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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chloe Angyal
Read between
June 10 - July 14, 2022
As was the case for so many parts of American life, the pandemic exposed the fragility and dysfunction of a system that had been working well enough for enough privileged people that its failings could be papered over and explained away. And as is the case for so many parts of American life, ballet is never going back to how it was before the flood.
If ballet survives, it will be because of the individuals and institutions who are demanding that it do better, who have long loved ballet and are now insisting that it, finally, love them back.
Ballet’s unusual blend of glamour and repression makes it easy to fathom a twisted dark truth behind the upright glittering beauty we see onstage.
Because it’s in ballet class, no matter how long they stick with it, that so many girls learn what it means to be a woman.
“men are far more likely to receive individual recognition because although they are in the minority, their power status within society is seen to legitimize the art. Therefore, teachers pay more attention to their male students in the hope that more men in dance will ease dance from its marginal position.”
When boys in ballet are taught from an early age that they are special and are permitted to exercise more creativity than girls, is it any wonder that they are far more likely to develop the belief that they are entitled to create and lead?
almost like it is a microcosm for real life
Some steps are considered too feminine for men to perform, and more than one gay professional dancer told me that teachers and artistic directors had instructed him to “butch up” his dancing, to dance “more solidly,” in order to stay within the confines of the binary.
lets girls do tour en l'air you cowards
pas de deux class does serve as a useful metaphor for the ballet world at large: as hard as the women are working, as beautifully as they are displayed onstage or in the studio, it’s the men who are in control.
ouch!
“What was so heartbreaking and painful about leaving ballet was that I gave up so many parts of myself and my identity in order to belong, and sort of denied and repressed myself. And I still didn’t belong.”
OUCH!!!!!!
Once controlled by the crown, ballet was now controlled by capitalism.
All my homies hate capitalism
Now that dancing had been devalued, it was done almost exclusively by women; and now that dancers were almost exclusively women, they were paid less and treated worse.
disappointed but not surprised
Ballet became a respectable way for American girls and young women to exercise, a form of physical activity that taught girls grace and good posture and didn’t threaten to make them too muscular or masculine.
Ballerinas, in exchange for their extraordinary beauty, are expected to endure extraordinary pain.
As basketball sneakers and running shoes have been engineered almost beyond recognition, pointe shoes have remained largely unchanged for generations of dancers, even though the technology exists to make them more durable and safer.
This resistance to safety in the name of beauty has a long, gruesome history in ballet.
In a culture that neglects research into the female body, cares little for women’s pain, and places a low value on women’s sexual pleasure, this is all quite predictable.
AGAIN disappointing but not SURPRISED
While physical health care is easy to justify as necessary for dancers to keep dancing, mental health care, McGuire says, is too often dismissed as an unaffordable luxury, not something worth making room for in a company or school budget: “We don’t have time or money for that.”
One result of the youth imperative is that dancers have limited chances to develop an identity outside of dance: dance is their identity.
this is the one
It is impossible to talk about ballet’s mental illness problem without talking about perfectionism, about the inevitable mental and emotional toll of an art form that requires its practitioners to spend hours in front of mirrors, comparing their fallible bodies to an unattainable ideal, and to each other.
Ballet teaches you a way of looking that is hard to shake even after you stop dancing, a way of spotting minute details—minute flaws—and fixating on them until they’re fixed.
“I think [ballet] attracts perfectionists,” Hamilton says, “because if you were not a perfectionist, I don’t think you would be doing the same tendus over and over again.”
"ballet attracts perfectionists" is an amazing and true take
Ideally, artists should be a little bit mad; madness, we’ve been taught to believe, is where the genius lies.
Succeeding in ballet, or even just surviving, requires extra talent, extra work, extra resilience, and extra sacrifices from dancers of color, especially Black and brown dancers, and their parents.
Dancers of color have continued to shape American ballet despite concerted efforts by gatekeepers to keep ballet companies white or mostly white.
It is impossible to separate barre’s restraint and control, or its associations with domesticity and childhood, from the whiteness of ballet.
Barre depends on the implied whiteness of ballet, and its overwhelming femininity, to market those luxury fitness classes and all the gear one is supposed to wear while doing them (and while traveling to and from them, and while brunching afterward). Without the implied whiteness of ballet, without its heavy association with a very particular kind of femininity, barre’s prestige would fall away.
I knew I felt weird about barre classes for a reason
Because it is still acceptable for ballet teachers and company directors to dismiss any dancer on the basis of their line, there is little to stop white ballet gatekeepers from dismissing Black dancers, especially women, based on the belief that they simply are not capable of the kinds of lines they believe are inherent to that white European aesthetic.
“Ballet is so subjective,” Howard says, “it’s basically who’s looking at that body, whether it’s a teacher or an artistic director, and how they perceive that body.”
New York City Ballet hired its first Black male principal dancer in 1962. It has never had a Black woman principal, ever.
kinda gaggy...
the trope of the Black man as a laborer makes it harder for white ballet audiences and gatekeepers to see Black dancers as romantic leads. In ballet, these roles are traditionally danced by the men who fit the description of a danseur noble, a regal leading man who looks like the white ballet establishment’s idea of a prince. Black dancers are relegated to comic sidekick roles, the Mercutio to the white man’s Romeo.
interesting
the Black body is not problematic. “What’s problematic are the implicit biases against the Black body.”
“The companies that don’t embrace this now will fail,” says Aubrey Lynch, the chief officer of education and creative programs at Harlem School of the Arts Dance. “Because in twenty years the majority of the country will be of color, and they’re not gonna want to go see a white ballet company with no Black people in it.”
“The directors have a lot of antiquated ideas about ballet,” Nardia Boodoo says. “Who gets to do ballet, and what ballet is… Everyone’s still in love and married to their old ideas that just don’t work. Then they turn around and want to know why no one wants to come to the ballet. It doesn’t represent society anymore.”
“The display of different bodies may be where diversity starts but not where it should end.”
there was a sense of loneliness and confusion among boys who, at a very young age, found themselves stuck between a subculture in which they were prized and precious, and a larger culture in which they were pariahs.
Because ballet is “for girls,” boys who choose to do it are understood to be deviant.
Most heartbreaking in Risner’s research are the stories of boys who are bullied in their own homes, by men in their own families, for violating the rigid rules of masculinity.
men are so tragic
In response, professional ballet dancers, especially men, used their social media platforms to push back against the derision and cruelty in Spencer’s words and, as Jared Allen Brunson put it on Instagram, “drag” her.
drag her.
Sometimes the attempt to prove how manly ballet dancers are verges on the comical: a desperate, repeated attempt to distance men who dance from anything resembling femininity by playing up the athleticism of dancing and playing down its artistic side.
now THIS is interesting. why can't men just like being pretty
Ballet, unlike sports, prizes something that men are not supposed to want for themselves: beauty.
Ballet asks men to be beautiful, to move beautifully, and to dedicate a great deal of time and attention to those goals. What if boys and men who dance didn’t have to justify their choices with assurances about how traditionally masculine ballet is?
no exactly
“Why can’t ballet just be ballet? Why do we have to super-masculinize it? Why do we have to compare it to football? There’s no need to compare us; we’re a fine art, not a sport.”
NO EXACTLY!!!!
It simply isn’t accurate, or effective, to insist that ballet is just as athletic as football and that it’s therefore as valid a pursuit for boys and men. The reality is that ballet is dainty and pretty, and what of it?
While boys of all sexualities might have a place in ballet, it’s made clear that all boys are expected to dance “like men.”
men in ballet are rewarded for performing a very specific kind of masculinity, one that codes as straight.
Boys who dance ballet live in the tension between two truths: they have it very easy and also very hard.
In ballet, the best women are obedient and the best men can do what they please, so long as they don’t quit dancing.
Martins resigned from City Ballet and is now a member of the George Balanchine Trust,
Garbage all of them
“It’s like Balanchine is like a god,” she told the Guardian in a 2018 interview. “It’s like a cult.”
if the shoe fits...
“You’re always underrehearsed,” former American Ballet Theatre soloist Sascha Radetsky told me. “You kinda go out there and that’s part of the magic, the spontaneity.”
