Figuring Out the Name for Guys in Ballet
Okay, so this question popped into my head the other day. I was watching something, maybe a movie clip or an ad, I don’t quite remember exactly what sparked it. But there was this guy doing incredible ballet moves. Leaps, turns, the whole thing. And I thought, wait a minute, we always hear ‘ballerina’ for the women, but what are the fellas called?
My first thought was just ‘male ballerina’, but that sounded kinda clumsy, you know? Like saying ‘male actress’. It just didn’t sit right. So, I started digging around a bit in my memory, trying to recall if I’d ever heard a specific term.
I remember asking my neighbor Brenda, she used to take her daughter to ballet classes years ago. She scrunched up her face and said, “Oh gosh, I think they just called them ‘the boys’ or maybe ‘male dancers’?” That wasn’t super helpful, but it got me thinking it might not be one single fancy word everyone uses.
So, I spent some time just, well, looking into it. Not like intense research, more like casual searching when I had a spare moment. Trying different phrases in my head, thinking about how people talk.
Turns out, there are a few ways people refer to them:
- Male ballet dancer: This seems pretty common and straightforward. No confusion here. Does what it says on the tin.
- Ballet dancer: Often, people just say this, and you figure out the gender from context, like if they say ‘he’. Simple enough.
- Danseur: This is the fancy one! It’s the French term, like ‘ballerina’ is. I saw this pop up a few times. Seems like it’s the technically correct or traditional term that parallels ‘ballerina’.
- Principal dancer: This isn’t specific to men, but it’s used for the top-ranking dancers in a company, male or female. So a top male dancer would be a male principal dancer.
So, yeah. It wasn’t as simple as one single answer, which happens a lot, doesn’t it? Reminds me of when I was trying to figure out the proper name for those little plastic things at the end of shoelaces. Took me ages to land on ‘aglet’. Anyway, for the ballet guys, ‘danseur’ is the specific French word, but honestly, ‘male ballet dancer’ or just ‘ballet dancer’ seems way more common in everyday chat. It was interesting finding out though.
