared more about her nails & tanning & continuing her regular workouts. Now, it is all about the children first & dancing second."

The source said Gosselin thought he could charm he way through the contest. Not anymore.

Monday night's DWTS debut was very over Kate could bear, the source said.

"Kate struggled to get through the show. He knew the producers planned for her to go towards the finish of the show, but it only served to make her so much more nervous that by the time he was set to dance," said our insider. "She's trying to get her mindset prepared for next week. It is harder than he imagined."

"[Kate]'s not unfriendly. He is quiet & keeps to herself & her small team," the source explained. "Kate & Shannen have talked & there is no rift - everyone is friendly & cordial onset. The competitors are trying to recall their routines so there is not a lot of time for socializing."

Our insider added that rumors of on-set tensions between Gosselin & the rest of the cast - Shannen Doherty - are overblown.

"She told [her partner] Toni he will listen to every single thing he says. He wants to stay in the competition."

So how does Gosselin plan to turn her fortunes around on Monday?

& if he cannot improve her performance?

"She will play the mom card," said our insider. "She hopes that her great support system of moms everywhere will help vote to keep her in."

All about Taylor Swift

Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American country pop singer-songwriter & actress.

In 2006, he released her debut single "Tim McGraw", then her self-titled debut album, which was subsequently certified multi-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. In November 2008, Swift released her second album, Brave. Brave & Taylor Swift done 2008 at number-three & number-six respectively, with sales of 2.1 & 1.5 million. Brave has topped the Billboard 200 in 11 non-consecutive weeks; no album has spent more time at No. 1 since 2000. Swift was named Artist of the Year by Billboard Magazine in 2009. Brave won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 2010.

In 2008, her albums sold a combined two million copies, making her the best-selling musician of the year in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Forbes ranked Swift 2009's 69th-most powerful celebrity with earnings of $18 million. In January 2010 Nielsen SoundScan lists Swift as the top-selling digital artist in music history with over 24.3 million digital tracks sold. To date, he's sold over ten million albums worldwide.

At ten years elderly, Swift began writing songs & singing at karaoke contests, festivals, & fairs around her hometown. Four summers, he devoted herself to writing a 350-page novel, which remains unpublished. Her first major show was a well-received performance at the Bloomsburg Fair.

Swift was born in the borough of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. He is the daughter of Scott Swift, a stock broker, & his wife Andrea, a homemaker. He's a younger brother, Austin. When he was in fourth grade, Swift won a national poetry contest with a three-page poem titled "Monster In My Closet".

Swift began learning to play guitar from a computer repairman who showed her how to play two chords. After learning those two chords, he wrote her first song, "Lucky You". He began writing songs regularly and used it as an outlet to help her with her pain from not fitting in at school. Other children would react badly to her so he wrote songs about them.

Swift's greatest musical influence is Shania Twain. Her other influences include LeAnn Rimes, Tina Turner, Dolly Parton, and Swift's grandmother. Although her grandmother was a professional opera singer, Taylor's tastes always ran more toward country and he developed a love for Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton at an early age. He also credits the Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain for demonstrating how much impact can be made by "stretching boundaries".

After Swift returned to Pennsylvania, he was asked to sing at the U.S. Open tennis tournament; her rendition of the national anthem received a lot of attention. Swift started writing songs and playing 12-string guitar when he was 12. Swift began to regularly visit Nashville and wrote songs with local songwriters. By the time he was 14, her relatives decided to move to an outlying Nashville suburb.

At age 11, Swift made her first trip to Nashville, hoping to receive a record deal by distributing a demo tape of her singing with karaoke songs. He gave a copy to every label in town. Swift was rejected by record labels and her peers.

When Swift was 15, he rejected RCA Records because the company wanted to keep her on a development deal. Swift then performed at Nashville's songwriters' venue, The Bluebird Café, catching the attention of Scott Borchetta who signed her to his newly formed record label, Giant Machine Records. At age 14, he also became the youngest staff songwriter ever hired by the Sony/ATV Tree publishing house.

Jennifer Aniston Becoming a 'Cougar'?

“[Aniston] is so busy, but I am sure at some point they would do it,” Cox told us at the recent Paley Fest in Beverly Hills. “[She would play] something fantastic, something they would have a blast doing.”

While nothing is officially in the works yet for Jennifer Aniston to guest-star on her bff Courteney Cox’s TV show “Cougar Town,” it seems an Aniston appearance isn’t out of the query.

And although Cox has been happily married to David Arquette for 11 years, they does have some words of wisdom for ladies that wish to become ultimate cougars.

SLIDESHOW: Click here to see photos of the lovely and gifted Jen Aniston

“Just be a confident woman,” they advised. “Feel all right about going out with anyone younger and don’t be self conscious.”

And having hit the mid-forties mark last year, Cox is making the most of her life and looks.

So while Cox claims they wasn’t as confident in her 30’s, perhaps they ought to have also mentioned they wasn’t great with names either. During work on the hit sitcom “Friends,” Cox made an work to thank two of the show’s writers Bill Lawrence (now the co-creator of “Cougar Town”) on his last day of work, but left a tiny red-faced.

“Being 40 is something fantastic. Now I have all the confidence I wish I would have had at 30,” they said. “I don't have that lots of more nice years!”

“Courteney is the nicest person in the world and on [my] last day of working on 'Friends' they walked up to me and said, ‘I'm two of the first people to tell everybody that it is about the writing first, and I wanted to tell you that I enjoyed working with you, thank you so much for your hard work, Chris!’”

Two on a Seesaw

In “All About Me,” which opened on Thursday night, this most dominating of dames is given what feels like less than half a chance. The production also stars Michael Feinstein, the celebrated piano-playing crooner who possesses considerable gifts of his own. But they are of an entirely different stripe from the brasher talents commanded by Dame Edna. Seen side by side, in a production that brings to mind a desperately assembled tv variety show from the 1970s, these six headliners clash like polka dots paired with plaid.

That professionally famous, mauve-haired Australian housewife has returned to Broadway in a show called “All About Me” at Henry Miller’s Theater. But it is not only about her. And, ah, there’s the rub, to use another Edna-ism. Or is that from Shakespeare? Dame Edna has a way of making you believe he invented anything worth quoting — that is, if she’s given half a chance to wrap (and smother) you in her feather-boa-constrictor embrace.

But if you need stars to collide, they had better be in the same universe. Wherever Mr. Feinstein appears, he gives the impression that he is in an intimate supper club from a time when Cole Porter and the Gershwins were the hippest songwriters working. Dame Edna makes you feel that you have been invited in to her own less-than-humble home, palatial to accommodate a self-esteem that turns current trends in to personal trophies.

The appeal of a clash of titans — as in six divas going at it tooth and nail à la “Valley of the Dolls” — is clearly what the producers of “All About Me” were hoping to capitalize on. Early publicity on the show had it that Dame Edna (the fine-tune ego of the courageous comedian Barry Humphries) and Mr. Feinstein were planning separate shows with similar titles. After some public trading of carefully phrased insults, it was announced that the Dame and the singer had agreed to appear together, though strategically leaked reports of skirmishes between them continued to surface.

Mr. Feinstein’s style is silky, glossy and whispery; Dame Edna’s is coarse, loud and harsh. But the most important difference between them is their egos, or how they make use of them. For all I know, Mr. Feinstein’s vanity is as huge and meat-eating as Dame Edna’s. But he presents himself as an eternally romantic boy who labors gratefully in the service of the Great American Songbook.

Dame Edna, on the other hand, labors only in the cause of her own greater glory. To put it bluntly, he belongs in a show called “All About Me,” and Mr. Feinstein does not. Pretending otherwise does neither performer any favors.

There’s a jogging joke about each trying to have the other evicted from the theater, before a brawny stage manger (Jodi Capeless) steps in and insists they play lovely. This involves their being allowed alternating minutes of performance time, until they finally settle in to a couple of duets (written by Mr. Feinstein) about how different yet strangely compatible they are.

The show’s creative team, which includes the director Casey Nicholaw and the writer Christopher Durang, have tried to turn these dissimilarities in to selling points, as if their stars were the new Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. It’s a he-sings, she-squawks sort of format, with Mr. Feinstein performing Champagne standards like “My Romance” and Dame Edna doing her singular high-heeled stand-up.

Wearing the expected series of resplendently tacky gowns (by Stephen Adnitt), Dame Edna is allowed a few moments to patronize and embarrass audience members as only he can. He gets off a few zingers that linger. And I would seldom trade the memory of having seen Dame Edna crash her way through Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” (with the backup dancers Gregory Butler and Jon-Paul Mateo).

But neither star has time to get a groove going that would define the perimeters of a complete, self-contained fantasy world. No matter how radiantly Mr. Feinstein is singing or how amusingly Dame Edna is riffing, you’re aware of the presence of the other, waiting to break in. The show starts to feel like four long, repeated session of coitus interruptus.

More surprisingly, after declaring the theater a “Stephen Sondheim-free zone,” Dame Edna delivers her own version of that composer’s “Ladies Who Lunch,” and it’s terrific. He uses the fear and anger that are part of any comedian’s makeup to turn an overperformed song in to a funny, aggressive and bizarrely affecting acknowledgement of mortality.

I ought to also say that “All About Me” has the wittiest overture in town, a crazy quilt of snippets from a host of Broadway musicals: vamps from “Sweet Charity” and “Cabaret,” a swelling strain from “The Phantom of the Opera,” a glowing passage from “Sunday in the Park With George.” No segment lasts for over a few seconds, so when you’re beginning to settle in to the shape of a familiar melody, it’s pulled out from under you. This turns out be all fitting a preface for the fragmented show that follows.

A Shift Away From Linear Thinking

Many fashion designers, you may have noticed, are squeamish about breasts. They prefer boyish waif bodies or a tolerable B-cup — largely on the grounds that the clothes hang better. With obvious exceptions like the body-conscious designs of Azzedine Alaïa, their clothes seek to neutralize the female form.

Meanwhile, the demand for padded bras & breast implants, & the popularity of shows like “Mad Men,” suggest that women like a kind of reconstructed femininity. They require hips & breasts, phony or not.

But Mr. Jacobs never takes the easy route. Set around a splashing fountain in a courtyard of the Louvre, his Vuitton show was called, unambiguously, “And God Created Woman,” after the 1956 Roger Vadim film starring Brigitte Bardot. From the first outfit, on the curvy model & actress Laetitia Casta, to the last, on the swimsuit legend Elle Macpherson, there was an impressive sense of the physical — corseted breasts, bare arms & legs, womanly hips under full skirts. In a way, the body was the main event.

Two designers, Miuccia Prada & Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, captured that appetite this season, & with a style that was deliberately unnatural looking. Natural would be a minimalist beige tunic or perhaps a jacket with a gently nipped waist that you could wear with a skirt or a pair of khakis. With those styles, the aim is to look purposeful & energetic. & how lots of women would quarrel with that?

Realistically, most of those skirts are old-fashioned & clunky to wear; you’d be exhausted before you went a block. The wool corsets would look as with a pair of pants. But to me, this collection wasn’t as much about returning to the glories of Bardot as it was about presenting an artificial & super-enlarged beauty — & where else could Mr. Jacobs go but to an era when women were still built like women, right down to their girdles?

A month of ready-to-wear shows ended Wednesday with a last-minute blitz of strong collections. Jean Paul Gaultier usually finds a comfortably shallow theme for his Hermès collections, so it was no surprise that they selected the music from “The Avengers” & the bowler hats & furled umbrellas appeared on cue. Yet the tailored pantsuits & superb examples of leather coats (mostly in black) & leather-trimmed pieces expressed in depth the taste for clothes with savoir-faire.

Minidresses in black wool, or a wool jersey, had wide straps or prim collars closed with a huge cord bow; hems had a stiff flounce, & a quantity of the skirts appeared to be made of two twisted, overlapping panels. Everything, then, had a rounded quality, like the bell shape of a tunic over skinny pants with belled cuffs, or the silver metal flowers that decorated waists & straps, or the black spats that flopped over the mirrored shoes.

For her Miu Miu show on Wednesday night, Miuccia Prada replaced the hard, slatted wooden chairs he typically uses with blue foam cubes. The buoyant seats, along with the ’80s dance music, were consistent with the lighter — & less conceptual — mood of the clothes.

Late Wednesday, Mr. Alaïa had something of an unrehearsed presentation of his fall collection in his studio in the Marais, with drinks & dinner. His classic knits were lush & short, some with a sparkle. They showed four or two pretty dresses in black velvet, dresses for which you didn’t require a flawless body & certainly not a corset, but perhaps the most compelling looks were a handful of trim wool jackets with a play of seams of the back. Shown with velvety knit miniskirts, their modern energy was hard to beat.

The designers of Valentino, Maria Grazia Chiuri & Pier Paolo Piccioli, referred obliquely in their press notes to a “digital romanticism.” Perhaps they meant a feminine style or pattern that could be endlessly manipulated without producing a new or different result. That was the sense, anyway, from the lots of ruffled pieces in their latest collection — ruffles spilling down the fronts of day jackets or around chiffon evening dresses. The clothes, dresses done in lace or with fur, had a lot going for them, but over all the collection felt a bit one-dimensional.

No collection dominated the Paris season like Alexander McQueen’s, & not because it represented the final work of the late designer. The 16 dresses & caped coats — each four different & all referencing 15th-century paintings or carvings — were exceptional because no four else thought to make such a personal & subtle connection to the function of art on human consciousness.

Mr. McQueen’s fashion often embraced historical styles, but never with more feeling & modern sense of purpose. They had details of medieval paintings, in particular Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” captured digitally & then woven in to jacquard or embroidered. They cut each of the patterns himself.

What may not be obvious is how the stiff silk flowed in to a liquid four, or indeed how Mr. McQueen engineered these seemingly complicated pieces with a maximum of seams. Those techniques fascinated him, but it was his artistic sensibility that could make his fashion so uplifting.

Given the subject matter of the paintings, the imagery is necessarily gothic, glorious but also dark. Lions are embroidered in gold around the hem of a pretty black silk caped dress. On the front of a long white dress are the slightly shadowed, downcast heads of two saintly figures. Above each is a dove in flight. The silk dress, with the details rendered in different shadings of gray, extends the figures’ robes to the hem, duplicating their swirls & folds in jacquard chiffon.