Broche Banter #43 -- India | On Floor Barre and Pro Ballet in France

Today on the show, I chat with India, who’s a professional ballerina and Floor Barre instructor living in France.

We talk about what Floor Barre is, why we think adults should be taken seriously in their ballet education, and a little about the hierarchical system of professional ballet in France.

It’s a fascinating conversation full of so many tidbits about ballet history, ballet itself, and inspiration. Enjoy!

LISTEN ON APPLE Listen on Spotify YouTube LA -> NYC -> Paris

Julie: Welcome to the show. India. I'm so excited to get to chat with you today.

India: Hi, so nice to meet you.

Julie: Where are you calling me from?

India: I'm in Messy in France, it's one hour and a half from Paris. And I'm actually here to work. I'm rehearsing Romeo and Juliet with the ballet company here.

Julie: Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. How long have you been there?

India: I got here last week.

Julie: Oh, wow. Okay.

India: The first week of rehearsals done.

Julie: Oh, my gosh. And where did you Where were you right before this?

India: I was in Paris.

Julie: But you haven't been embarrassed forever. Tell me a little about your a little bit about your journey that's led you to where you are now.

India: I was born in Los Angeles, California. Trained there. And then I'm moved to New York when I was 17 to train with Gelsey Kirkland. And there was that period, where she had a ballet company. And I did that all in five years. And then I moved here to Paris.

And it was pretty unexpected. I just want to come for a vacation. And I ended up staying here, because I like the teachers and I discovered floor barre. They didn’t have Zoom back then, so there you go.

Julie: We've been living parallel lives. I grew up in San Diego where I started my life and then moved to New York City. And then as we were just chatting before the call, we may or may not have been in the same intensive in the summer at the Gelsey Kirkland first summer intensive program.

India: Yeah, yeah.

Julie: We're gonna have to check some dates on that and see if we were there. That would be really funny if we happen to have been in the same one.

India: Yeah, I think so.

Floor Barre

Julie: Floor bar is now a big part of your life. You're still performing as a dancer, obviously. But you also have gotten super into floor barre. What is floor barre? Let's start off with that as a question.

India: Yeah. Well, floor barre, I think, globally speaking, it's the whole idea of to train your alignment and strengthen, to put yourself on the floor and do ballet movements on the floor. I know there is a Rommett method, Zena Rommett, and that is one way to do things.

I almost want to say looks a little bit like Pilates, but I'm not gonna butcher anything here. And then there's another method, which is the Boris Kniaseff method that I teach.

And then I think in general, when a floor barre, sometimes I think sometimes it can be sort of mixed with stretch & conditioning class. Like “okay, let's do some exercises on the floor.”

But the method that I teach it, I know the Zena Rommett method. It's very methodical.

I got into it when I first came to Paris, and it was all very innocent. I was doing a lot of Pilates in New York. Semi-privates. I was doing it with a girl from ABT and I really needed that because I had a hip injury. And my doctor, who actually did Susan Farrell's hip replacement and Baryshnikov’s knee surgeries, he's really good, Gelsey got me in with him.

But he suggested that I do Pilates to get super strong because I fractured my hip in a really weird area. And he said he's never seen that before. And I think it's because of the modern trends. I think I got it at an oversplit angle, point-blank. And I don't think my hips were made to over-split at the degree that I was doing them.

But I had to get my legs up. And so when I came to Paris for vacation, I heard about this floor barre. And even when I was little in LA, we had a teacher, a French teacher, and she gave us floor barre. And so I heard “Oh, I hear these like Paris Opera people they do floor barre.”

And at that time, I mean, back then they didn't even have soy milk in France and didn't have kale and have any of that. It's not New York where you can go and get a Pilates class. It still isn't. So I saw signs for floor barre everywhere. And I said, “Oh, this is like French woman's Pilates.”

But women in general, like regular French women, it's like their mat Pilates class in America. It's like parallel, like for them floor barre, It's normal. It's the thing, they go and they do at lunch, like Pilates like same exact sort of thing.

Gelsey, you remember, she did this Core Dynamics, and we had to do 45 minutes of warm ups. I found a studio where they had floor barre before the technique. I said, “Okay, well, I'm gonna do some floor barre.” And I liked it. And then I was walking down the street one day, and I ran into this guy who was dancing for Bejak, like, incidentally. And he said, “What do you like about being here?” And I said, “I like this floor barre.”

And he told me “You have not the real floor bar until you go to Jacqueline's class.” And he's like, “This is the class where Sylvia Guillem used to go to every day, and every single etoile passed through the class and blah, blah, blah.” And he said that “She's a tough cookie, but that is the real thing. Injuries, maternity leave, she's the lady to go to.”

So I went there. And that was kind of like, the first day of the rest of my life here, because she was an amazing teacher. And she taught the Boris Kniaseff method. Because, you know, pretty recent. Boris Kniaseff was around World War Two, he made the method. And then he had his students, a lot of great students, and she was one of them. And I guess when he retired or finished, she took over the classes because Nureyev told her to. She went to lunch with Narayan and Eric Bruin. And they're like, you should really get back with that floor barre, Jacqueline. So, yeah. A lot of history there.

Julie: So she's only one generation away from the o.g. floor barre.

India: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, she's one generation away. And she recently retired. And my teachers, I mean, she was the lady to go to. I mean, if you said, Jacqueline, it's always a very strong response. It's like, “Oh, God,” or “Oh, oh, yeah, she's great.” It's always like, “Oh, [grunt].” She was you know, she was a legend. And a tough cookie.

A little about the hierarchy of ballet in France

Julie: I just want to go back and pick up on one vocab word that I think our audience will enjoy. What’s an etoile?

India: It's a principal dancer, or it’s a star. Etoile means star. They have a very hierarchical system in Paris Opera, and they have the different corps and soloist ranks, and then they premiere danseur and it can translate to first soloist and then etoile - it's like when you get nominated on stage.

Julie: Amazing.

India: Yeah, yeah. You can look up the videos and nomination videos. It's quite a special thing.

Julie: That's so cool. I yeah. That little bit about the nomination, only the ranks itself. How fun is that? What a great little tidbit.

India: The rest is a competition over there. And I've been lucky enough to attend it. Everywhere in French culture, it's competition. It's like the exams, the top two scores get the promotion or the spot at this at that medical school, it's very much like that. And so in Paris Opera, if you want to get, let's say, a promotion, they have the posts that are free. And then you present a solo, two solos, a required solo, and then a freestyle solo like one that you want from the rep, and they all perform it, and you're not allowed, you have to get an invitation. It's like a closed thing. So I was able to attend.

It was like a gladiators, it was very interesting to attend. Because at the end of the solo, you can't clap. And they're like, number 100, this girl for the post of soloist, and it's kind of like a competition without clapping. And then they score them. So it's supposed to democratize things in a way, but it’s pretty tough. But, the director gets one vote, but the nomination to etoile, it's a promotion, which doesn't have to be through like a sort of bureaucratic system like that.

Julie: How do you think about that in comparison with other ways? I mean, it seems to me like kind of thinking about from other professional companies, especially here, it's a little bit more like, you're not sure how someone gets promoted, or it's more rather random and arbitrary versus a more scored system. What are your thoughts on that difference?

India: I think I mean, I think there's pros and cons. In any case, I personally think this, maybe, you know, in my humble opinion, disclaimer, you know, I think if the director really likes you, in the conquer, you can fall in your butt and still get promoted, it's happened before. And if you're really were required to get that score to get promoted, you can also fall on your butt and not get a promotion, even if you danced a bunch of principal roles that whole year.

So there's people like the principal in San Francisco ballet and Mathilde Froustey, she was really frustrated with the conquor system, because she was getting a lot of soloist and principal roles, but she couldn't jump that rank. So I could see how that wouldn't work. It's a very jarring system. But I think that democracy is easier said than done.

Julie: If that isn't the wisdom for the time, I don't know what it is.

India: Yeah. But yeah, I think the whole principle of it is that it also can keep people in shape. Because every year you can present a solo on stage until you're 42. Err two solos on stage and work on something. So something to work for, instead of just waiting and waiting. So there are definitely pros and cons, but I think it's quite intimidating. You just want to wish someone like a fairy godmother will give you a promotion, right?

Julie: I can feel my palms sweating, just thinking about it.

India: It’s like the most stressful thing in the world. One of my friends who did it, she was like, “I thought it was just gonna be a show..” her first conquor, she was like, “I thought this was gonna be like a show without clapping.” And she was like [gasp]. And it was the piano and you wear just white, no costume, white leotard, and white tutu.

And then for the free choice variation, you get to wear a costume. But still, the blue screen that is.. if you're like nervous like I get for things, I don't think I would fare well in that system.

Julie: You need to be able to walk over hot coals to like to be able to withstand the nerves for that kind of an event.

India: It's very stressful. And it's just like, I could even feel the atmosphere. I remember once, I was taking gyrotonics. And the girls in my class had the conquor. And it's just like a very stressful and even… I don't know why I know so much about this….

But about democracy is that you still have your performances and everything, and you have to find that extra time and a teacher to rehearse with. So, actually, you have to put your name, and the only way to reserve a studio is if you put your name down the day of so there are people waking up at 5 am to put their name down on the studio. Crazy.

Julie: Oh, my goodness, the things people do.

India: I think it’s chaos.

Julie: Yeah, oh my goodness, the things people do for the moment on stage. I mean, I get it. It's very exciting. And it's very coveted, but also it when you're not in it up outside looking and you're like that is a lot that is very intense.

India: I think unless someone's flown through the ranks. I'm just making a wild guess. Because there are 154 people there. I think they'd say it's a soul-killing system. Some of the people got [tick tick tick motioning up the ranks] like Sylvie Guillem, or there's one we knew we were every year. Unless you were like that, you know that? It's it, there's some real cons with that.

Julie: Yeah, definitely.

A little more about floor barre & teaching ballet to adults

Julie: I could honestly listen to you talk about the pro world all day but I want to get a little bit more about floor barre and into a couple of things are interesting about this. Number one it's normal in France, which is very interesting. Are the women also taking regular ballet as well? Or is it floor barre just completely standalone and its own kind of activity?

India: It's pretty standalone. I think there's some who do but I've met all sorts of ladies who they just do the floor barre. And in Jacqueline's class, I literally had, there were etoiles in the class with some ladies coming to the floor barre on the lunch break.

It was that whole democratizing ballet thing, like you and Hugo Maschinen, you’ve got to do XYZ exercise and if you didn’t do it, not good. She used to, back in the day, she used to kick out people. So you got to get with the program. So exhilarating lunch break. Yeah.

Julie: But so do you teach mostly adults when you teach floor barre? Do you teach kids? Do you teach pros? Who are you teaching when you're teaching floor barre?

India: I'm teaching adults, pretty much, I have one child. And I do teach a number of people with a ballet background. But it's mainly adults and I started teaching French women who are not ballet dancers, because they wanted that. In their lunch break, you know? So that was where my experience started.

Julie: That is so awesome. So I always love to talk with people who also teach adults, what are your thoughts about adults’ potential? Can they improve? Can they get more flexible? Can they get stronger? How much of this can they learn? What are your thoughts on that working with adults?

India: Well, I'd like to start with one quote of my teacher, Jacqueline, which is, and hear me out. She said, “limitation is only a physical sensation.” That doesn't mean break… go and take that cement block like Bruce Lee and chop with your hand. But I think I absolutely have seen it with my clients.

Number one, the biggest difference is any really nagging injuries that they've had for years or hip replacements, knees, ankles… if there's a replacement, I have somebody in my class with it, and it's enormously relieved them. And I’ve seen people finally improving their turnout, finally. At 70, someone told me, I'm doing my best dancing now at 70.

“[With floor barre], I’ve seen people finally improving their turnout, finally. At 70, someone told me, I’m doing my best dancing now at 70.”

So I do think so. And I think the idea, the little riddle what my teacher meant to say is, it's more like, “the physical idea of thinking and putting limitations on yourself is just a sensation. The thoughts are just a physical sensation” in a weird way.

Julie: Right. It's, we're not saying have someone sit on you in a frog stretch, but the thought is that if you believe you won't be able to improve your turnout, then you certainly aren't going to work hard enough to actually see the improvement in it.

So you have to first believe in your mind that you can, and then you can put in the hard work that's required.

India: My teacher did it in a really tough love way. I remember she was saying, one dancer got promoted to first dancer, premier danseur and then he became an etoile. And she was like, “I see a lot of first dancers with a bent knee in fifth position, plenty of them.” She was always like [mimic checking off a list]. Sylvie Guilliem didn't like to wear pointe shoes. That’s why she does modern, you know. With a leg like that, who wants to do a piqué manege in the 3rd act with the foot there and a knee back there. So it was really funny.

But, even today after this. I'm having a semi-private with two women. And they are, you know, over 60 and they have real improvements. And they're making real breakthroughs in ballet. And they always tell me that they like that I hold them to a certain standard.

And it gives some dignity to people. I think what adults who study ballet, what they can't stand the most is how patronizing it is.

“Adults who study ballet, what they can’t stand the most is how patronizing it is”

And even I was watching a video of floor barre. He's not a floor barre teacher, but he studied with Jacqueline. And in one live stream, he was like, “okay, grandmas do this grandma's he was giving the modifications, but he was addressing people who'd be adult or who don't have as much ballet training as a professional dancer. He always addressed them as grandmas.

Julie: Oh my gosh.

India: And I know for my clients that would be so demoralizing,

Julie: The thing about our clientele is that they already have enough limitations on their selves. In their own minds. We don't need to add any more thoughts to put in their head that they may not be able to do something, right. Society has already told them that they can't be dancers, if they didn't start at the age of five, like, we don't need to include any more of that all we need is to encourage them that they can do it and that we expect that they could do it and that we've seen it happen and that they'll be able to do it, too.

India: Yeah, yeah, I absolutely agree. So for me, it's I that's like the most fulfilling part. I remember I was talking to one woman in a private, she was in her 70s. She was a dancer. And I don't know what I was telling her. But I was like, “Well, you know, this exercises for that, so then when you do this variation on stage..” because my teacher was always relaying it back to, which was always so inspiring about her, about being on stage and all this kind of… she was very and stuff very artistic. I just loved it. We all loved it. And she said, “Oh, I just love that you keep talking about my ballet career. I just love it. Keep talking about it.” But you know she was half-joking but she liked I was talking to her seriously about the minutiae of the profession, you know?

Julie: Yeah, well, I think people enjoy general, the people who I've met, don't go into, they don't go into ballet just for the exercise. There's so many more efficient ways to exercise, they go in it for the dream, they go in it for the precision, they go in for the detail for the gracefulness for the posture. So I think it's worth giving all of that to them because that's what they're there for. Honestly, if you just want to work out, you want to get in shape. Like literally, there's way better. There's way faster ways to do it. Ballet is very slow.

India: Yeah, absolutely. And when I started doing this online, I quickly changed the way I was writing and addressing an audience because of course, for me, personally, I love this Kniaseff floor barre. For me, it's one of the best ways for me to work out. So at first, I said, “Oh, maybe I should talk about you know, and your butt is going to look like this, and this and that,” because what people were telling me like, “Whoa, does this lift your butt? And I was like, “I don't know, I never thought about it that way.”

But for some people are non-ballet, they come to get their butts lifted, you know, even though I never really took that into account. Apparently there's evidence.

But, I didn't feel like that was… I didn't really need to speak to somebody who had a bazillion choices of efficient exercise methods. I was like, “I should speak to the ballet lovers.” And what's interesting is I meet most interesting people who you'd never guess, would be interested in ballet. And they're like, you know, I wanted to when I was five, but this person wouldn't let me, that person wouldn't let me, I'm a boy, this, that, and it's really like broken dreams.

And so for me, it's like the floor barre was like the gateway drug of ballet. Maybe there’s a better word. I've had so many stories, it's really touching, and at the same time, very bittersweet when someone's like, “Okay, I'm gonna safely go into this and do floor barre,” which I love. Because after, they can go to the ballet class and be a little bit more prepared, because I understand and I'm, obviously you do to a, how intimidating and overwhelming it can be to just throw someone into an open drop-in advanced class, which may be the only time to do it in a work schedule. Just go to a Steps [on Broadway] class. Like, you're not going to get anything out of it, like very little.

Julie: You might even get negative out of it, because you're gonna leave thinking horrible things about yourself if you don't come in with the right mindset.

India: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Julie: Totally broken dreams. It's very difficult. I mean, the ballet world is…. you know, it's an interesting place. Because, of course, in order to be the top of the top, you have to be the best of the best, right? There is that, but then it feels like for so many people, that there's no room for people who just are really good at it, right?

You don't have to be at the top to enjoy it. And like, almost nobody is the top of the top right? There are like five of them in the world, right? Maybe 100, or a 1,000. So when you're thinking about the number of people, you don't have to be at the top of the top to have a really fulfilling and enjoyable time in ballet. You don't have to be at the top of the top to have a stage performance. You don't have to… You can be really, really, really good at it and not have to get to that incredible level where you had to have started super young and have your over splits and all that stuff. That’s not required to enjoy and love ballet.

India: At the end of the day, it's about the practice of the art form. And it's a daily aspect of it. It's almost like new people say like “It's the idea of it's a practice, and it's a craft.” And I always, if I write I usually use that term a lot.

It's a craft, you keep working and tinkering and you keep working at it without … Yeah, of course, you have certain objectives and end goals and like yes, point your foot, it’s not just like, “whoo.” But it's the journey in a way, that's supposed to be the most fulfilling thing.

“At the end of the day, it’s about the practice of the art form. It’s a craft, you keep working and tinkering and you keep working at it. It’s the journey in a way, that’s supposed to be the most fulfilling thing.”

Yes, the destination, of course there will be a destination, but also what I loved. Sorry, I always mentioned her, but what I love about my teacher, because she completely changed my taste. As you know, Gelsey was in the right direction. But then Jacqueline kind of opened it up into… she taught us about actual taste and how to look at ballet, which I really loved. And I remember telling Gelsey, when I came back to give her my resignation, I told her everything. And she was like, “Oh, I agree. I agree. Yes, yes.” You know, so it was on this, and I think, you know, Gelsey was also it to a certain degree about kind of reviving ballet in a more sustainable and accessible way.

And she felt that was through to reinstate its artistic values. And not so much its gynmastic values.

I think part of ballet is for everyone, and what we're doing… I mean, people need to understand ballet as well. And it turns out, there's a huge demographic of people who want to understand ballet. People who love ballet who are willing, as you know, Hannah said, or if they could, they would spend all their disposable income on ballet.

And so how come ballet companies are also broke? There's so many people, it's because you exclude them, maybe a little bit, or you don't know, you're not actually finding the right messaging, you know, you're not reaching the right public. So I don't know. Yeah, the

Julie: When I ran my, when I ran my Denver studios, the messaging is not come and get exercise, the messaging is not let's come and dance around, the messaging is like, let's learn the technique. Let's learn ballet technique. Let's learn the details. Let's study, let's commit to come every single week, let's make this a structured program, let's not just kind of mess around, because the people who want to mess around, there's so many options, right? You don't you wouldn't come to a ballet class, if that was what you wanted.

So I think it's a matter of understanding the customer and understanding what adults really want, as you're saying, they want to learn about the craft, they want to learn all this stuff. I think people are gonna love this episode with all these details about the professional world and be able to dream and think about what that would be like to be in the competition and onstage. I think that part of that is confusing when you couldn't imagine who would want to spend their free time on this. That's very, very difficult. It's hard to imagine sometimes that someone would choose this over other activities if you haven't done it yourself.

India: I always thought that ballet, it's a universal language as well, and it's an uplifting one. Maybe some people say, “Oh, well, Shakespeare, nobody can understand Shakespeare, blah, blah, blah.”

“Ballet is a universal language, and it’s an uplifting one”

I'm like, “Well, actually, the language is very beautiful,” but it's like Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet was extremely successful. You just put Leonardo DiCaprio and you put a little beach shirt and everybody got it.

Democratizing it and putting the right values in there, and everybody can understand what's going on. And it's not so much make her skinny or make her leg higher.

A lot of social media, I don't think… I'm not naming any names or anything… it's also very quite widespread… But there's a lot of stuff on social media where I’m like, “you're using ballet, but I'm not sure you're opening ballet to the public. I think this is like not going in the right direction. I think this is a little inappropriate. I think a little girl shouldn't be looking at this.'“

I like what Gelsey was talking about, it's still an uplifting art. There's something where we will pull you up to the level, we're not going to dumb it down for you. We're not gonna vulgarize it. We're not going to understand ballet better by putting on pointe shoes and twerking. It's out of context, and that's not ballet. And I don't think someone's going to be like, “this is my dream for ballet. I get it now, light bulb moment.” And maybe I can see how that could offend a lot of people but I think between black and white there is a gray zone and a whole range of colors.

I really believe in and I think this is why was with Gelsey, if we just message ballet differently and just re-evaluate some of the values, we don't have to like completely… it can still touch people it still has a universal value.

My way of doing that is through floor barre because people could just sit on the floor, they don't need to digest they just wear a pair of socks and lie down no yoga mat, and we'll just start there. Bend and stretch, flex and point.

Julie: Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. I think I think the tides are changing. I think actually, ironically, COVID will change the tides more than we expected it to, I think we all kind of can feel it changing in the performing arts world. And you know, as sad as so much of the loss is, out of loss always comes new opportunities. And I think there are so many more conversations happening where artists now realize that they have access directly to the public through social media through being able to publish virtual performances, smaller companies able to start working, and I think the tides will start changing a little bit more quickly after this whole thing.

India: Yeah, I think something positive is happening, I have a good feeling. I mean, it'll take some time, but I think it is cool that a lot of professional dancers and, and people in the ballet world are also using social media. I feel more connected to the ballet world than ever due to COVID, because I'm meeting people like you and all sorts of people who share my values. And we altogether can make quite an influence and a big impact. That we might not have otherwise.

Julie: So to wrap up our conversation, I always like to ask for your last words of wisdom for our audience, either whether relating to floor barre, or ballet in general or anything you want to make sure you get out to our audience of wonderful adult dancers.

India: My teacher always said that Jacqueline, she always said, “be sure to be passionate about what you can do, and you can move mountains that way.” And like she said, limitation is only a physical sensation. Just that's only in here [the mind]. So yeah.

Julie: Yeah, that's wonderful. The passion will take you very, very far. Thank you for such a wonderful conversation. It was so many awesome places. Thank you so much for your time today. What a pleasure it's been to be able to meet you and hear about your wonderful mindset about ballet and dance and all that stuff.

India: Thank you so much for having me.