Twitter joins toeshoes and tutusbackstage.

By GIA KOURLAS

In the rarefied world of ballet, where dancers are expected to speak with their bodies, sometimes it seems that aloofness is something to aspire to. Lately, though, the ribbons are loosening. Courtesy of Twitter, dancers are starting to make themselves heard. It isn’t always dainty.

“Hi, I’m Devin and I’m an MRIaholic.”

“Once again I took 2 days off this week. My body is wrecked. At the chiropractor now getting fixed.”

“What you didn’t know- fell in my dress reh. Fri, tweaked my foot, and couldn’t finish! Thurs was the first time I did the whole ballet!”

“Don’t let me be fat.” Tweets - like these by the New York City Ballet dancers Devin Alberda, Ashley Bouder, Kathryn Morgan and Mr. Alberda again - are starting to change the public face of ballet, making dancers human. Ballet has long been seen as elite, ethereal and something to keep under glass. Casting is a closely guarded process, and when a dancer is off the stage, the reason rarely becomes public.

But when dancers are the ones documenting their own injuries, as Ms. Morgan did before her debut as Aurora in “The Sleeping Beauty” last season, they hold the power. Ms. Morgan wasn’t sure she would be able to dance the role until two weeks before her first performance. She tweeted the cancellation of her appearance in another ballet and assured her followers that she was saving her injured foot - “super frustrated but it is for the best.”

Ms. Bouder, a principal dancer at City Ballet, has a growing international presence that she credits in part to the connections she has made through Twitter and Facebook.

For her, social media are a vital way to reach past the orchestra pit. “We don’t have celebrity status like actors in magazines,” she said. “That’s the main reason people get interested in something ? you get all the dirt, you get to know someone and you become attached, and in the dance world, we’re like a face, not a personality.”

At City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, there are no policies on dancers’ participation on Twitter, though some choose to keep their Twitter accounts private. (At the moment the relationship between tech-savvy dancers and company administrators seems to be akin to a child showing a parent how to use e-mail.)

Mr. Alberda is a different sort of ballet tweeter, less self-promotional, more philosophical and always snappy: “I’ve heard the voice of God and he is an angry God with a Danish accent who doesn’t like my acting.” The god in question was his boss, Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief. As Mr. Alberda explained, he wasn’t trying to be offensive. “It’s taking a difficult part of my day and making it slightly humorous,” he said.

For now at least, the gods haven’t tweeted.