Paris (AFP)

In the world of ballet, languages ​​are loosened to evoke the taboo of wounds. Dorothée Gilbert, star of the Paris Opera, knows something about it since in the recent past, she thought she would become the "dancer with a holey foot" forever.

It is with this formula that the 36-year-old artist, now one of the most brilliant French ballerinas of her generation, begins her first book, "Etoile (s)", recently published.

Thanks to her "warrior temperament", she was able to overcome the difficulties at the opera's dance school, one of the most demanding in the world, Dorothée Gilbert almost 24 years old to see her career stop dead because of an injury that paralyzed him for six months. She tells how an examination reveals a "hole in the foot, fracture of fatigue of the second metatarsal, this small square bone at the base of the toe".

"Overnight, everything stops .. We say why me why now?", Says the AFP dancer, showing in December in the ballet "Raymonda" at the Paris Opera. "Like top athletes, we push our body to the extreme," said this Toulousaine born in a modest family.

She is part of a growing number of star dancers who speak more openly about their wounds, in books or on social networks.

The dancers grow up unconsciously with the saying "no pain, no gain" (no pain, no gain). Russian superstar Natalia Osipova told AFP in June that the dancers "are holding back" despite the pain, even evoking a superstition: "if we talk about it, it will get worse". Others are afraid of being seen as weak or missing opportunities.

"I chose to ignore the pain because time in the theater was precious," confided in July to its 80,000 subscribers on social networks the promising Canadian dancer Shale Wagman, after an injury. "It's a facet we do not want to show you," he wrote.

- "Politics of the ostrich" -

"It's a little politics of the ostrich, we do not want to talk about it, because we do not want to see it, we do not want to be hurt," says Dorothée Gilbert.

But according to her, "the wound, the recovery, the hygiene are more and more present subjects. Between us, we talk about it, we say to ourselves, this machine to massage the muscles, it is top, I'm going try '. " "We must talk about it to learn from our mistakes".

A Bolshoi star, Vladislav Lantratov, recently shared a video of him at the bar wearing stretch boots designed to stretch the muscles.

During his short tenure in 2015 as Director of Dance at the Opera, Benjamin Millepied led a small revolution by introducing a permanent medical unit at the Palais Garnier.

It remains that the dancers are less pampered than the sportsmen, according to Dorothée Gilbert. "The footballers have a whole system of kines and after the match, they are treated directly," she said.

Care and prevention "is an education that we did not necessarily have, but we learn on the job," says one that includes yoga and "gyrotonic" machines.

Sign that times change, Steven McRae, dancer of the often injured London Royal Ballet, confides regularly on his surgeries, and in his book "Dancing to the Edge and Back" (2017), the American David Hallberg, evokes at length a injury that kept him off the stage for two years.

Mother of a five-year-old daughter, Dorothea Gilbert wants this book to encourage the younger generation of dancers to fight. "For them, everything must be easy and fast, they do not take the time ... Many told me + I'm not flexible, I can not be a dancer".

Having missed her first contest to enter the school of dance, she was not flexible herself and did not have the ideal feet for the dance: "But I never doubted".

© 2019 AFP