Inquiring minds want to know: do ballet dancers ever have large busts?
This post was sparked by this question from commenter “IrishOtter49”:
This is a serious question. Can women with an, er, “ample” bust be ballet dancers?
Commenter “om” replied thusly:
If you are jumping, spinning, bending at the waist, rapidly at times, in cadence with a musical accompaniment, and of course trying for grace and art, or being thrown into the air by your partner, excess mass and non-muscular tissue is probably a burden.
If for no other reason than it places extra stress on the bones, joints, etc.
It seems that this type of dance is very demanding physically and very competitive. Physical and aesthetic selection against hearty gals as well?
My answer is in line with that. Thin dancers are easier to lift, plus the shapes they make in space seem to most viewers to be more elegant and streamlined. Jumps are harder for heavy people, as well, and even turns can be harder because the center of gravity is less of a plumb line.
And imagine how much more difficult it is to carry extra weight while dancing on pointe.
Therefore, since for the most part slender women have smaller breasts – breasts are made mostly of fatty tissue, after all – it is very rare indeed for a professional ballet dancer to be well-endowed. When we see slender women with big breasts these days, it’s certainly possible they are natural – such women do exist – but it’s more likely that implants are involved. There is little reason for a ballet dancer to avail herself of implants; it’s just not an advantage at all.
However, I bring you Gloria Govrin as an example of the most well-endowed ballet dancer I can recall. She’s still alive and is in her early 80s, but in her heyday she was a soloist with George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. Most female dancers and even many male dancers tend to be on the short side, but Govrin was 5’10” while not on pointe. So she was very impressive onstage and made quite an impact. Because of her height, Balanchine tended to give her solo parts rather than pas de deux with a male partner.
Here’s an article with a photo:
Govrin, currently the artistic director of Eastern Connecticut Ballet, stands at five feet, ten inches. Though choreographer George Balanchine initially discouraged her from trying to become a professional dancer, he changed direction, and hired her for the New York City Ballet.
She became a soloist, and upended the longstanding idea of what a female ballet dancer should look like.
“For him, his dancers were inspiration and he once told me that he never saw anybody my size move the way I moved, and he was intrigued,” Govrin recently said on WNPR’s Where We Live.
“I had a different kind of career. It wasn’t the kind of career where you did the ballerina pas de deux kind of — there weren’t many tall boys in the company so it was difficult,” she said. “So what he did, was he created solos for me.”
Now, don’t get me wrong; Govrin wasn’t Jayne Mansfield or Sophia Loren. But for a ballet dancer, she was slightly more well-endowed than usual. Here she is in 1965. I’ve cued it up for her solo, which lasts about two minutes:
Wife was a 34DD back then, and went through college on a ballet scholarship. Asked how she handled that sized breasts. Her response was that you just strap them down really well. On the flip side, she didn’t do well with the guys putting her up in the air. It was a trust issue with a control freak.
}}} Therefore, since for the most part slender women have smaller breasts – breasts are made mostly of fatty tissue, after all
As I understand, there are actually 3 components to breast tissue —
Mammary Glands, Fatty Tissue, and Fibrous Tissue. The fibrous tissue is what gives them firmness and support, and some women have far more of this than others, leading them to have much firmer breasts.
That said, and admittedly not being a female (so no direct experience) I would guess that one of the biggest issues to having larger breasts as a ballerina — or a gymnast/acrobat, for similar reasons — is that no matter how firm they are, they do shift, and maintain an inertial tendency to continue moving even after you’ve stopped the main mass of the body, and that has to interfere with any precision applications of balance or spin, typical to both gymnastic/acrobatic and ballerina activities, as well as dancing in general, but even more so for the precisionist efforts.
As Bruce suggests above, I can see how strapping them down really tight has to be the only way to reduce this issue to acceptable levels. And that can’t be very comfortable, I would assume, so it may make some, if not many, girls who might want to continue decide it’s not worth the effort…
While I was struggling to adapt to my new abundance which arrived at mid life, my DH once said to me: “you dang girls– you spend the first 20 years complain because you don’t have enough, and the next 20 years you complain because you have too much!
Ballet Russe De Monte Carlo principals Miguel Terekhov and Yvonne Chouteau were teaching ballet at the University of Oklahoma where I met my first wife who was an accomplished Freshman dancer in our French class. She had been dancing for years in Houston and she was rather good in spite of her feet giving out. Feet ate a mess with some dancers and when she was in college she had X-rays which showed that she had the feet of a 60 year old woman and she was told if she continued dancing in a few more years they would be 80 year old feet.
So much for the feet, she did quit dancing however in her 40’s after two children she still had delightful little apples on her chest which needed no support when she wore camisoles. The dedication of dancers is as strong as the dedication of any other men or women who participate in athletics and like my friends who were college football players there is a price with knees, feet and joints for being some of the best.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasia_Volochkova
She is 5’10” and has pretty large breasts. Lately she’s been mostly known for rather scandalous lifestyle but she was a remarkable dancer. Not at Plisetskaya level of course.
Speaking generally, not absolutely:
I have also often wondered if athletic women (not just ballet) might have a slightly higher level of testosterone than is the norm for women. Many athletic women (especially track and field, swimming, etc.) are small breasted. So could it be that a higher testosterone level attracts such women to an art/sport with a higher activity level?
For strapping the boobs, corsets work very well if well fitted. It’s as much the fit as the bind. The boobs stay in one place and stop on the spin as she does. About half of the gals in my troop wore them.
I used to watch one woman’s channel about making antique clothing reproductions and she’s an advocate, saying they take away back strain. Probably a person by person thing and, of course, like Dolly Parton says “You can’t stuff ten pounds of flour in a five pound bag.”
I was paired up with heavier gals on a few occasions. You cannot do a lot of things you can with an itty bitty gal. Physics and mass.
Bounce her up and perch her lightly on your shoulder like a birdie? No. She might be able to sit on your ilium but your line won’t be as near straight or vertical. Catching someone on a leap is very different and looks heavier.
I could do it, but there’s a large difference between pressing a 105 and a 155 – even a 130 – into the air above your head. And the larger gal has to be rock-steady because you can’t really direct much tilt with your thumbs. Any teeter-tottering is courting disaster.
My 2¢s from a few years in ballet but the same applies to stunt work. No 150 is going to comedically bounce off your chest like you’re a post.
The “Miss Korea 2022” is a classically trained ballet dancer named Hanna Kim, and used to often appear as a “cast member” on the YouTube channel called “Giggle.” She seemed “larger” than most Koreans I’ve seen in kdramas and movies, and given that she works as a model, I assumed she had work done to get to the size she was.
One day, they had a ballerino come on the channel to “teach newbies” and she had the opportunity to showcase some of her skills with him. In that video, she seemed smaller than normal, so I assume she was simply “well wrangled” since she knew she’d be dancing that day and was probably wearing a sports bra under her leotard. Even with that she still seemed “a bit bigger than a typical ballerina” to my eye.
It’s not a super showcase or anything, but this is that video, which I find fun to watch – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jDyDdQ8bY
I would urge readers to watch beyond the time stamp to see the other dancers move in comparison. If you listen to the audio you can hear Gloria hit the ground more harshly (even if ever so slightly different) than her fellow dancers. Despite how she well she carries herself that mass has to go somewhere, it’s just physics. It’s not hard to imagine taller/heavier dancers deal with injury earlier and more often than smaller dancers
The “male gaze” becoming a felony, it’s dangerous for a man to ponder upon the body parts of a woman. I’ll only offer this:
1: I am grateful when I went through school I was only forced by well meaning teachers and administrators to view ballet and opera. Not drag queen story hour.
2: I was looking at their bottoms, not their tops. the girls/women in ballet have well developed lower ends. I wish I could say I’m sorry, but as a lifelong admirer of the female form I just can’t.
3: I hear they have ugly feet. I’ve never been able to confirm this personally.
4: Yours truly, an American Sailor who most definitely will not be building Biden’s demented Hamas’ sustainment sea base
T:
I don’t think so. Ballet dancers are shaped very different from track and field athletes, especially in the pelvis/hip area because of the need for turnout. In that sense, ballet dancers have a more conventionally female shape.
Neo, so I’m not entirely wrong. It would be a chance from being entirely wrong about everything. Ask a Democrat to define a woman. I can. I can tell a woman from a man in the dark.
In the early 90s I was serving in Carl Vinson as part of the airing. VF111. I left the Intel spacers to go to the radio shack to send a message. I didn’t take more than three steps before I stopped and said to myself, “there are women aboard. ‘
This was pre-tailhook. Women didn’t serve in warships. With some temporary exceptions.
I followed my nose like a bloodhound and sure enough women. And pheromones, which I learned about later. A trans whatever would have just been another stinking swabbie transitioning the south Pacific along with the other 5000 of us
I meant “change, ‘ not ” chance. ” I tried the edit function with no effect. Hopefully my meaning comes across
“‘My God, Norrey, she’s enormous.’ …Imagine a supremely gifted basketball player five feet tall.”
SF writer Spider Robinson proposed one possible solution: freefall dancing, in orbit. He was married to a ballet dancer, and she is credited as co-author of their 1977 novella “Stardance”. (Won the Nebula and the Hugo, back when those awards were in fact about good SF.)
Although not overly endowed I could watch these beauties all day long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay5uNo53H88
It’s the old deal of reality vs fantasy. Just like in sports if you can dance you’re a dancer.
A 5’10” ballerina?? You mean I could have done it? I took a year of ballet in college to fulfill the PE requirement. I was thin, have turnout, and I heard my teacher talking to someone about “untrained bodies” which might otherwise have been dancers. He gave me As for effort, and sat on the bench laughing at the whole class when we tried pirouettes down the room.
T, I think breast size is genetic, not testosterone. Even nearly flat mothers can breast-feed babies, as I can attest.
This is not to mock, seriously; but, to some extent, it looks like a 1960s light comedy performance by a chorus line dancer [ or whatever studio available variety show dancers would have been called] doing a ballet skit. Or, if not a skit exactly, an interlude or reverie from some non dance storyline.
A dance troupe comes through Mayberry, where the bus breaks down: and during the forced diversion there, Barney Fife develops a crush on a tall dancer, daydreaming at his desk until Andy shouts “Barney!” for the third time.
Or something.
But then I know nothing of dance or dancers in general.
I don’t even understand what it is, if it comes down to that. Dancing is a very strange business, if you think about it.
My granddaughters were, early on, interested in dance. One got almost to the en pointe stage, the other not so far before they took to sports. Volleyball, softball, basketball–all champion level, playing for teams one year older–and equestrian.
Not much spare weight. The younger, when in the fifth grade, ran sixth-grade cross country. Top ten in the county for girls, sub thirteen minutes for two miles.
But they lost interest, relatively speaking.
There were some pretty big classes of girls maybe seven or eight years old. I figure a number of them, besides my own relations, have lost interest, at least at the level it takes to progress.
One thing or another and…a bigger chest might be one of the issues which causes them to try something else.
Saw some high school musicals over the years where dancing and singing were necessary. Seems as if the young women in the leads or even the secondary roles knew what they were doing. But drama and singing and high school life were sufficient.
So perhaps progress along the road to being a ballerina has a lot of reasons to not continue and one of them could be build.
A million years ago, when I was in high school, I took a master class with Ballet West. The dancer who taught the class was zaftig for a ballet dancer. And she was an amazing dancer.
Wasn’t Julie Newmar the Prima at the Los Angeles Ballet around 1950?
No, I guess she wasn’t. Sorry.
If you have big tatas, you should go into opera, not ballet.
– – Univ of Saigon 68 – –