Does Extension Height Matter?
The memory that got me thinking
A few years ago a friend of mine rather foolishly sent me the link to a clip, saying “Have a look at this ballet, it’s awesome!” ‘Awesome’ and an exclamation mark—that had to mean something. I clicked on the link and found … not ballet. Now, please don’t mistake this for being unimpressed. It was extremely impressive—I actually snorted with an overwhelming feeling of ‘How is that physically possible’—but it wasn’t technically, classically ballet.
“Shut up and tell us what it was, Frances!”
Okay, here’s the clip in question:
The performers, Wu Zhengdan and Wei Baohua of the Guangdong Acrobatic Troupe of China, are both trained acrobats and are, there is no question, extraordinary.
My friend called that performance ‘ballet’. I stared condescendingly down my nose at him and said "No, dear".
Where am I going with this, you are wondering? Well, it makes me wonder: just what is defined as ‘ballet’ and who exactly is doing the defining? And, an extension from that, just what is defined as ‘beautiful’?
My first thought: perhaps this dance world is becoming more of a democratic place, where the people dictate what they want to see? And sometimes that desire is one that is not based on tradition, but on spectacle.
But, here’s the crux of the piece, is the spectacle more beautiful than the classical?
Let’s test this.
Is the first dancer any less beautiful than the second?
I’m fairly sure your answer is no.
Margot Fonteyn and Polina Semionova were and are, in their own times, the very epitome of the title 'ballerina'. That Polina’s leg is higher than Margot’s? A sign of evolution, of changing times and changing expectations. Ballet has evolved, in some areas, to become more acrobatic, challenging the dancer’s body to do more extraordinary things.
But both are beautiful.
And I’ll wager that anyone who saw Margot dance would put that label of ‘extraordinary’ on her, just as much as anyone watching Polina, or Wu and Wei.
“So what’s your point, Frances?”
This is perhaps a more philosophical post than usual, and you might be wondering what this has to do with adult dance classes. I’m rather hoping that it’s made you think about what you’re seeing in the mirror. Yes, as older dancers or dancers who have only found this passion later in life, we may not be leaping to great heights or lifting our legs up beside our ears, but that doesn’t mean that that figure in the glass is any less beautiful.
We have the emotional maturity to really convey feelings through dance; we have the artistic eye to appreciate a clean line, no matter how high it is. It is time we stopped comparing ourselves to others.
'Height' does not matter.
A make-up company recently produced a video that pretty much sums it up. And they asked another extraordinary dancer, Alessandra Ferri, to do the ‘talking’:
Like Alessandra of now, you may not be the acrobats of the new generation of dancers, but you are beautiful.