Christina's Adult Ballet

History lesson!

Her head had already been shaved.
In Revolutionary Paris, that meant one thing. The guillotine was coming.
Her name was Marie Grosholtz. She was a young woman who had made the mistake of living too close to royalty. She had spent years inside the Palace of Versailles — not as a noble, but as an art teacher to King Louis XVI's sister, Princess Élisabeth. She had walked those gilded corridors. She had laughed in those rooms. And when the Revolution came and turned France into a slaughterhouse, the mobs decided that was close enough.
They threw her in prison.
They shaved her head.
They scheduled her death.
But Marie had a mentor — a doctor named Philippe Curtius, who had raised her like a daughter and taught her his obsession: sculpting human faces in wax. Curtius ran a wax exhibition in Paris that crowds couldn't stop visiting. He had sculpted Voltaire. He had sculpted Benjamin Franklin. He had made the famous and the powerful look so real that strangers would gasp and reach out to touch them.
Curtius rushed to the revolutionaries. He argued, begged, and showed them her work. This woman, he swore, was no royalist. She was an artist of the people.
They released her.
But there was a condition.
To prove her loyalty, she would be given a job that almost no one else had the stomach for.
She would make wax death masks of everyone the guillotine killed.
She started with people she had known personally.
King Louis XVI — the man whose palace she had walked through. She pressed the casting plaster against his severed face.
Marie Antoinette — the queen whose gowns had swept past her in the corridors of Versailles. She did the same.
Princess Élisabeth — the woman who had been her student, her companion, possibly her friend. She didn't look away.
When the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed to death in his bathtub, Marie was called to the scene so quickly that his body was still warm. She knelt beside him and worked.
When Robespierre — the man most responsible for the bloodbath that had nearly k*lled her — was finally executed, she made his mask too. His face was disfigured from a failed su***de attempt the night before. She sculpted him exactly as she found him.
For years, she sat with the faces of the dead.
And she survived.
When her mentor Curtius died in 1794, he left her everything — his wax figures, his two museums, his entire collection. Marie now owned the most extraordinary visual record of the French Revolution in existence: the actual faces of the people who had made it, led it, and died in it.
In 1802, she packed everything she owned, took her young son, crossed the English Channel to Britain, and never went back.
For the next 33 years, she traveled the British countryside alone — a single mother with a horse-drawn caravan full of wax figures — setting up exhibitions in dusty rented halls, charging one shilling a ticket. Farmers and shopkeepers and country families who would never see Paris suddenly stood inches away from the real death mask of Marie Antoinette, looking back at them in silence.
In 1835, at 74 years old, she finally stopped traveling.
She settled in London, on Baker Street, and opened a permanent museum.
She had survived a revolution. She had outlasted an empire. She had built something no one could take from her — in a country whose language she had barely spoken when she arrived.
In 1842, at 81, she made one final sculpture. A self-portrait. A small, calm, sharp-eyed old woman in a white bonnet, looking steadily out at the people coming through the door.
That figure still stands at the entrance to Madame Tussauds in London today.
She died peacefully in her sleep on April 16, 1850, aged 88.
The next time you stand next to a wax figure and take a photo, you're standing inside something built by a woman who was supposed to be executed — who pressed casting plaster against the faces of kings and queens she had known in life, and turned her survival into something that has now lasted nearly two centuries.
Some people are shaped by history.
Marie Tussaud shaped it back.

Memorial Day classes :

9:30 am, Advanced with Christina
11:40 am, Beginners 3 with Leslie
1:20 pm, Absolute Beginner Plus with Leslie
NO EVENING classes on that day, but all students may attend one of the classes offered in the morning! Let’s enjoy each other’s company!

Today’s class!!!

Our schedule for Spring / Summer

Great group of new beginners under Tara’s guidance,started yesterday, it was about balancing fun and hard work! Welcome to our studio dancers!!