Is ballet a form of child abuse?

TS: Fairy painting rainbow vs Princess gathering flowers.

V cruel say I.

yes, Emma to thread

Shut up Tom you were visibly moved.

Re the article. 8 year olds on point? This is madness! We weren't allowed on point till we were about 16 or so.

Cruellest thing my ballet teacher ever said to me was 'Emma stand up straight and pull your stomach in, you look like you've swallowed a whole Xmas pudding'. sob.

B-b-but you had swallowed an entire Christmas pudding.(Sugar Plum Pudding Fairy).

Are you, like Clare, complaining that your ballet school didn't torture you enough?

Bizarre, I was just about to post a "Dance - rfi s/d c/d" thread, cos I got this spam today:

Transcendance is Vox Medusa Dance Company's compelling epic of the human spirit set within the beautiful backdrop of the Basilica of Saint Mary. Follow the first two souls on their journey to find each other. Guided on this journey by the Goddesses of Earth, Water, Fire and Air the souls will overcome fear, find independence, freedom, and finally love. This lavish story is told through various word mythologies and the breathtaking use of dance, electronic music, fire dancing, opera, spoken word and futuristic lighting to propel audiences into another world.

erhm...

(not ballet I know)

My grandmother's feet were ruined for the rest of her life from ballet as a kid.

Lara, yes. If they had tortured me a bit harder I might be a skinny prima ballerina with the Royal Ballet by now instead of a non-skinny disillusioned office minion. My auntie was tortured harder than me and as a result has hideously disfigured feet but nearly got to be a ballerina (thwarted by overbearing father who thought ballerina = WHORE).

I have just remembered the sartorial torture, we had to wear shiny brown leotards ICK ICK ICK and at our dance school shows we usually had to wear totally rubbish outfits e.g. MORE vile coloured leotards with hankies hanging off them. Only once did I get a tutu.

Ballet is torture.

I was in ballet growing up and I loved it. Sadly though, I was the youngest in my class and much younger than the next to youngest. So I tended to feel pretty left out. And when everyone moved to point, the teacher let me do so as well. But I was only about 8 or 9 myself and I fractured several toes and one foot that day. That kept me out of dance - and lots of other activities - for quite a while and I had to wear an ugly fracture shoe (one of many).

When my youngest sister was in dance, she was very happy. But then her teachers told her she was gaining too much weight. They put ALOT of preasure on her to lose it quickly. So she developed horrible eating disorders to look like the other girls and took up smoking too (not as bad as the disorders, just saying she didn't everything in her power to make them happy). When she started eating again, she quickly gained back the weight and was scolded by her teachers.
She is still trying to recover from said eating disorders. Such is the crazy world of dance.

That's nothing. Have you seen Irish dancing costumes?

Yeah, but in ballet you go in with visions of pretty tutus and lovely floaty princessyness so to be forced into a revolting turquoise nylon thing with bits of cheap chiffon sewed on and co-ordinating plaited nylon headband in turquoise, pink and lilac is very disappointing.

My ballet outfits were alright, but my tap dance outfits always looked a bit smutty for a little girl to be wearing.

Now there's something I can identify with.

42nd Street? Hollywood Boulevard more like.

Emma, I blame your parents. They should have sent you to the Opéra National de Paris. That would have fulfilled the fear and frou-frou quotient.

Yeah, the Methodist hall in Leighton Buzzard was pretty third rate by comparison.

It's a wonder you can still walk.

I think its a wonder she can play wheelchair basketball.

Be nice.

I think a lot of little girls really enjoy it, despite the physical suffering involved. (I wouldn't be in favor of forcing kids into it though.)

The training can be overly harsh, but I'm not convinced it needs to be. One things I love about my dance teacher, an x-ballerina, is that she consciously tries to teach her young ballet students in a way that will increase their self-confidence, rather than making them hung-up about whether or not they fit into an ideal ballet body type. (Of course, realistically, body type will matter down the road if they want to turn professional, but they don't need to internalize those standards as kids.) This is not to say that she's easy on them (far from it).

Is Spandau Ballet a form of child abuse?

(danger! danger! thread title mutation madness)

*punches Alan in chest*

*playfully* natch.

More importantly. Is child abuse a form of ballet.

jackie chan to thread

I don't know about teaching it, but forcing children to watch ballet certainly is a form of child abuse.

Allow me to hijack this thread - who here can actually appreciate ballet, or any dance for that matter? The only form of dancing I've ever been actually interested in watching is breakdancing, if only because it looks so damn cool. Watching people prancing around in silly costumes to sometimes brilliant music is just not interesting. Convince me that I'm wrong.

I thought the same Andrew until I saw Emma miming a fairy painting a rainbow!

Andrew, I've gotten to like watching ballet over the past several years, but I don't see it very often (it's expensive) and wouldn't know how to make it seem interesting.

I enjoy watching some other types of dance, but I prefer just going out and dancing myself (not the same thing, of course).

I once watched much of a 24 hour dance performance by Kei Takei (sp?) and it temporarily changed how I viewed every (non-dance) movement taking place around me.

About ballet: from what I've read, some people are born with a great potential range of flexibility than others. Ballet probably tends to attract a self-selecting group of people whose bodies can handle it. (This breaks down, of course, if kids are forced to keep taking it when they don't want to.)

What is it about Lara and ballet?

There's something suspect about the whole tenor of this argument.