Wordles: Design and Ballet

How do you sum up a year of words? To celebrate its anniversary, The Ballet Bag made two Wordles based on content from the site. It's a quick way of showing what's been timely and worth writing about.

It was an Ashton-heavy season for the Royal Ballet. And Black Swan has taken up some serious space in ballet writing. There are the obvious words — ballet (duh!) — but I like looking at the smaller pieces of the puzzle.

'Critic' (or derivatives of it) comes up a lot in these images. I wonder in what way the word was being used — to introduce a writer or to talk about the role of a critic? Wordle arranges the words randomly, but it's quite a fun experiment to see what words are paired together. It prompts me to think about issues in ballet, and what should be covered:

1. "different read"

2. "made...little...use"

3. "things wanted"

4. "another"

5. "copyright

6. "make"

7. "might end"

1. "critic wrong"

2. "fact critics"

3. "reviews tale"

4. "certain moment found"

5. "sense"

6. "online"

7. "interesting position"

8. "real dancers"

I'm also noticing that many of the words I chose to pull from these diagrams have a thingness to them, a design-ness:

critics, found, online, real, made, use, things, wanted, another, copyright, make, might, end

I keep thinking about 'making.' What goes into making a ballerina? What goes into the making of a ballet? What goes into the making of those pointe shoes? Making, to me, has to do with process. 'Making' implies questions of How? and Why?

I need to think about Making and Ballet. And Making and Design. And Making and Ballet and Design.