In a recently-aired pre-Oscars conversation with Matthew McConaughey, hosted by CNN and Variety, Timothée Chalamet spoke about the vibrancy of cinema, and about how lucky he is to be working in the field. “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera,” he said, “or, you know, things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive.’”
Chalamet went on to claim that “no one cares” about ballet or opera. McConaughey agreed and chuckled in response.
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Ballet artists around the world promptly pushed back, insisting the art form is alive and widely loved. The Royal Ballet and Opera posted a supercut of its productions with a caption about how thousands of people attend shows every night, and invited Chalamet to visit. One Russian dancer posted a video of someone removing a Marty Supreme poster to reveal a poster promoting a performance of Swan Lake.
To many ballet dancers, Chalamet sounded like an ignorant bully. Ballet is too often the butt of the joke, and the joke usually relies on the shared assumption that ballet is feminine, frivolous, and a little gay. Good one, bro.
And though Chalamet did not make such insults himself, his comments fit into this broader context of disparagement and dismissal.
In the U.S., ballet is starved for state resources, which reflects a widespread lack of respect. And every few years, something like this Chalamet incident pops up, reminding dancers that as skilled as they are and as hard as they work, they’re not taken seriously. In 2019, Good Morning America’s Lara Spencer and George Stephanopoulos snickered at the news that Britain’s 6-year-old Prince George was taking ballet classes. Today, it’s Chalamet taking potshots at one artform as he celebrates the ongoing relevance of his own.
The uproar from the ballet world is understandable. But to Chalamet’s point, ballet is not as relevant as it could be.
Ballet is exclusive. For some, this is part of its appeal—only the best make it. And while striving for excellence is admirable, ballet’s obsession with excellence can make for a less-than-welcoming environment for those who just want to do it for fun.
This is especially true for adults, who can struggle to find ballet classes where they don’t feel hopelessly behind because their parents didn’t put them in a leotard as soon as they were potty-trained. Encouraging amateurism would help ballet find fans (and paying customers) it currently dismisses.
Then there’s the cost. Whether it’s classes, shoes, costumes, or competition fees, putting your child in ballet is a major investment. A pair of pointe shoes will set a parent back over $100, and depending on how hard your kid dances in them, will last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.
Dancers of color who want shoes that match their skin tone will spend more; because not all brands make shoes in inclusive shades, they buy special paint or foundation to customize their shoes, which takes extra time and breaks the shoe down faster.
Watching ballet is also expensive. While a ticket to see Chalamet play ping pong on the silver screen costs around $20 in New York City, the cheapest tickets to New York City Ballet—rush tickets for patrons between the ages of 13 and 30—are $30.
Read more: ‘Marty Supreme’ Is as Hollow as a Ping-Pong Ball
It’s expensive to be a professional dancer, too. Wages are low, and often aren’t paid out year-round, which means many dancers spend some of the year claiming unemployment or hustling for side gigs like teaching, guest performing, or private coaching to supplement their wages and fill the gaps.
While almost all the nation’s most prestigious ballet companies are unionized, many professional ballet dancers work in smaller companies or freelance, and don’t enjoy union protections, leaving them with little power to raise their wages or improve their workplaces in other ways.
Ballet’s rigid gender binary creates other problems. For all its public association with queerness, ballet remains largely committed to a frail, wispy femininity and a princely but muscular and explosive masculinity—with the stringent, often punishing body-shape standards to match.
Ballet’s stories are stale and often out of step with modern life. The ballets that dancers revere most and that companies rely on to fill theaters are mostly fairytales or Shakespearean tragedies about straight couples—Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet—in which the woman dies or is turned into a bird. (In Swan Lake, it’s both.)
All of which is to say: a lot of ballet’s waning relevance, its failure to thrive in the modern world, is of its own making.
Fortunately, there are many people who care enough about ballet to face these uncomfortable truths, and who are working to bring ballet into the twenty-first century by challenging traditions that don’t serve dancers’ health or the long-term health of the artform.
Theresa Ruth Howard, founder of Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet, has spent years challenging ballet leaders to see the full potential of Black dancers. At the Kennedy Center, she recently curated an evening of dancing that brought together Black choreographers and Black dancers from the nation’s best ballet companies, where they are accustomed to being in the minority. Phil Chan’s organization Final Bow for Yellowface has worked to end the practice of Yellowface in America’s most popular ballet, The Nutcracker, and bring authentic depictions of Asian culture to ballet stages.
Just this month, England’s Northern Ballet premiered Gentleman Jack, which has the extremely rare distinction of being full-length ballet with a lesbian protagonist. It’s the latest attempt by choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa to use ballet to tell stories about women who aren’t doomed fairies or birds. Here in the U.S., Kade Pyle runs a small ballet company whose open adult classes are friendly to genderqueer dancers—and large companies like New York City Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet are creating space for nonbinary dancers, too.
On the physical and mental health front, the new leadership of England’s Royal Ballet School has raised the age at which dance students leave home to live in their dorms from 11 to 13, allowing them to experience a less blinkered adolescence.
Following the longstanding example of the Australian Ballet, some U.S. ballet companies are recognizing the role strength and conditioning play in injury prevention and career longevity. The School of American Ballet, which trains many of the dancers who join New York City Ballet, recently invested in real strength equipment and personalized strength training for its students—something too much of the ballet world resists for fear its ballerinas will bulk up and become less flexible.
And around the country, ballet teachers are taking a second look at their own ballet education—which might have involved verbal abuse, pressure to dance through injuries, and praise for weight loss—and they’re choosing to run their classes or their schools differently. Rather than lionizing their own suffering and passing it down to a new generation, some teachers are imagining ballet without the kind of harms they endured, and finding that while “old school” methods might have yielded good results, new methods can make dancers even better.
The next time a public figure makes a mockery of ballet, rest assured that ballet will bite back. Bunheads are a passionate bunch.
But for ballet to survive and thrive, the many people who care about it need to direct that same passion at ending the practices that endanger our beloved artform.
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