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!

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 tha