Flexible Venus 1: Dancer in a lilac tutu

Agent Triple P would never claim to be an aficionado of ballet, although he has attended a fair few in the company of ballet-loving ladies.  We have seen ballet in London, Berlin, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Vienna, Toronto, Hanoi and probably a few other places we have forgotten about.

Whilst Triple P can understand the appeal of ballet he remembers being rather surprised, on attending his first performance, at the amount of noise the dancers made when thumping hard on to the stage.  It took something away from the experience, which is why we think it works better on TV where you just get the music and no thumping!

Although we haven't gone out with any dancers per se we have known  some who have had dance training (quite a lot in several cases) and the thought of dancers has always held a certain erotic frisson for Triple P.  There are four things Triple P finds particularly alluring about dancers: the toned legs and slender figures (we appreciate a skinny girl),  the clothing, the physical poise and, last but by no means least, the demonstrable flexibility.

One girl we knew did regular jazz and tap classes to keep in shape and her legs, although pleasingly soft to the touch had this iron tone beneath the surface like silk riding over tungsten carbide.  Stroking her legs was a true pleasure, especially when she flexed her muscles and you could feel her underlying strength.

There are two attractive aspects of dance dress.  Firstly, the performance wear, which for classical ballet features that strangely attractive garment the tutu. This Russian dancer is wearing a fetching lilac example of the now almost ubiquitous Balanchine/Karinska Tutu whose softer profile was, nevertheless, radical when it first appeared in 1950 as an alternative to the stiffer wired "pancake" tutu.  The success of the tutu, which on reflection is, of course, an utterly ridiculous garment, relies on the emphasis it gives to the dancer's legs.

Dance practice wear tends to be an artfully created melange of all sorts of contrasting pieces of clothing which, nevertheless, needs to allow full movement whilst keeping the legs warm.  One of Triple P's lady friends had got the wearing of legwarmers, skirts, vests, short cardigans and scarfs down to a fine art.  There were so many items of clothing but all so skimpy that they barely made a costume in total.  Which, of course, is the real trick.

Properly trained dancers are usually easy to identify by the way they move, hold their bodies and even the way they stand. Girls who habitually stand with their feet in a "T" position have probably had a lot of ballet training.  Triple P finds this almost unconscious elegance very appealing.

This young lady has had classical training as she is able to go en pointe a technique which requires literally years of practice starting at the barre and great muscular strength (and not just in the legs).

Although the idea is to extend the line of the leg and make the feet look elegant in reality most ballet dancers have terrible feet; the rigours of going en pointe giving them calluses, bleeding toenails, bunions, bursitis and many other nasty ailments.  You have to suffer for art!

This sequence of pictures was recently sent to us by our particular friend S with whom we have been to several ballets in Canada.  A young lady who did a lot of ballet as a youngster she well knows the effort needed to look effortless!

Triple P confesses that every time he sees an attractive ballerina in a tutu his mind always turns to exciting thoughts of flexibility and minimal ballet clothes so this set of photos is most welcome!

Female dancers' flexibility is their most obvious source of erotic appeal, as our Russian girl exemplifies in this final splendid study, but we will look at flexibility and the erotic shortly.