As a former ballet dancer, I absolutely lost it watching the full version. Just, holy shit.
Tumblr always says that they want men to be sluttier, but we finally get a male version of the can-can (a fixture for girls in my ballet school), and you mock them?
This isn’t pure ballet, by the way. It’s heavily influenced by Hopak (Cossack dancing) – unsurprising considering it’s a Russian company. Those bits where they bounce between deep pliés (squats?? I guess) and then back up to standing are classic Hopak moves. I remember when I was at my fittest, doing about five or six hours of dance a week, I could do those deep Hopak pliés, but I sure as heck felt it the next day. These guys would absolutely have thighs of steel. (And not so much hip flexors of rubber bands, but hamstrings of rubber. Hip flexors of steel. That’s gonna be the necessary ingredient to be able to kick your leg above your head. Which I used to be able to do, once upon a time.)
Ballet itself is a formalised form of dance that has always taken peasant dances into itself and stylised and gentrified them, so a melding with Hopak is absolutely part of the tradition. As part of my ballet training, I was taught stylised versions of a hornpipe (a sailor’s dance, not entirely unlike Yablochko above), Hungarian folk dancing, the tarantella, the polonaise, and flamenco. There are even steps like ‘pas de basque’ which acknowledge that they’re lifted from other places – in that case, Basque folk dance.
