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More than any other art, classical ballet makes gender its problem. The focus is obvious but subtle. Almost every class is two-thirds female and the hallways of a ballet school are always disproportionately pink. But ballet also curates a vision of femininity as the very ideal of its practice. The vision is manifest not only in the old, narrative productions of the nineteenth century-like "The Nutcracker, "or "Swan Lake", or "Giselle"-full of the tiaras and tulle that women wear, but also in the newer, abstract pieces of the twentieth century and after, where dancers shuck off fairy-tale stories and make abstract shapes in nothing more than leotards. In all of these, women are the furthest extension of the classical ballet idiom, literally and figuratively. It's women who rise up to their toes en pointe, women who unfurl their legs to that height around the ears, women who do the thirty-two fouett'es. Women who are lifted up to make gravity-eluding shapes in the air. The "pas de deux", a male-female dance at the core of classical technique (partnering is usually the last class added to a dancer's training), remains a vision of heterosexual relations that exchanges support for lift, ballast for flexibility, power for finesse. Men are in control; women are on display. Ballet stages gender with every step.
Ballet has always known, that is, that gender is performance. It's easy to assume or even to dismiss the word-performance-when it comes at you in a theory of culture. In ballet, it comes at you with the power of art. Femininity is something to be perfected and made beautiful. A hard, endless, noble kind of work. That's why ballet can seem, to the young women practicing it-to me, for example-like an honest and subtle thing, even if its artifice is obvious-more than obvious, pretty embarrassing, really-and its relevance waning. Here's the ideal, it says. Here's the effort. Here's the distance between the two.
"You have to fall in love with the discipline": that's how Wendy Whelan puts it.
Whelan was until October probably the greatest female ballet dancer working in America. Six weeks ago she gave her last performance with New York City Ballet, the company where she danced for thirty years. I saw that final show. I probably also saw her first, since I grew up with the New York City Ballet and for some time lived close enough to go to most season openers.
Read more Beauty Work: Lessons in Ballet at The Toast.
Credit: womanizer-psychology.blogspot.com
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