The ballerinas in this story are handicapped with weights, masks, and noise-making devices to cancel out their strength, beauty, and intelligence, respectively.
First, we find out that the ballerinas are handicapped to hide their strength and beauty. Their bodies are weighed down with heavy objects, and their faces are obscured by masks. Here's how George first perceives these handicapped dancers on television:
They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.
We also know that mental handicaps have been imposed on at least some of the ballerinas. When George's thoughts are interrupted by a loud noise in his head that causes him to flinch, he sees some of the dancers on the screen also flinching in the same manner. This observation leads us to infer that they, too, have noise-making devices implanted in their bodies to prevent them from thinking too deeply or for too long. In fact, when George hears a subsequent, particularly painful sound in his head--of a "twenty-one-gun salute"--he sees a few of the ballerinas on screen actually collapse, presumably from the shock of the same sudden sound.
As the story reaches its climax, we see what happens when a ballerina's handicaps are removed to reveal her true intelligence, strength, and beauty, in that order:
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask. She was blindingly beautiful.
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