According to Yuval Noah Harari, author of <\/span>Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind<\/span><\/i>, \u201c\u2026fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively.” In WR <\/span>152: Public Narratives: Storytelling for Social Change<\/span>, we consider the purpose and effect of these \u201ccollective fictions\u201d as public narratives that shape personal life and power structures, and we unearth the rhetorical techniques, stakes, control, and the purpose of storytelling to further agendas. Students choose their own topic for their semester-long research project which culminates in a positioned research paper that locates and deconstructs the public story of their topic as they consider history, authorship, and influence across time and institutions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Lily O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cBallet: A Cursed and Complicated Beauty\u201d uniquely situates the ballet body as a genre in and of itself as she wrestles with the harm dancing bodies suffer, ultimately asking the reader to rethink the body\u2019s relationship to artistic beauty and consider who controls \u201ctradition\u201d and for whom does the ballerina perform.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Ballet is a centuries-old practice of beauty and grace filled with dazzling performances, romance, and magic. What most people tend to overlook, however, is the grueling intensity that is required of the dancers themselves to make that magic possible. In this essay I examine the structures and practices deeply rooted in ballet\u2019s tradition that force dancers into unrealistic and dangerous physique ideals and environments riddled with abuse and archaic pedagogy by unpacking the Western history of ballet and applying it to today\u2019s ballet scene. I propose the necessary shifts of these traditions for the health and well-being of dancers everywhere.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For audience members, classical ballet is an art of magic, grace, and beauty. Dancers twirl on the tips of their toes, soar through the air, and glitter in their costumes, defying gravity. Ballet dancers have an incredible ability to take an audience out of their real lives and into a fantastical world where humans are weightless and built to fly. But after a two-hour escape, the audience moves on and goes back to everyday life, while dancers stay in the world of ballet\u2013which is not as beautiful and glittery as it seems on stage. Hours upon hours of rehearsals leave dancers in crippling pain, with skipped meals and sacrificed relationships. During the course of mounting a ballet performance, ankles are injured, bodies are criticized and shamed, and tears are shed day in and day out, all for the sake of achieving success in the art.<\/span><\/p>\n Female dancers are held to a physical standard where \u201cextreme thinness predominates\u201d (Henderson). This standard has not always been the norm, though. There was a time when ballet bodies reflected the feminine curves that represented status and health. But with the emergence of American ballet in the twentieth century and the adoration of its greatest influencer, George Balanchine, the ballerina ideal shifted from curvy to a thinner, bonier figure. Ballet\u2019s roots in a Eurocentric tradition of patriarchy and female objectification provided a natural foundation for Balanchine and his contemporaries, and the behind-the-scenes culture they would create for American ballet\u2014a culture marked by impossible ideals, reinforced through cruelty and abuse, low odds of professional success, and, ultimately, a mental health crisis among dancers.<\/span><\/p>\n Despite shifts in approach and style over the centuries, ballet has remained popular for its exquisiteness, spectacle, and impassioned storytelling. Sparkly tiaras and tutus, twirl after twirl on the tips of satin-wrapped toes, male dancers lifting their seemingly weightless female partners high into the air as audiences gasp and applaud\u2014all of this is still very much at the core of ballet performances across the world today, more than four hundred years after the earliest ballet productions in the aristocratic courts of French King Louis XIV. And in the United States, nearly a century after the birth of what we know as American ballet today, Balanchine\u2019s own indelible mark\u2014and its impact on female dancers in particular\u2014also remains. <\/span>Ballet in the U.S. is still very much driven by a fixation on the thin, ethereal female body ideal, even as research documents the thousands of dancers that go to extremes to attain that ideal and incur tremendous physical and mental health costs along the way: eating disorders, low self-esteem, and anxiety, to name just a few.<\/span> Ballet is stuck in this culture. Unlike other forms of art and athleticism, it has failed to evolve with time, technology, and growing social awareness. Backstage and hidden from public view, ballet remains an art form sustained by dark, and often dangerous, realities for its female dancers.<\/span><\/p>\n To understand the persistence of misogyny and cruelties that still mark classical ballet today, it is important to understand ballet\u2019s history. Classical ballet first emerged in seventeenth-century France, created to be \u201ca chance to take man\u2019s troublesome passions and physical desires and redirect them toward a transcendent love of God\u201d (Homans 6). By the time it landed in the United States in the early twentieth century, brought by Russian artists fleeing Communist rule, ballet was still viewed as an angelic art form, something that pushed dancers farther from humanity and provided them with the power to convey true magic. It was a unique way to tell stories\u2014through a highly structured set of rules, centered around body and music. But \u201cclassical ballet was everything America was against\u201d (Homans 448) when it landed on the streets of New York City. It was rooted in a history of Russian Imperialism and European aristocracy, while Americans in New York at the time celebrated extravagant individualism. But with time, ballet became central to American culture and took the country by storm. Paul Vasterling, artistic director of Nashville Ballet, says \u201cthere is nothing more exposing of your physique than classical ballet,\u201d (<\/span>Pointe Magazine<\/span><\/i>) and by the mid-twentieth century, Americans had become infatuated with the exposed female physique of ballerinas that classical ballet handed them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As America was becoming acquainted with ballet in the 1940s, George Balanchine, who fled St. Petersburg in the 1920s, arrived in New York. He founded his famous company, New York City Ballet, in 1948 and quickly established his own ideas about what the female dancer should look like, ingraining onto the conscience of choreographers and ballet masters how she should be cultivated and trained.<\/span><\/p>\n George Balanchine did not create the ballerina, though. That distinction belongs to ballet\u2019s French artists. What Balanchine did so effectively was take his predecessors\u2019 creation and shape her to fit his own unique vision. During the French Romantic period in the late eighteenth century, ballet was an art of \u201cwomen devoted to charting the misty inner worlds of dreams and the imagination\u201d (Homans 170). Famous classical ballets like <\/span>Giselle <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>La Sylphide <\/span><\/i>were centered around female figures that descended into a flurry of madness due to their tortured relationship with a man, or in ballet terms, their <\/span>cavalier<\/span><\/i>. These ballets were written and choreographed by men who attributed their pain and loneliness to the women who wronged them, or who never loved them in return, and the heartache of these men gave us our ballerina\u2014a picture of male fantasy and the source of their temptation\u2014and a way for them to exert their power over women by turning them into characters and putting them under a spotlight. And while seemingly weightless and ethereal, the hallmark of the early ballerina at the time was not extreme thinness. Her soft and supple lines were celebrated, a sign of beauty and femininity. Balanchine would take those curves and straighten and stretch them to skin and bone.<\/span><\/p>\n By the 1960s, New York City Ballet was thriving, and George Balanchine was the brilliant man responsible for it all. The ballerina born from the French Romantics was evolving, her curves giving way to straighter lines, and her creator no longer focused on stories about sylphs and fairies, but instead on an infatuation with the human body. More than any of Balanchine\u2019s other dancers, Suzanne Farrell epitomized this shift. A member of New York City Ballet, Farrell would eventually become Balanchine\u2019s greatest love and his most powerful muse. Balanchine only loved and married his own dancers, and he did so quite a few times. But his love for Farrell was distinct. She was captivating, and with surreally long legs, a long and elegant neck, a short torso, and a small head, Farrell embodied the Balanchine standard (<\/span>Pointe Magazine<\/span><\/i>). In 1969, when she could not return Balanchine\u2019s love and married someone else, he fired her and became deeply depressed (Homans 534). Much like the eighteenth-century writers in France, Balanchine\u2019s inspiration was born of his dysfunctional relationship with women, and his obsession with Farrell further cemented for him the extremely thin body ideal.<\/span><\/p>\n To turn this ideal into the female ballet body standard, Balanchine drew on lessons from his homeland and its deep imperialist roots. He filled New York City Ballet\u2019s ranks with beautiful dancers spanning different training styles, backgrounds, and qualities of movement and created the illusion on the outside of a truly American company\u2014one that celebrated individualism and diversity. But Balanchine\u2019s \u201cnostalgia for Russia\u201d dictated how New York City Ballet functioned on the inside (Homans 506). It resembled an imperial court, with Balanchine as the tsar and the dancers as his entourage, or even servants. His word was law, and his art untouchable. He was considered godlike in the dance community\u2014and still is. Gelsey Kirkland, one of New York City Ballet\u2019s most famously tortured dancers, made the grave mistake of daring to \u201csuggest that Balanchine was human, when everyone knows he was really a god,\u201d in her autobiography, <\/span>Dancing on My Grave<\/span><\/i> (Lakes 8). Balanchine\u2019s brilliant, all-knowing status allowed him to determine what was beautiful in American ballet and to achieve that beauty by any means necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n Balanchine\u2019s contemporaries quickly latched onto his way. Jerome Robbins, Alvin Ailey, Antony Tudor, and even modern dancers like Martha Graham and Paul Taylor mirrored his tactics that were inspired by European power structures. Across the American ballet scene, Balanchine\u2019s Russian roots\u2014exhibited by authoritarian direction and an almost military-style pedagogy\u2014took hold. \u201cI\u2019ve actually hit dancers,\u201d said Antony Tudor, a prominent choreographer and instructor at American Ballet Theatre in the 1940s. \u201cI\u2019ve bitten little fingers that stuck out too much. I\u2019ve slapped wrists. I\u2019ve threatened to throw people out of the window. People don’t usually learn unless there’s a little pain involved\u201d (Lakes 5). Abuse, both physical and emotional, became the norm, as a way for the teacher to establish control over the student (Lakes 5). \u201cTeachers have used pedagogical methodologies and techniques that today would appall any person with minimal anatomical understanding and common sense\u201d (Ducci 1). Because ballet is based on the physical form, this abuse focuses on dancers\u2019 body types, movement qualities, weight, and physical features. Teaching has become a direct attack on a dancer\u2019s physical being, and by extension, her existence.<\/span><\/p>\n In her analysis of the authoritarian teaching methods of concert dance, University of North Texas dance faculty member Robin Lakes describes how ballet teachers have power over casting and dancers\u2019 careers, so their judgments have the upper hand, and their opinions begin to be a part of their students\u2019 self-concept and self-worth\u2013or lack thereof (5). If a teacher tells a student to lose weight or to change some aspect of their body, the student internalizes that criticism as part of her identity as a dancer. The dancer is defined by her body; she believes she is less worthy because she is not thin enough. The student doesn\u2019t question this; she simply changes her ways to please the teacher and avoid further beratement. Students are taught to be \u201cempty vessels,\u201d nothing more than bodies waiting to be molded by a smarter, more successful embodiment of who they are trying to become (Ducci 2). There is also a \u201chesitancy about so bluntly questioning their teaching behaviors, as if such an act would undermine one\u2019s heritage\u201d (Lakes 3). The perpetuation of the old-fashioned, abusive methods introduced by Balanchine and his peers has trapped dancers into believing they deserve the abuse and, for those who go on to also become teachers, must repeat that behavior.<\/span><\/p>\n A survey performed by the Pittsburgh-based project \u201cMinding the Gap\u201d shows that 73% of dancers consider disordered eating to be an extremely prevalent problem in dance. An even greater 82% consider anxiety and depression to be prevalent\u00a0 (www.wearemindingthegap.org\/survey-results). Eating disorders, body dysmorphia, anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and substance use are just some of the battles that dancers fight daily. These illnesses thrive in environments thick with criticism and a focus on the physique, and they often stem from a distorted notion of hard work. \u201cDancers who don\u2019t have the \u2018perfect\u2019 ballet body are often made to feel as though they\u2019re simply not working hard enough\u201d (Henderson). At some point for dancers, dedication to craft and diligence in the studio morphs into sacrifice of health and wellbeing\u2013all to look a certain way.<\/span><\/p>\n Research supports these survey results. A study to determine the effects of dance style and training level on body image in dancers identified clear relationships between negative body image, eating disorder symptoms, and poor psychological well-being (Swami and Sunshine Harris 1). When asked about her motives for eating disorder-related behavior in a different study, one dancer responded, \u201cAesthetics, the dancer always has to be thin\u201d (Santo Andr\u00e9 et al. 5). The imperative of a thin physique is everywhere, in every dancer\u2019s head, tricking them into thinking that they must engage in extreme, even dangerous habits to achieve a true \u201cballet body.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps most compelling in connecting the fixation on thinness and ruling with cruelty to mental health consequences are the words and public displays of mockery by the great choreographers themselves. Talking once to a dancer about her leg, Alvin Ailey said, \u201cYou fed it, now hold it up there.\u201d The suggestion: the dancer ate too much, and her leg is now heavy. The punishment: to hold her leg extended in the air for a prolonged time (Lakes 7). This incident occurred in a classroom in front of the dancer\u2019s peers, where Ailey made a joke of her for being overweight by <\/span>his<\/span><\/i> standards. Such conversations about weight are rarely held in confidence, and almost never in a safe and supportive manner. Attacks are made publicly, the assumption being that the teacher knows best and that a lack of compliance will result in punishment and or humiliation for the dancer. This strips young people of their self-confidence, leading them to believe that they are replaceable, that their wellbeing and individuality do not matter, and that they simply aren\u2019t enough.<\/span><\/p>\n In addition to humiliation and abuse, dancers experience punishment when their bodies do not conform to the thin ideal. At Ballet Memphis, artistic director Dorothy Gunther Pugh emphasizes the importance of her dancers\u2019 weight. \u201cChoreographers\u2026come in and say, \u2018I will not cast that dancer because he or she is too big\u2019\u201d (<\/span>Pointe Magazine<\/span><\/i>). Kathryn Morgan, a former New York City Ballet and Miami City Ballet dancer, had roles taken from her at Miami City Ballet when she was not able to lose weight fast enough (Kourlas 4). If a dancer is only as worthy as her weight and physical proportions, it is easy to see how she would believe she is worth nothing when her body is being constantly criticized. Confidence and self-worth are difficult enough for young people to achieve. In a ballet environment, where respect and kindness are so often absent, that struggle is extreme.<\/span><\/p>\n A dancer\u2019s mental health greatly affects all aspects of her life (Ducci 2). Poor mental health impacts injury prevention, physical health, motivation, ability to work with others, mood, and cognitive abilities. As a profession that requires high levels of physical performance, ballet fails to recognize that mental health and physical health go hand in hand, and the \u201cget over it\u201d attitude breeds silent suffering (Ducci 1). When experiencing a physical injury or struggling mentally, dancers are given few resources for support. In a 2017 <\/span>Dance Magazine <\/span><\/i>survey, 75% of dancers said their schools or companies do not offer or refer support services to dancers struggling with their mental health (www.wearemindingthegap.org\/survey-results). Dance teachers are rarely trained to provide support to students, and students are led to believe that taking care of themselves takes away from rehearsal and throws into question their dedication to the art. The pressure to have a certain body type can lead to burnout, career-ending injuries, or simply a loss of love for the art.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Can glittery, two-hour displays of magic on a stage be worth such devastating and life-long consequences?<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe world is full of heartbroken ballet dancers, former and current\u201d (Kourlas 4). Heartbroken because they have been hurt by something they love and are good at. Betrayed by teachers and choreographers who should have helped them to be better without bullying them. In her memoir, famous New York City Ballet ballerina Jenifer Ringer emphasizes how dancers should be seen as whole human beings, not \u201ccollections of bones moving from one beautiful pose to the next\u201d (Kelly). To move with conviction and grace, dancers need both physical and inner strength. George Balanchine and his predecessors used the human body as inspiration for movement, but somewhere along the way, the dancer\u2019s body became defined by an unattainable ideal, forced upon her through abuse and scare tactics. And to this day, ballet continues to rely on this concealed approach for success.<\/span><\/p>\n The original purpose of ballet was to display the incredible feats of the human body through art (Kelly) and to bring dancers and their audiences closer to the angels. But one might argue that most dancers could not feel farther from angels; there is nothing magic about harsh training and a fixation on a thin, fairy-like ballet body that leads to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and low self-worth. What audiences see onstage inspires young girls and boys to dance. And it <\/span>should<\/span><\/i>. But this inspiration comes from a world built on objectification and patriarchal structures that reduce boys and girls to nothing more than a successful or failed ballet body type. Our bodies are art (Kourlas 4), and what we can do with them is<\/span> magical\u2014that is what should be celebrated. To dance is to be part of creating something beautiful, and a ballet body should simply be a body that can <\/span>do ballet<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\nCarroll Beauvais<\/span><\/h6>\n
\nFrom the Writer<\/b><\/h4>\n
\nBallet: A Cursed and Complicated Beauty<\/h3>\n