Dear Timothée,
I didn't want to give this controversy more attention because... Mr. Chalamet was right. Kind of.
Ballet isn’t dead.
But it is becoming a taxidermy of sorts.
Pretty on the outside, the same at a glance, but lifeless. And Odette is not a stuffed swan, sitting prettily on a shelf.
When the focus goes from the story to the legs being constantly split and the turns being fast and many, audiences will stop coming, if not caring. They can see someone with crazy extensions and quintuple pirouettes on Instagram, and if that’s what ballet is about- well, why not a save a couple hundred dollars on tickets?
Ballet is an art, and art is meant to invoke emotion. It is hard to do that when it’s been reduced to it’s social-media self, especially when social media is probably one of the biggest emotion sucks I know of, as a teenager.
If audiences stop coming to the ballet, it simply because they think it is not worth the money for something they don’t care enough about. Dance people in power criticize the critics of the system, saying “everyone should care about ballet” without making changes throughout the world to allow it to survive, not just in it’s 1890 or 1983 form but into the future. Ballet is still not only an expensive industry ($207 for a single ticket?) but an antiquated industry. It is one where seeing oneself reflected onstage is still rare for people of color, and where women hardly ever rise to places of power (however when they do, they are highlighted by my fellow Substackers here), and where body ideals leave many people, but especially young girls, alienated and even unwell.1 For that price, who can afford tickets?
The fact of the matter is, ballet is not instant gratification. Its years of work for performers, it’s an evening spent in awe-struck silence for audiences. Ballet sits in your brain. You might not register this spiritual experience until afterwards, and you’ll probably never understand it. Ballet isn’t what you see on Instagram. It’s not even what you see in books. Ballet is seen and heard live. It is felt- in the pit in your stomach, in your cheeks when they hurt from laughing, in a horse throat at the end of many curtain calls.
That is why I still think of Sara Mearns in Diamonds three years ago, crying as Russell Janzen kissed her hand for his final performance. Ballet is in Megan Fairchild throwing her head back in Baiser de la Fae, in Kloe Walkers Dewdrop grinning, satisfied, at the end of Nutcracker. Ballet makes my eyes light up and my heart pound.
Ballet makes me feel alive.
To learn more about the messed-up-ness of the ballet world, and, crucially, how dancers are working to “save ballet from itself” read Turning Pointe by Chloe Angyal.
Yes 'Ballet makes me feel alive.' --its living