IT’S ALWAYS BEEN A PROBLEM

In Willa Cather’s “Training for the Ballet: Making American Dancers,” a piece she wrote in 1913, she interviews Mme. Pauline Verhoeven, the new director of the Metropolitan Opera’s ballet school, who says that “High-kicking is not only ugly and disgusting in itself, but it is absolutely disastrous to the dancer. She soon becomes so loose at the hip-joint that she can no longer control her own motions properly. . .”