In which your itinerate correspondent stubbles onto the stage, and writes about ballet! Dance aficionados, perhaps even former corps de ballet members, are invited to pas de deux in the comments or stage a solo in reply on one of the several open days this month. Through the opening days of this month’s theme, “Men and Women,” it has variously been asserted that the relationship between the sexes is one of supremacy, of (zero-sum?) competition, or of complementarity. What follows is an illustration, perhaps an argument, of complementarity in a positive-sum competition.

On point, en pointe:

The Royal Opera House’s “Ballet Evolved” video series, illustrates on stage the evolution of ballet over the past four centuries. In the 1830s, a ballerina created an innovation in female dancers’ footwork. While the en pointe technique innovation drove a change in ballerina’s footwear, enabling more extreme development of the technique, men did not see a similarly radical change in technique.