Ballerina and Critic

A critic Alastair Macauley made a reference to ballerina’s Jenifer Ringer’s weight. I saw her on Channel Thirteen recently and immediately thought she was one size big for a ballerina. That is because my eyes, as others’ eyes, have been accustomed to seeing often little-girl-figured, flat-chested, stiff-backed ballerinas. As a personal trainer and someone who thinks she has great taste in all from food to paintings to dance to furniture, I can say that beauty and fitness come in all packages. However, the truth and most in the world with a good brain, would say balance and proportion are key> Those who obsess on what they eat and body weight all day probably suffer from a psychological disorders, as perhaps do those that are fat or obese for a long period of time. Why not be able to eat a little of what you want while you make sure you eat lots of healthy food too, your blood is good, you have energy and you work out? The middle sizes, in an exciting, not bland way, 6-10 are usually the best in health and beauty.

A person, even a dancer or dance critic, with no biology education, should not declare themselves the expert on what is healthy and fit, or who eats too many sugar plums, Big Macs, or anything else. Obviously a dancer such as Ringer is self-disciplined or she would not be a dancer. 1+1=2. It’s logic. Now, he has the right to his opinion and artistic directors can do what they want. Masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art represent mostly fat or at least “shapely” women, as Ringer called herself. But in an age where industries such as fashion shove to us either skinny of sometimes anorexic sizes 0-4 or the opposite 12+ plus sizes where women are often out-of-shape, can we go back to a beautiful, exciting middle that is healthy and sexy. I object to the false thinking that a woman with a bust and hips is out of shape. One can be and often is athletic and has a bust and hips. It’s called estrogen. IN other words, how about, in various areas, we have more of what God and Nature intended, the classy ferocious hourglass figure, in other words, that of a WOMAN. I do detect an often abhorrence of this by some, which indicates to me misogyny, fear and stupidity.

As for dance, what matters most, my dears, is ability, and, even more, spirit, energy and that “it”.