Ballerinas Go on Tours
Big professional ballet productions often go on national and international tours, which means that the dancers get to see the world like rockstars.
While this may sound appealing to some, this life can be harder on others, who have to spend a long time away from their families and loved ones.
What It Takes to Make a Tutu
Tutus are the perky tulle skirts ballerinas wear on stage and every three-year-old girl's dream. The engineering behind those tutus is actually a lot more elaborate than you'd think.
To put it in numbers, the making of each tutu takes about four days, 300 ft of tulle, and will cost up to $2,000 or more, depending on the quality and design. When you learn that ballerinas can go through 150 of those skirts in their careers, it turns into a serious expense.
No Two Performances Are Identical
Just like with a big Broadway musical, a big ballet production performs the same ballet day in and day out. But the performance is never completely identical, and if you watch the same production twice you'll be able to notice the subtle changes.
Sophie Martin, a principal ballerina for the Scottish Ballet, says those changes are what helps her stay balanced when performing the same show every night.
An Average Show Is Four Hours Long
One ballet show can last about four hours. This means that the dancers need to be in tip-top shape to do it.
Actually, they need to be in shape just as much as any other professional athlete. In fact, the energy spent by a ballerina during a full show can be weighed against playing two soccer games or against an 18-mile run!
Male Ballet Dancers Are Mega-Lifters
Do you even lift, bro? Even if you do, odds are male ballet dancers lift more. Sure, the ballerinas they lift are usually petite women that don't weigh much, to begin with, but when you combine the weights of all the lifts a male dancer has to do in a single show, you reach about 1-1.5 tons!
By comparison, it's like the combined weight a weightlifter would lift in 4-6 events!