Text 1: A rugby writer at the ballet, by Callum Reade

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

When my editor asked me to review the ballet, I assumed it was a punishment. I have spent twenty years writing about rugby. My idea of a good night out involves mud, floodlights and a pie of uncertain origin. Ballet, as far as I knew, was something for little girls in pink and grown-ups in very expensive seats.

I was wrong within ten minutes. From row F of the stalls you can hear what the audience at the back cannot: the thud of a landing, the squeak of a shoe, the sharp breath a dancer takes before a lift. These are not fairies. They are athletes, and the leading man, who threw his partner above his head as easily as a winger catching a high ball, had thighs a prop forward would envy.

At the interval I got talking to an eight-year-old called Maisie, who was there with her grandmother and who explained, with great patience, that the dancers had been rehearsing for six hours a day. ‘Their feet bleed,’ she told me, with obvious satisfaction. ‘Mum says that’s why they don’t show you.’

She was right about that. The whole point, I realised in the second act, is that the effort is hidden. In rugby we cheer the effort: the grimace, the collision, the player who drags himself over the line. Here the dancer spins thirty-two times on the tip of one toe and then simply stops, perfectly still, smiling, as if it had cost her nothing at all. That stillness was the most astonishing thing I saw all night. My hands were sweating.

I will not pretend I understood the story. There was a prince, a curse and a lake, and somebody died. But I understood the skill, and I understood the risk, and when the curtain came down I was on my feet before I had decided to stand.

Maisie, two rows in front, turned round and gave me a thumbs up. I gave her one back. I am not sure which of us was more pleased.

Text 2: A letter from London, by Agnes Hollins

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1853, a clergyman’s wife describes to her sister a visit to the ballet at a London opera house.

My dear Theodora, You will be shocked, and I confess I am a little shocked myself, to learn that on Tuesday I went to the ballet. Mr Hollins’s cousin had taken a box and would not hear of a refusal, and I could not well explain to her that I thought the whole business improper without seeming to accuse her of impropriety.

I will tell you honestly what I saw. The house was a blaze of gaslight and gilding, and so warm that several ladies near us were obliged to fan themselves without ceasing. When the curtain rose upon a forest glade, some forty young women came on in white gauze skirts that reached scarcely to the knee, and I lowered my eyes, as I believe any respectable woman would.

I did not keep them lowered long. The principal dancer, a slight, dark girl who cannot be above nineteen, came forward alone, and rose upon the very points of her toes, and seemed to float rather than to walk. She turned, and leapt, and alighted again with no more sound than a falling leaf. The whole house held its breath. I am ashamed to say I held mine also.

And yet, Theodora, my pleasure was spoiled before the end. Our cousin told me that the girls of the chorus are paid a few shillings a week, and that a dancer at another theatre was burned to death last winter when her skirts caught at the footlights. After that I could not see the gauze floating near the flames without a dreadful anxiety, and I watched the little ones at the back, who smiled so bravely, and wondered whether they had eaten that day.

I do not think I shall go again. But I do not think I shall forget the girl who floated, nor the others who did not.

Both of these texts are about visits to the ballet.

Compare:

• the writers’ thoughts and feelings about the ballet and its dancers
• how the writers present these thoughts and feelings

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