Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself

by Chloe Angyal

dancers have limited chances to develop an identity outside of dance: dance is their identity.

“There are never enough boy dancers,” Katherine Davis Fishman wrote in her book about the Ailey School. “Anywhere.”

Already he could sense that the people around him—children and adults alike—were on high alert for deviations from a hypermasculine norm, ready to police anyone who failed to perform masculinity properly.

What if boys and men who dance didn’t have to justify their choices with assurances about how traditionally masculine ballet is? What if they didn’t feel the need to shore up their masculinity, and for many, their heterosexuality, by emphasizing the bravura leaps and turns that ballet demands of them in addition to all that beauty? What if they were allowed to be dainty and pretty—what if they were allowed to be feminine—without apology?

Dancing is an act of connection—to music, to community, to history, to an audience, to one’s own body. To dance is to affirm our humanity, to take up space, to revel in our own beauty and power. In moments of crisis—be they political, ecological, or epidemiological—acts of humanity and beauty are precious, essential, life-affirming. Ballet is sometimes described as an ephemeral art, a creation that vanishes as soon as it appears. But the harm it can do, as well as the enormous good, will endure.