"I told my mom, 'This isn’t serious.... I’m just going to wait till I’m 6.'"

Said Mira Nadon, when she was 5, quoted in "At City Ballet, a Once-in-a-Generation Dancer Arrives/Mira Nadon, the rising New York City Ballet principal, is coming off her best season yet. And it’s only the beginning."

The ballet class for 5-year olds was "pre-ballet, which meant running around the studio, maybe getting a shot at fluttering like a butterfly" and Nadon "found out that students began proper training at 6."

Is it okay to love seriousness in 5-year-olds? Mostly, we want the very young to laugh and play — experience delight. What's up with early-arising seriousness? When is it too young to manifest staunchly that you know you've been presented with the bullshit kid's version of something and you want the real

Have you ever known such a kid? Were you one?

I'm picturing the child drawn by Edward Gorey....

"So, yeah, I said, ‘Okay, well, this floor is moving. So, the floor is going, and you have to just find how you relate to the floor."

Said ballet master Antonio Castilla, quoted in "The perils and pirouettes of staging a ballet aboard the Queen Mary 2/The Cunard line’s flagship offers passengers a rare opportunity for performances at sea with the English National Ballet" (WaPo).

"The body of the dancer is very, very sensitive to the changes... We work down into the floor and then from the floor we adjust up, and unless you do it from the floor, it’s just fake."

"For the first time in modern ballet history, a male dancer is performing as part of the female ensemble at an international ballet company..."

"... signaling an important moment in an art form that often celebrates a particular ideal of femininity. Or, as the great choreographer George Balanchine said, 'ballet is woman.' But in a world with a heightened awareness of gender fluidity, and with transgender people increasingly accepted in a variety of professions, including acting and modeling, ballet is taking its own brave leap. 'I want to be seen as a ballerina,' said [Chase] Johnsey, an American, who identifies as gender fluid but uses male pronouns. 'My hair is up, I wear makeup, female attire. I am able to do female roles and look the part, so that is artistically what I do.'"

From "He Wants to Be a Ballerina. He Has Taken the First Steps" in the NYT.

It seems to me that it's all about the performers looking a certain way. Maybe there's a problem with how extremely ballet presents the difference between male and female. But most female human beings fail to meet ballet's image of the female. There are rigorous "specific aesthetic norms, which include thinness and ideas about harmonious proportions," and groups of female dancers need to blend together with no one sticking out as different. How can any man possibly fit into that narrow niche? But if he can, why not let him? It might be that he can't, but they're doing it anyway. I don't know.

There is also Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, which is a comedy form of ballet where males dance as females, and Johnsey has done that, but he quit and claims he was harassed for looking too feminine. And:

“With the Trocks, if you messed up, you could make a joke about it,” he said. And despite his strong point-work technique, he said he had “completely the wrong idea about what makes a ballerina beautiful and graceful. It is actually strength, hidden within softness and grace, and I have had to figure out in my genetically male composition, how to find that.”

He lost 20 pounds in order to be able to present his body as feminine enough for ballet standards. It sounds disturbing unhealthy: "I had to cannibalize my body, make it run on energy from muscles and figure out how to lose muscle mass without losing strength."

Here's what Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo look like:



AND: Why must ballet enforce a near-anorexic standard of feminine beauty? Here is an early effort at adjusting to modern-day standards of body acceptance:

Don't those Ivanka haters know about Mother Ginger in "The Nutcracker"?

I'm reading "'So creepiness runs in the family?' Twitter users slam Ivanka Trump for sharing 'gross' photo of her children playing 'peek-a-boo' under her dress.... She shared a photo of Arabella, six, Joseph, four, and Theodore, one - attempting to hide under her flawless red, floor-length gown/Critics called the photos 'creepy' and 'gross'...." (at The Daily Mail).

'Oh good lord, there is so much wrong with this picture,' one Twitter user wrote. 'Are you seriously so utterly tone deaf than to post a picture of boys looking up your dress?'

I'd say the haters are tone deaf. It's Christmastime. The first thing I thought of when I saw that picture was the great Christmas classic "The Nutcracker." Look! It's Mother Ginger:



I wonder how these fools react when they see a mother breastfeeding. So twisted they're missing the beauty of motherhood and the innocence of children.

It makes me think of the old Anglo-Norman maxim, Honi soit qui mal y pense — "May he be shamed who thinks badly of it" or "Shamed be he who evil of it thinks."

According to historian Elias Ashmole, the foundation of the Garter occurred when Edward III of England prepared for the Battle of Crécy and gave "forth his own garter as the signal." Another theory suggests "a trivial mishap at a court function" when King Edward III was dancing with Joan of Kent, his first cousin and daughter-in-law. Her garter slipped down to her ankle causing those around her to snigger at her humiliation. In an act of chivalry Edward placed the garter around his own leg saying, "Honi soit qui mal y pense. Tel qui s'en rit aujourd'hui, s'honorera de la porter."