GG Popova

Maria Popova teaches at a St Petersburg ballet school, twenty years in the studio, first at the barre and now standing in front of it, and the lesson she repeats most often is that the correction matters more than the applause. It follows her online. Somewhere in a match she will mention, gently, that you are sitting badly: the shoulders, the wrist, the way the screen is angled, all delivered in the tone of somebody who has said it four thousand times to teenagers. It is never about the dice. Two members have told her it did their backs good and one has told her it is unbearable. She never mentions the play and the posture together, which she considers an important distinction.