How the tutu got its name
Hello, dear readers --
This week in New York City, 306 dancers - New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre principals among them - gathered in front of some TV cameras in midtown and stood en pointe for one minute, thus setting a new world record for most dancers en pointe at once. This sounds unpleasant to me, because I loathe midtown and I did not particularly enjoy being on pointe, either. But hey, new world record!
Here are some other ballet world records:
The largest ever ballet lesson (1,530 people)
The tallest ballet dancer (6 ft 6.63 in, or 199.73cm)
Most pirouettes à la seconde in 30 seconds (50)
Most continuous grands battements (1,199)
Oldest ballet male ballet dancer (74)
This episode of Live with Kelly and Ryan was in the works before Good Morning America mocked Prince George and his ballet lessons, but it provided a nice contrast nonetheless: where George Stephanopoulos sniggered at the very notion that a boy might enjoy ballet, Ryan Seacrest tried on a pair of pointe shoes.
I’ve had pointe shoes on the brain this week because I’ve been reading about the history of various ballet tools: the barre, the pointe shoe, the tutu.
The barre has been around for hundreds of years, but the shape of the ballet class as we know it today - barre exercises, then increasingly mobile steps in the centre of the room - was invented by an Italian teacher in the 1830s.
The pointe shoe began when women started darning their slippers to harden the ends and make it easier to stand on their toes, but it was revolutionized by an Italian shoemaker who custom-made shoes for one of the Italian stars of the day. Pierina Legnani’s shoes had leather soles and her toes were encased by a box made of hardened, molded fabric. When her Russian counterparts realized that the more rigid shoes helped her stay up on her toes longer, they asked their shoemakers to get to work.
And then, there’s the tutu. The barre and the pointe shoe I knew about already, but this week I learned something: the tutu is named after the butt.
The tutu as you’re probably thinking of it - a snug bodice attached to a circle skirt that sticks straight out, perpendicular to the dancer’s spine - came into being toward the end of the 19th century. For decades, the style had been a bell-shaped skirt, which was originally long and voluminous. It had been popularized by ballet superstar Marie Taglioni, whose teacher, her father, was protective of her chaste public image: he liked to keep her skirt long so that even when she jumped, the audience wouldn’t see her knees.
But as pointe shoes and the dancers wearing them got stronger, and footwork became more complicated, the skirts starting creeping up. In the 1860s, per dance historian Carol Lee, “costume designers, in noting the necessity for the abbreviated shape of the skirts worn by Italian acrobats and circus girls riding horseback, adapted the shorter, knee-length style.”
A few decades later, a Russian ballet star requested a more tailored bodice, the skirts got even shorter, and ballerinas stopped looking like bells: “Numerous layers of tarlatan, a stiffened open-weave muslin of Indian origin, were attached to the yoke,” Lee writes. Now, “they were cut so that the topmost skirt was the widest, giving the effect of a flower in full bloom.”
I know, I haven’t told you about the butts yet. I’m getting there.
Modern tutus, though they’re quite short, have layers and layers of tulle sewn around the bottom and crotch of the leotard, so that unless the skirt flies up, you really only see leg. But the way the tutu got its name suggests that wasn’t always the case. Lee, again:
“At some point the newly styled costume acquired the name tutu. It is widely thought that the French word cul, meaning end or one’s posterior, was reduced to cucu and then mispronounced in an infantile rendering to become tutu.”
So, “tutu” is really just old-timey French slang for… “butt butt.”
Ballet, so high brow and classy. Truly ass-pirational.
Dancers you should be following
Kurt Froman is a former New York City Ballet dancer turned Hollywood ballet teacher (as in, he trains actresses to play ballerinas) and amateur archivist. His Instagram feed is a gold mine of 20th century ballet history.
August 21, 2019
Talk to me!
If you’re a ballet teacher or a ballet parent, I’d like to interview you for this book. Whether your ballet student is in Baby Ballerinas or pre-professional, I want to talk. Ballet dads are very welcome. If you’re interested, you can reply to this email, or tell me a bit about yourself at turningpointebook@gmail.com.
And if you know anyone who might be interested in speaking with me, please don’t hesitate to forward this along to them.
That’s it from me. Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
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