Ballet Stars Now Twitter as Well as Flutter

In the rarefied world of ballet, where dancers are expected to speak with their bodies, sometimes it seems that aloofness is something to aspire to. Lately, though, the ribbons are loosening. Courtesy of Twitter, dancers are starting to make themselves heard, reports The New York Times.

“Once again I took 2 days off this week. My body is wrecked. At the chiropractor now getting fixed.”

“What you didn’t know- fell in my dress reh. Fri, tweaked my foot, and couldn’t finish! Thurs was the first time I did the whole ballet!”

“Don’t let me be fat.”

Tweets — like these by the New York City Ballet dancers Ashley Bouder, Kathryn Morgan and Devin Alberda — are starting to change the public face of ballet. They may never amass the number of followers of more well-known prolific tweeters, but Twitter is making ballet dancers human.

Kristin Sloan, a former City Ballet dancer who now runs her own video-production company, was a pioneer in this trend with her website, 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 elite, 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. 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.”

Photo: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times