A Bearbrass party had a marvellous time discovering behind the scenes how a ballet is put together. Our ballet hostess was Mary (centre of pic - no other pics allowed inside) — in full costumed rig-out. She took us through the Ballet Centre at Southgate showing us everything from dancers limbering up to rooms full of nothing but jars of sequins and beads for the costume makers.
Another circular room was piled floor to ceiling with many hundreds of ballet shoes — allocated in compartments for each dancer by name. In a season the Centre gets through multi-thousand point shoes made largely of paper-cache and glue. They’re all imported from London and cost up to $200 each. For Swan Lake the shoes for the heroine Odette/Odile don’t even last one performance and she needs a new pair for the last act.
We also learnt what goes into a tutu — well over 10m of gossamer fabric. One reason it’s kept light is that the male has enough of a job already, lifting the wearer overhead. Each costume has a series of hooks-and-eyes spaced to adapt to multiple dancers’ size.
Watching the dancers on their six-days-a-week practising, we marvelled at how tall the males are these days — almost all at 6ft plus.
Our big takeaway was that even with tickets $125 upwards, ballet is an inordinately costly business: you just have no idea what’s involved backstage!