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.)
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