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

This was the dichotomythe achievement of fragility and delicacy meant a core of strength. Butterflies are not weak.

A LLEGRA K ENT, O NCE A D ANCER: A N A UTOBIOGRAPHY

E very day, in dance studios all across America, legions of children line up at the barre and take a ballet class. This book is about what they learn there, not just about dance, but about gender, race, and power, about the value of their bodies and minds. About their place in the world both in and outside of dance.

The vast majority of those who take ballet classes in the United States are girls, many of whom aspire to grow up to become the ultimate in femininity, the epitome of a very particular kind of womanhood: a ballerina. Very, very few of theman infinitesimally small numberwill achieve that goal. This book is also about what awaits those who do: what the select few who make it to the top of the ballet world experience and endure in order to live their dream of dancing professionally.

Despite its widespread popularity in the United States, despite its central place in American childhood, ballet can seem a world aparta place governed by different rules than the larger culture of the country, isolated from its most pressing problems and its overlapping crises.

Certainly the nature of balletits association with the economic and cultural elite, its cultivated glamour and opacity, its inescapable Frenchness and fanciness, and the almost nunlike lives that so many of its professional practitioners leadall contribute to this sense that ballet is another world entirely.

And its true that ballet does have some very odd rules. For example, a ballet class doesnt end until the students bow (or curtsy) to the teacher and he or she bows back. Sometimes the bows are performed as an elaborate choreographed sequence, completed, like every ballet exercise, first on the right side and then on the left. Its both an odd rule and a reinforcement of the sense that ballet is a separate world, governed by a different set of laws than the world where most people live.

But as the dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild wrote in her landmark book The Black Dancing Body, Dance is a measure of society, not something apart from it. And balletjust like American societyis cracking under the weight of multiple interlocking crises, some of them of its own making.

Given the millions of children whose early lives are shaped by ballet, the art form demands our attention. And perhaps the crises rocking American society can be seen with greater, necessary clarity by examining ballet. Because ballet, like the larger society in which it sits, finds itself at a turning point: Will it remain mired in its old traditions and entrenched prejudices, or will it remake itself into something less broken and more beautiful?

While I was reporting this book, I met and interviewed dozens and dozens of inhabitants of the ballet worlddancers, teachers, choreographers, artistic directors, parents, health care providerswho told me stories that demonstrated just how badly ballet needs to be saved from itself.

What I found was an ecosystem in crisis, made fragile and brittle by years of inequality and rendered dysfunctional by sexism, racism, elitism, and a stubborn disregard for the physical and mental well-being of the dancers who make the art form possible.

I interviewed a gifted gender nonconforming dancer who was pushed out of ballet because their teachers refused to imagine what the art form might look like without its rigid gender binary. I interviewed a Black ballet mom whose biracial daughter was subject to racist treatment at the hands of a white ballet mom. A professional dancer who

Each of these stories suggested that some essential part of the ballet world was breaking down. Together, they revealed that the ecosystem was perhaps already broken, and that, in turn, it was breaking people.

Inhabitants of the American ballet worldpeople who loved ballet and needed it to love them backwarned me that unless something changed, unless ballets gatekeepers could radically reimagine what the art form could be and whom it could serve, it would die: death by irrelevance, death by inaccessibility, death by excluding the very dancers and creators and audience members who could keep it alive and carry it into the future.

For some observers the die-off might have been difficult to detect, but the more marginalized members of the ballet world, made prophetic by their exclusion, could see it happening. They could feel it. It was a slow-motion extinction happening one ballet dancer and one ballet dream at a time.

And then the flood came.

By April 2020, just a few months after I finished the bulk of the reporting for this book, the coronavirus pandemic had swept over the ballet world, wiping away familiar structures and leaving others in a desperate state.

Theaters and dance studios sat empty. Spring recitals were called off. Emerging choreographers had their debuts postponed, and retiring dancers had their farewell performances canceled. Ballet schools pivoted to Zoom classes and then to drastically reduced class sizes, and students staged digital performances and recorded video competition entries. Ballet companies pivoted to digital offerings, emergency fund appeals, and dance pods after canceling their spring seasons.