Turning Pointe by Chloe Angyal

Author:Chloe Angyal [ANGYAL, CHLOE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Inside the ballet world, the art form’s overwhelming whiteness has real professional and psychological consequences for dancers of color. As we saw in Chapter 4, it’s no longer widely acceptable for ballet teachers and company directors to explicitly tell a dancer to lose weight; that kind of critique of a dancer’s body has been replaced by euphemisms about “health,” “fitness,” “elongating,” and, of course, “the line.”

A similar doublespeak has developed for white teachers and directors attempting to justify their biases against Black dancers, especially the darker-skinned ones who are the furthest away from the white “European” aesthetic.

“African Americans,” Gottschild wrote, “have also been stereotyped as genetically best suited for certain types of dance that exhibit what is supposedly our innate sense of rhythm, but innately ill-equipped for other ‘white’ dance forms.” And there is no dance form whiter than ballet.11

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.

And, just as a tech start-up might decline to hire a Black engineer on the grounds of “culture fit,” a ballet company can offer the vague justification that, in hiring only white dancers, or all white dancers and one light-skinned Black or Latina dancer, it is preserving the company’s “standard” or “aesthetic.”

Because ballet is an art form without objective measures of success beyond box office takings—because it is not a sport in which success can be measured on a scoreboard—it is easy for directors to hide their biases against Black bodies behind this “aesthetic” defense. It is still acceptable, even in an age of dutiful lip service to racial and ethnic diversity, to argue that because ballet is defined by unison, conformity, and order, and because a company’s corps de ballet must move as one, a director has every right to assemble a company that is mostly white and in which all the dancers have similar physiques. This, the argument goes, is what best serves the company and the director’s artistic vision. It’s not bias; it’s just that ballet is an aesthetic art form.

Except, of course, that it is bias. As Howard reminds the institutions she works with, it is a deep-seated, often-unconscious bias built on the notions that ballet is synonymous with whiteness and bodies that are not white are inherently unsuited to the upright, aristocratic discipline ballet demands. “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.”

In the US, that bias, informed by resilient racist tropes, makes it especially hard for white teachers, directors, and audience members to see Black ballerinas, especially darker-skinned ballerinas, as acceptable, let alone aspirational.

It is somewhat easier, apparently, for those same white gatekeepers and audience members to accept men dancers who do not fit the “European” aesthetic.

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