LINES Dance Center video

In yesterday's posting I mentioned a video of an adult ballet company. It's quite good, produced by KQED TV in San Francisco, so I thought I'd link to it here. It runs almost 23 minutes, but it's worth watching. I don't seem to be able to embed the video, so here's the URL:

http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/trulyca/shorts/episode.jsp?essid=29515

A note to anyone thinking of taking classes and looking at this video to see what it's like. This instructor seems to scowl a lot, something none of the instructors I've met have done. Everyone I've taken class from has seemed happy to be there, as if this is an escape from the "real world". Which, for folks like me, it is. From the praises her students are singing, I'm guessing she's a lot more personable than the scowling taskmaster she sometimes appears to be in the video. Don't be put off by it.

One of the things that's had me scratching my head is a man who first appears at 04:14 into the video. He talks a bit about how he found his way into this class, which I'm sure rings true for many of the men who started dancing ballet as adults. He also talks about how he wanted to find a class where he could learn pointe, which men rarely do. At 04:46 we get a shot of him in pointe shoes doing a demi-plié, and again at 05:00 doing some tendus. I'm a bit surprised a teacher would put him on pointe at his level of skill and flexibility. We never see him en pointe (he does one rise to what looks like demi-pointe, though we can't see his feet) so maybe going en pointe is a future goal? It certainly doesn't look like he has enough ankle flexibility to get over the box yet.

Mind you, I don't have any problem with men doing pointe work. My concern is whether the instructor is allowing him to attempt something he may not be physically prepared to do yet, and might injure himself attempting. Maybe those with more experience can tell me whether my concerns are warranted.

Thinking about it more, I'm beginning to wonder if the video's director asked for shots of him in class wearing pointe shoes, even though he doesn't do so in class normally. In both shots of him in pointes he's also wearing leg warmers that are pulled down to cover everything behind the throat of the shoe, so there's no way of telling whether they properly fit him or if they're just stuck on his feet well enough to be filmed. Directors seem to have a very tenuous attachment to reality when it interferes with some fanciful image they have in mind -- many of the fire scenes in the movie Backdraft were filmed on an upside-down set because real fire refused to behave the way the director wanted it to, thus teaching millions of people that fire behaves in a way that it doesn't. But that's a different rant.