(Untitled)

[gonzo21]

This is very cool.

Seventeen-year-old Bianca Passarge of Hamburg dresses up as a cat and dances
on wine bottles in June 1958. Her performance was based on a dream. She
practiced for eight hours a day to do this.

Comments

[mcmurphy79]

This is mental

[gonzo21]

It looks like she's got the bottles sort of lodged a bit in some sort of structure, I guess for a touch more stability. But, that almost looks more dangerous because if she slides off there's all that wood there to turn an ankle on.

But yeah, I wonder if somebody took video of it.

[amethystian]

I'm a dancer and the thought of this makes me sweat!
Pointe shoes and glass bottles? Nope nope nope! I have enough trouble on the ground in pointes, lol!

[gonzo21]

Ballet dancers do some truly superhuman things. But that. yeah. I mean, how would you even start?

[amethystian]

Aside from having massively strong ankles and fantastic core strength, I imagine she probably trained on a gymnast beam first.
And I'm really hoping those bottles were glued down.

The other thing that slays me is that there probably wasn't any padding in her pointe shoes. Nowadays, we use lambs wool, gel-lined pouches, toe-tape, toe pads, etc to protect our feet- some pointe shoes have padding built in. But even 20 years ago, dancers had nothing for padding. At most, they could dip their feet in surgical spirit to harden the skin and wrap their toes in leather.
I'm a massive wimp- my pointe have built in padding, and I use gel pouches and lambs wool. Although, in my defence, my middle toe is longer than all my other toes, so part of this is to keep all on my weight going onto my middle toes and nowhere else.

[gonzo21]

The bottles do look like they're locked down in that frame, yes. But yeah, that was one of the things I've enjoyed most about the ballets i've been to, just the musculature on the prima ballerinas, the way they move, all that power and grace. Just amazing.

Surgical spirit and leater wrapping? Geezus. Ballerinas are hardcore.

[akkajemo]

She may very well have had a dream about this, but to me this looks like a publicity photo - the building behind her is a "Schwarze Katz" wine cellar.

[gonzo21]

Well the picture and blurb I did pick up from tumblr, and 99.9999% of the things on Tumblr are just flat-out factually wrong, so it wouldn't surprise me.

[topum]

This is pretty cool indeed.

[gonzo21]

Ballet dancers are amazing.

[ellierachael]

That's pretty crazy balance skills

[gonzo21]

As party tricks go, it's a pretty impressive one.