"Today’s ballet teachers and company directors know that they can no longer simply instruct their dancers to lose weight. But that doesn’t mean they’ve relinquished their rigid, narrow vision..."

"... of what a 'good' ballet body looks like: They simply swathe that ideal in the gauzy, feel-good messaging of today’s fitness culture.... In the 1990s, ballet’s high-pressure and eating-disorder-friendly culture came in for some unwelcome attention.... The bad old days of American ballet teachers and company directors telling their dancers to eat nothing, or telling them exactly how many pounds they should lose, are largely over... [B]ecause of the new cultural injunction against explicitly telling dancers to lose weight, gatekeepers have developed a suite of euphemisms that all amount to the same message: slim down.... When [a] dancer used a dangerous and unsustainable crash diet to become skinnier than he had ever been [t]he company’s decision-makers said he looked 'longer.'... In 2019, [the message was] phrased differently: to 'lengthen.'... In ballet, 'long' is the new skinny, but skinny still reigns supreme."

From "Ballet directors talk about ‘fitness.’ That’s still code for rail-thin dancers" (WaPo).

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