National Domestic Violence Awareness Project

profeminist:

“Dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild explained this in her book, “Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance,” by framing it as a systemic problem, a case of Black people being “interrogated, tried, and convicted on the basis of a white aesthetic.” 

In ballet, the uninflected, rod-straight spine is the organizing principle from which all movement flows and to which it must return. In contrast, Africanist dance animates the body with relatively “democratic equality.” As a result, Dixon Gottschild said European standards deem Black dancing traditions as “vulgar, comic, uncontrolled, undisciplined and, most of all, promiscuous.” 

This has allowed ballet to normalize ugly racial and gender stereotypes as canonical. 

In 2018, when English National Ballet star Precious Adams rejected the regulation pink hosiery for a brown skin-matching one, her insistence left ballet purists enraged. In December 2019, Russia’s Bolshoi Theatre defended their use of blackface in La Bayadère. Modern productions continue to peddle unfortunate Orientalist stereotypes, with year-end darling Nutcracker using Fu Manchu moustaches and outstretched index fingers (meant to approximate chopsticks). Appointed to head the Paris Opera Ballet in 2014, Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied hit a wall with his push for diversity at the ancient 150-strong all-white company that traces its origins to the imperial courts of Louis the 14th. His refusal to let dancers present in blackface upset ballet conservatives, and his reformist zeal led to his resignation in a year’s time.

Despite its historical impassivity to race politics, ballet has shown that it can rise to the ask of representation. While it’s now well-known that Misty Copeland became the first female African-American principal dancer at American Ballet Theater in 2015, other examples abound.”

Read the full piece here