The Red Bulletin May 2019

The poise and beauty of ballet masks a gritty
world of bruised bodies, inflamed muscles,
pain and pressure. But a game-changing
generation of dancers at The Royal Ballet
are using innovative sports science to
fortify their bodies and minds, and thrust
their art form into the future
When Gemma
Pitchley-Gale is
not pirouetting
in pink pointe
shoes at the Royal
Opera House – the
London home of
the world-famous
Royal Ballet – she
can be found power-lifting cast-iron barbells
in the gym. The petite dancer once dead-lifted
97.5kg – more than double her 47kg bodyweight.
“People think we just flounce about in the
studio all day, are skinny and weak, and don’t
eat anything,” says the South Londoner. “When
they find out how strong we are now, they think,
‘What? Wow!’” Her colleague Claire Calvert,
who has danced roles including the Sugar Plum
Fairy in The Nutcracker, has a squat PB of 100kg,
which makes her stronger, pound for pound,
than legendary 116kg South African rugby prop
Tendai ‘The Beast’ Mtawarira.
The male dancers in their company also possess
astonishing power. Welshman William Bracewell
can lift his 73kg bodyweight for 45 consecutive
calf-raises. During a routine gym workout,
Alexander Campbell, a cricket-loving Australian,
lifts a cumulative load of 3,655kg – roughly the
weight of a full Ford Transit van. And Matthew
Ball, a Liverpool-born dancer with boyband
good-looks, can endure the equivalent of four
times his bodyweight when holding a stationary
single-leg squat. “I showed my parents a video
of me lifting weights and even they said, ‘Should
you be doing that?’” smiles Ball, 26, bulging
veins clearly visible on his sculpted biceps.
“But when I land from a big jump, I have the
equivalent of 500kg of force through my legs,
so I need to train for that.” To provide some
perspective, 500kg is the approximate weight
of a 5m-long saltwater crocodile.
Today’s dancers are powering up in the
gym for good reason: ballet is a beautiful but
brutal world of aching muscles and crushing
fatigue. To master the sublime footwork of
iconic ballets such as Swan Lake, Cinderella or
this season’s crowd-pleaser Romeo and Juliet,
these performers undergo up to six hours of
intricate rehearsals every day, and deliver as
many as four live shows each week. The physical
toll is immense: the Royal Ballet’s dancers –
of whom there are around 100, and whose
bloodied feet are wrecked by blisters, bunions,
black nails, cuts and bruises – burn through
12,000 shoes on average every year. With
a mean of 6.8 injuries per year, ranging from
42 THE RED BULLETIN