Parallel Worlds: Arts and Sciences

Nowadays, the ballet world is becoming more and more popular, and its international stars are becoming brands and public figures: “A wave of international ballet stars are increasingly leaping from company to company, creating their own brands and becoming more like world-traveling conductors and opera stars. In doing so, they are upending ballet’s traditional professional path and changing an art form long defined by national styles that dancers perfected as they grew up with — and stayed loyal to — a single company. “The talented people belong not to one company, but to the dance world,” the Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova said in a recent Skype interview. “In opera, this happens already. You have a chorus, but principals from all over the world.” Ms. Osipova, 27, is a prime example. On Thursday, she is to dance her first Juliet as a member of Britain’s Royal Ballet, the fourth dance troupe she has joined in two years. Her crowd-pulling virtuosity and charisma have taken...

This is just a list of curiosities within the ballet world: 45 the percentage of professional ballet dancers who are smokers 110 lb. (7 stone 12 pounds): the weight reached by prima ballerina Anastasia Volochkova that led to her firing from the Bolshoi Ballet 12 the age at which most girls are considered old enough to go on pointe 4350 the number of students at the Cuban National Ballet School in Havana, the biggest ballet school in the world 80 per cent: the injury rate among professional dancers in Britain 100 kg/15 stone: the minimum weight requirement for ballerinas in the Big Ballet, a Russian dance company 3 The pain threshold of ballerinas is 3 times higher than that of non-ballerinas 7 Ballet dancers are 7 times more likely to suffer from anorexia than non-ballerinas 22,000 the annual wage, in pounds, of second year corps de ballet dancers at the Royal Ballet 29 average retirement age of professional ballerinas in the 1990s 40 aver...