QUESTIONS

Typically, young dancers start ballet training as young as three years of age. Once you’ve got the hang of walking, you can start dancing.

Becoming a professional dancer takes years of training. Once a dancer has advanced through the required classes, the dancer then auditions to join a professional company.

Although the amount of training and practice it can take to go en pointe can vary, dancers typically reach this benchmark by the age of twelve. In order to pull this off, dancers must heavily train to strengthen the feet and lower legs or else risk potential lasting injury.

With very rare exceptions, men do not dance en pointe or use pointe shoes. A man will only dance en pointe in a specialist character role that requires it.

While the lifespan of a pair of pointe shoes can vary, most dancers can go through at least one pair in a single performance.

Male ballet dancers are referred to as danseurs.

The ballet dance style began in the Italian Renaissance courts during the 15th and 16th centuries. Ballet spread from Italy to France and Russia where it would be developed into a concert dance form. The Académie Royale de Musique was founded in 1669 by King Louis XIV, from which the Paris Opera Ballet would develop as the first professional ballet company.

Much of modern ballet was developed in France, and the terms have been handed down over generations. No matter what a dancer’s first language may be, all ballet dancers are united by the universal terms for movements.

You should clap anytime you feel moved to do so! When the dancers are pulling off spectacular moves, it’s perfectly acceptable to cheer the dancers on with storms of applause or shouts of “bravo” and “brava”.

Superstition holds that wishing a performer “good luck” will bring quite the opposite. While actors tell each other to “break a leg”, ballet dancers say “merde” before a performance. The term translates in French to a not-so-polite word for horse manure, as 19th-century patrons of the Paris Opera Ballet would arrive in horse-drawn carriages. If the Palais Garnier was covered in manure at the front, you had a packed audience.

Most ballet performances are divided into two acts with one intermission in the middle. Triple bill performances have three acts with an intermission between each act.