​Melissa Lineburg ​Melissa Lineburg is enjoying her 12th season as a professional dancer. As a freelance dancer she works with multiple dance companies and choreographers in the Washington, DC area. She is co-founder, managing director, and company artist with Ballet Embody. Off-stage, she is a certified yoga teacher, and she teaches Adult Advanced Beginning Ballet at Maryland Youth Ballet in Silver Spring. She knows what it’s like to be a dancer…classes, rehearsals, performances; and then there is food. What to eat? How much and when to eat? Always an issue. But one day, somethin ..read more

Here are some tips for surviving Summer Intensive. Eat Well. One of the best things you can do for yourself is to eat well whenever you’re dancing. Rachel Fine, a former professional dancer turned Registered Dietitian Nutritionist offers some sound advice and a free course on dance nutrition and diet. Check out her website. https://dancenutrition.com/nutrition-for-dancers/ Your body needs time to rest and recuperate after a long day of dancing. Give yourself the luxury of an ice bath…whatever you need to relax your muscles and give them the rest they need to rebuild, strengthen, and be read ..read more

Is a Summer Intensive program right for you? What will you get out of it? Where should you go? Ballet schools almost everywhere offer some kind of Summer Intensive that combines a rigorous schedule with a lot of new and different teachers, students, and often an entirely new city and dance community. How do you know if you’re in the right place? And what should you expect once you get there? Where will you live? How do you prepare for the experience? What about the audition? We talked with Kristina Windom, Upper Division Head at The Washington School of Ballet who helped answer some ..read more

What are the differences between real injuries versus aching feet and sore muscles? The answer is often resolved with two basic home remedies – Compression and Ice.  COMPRESSION Research conducted by Connecticut University Professor of Kinesiology William Kraemer in 2011 shows that wearing a compression suit improved an athlete’s performance while they rest. It also helped boost performance under fatiguing conditions, improved stability and helped reduce injuries caused by tired muscles. “Our research in the area of compression and soft tissue damage helped us develop this idea of using c ..read more

What’s a dancer blog without addressing some common ballet injuries? Which is why today we are sharing hip labral tear treatment and some stretching ideas, massage to decrease pain and about the ballet labral tear in general. Hopefully, this will help to give you ideas about how to prevent and treat hip labral tear, which is a common injury amongst dancers. You might be sitting at home thinking about how much pain you’re in and wanting to know if hip labral tear is the culprit. Ballet labral tear is a common ballet injury due to the nature of the constant repetitive movement that dancers are ..read more

Welcome back to another week of Ballerina’s Choice, where we feature different Zarely products that have been hand-picked by ballerinas. We offer 20% off each item for 48 hours. Ballet fashion is about feeling empowered to dance your best by looking your best with dancewear that accentuates your beauty. Zarely is the perfect shop for all your ballet fashion needs with products co-created by dancers for dancers. Whether you want to show off your athletic side or your delicate grace, we have it all THIS WEEK WE ARE EXCITED TO FEATURE ZARELY ROLE MODEL, KATHERINE BARKMAN and her top-selling Kat ..read more

As the COVID-19 outbreak has escalated across Europe, the US and Asia over the past month, it has taken a toll on dancers and the arts. The daily routine of heading into the studio and working as a class, with productions to look forward to has been temporarily halted. Of course, along with the rest of the world, coronavirus has caused everything to come to a standstill. A fast-paced world has felt the force of the pandemic and it has led to a new era that none of us could have predicted. Zarely will be donating 10% of every sale to help major US ballet companies in these unprecedented times ..read more

As if hamburger hands in ballet isn’t bad enough, ballet brings a whole range of problems. But the good news is, food isn’t just represented by sloppiness, sometimes it’s an aspirational metaphor! Though it does seem like, most of the time, ballet brings all sorts of problems to the table and, you guessed it, we have a food name for most of them. You might fancy a frappé on a cool summer’s day and who doesn’t love pancakes and chicken wings? But, we’re guessing you want to leave some of them on the real table and not bring them to ballet class with you. Are we right? After the success of our g ..read more

A question that sits on most dancers’ lips at some point in their journey is how many ballet class per week and how many ballet class should I actually be taking?How much is too much? When does it get to the point that you’re burning the candle at both ends and find yourself not being able to give 100% because you’re beyond exhaustion? On the other end of the scale – how many hours is not enough? Should we be comparing hours with our friends and attending the same amount of ballet classes per week as our friends, or is it all personal and relative? Here at Zarely, we’re finding out how many ba ..read more