Dancing Around the Truth
Ballet. It’s everywhere, it’s big time racist.
One of the most famous quotes repeated constantly around the world is “dance like nobody’s watching,” but people are watching. But first, here’s your background info: Ballet came about during the Italian renaissance, which starts around year 1300, and developed into the form the world knows today via the French courts. How did that happen? This noblewoman Catherine De Medici married King Henry II of France and she was really into ballet, so she made people perform it for them.
So, the dance form develops and becomes what is more familiar to us today with all those positions of the feet and the really intense leg extensions. And who is performing these ballets? Rich people. Rich white people to be exact. And who has the most access to ballet today? Still rich white people.
Dance is consumed by a large audience that needs to look at content they are consuming and its intersection with white supremacy and racism. White supremacy is dated back to the 17th century when scientific racism was still considered valid science. Scientific racism is essentially fake science that tries to justify racial discrimination. It’s not real, in fact, race is actually made up altogether.
Typically, the relationship between ballet and white supremacy is not discussed together; however I think it’s important that critique is given. In this modern world we need to see the part that art can play in upholding the system that is white supremacy.
The system that is white supremacy?
Yes. White supremacy as a concept can be defined in many ways; we’re going to use a definition from Frances Lee Ansley (1989) from their journal Stirring the Ashes: Race Class and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship.
Ansley writes that white supremacy is “a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non- white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”
Extrapolating from that we can get: White supremacy is a system of institutions that work in tandem to privilege whiteness and to maintain the power that whiteness has. To keep it clear, racism is not simply an individual action but an entire system that works to support white supremacy.
Another important term to define for this is cultural appropriation. In her book Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada Chelsea Vowel (2016) explores cultural appropriation at length. Using her writing we can loosely define it as the co-opting of symbols that may hold specific significance within a culture or minority group by people who are not part of said group.
Cultural appropriation takes place when someone from a position of privilege or power ignorantly and apathetically takes from from a culture that historically has less privilege and power. The taking of the symbol erases that minority group from the cultural conversation in favour of it being an accessory to whiteness. In short, cultural appropriation upholds white supremacy through erasure and generalization.
Ballet is a beautiful and complex art form, but it upholds systems of white supremacy. It does this in many ways, but two of them are culturally appropriating folk dances and generalizing minority cultures through disrespectful costuming.
Firstly, ballet choreographers co-opt folk dances for the benefit of art at the expense of non-western cultures. Every year around the holiday season ballet companies perform The Nutcracker, one of the most famous ballets originally choreographed by Marius Petipa with music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The performances around the world are all nearly the same storyline with minor artistic and technical differences based on each company’s ability and style.
The December 2012 production of The Nutcracker by the Mariinksy Theatre with choreography by Vasily Vainonen is just one performance that we can analyze. In The Nutcracker there are several scenes referred to as “international dances” named: chocolate, coffee, tea, and trepak and they refer to Spanish, Arabian, Chinese, and Russian dances respectively.
In this production the Spanish dance is quick with elaborate arm positions similar to what you would see in a flamenco dance. While the choreographer is at the mercy of the music for timing and rhythm, the style of the choreography—specifically the arms—borrows directly from flamenco dance.
After the Spanish dance finishes the next scene is the coffee or Arabian dance. The choreography of this piece looks like raqs sharqi, what North Americans would call belly dancing. It could even be interpreted as Bollywood style dancing or Bharatanatyam a classical Indian dance; however in this production it is danced entirely by white women.
On its own the choreography is problematic for taking from other cultures, but the way it is presented is an issue as well. The dance is very slow and sultry mixing different Middle Eastern and South Asian dance forms together without regard for the original intention or style of those forms. The sultry and sexual nature of the choreography perpetuates the hyper-sexualization that asian women experience daily throughout the world.
Western media portrayals of South Asian women give us silenced victims or sexual exotic beauties. Think the crop-top adorned Princess Jasmine from Disney’s Aladdin or the cold and ferocious Ling Woo from Fox’s Ally McBeal, “knowledgeable in an art of sexual pleasure unknown to the Western World.” Western assumptions about women from the East are that they exist as submissive objects for the men in their cultures and this choreography reinforces that negative stereotype.
The Chinese dance that comes next uses fans as props in the choreography and, to an audience that does not know better, looks like a traditional fan dance. Here what happens is the generalization of China; boiling it down to just fan dance. There is no showcase of any other aspect of Chinese culture aside from the props and the dance is again performed by white people. We see white people controlling what is onstage and white people feeling entitled to use other cultures images for entertainment. This is that upholding of white supremacy by way of generalization that we discussed earlier.
It’s not just Western ballet companies
Similarly, the Philippine Ballet took dance forms from the Indigenous people of the islands and generalized them all under the title “Igorot.” Joelle Jacinto (2013) writes in her essay The Appropriation of the Dances of the Igorots that the grouping Igorot in this way actually refers to five completely different Indigenous ethnic communities in the Philippines. She further explains that the Philippine Ballet appropriated hand movements from traditional Indigenous folk dances and incorporated them into their choreography to “orientalise” the dance. Orientalism is the Western attitude that Asian cultures are exotic, primitive, and inferior.
So the Phillipine Ballet took dance forms from indigenous people of the Phillipines and mixed them with ballet to make the work appear more exotic. This is again erasing and generalizing different cultures. This is key to upholding white supremacy because it literally erasing other cultures from existing by erasing them from our purview.
From Jacinto’s view this is a fine way to present Filipino culture on the world stage. In her own work though she presents the perspective of a member of one of the Indigenous communities who says that it is not okay and was disrespectful the culture. Jacinto’s own views on this are problematic because she completely disregards the viewpoint of an actual Indigenous Filipino person in favour of some alleged societal progress.
Although some may argue that Jacinto is being fair because the dance still came from the Philippines it is important to note that it came from an Indigenous community that existed before the islands were colonized by the Spanish and the Filipino state was established. So, the dances are in fact not Filipino in origin, but of their respective Indigenous communities.
A key part of colonization is that the indigenous culture of the place being colonized is wiped out to make room for the colonizer. White people colonized the islands and wiped out much of the indigenous culture that was there. Then the Philippine Ballet further takes part in this colonization by appropriating the indigenous folk dances into their ballets. And finally their ballets are choreographed in a way intended to orientalise them meaning that they are choreographed from a white western lens with a white western audience in mind. These dances are not even for Fillipino people. This is a shining example of how white supremacy acts as a system through institutions, and not just simply through racism enacted directly at a person.
In addition to co-opting folk dance, the costumes used in many ballets are generalizations of minority cultures or just offensive. White people historically mocked and degraded other cultures through costuming for centuries and today this is referred to as blackface or yellowface. In American minstrel shows white actors painted their skin black to depict plantation slaves. These shows depicted black people as lazy, ignorant, and hypersexual. Productions would also use paint, tape and rubber bands to make white actors Asian. These costumes were accompanied with exaggerated speech and other antics mocking Asian people.
The costuming used in the Mariinksy Theatre version of The Nutcracker gives us an example of common practice from ballet companies worldwide. The Spanish dance includes costuming resembling flamenco dancers in traditional Spanish colours of red, white, and black. The man is dressed like a matador and woman wears a large flowing skirt with matching flowing sleeves.
The Eastern dancers have long, loose garments that look similar to the salwar kameez, a tunic and pants, that is traditional to the women of India crossed with the traditional dress of Libyan women. On top of that they wear long black wigs to look like Indian women.
The Bolshoi Ballet ran a production of The Pharaoh’s Daughter in 2012 and painted dancer’s skin black. The easiest way to avoid appropriation here is to actually hire dancers from these different cultures and work collaboratively with them to design appropriate costumes. These examples paired with the history of mocking people of colour illustrates further generalization and erasing of cultures and the upholding of white supremacist systems.
We can also look at the misuse of a traditional gendered garment in the Philippine Ballet. Circling back to the indigenous man that Jacinto speaks with in her essay, he said that the appropriation is inexcusable and that “[the choreographer] was unable to justify the women’s use of the bahag”. Bahag is a loincloth traditionally worn by men in the Philippines before colonization.
This is similar to Halloween costumes and the idea that it is okay to dress up as another culture in costume for entertainment. It’s very much like dressing up as a “Native American Princess” or “Mexican” in stereotypical, often offensive, clothing and this behaviour is disrespectful towards an entire people and culture.
As Vowel explains in her analysis of cultural appropriation this cheapens the significance of these symbols and we should ask ourselves what our intent is when we want to do this. The practice of putting on another culture as a costume is not only disrespectful but upholds systems of white supremacy through the erasing, generalizing, and mocking of minority cultures.
Just Be Mindful
Ballet is a beautiful and complex art form that has existed for a long time. But throughout its history and even today it upholds systems of white supremacy through cultural appropriation by co-opting folk dances and generalizing minority cultures through disrespectful costuming.
It’s pretty, it’s good for your body and mind, it has an elaborate and interesting history, but we need to be more mindful of the art we consume en masse. So much more critique and analysis are needed surrounding ballet and how it intersects with and upholds white supremacy to make sure that we work for a future that is hopeful for all people.
