Twitter is making ballet dancers human?

Just over a year ago the New York Times ran an art­icle about Twit­ter­ing bal­let dan­cers. From Lon­don to San Fran­cisco, Moscow to Sydney, we’re hear­ing about muscles and meals, see­ing snaps of dress­ing rooms and shar­ing in the inter­val gos­sip. Mak­ing them human? Well, I don’t think any­one has doubted that dur­ing recent years. In the fifties and six­ties bal­let dan­cers, baller­inas espe­cially, were taken off their ped­es­tals and firmly placed among us: Fon­teyn went to jail, Gel­sey Kirk­land had eat­ing dis­orders and there was extens­ive drug-use at the ABT … all very public.

Twit­ter goes fur­ther than that: it doesn’t just allow us to rub shoulders, but we can actu­ally peak inside dan­cers’ heads, learn­ing tit­bits that maybe even col­leagues don’t know. This, of course, is in line with all celebrity life: prime min­is­ters’ sex romps, act­ors’ drink and drugs binges, Roy­als in every scan­dal ima­gin­able. We know it all. But Twit­ter tells us that Daniil Simkin has a pas­sion for cook­ies dur­ing the inter­val, and Ash­ley Bouder gets her hair done at Bumble and bumble, (she even let’s us have first peek at the new cut) — so yes, a little more human: hey, I eat cook­ies and get my hair cut too!

Tweets — like these by the New York City Bal­let dan­cers Devin Alberda, Ash­ley Bouder, Kath­ryn Mor­gan and Mr. Alberda again — are start­ing to change the pub­lic face of bal­let. They may never 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 plus 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 quite a step for bal­let, which has long been seen as élite, 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 rarely 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 she would be able to dance the role until two weeks before her first per­form­ance. She tweeted the can­cel­la­tion of her appear­ance in another bal­let and assured her fol­low­ers that she was sav­ing her injured foot — “super frus­trated but it is for the best” — doc­u­ment­ing the ail­ment with digital pictures.

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

Ms. Bouder, a prin­cipal dan­cer at City Bal­let, has a grow­ing inter­na­tional pres­ence that she 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,” she said. “That’s the main reason people get inter­ested in some­thing — you get all the dirt, you get to know someone and you become attached, and in the dance world, we’re like a face, not a personality.”

read all via NYTimes.com.

Photo: Ash­ley Bouder shows off her new look

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