Read on Twitter
The Crown S4, aka the first Diana season, drops Sunday, and you'll probably hear in the next few days that Diana dreamed of being a ballet dancer "but was too tall."
The second half of that sentence should be "...by ballet's fairly arbitrary standards." Diana was 5'10". Pointe adds several inches to your height, roughly the length of your own foot.
This is not "too tall," it's "too tall to be partnered on pointe by most men." Or "too tall to fit into a corps of swans where every other woman is 5'4"."
(But even then, there is a place for tall girls in ballet: there are two principal women at New York City Ballet right now who are 5'9". One of Balanchine's ballets literally has a role called Tall Girl.)
Lots of tall women were discouraged from taking their ballet training further because, looking up the ranks, their teachers see that tall girls aren't considered very employable. That's a choice that ballet gatekeepers make, and they can make different choices, if they want.
There could be an even bigger place for tall girls in ballet, if ballet decided to make one. If men were taught to partner women who are taller than them, or if choreographers de-prioritized man-woman partnering, for instance.
Diana was not too tall, the culture of ballet was too rigid. She could have become a ballet dancer, and lived her dream, and never have met Prince Charles.
And had her life warped by a completely different antiquated institution, I guess.
And had her life warped by a completely different antiquated institution, I guess.
