Stairway handrails, pipe fittings, modified shelf brackets, drinking bar foot rest—these are all places where Ballet Barre brackets have been harvested. As you check out photographs we’ve gathered, you’ll see how many people have improvised their own solutions. Until 1952, there was no Ballet Barre bracket you could simply buy in a store.
In 1952, Alva built Rosalie, her beautiful 2,000-sq-ft dance studio/theater in San Pedro. Instead of doing what everyone else had done, he decided to recreate something more practical. “How high should a ballet barre be?” remains the most common question we receive. In the original plans, Alva included specific measurements to get his hand-drawn designs approved by the city. However, those figures quickly changed to match the needs of his clientele.
A Ballet Barre is used for balance and stretching. Even though nowadays there may be hundreds of different exercises that use the iconic Ballet Barre, balancing and stretching was its original and primary purpose. If a barre is too high, it may lift the dancer’s shoulder and compromise proper posture. If it’s too low, they may lean into the Barre. “Waist height” of the user has long been considered the approximate correct height for a Ballet Barre.
Instead of just making fifty brackets for their new, gorgeous studio, Alva made one hundred. He believed others might want this innovative design as well. It was adjustable in height—something never seen before. This allowed the Barres to be lowered for children’s classes and raised for adult classes as needed. While double and triple Barres have certainly been used to accommodate different heights, Alva noted that for an adult doing port de bras or fouetté turns at the barre, a lower barre could get in the way—and he was right. Having a single barre is clean and simple.
Another huge innovation—still unmatched by others attempting to create the perfect Barre bracket—was how the Barre was mounted to the bracket. Alva chose to mount it at a single point from underneath. A slight bend to the supporting arms keeps the bracket completely out of the way and eliminates interference. The full length of the Barre is unobstructed.
A bonus feature, not originally planned, was that the Barre could also be slid out of this new adjustable bracket and easily removed from the wall. The room may be needed for other purposes like performances, which the Rosalie & Alva school of Ballet and Allied Arts Theater has taken full advantage of for 70+ years.
Years later, Rosalie and Alva’s son Matt expanded the original design to create what is now the most beautiful and practical freestanding Ballet Barre produced anywhere. All Alvas products are still manufactured entirely in the United States.
This freestanding Barre has Barres on both sides that can be adjusted independently—one side high, one side low, both high, both low, whatever is needed. It is extremely strong, using X-brace construction, yet lightweight and easy to move around the studio. Its stable design, along with the Barres being set away from the center of the frame, prevents the legs from jutting out and interfering with the dancer the way center-mounted Barres often do.
If you’d like a more detailed explanation from Matt, please contact us.
