Name the professional athletes you respect the most and why.
Ballet dancers. They give their lives over to their discipline and focus and, in many cases, their freedom as much, if not more than other athletes, and for very little money or fame. Even the prima ballerinas aren’t household names and aren’t known at all outside of their own countries or even outside of their own ballet companies. For ballet dancers, it really is about the love of the ballet. They don’t get endorsements or their faces on cereal boxes or multi-million dollar deals . Most of them are paid barely enough on which to live.
Think about it. Can you name me 2 ballet dancers, one female and one male who are currently performing? As a matter of fact, I doubt that you can name one. You might know the name of Melanie Hamrick, but not because she was a ballerina, but because she’s Mick Jagger’s current girlfriend.
What about the men? You’d have to go back to Baryshnikov, and he’s 76 years old and hasn’t performed in 2 decades or more. And the likely reason you could come up with his name is because he was in movies or that he was in season 6 of Sex and the City, playing Carrie’s Russian love interest.
Unless you are a fan of ballet and you follow it, you won’t know anyone who is currently performing. Yet I can name current baseball, football, and basketball players and even a couple of current soccer or European football players, and I don’t follow sports at all, with the exception of heavy weight boxing.
I’m going to include some videos of some current ballet dancers to prove the point that these people are athletes who can jump higher and longer than Olympians and balance better than gymnasts.
Men
Women
I fully agree with you, although I couldn’t name any dancers. The male dancers are insanely strong.
The only show I’ve seen was Bram Stoker’s Dracula by the Atlanta Ballet. Saw it twice twenty years ago, and it was excellent – very dark and very well done.
I saw the Dracula ballet this year, and it was incredible. Youtu.be has some fantastic ballet channels that I follow, and of course, the National Ballet of Canada has some amazing talent ,from my own country, but by far the best company I’ve had a chance to see was the Kirov ballet. Ballet is a beautiful artwork and an amazing sport of its own. The ballet body is the most usefully muscular body, in my opinion.
Sadly, eating disorders and Body Dysmorphic Disorder are rampant among female dancers, much like they are with female gymnasts.
True, but thankfully there’s currently a curvy ballerina trend happening in some companies like the Harlem ballet theater, among others. Recently I saw a performance from the Harlem ballet and it was refreshing to see some thicker female bodies.
That’s a very encouraging trend, as well as more dancers of color.
I didn’t know Dracula was still going somewhere, and I would probably see that again if I could.
Personally, I can name two females. My sister Simone, deceased, got her BFA at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland majoring in ballet. She was awarded full scholarship as a Soviet State Scholar at Moscow State University (USSR equivalent of Harvard) and received her MFA in Russian literature and ballet. She performed with the Bolshoi. And, I had a close friend, Georgiana Hart who danced ballet internationally and had her own ballet school. She accumulated 17 bone breaks in her right foot and 19 bone breaks in her left foot. I didn’t personally know any males.
The only sport I follow is Formula One racing. But from the sports car racing I did for a while I can attest it is far more physically demanding than it appears. Marco
I can see how formula one racing is physically demanding. Not more than ballet, but it is demanding.
I imagine it is.
I did ballet full-time for a year. long time ago.
So you know how difficult it is. I had years of ballet classes but was never good enough to transition to the corps. Now that I’m a wheelchair user, I wish I’d tried harder.
I wouldn’t name one ballet dancer. The clips you have shared are great. Their moves are elegant
Thank you. Most people are the same as you.