Lisa Armstrong
A ballet class that’s fit for the fashionable
Five feet nine of tensile strength and grace, Mary Helen Bowers is the real deal. She’s the former New York City Ballet dancer who transformed Natalie Portman into a plausible prima ballerina for the 2011 dark hit, Black Swan (they worked out between 5am and 7am for two years), Oh, and she has also trained Helena Christensen, Kirsten Dunst, Miranda Kerr, Karen Elson and Doutzen Kroes as well as chiselling numerous other supers into Victoria’s Secret Angels shape. Unexpectedly, she’s accessible and – a quality not always associated with ballerinas, not least because of, ahem, Black Swan – sane.
I know this, because for the past few years I too have “trained” with her – online. For in addition to sculpting the stars, she has developed Ballet Beautiful, a workout method that any woman can follow, anywhere in the world, by logging in online.
Online exercise classes are not generally that satisfactory. They’re either too easy or impossible. The camera angles are confusing and the instructions annoying. Hers, however, are precise (when she lapses into too much balletspeak, her husband Paul Dans soon picks her up on it), serene (but oh so tough) and the music classical. Chopin workout at 7.30am? Lovely. Every so often, when she’s about to shoot a new batch of films, she’ll ask subscribers for music requests.
Still, there’s nothing like taking a real class, and recently, one day between shows in New York, I finally found a free window to book into one. That alone felt like an achievement, because the address of her studio isn’t on her website. This is properly “boutique’’. But the team reply to online requests quickly and they’re very friendly – so I make my way down to Soho, up a lot of stairs (got the heart going already) and find myself in a light filled, white floor
boarded studio garlanded with tutus – and Bowers herself. I’m to have a one on one and interview her at the same time. A few weeks later, back in New York again, I took a class with about nine other women – including two twiggy Parisiens and a magazine editor – all relatively normal until a sweep of models, including Doutzen Kroes, arrive for the next class.
Once you dip your toe in, none of this is intimidating. There’s so much emphasis on gracefulness and doing small, callisthenic type movements (when I listen back to the interview, I keep hearing Bowers remind me to pull in my core) that it seems less competitive than the average yoga session, which can end up being about how contorted you can go. “My hope is that women leave feeling beautiful, whatever their shape or age,” says Bowers.
If you’ve been to barre classes in the UK and found them missing something (eg, anything remotely balletic and music that didn’t make you want to wrench your earlobes off) Ballet Beautiful is a revelation. Thoughtful, rigorous, it comes, as Bowers puts it, “from an authentic place that’s directly connected to ballet”. While you don’t need to have been near a ballet lesson to benefit, there’s enough standing in first, second or even sixth position to bring out your inner Darcey. You’ll find yourself doing plies, arabesques (after a fashion, in my case), tendus and swan arms. But perhaps more importantly, you’ll hear her talking about elegance, posture and elongating the neck – not often referred to in the average gym. “Urgh, gyms,” says Bowers, who retired from professional ballet at 26 (she’s now 40). Unlike Deborah Bull, a former prima ballerina with the Royal Ballet who vocalised her objections to the sadistic environment portrayed in Black Swan, saying the ballet world had moved on, Bowers thinks, if anything, the darkness was underplayed: “There’s still a lot of weird snobbery. But what do I know about what things are like in British ballet companies?”
Quite a bit, I imagine. Part of her training was through the Royal Ballet’s syllabus. She moved to New York from Charlotte, North Carolina, at 15 and danced with the New York City Ballet, which was founded by George Balanchine, an exacting taskmaster who, according to legend, would parade up and down his corps de ballet saying that he wanted to see “bones”). “Balanchine’s is a very different technique to standard classical ballet,” explains Bowers. “He made the lines more elongated, less curved. Everything is extended.”
After she stopped dancing she didn’t exercise for a year. “I’d been doing eight to 10 hours a day. I was burnt out.” She studied English Literature at Columbia University and didn’t look back. But then she began to gain weight. “And my body actually ached from not exercising. I got atrophy, which is surprisingly painful.”
She knew she didn’t want to do Pilates (“I never got on with the Reformer”) or yoga, or get on a treadmill – ever again. “The hours I’ve spent on a running machine, literally and metaphorically getting nowhere.”
She had begun to experiment with her own technique while she was still dancing and soon realised she had the basis for something very different. She launched Ballet Beautiful in 2008, soon moving into DVDS and the online classes, which vary in length from four minutes to 20. Students can put their own programme together, buying videos as they go, which I did, until I discovered the subscription option: a monthly fee, which opens up the entire library of 280-plus videos, plus daily one-hour programmes. Two to three hours a week guarantees change in your body. Four hours will transform, she promises.
Better still, there’s no pounding. Bowers recommends about 20 per cent of cardio each workout (through plies and arabesques rather than high-impact jumping). “There‘s so much noise surrounding cardio. It’s completely overstated. Sure, it’s good for heart health, but do too much, your body can hold on to excess weight.”
Although she’s clearly genetically blessed, she’s also had three daughters in five years, “and they’re professional destroyers of sleep … In the end, whatever you do, enjoy it, and don’t beat yourself up,” she says.
For what it’s worth, I’m definitely more toned, with better posture but I’ll leave it to Natalie Portman to summarise: “Mary Helen’s technique allows anyone to achieve the long, toned physique of a dancer.”