Authors Note: This is a response to the NY Times Article “What is a Ballet Body” by Gia Kourlas, please read the article to provide context.
TW: Discussion of eating disorders, and inflammatory comments about weight. Proceed with caution for your own mental health.
As I read this article all I could think was good intention, poor execution. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this article is a perfect example of that.
It promotes itself as an article claiming to be reconsidering what a “ballet body” looks like. I would wish that an article focused on this would be able to think objectively about the very real health problems, physical and mental, that come along with this excessively thin, ‘ethereal’ ballet body.
You would think they would talk about the eating disorders almost every dancer struggles with, the health problems with being clinically underweight, the stigma faced for dancers who quite literally starve themselves but whose bodies won’t physically become as small as directors and choreographers are requiring.
You think it would be cognizant of the competitive nature of eating disorders, and perhaps be sensitive to that because they are talking about body image, health, weight and food intake- but no in fact blatantly multiple times the dancers say things that would get them clinically diagnosed with eating disorders and the concept of disordered eating is entirely brushed off and ignore.
I do not claim to be a ballerina, I chose contemporary dance a long time ago, and though I have still struggled within the dance industry trying to work my way through some of these useless decades-old traditions and standards, I’m ever grateful I didn’t go down that path, because to be completely honest- I might not be alive if I did.
But as I said, every part of dance culture is infused with these disgustingly white privileged standards that require thinness to the point of danger. Every dancer you know has likely experienced it regardless unfortunately of their genre of dance. Our bodies are our instruments and therefore subject to an unusually high level of attention and attunement.
And this article proves my point- athletes, dancers, and anyone who works with their body as their instrument can fall prey to extreme clinically diagnosable health conditions, and it will be brushed off as being committed to their craft. Look to Gracie Gold the Olympic gold medalist figure skater- who years after her “success” has finally come forward about the devastating effects people ignoring her very clear eating disorder had on her life.
We are teaching children that sacrificing their health for their craft is a worthy cause. We are teaching children that their success is more important than their lifelong health- and we are creating an environment that allows coaches, teachers to abuse their students in this way- and it is abuse. The options shouldn't be to have detrimental health problems and succeed or be healthy and fail. Ethically we have a responsibility as a society to move away from this toxic cultural habit.
Excuse my discussion of weight, because I don’t believe that anyone's individual weight needed to be brought into this conversation, but as it was already brought up in the article, I believe that it needs desperately to be reframed in reference to health. Lauren Lovette, the main focus of this article is 5’4 and proclaimed her ‘dancing weight’ to be 94 pounds.
This puts her BMI (an archaic and outdated measure of health but the measure of health used by most health professionals) significantly under the healthy range. She is clinically underweight.
Most professional dancers are. This isn’t just a ”looks” conversation or situation. This is a lifelong health complications situation that almost all serious female athletes are subject to dealing with. Forcing dancers and female athletes to believe that the only way they can succeed is if they are so thin that they can barely function is not logical or ethical.
The ballet body is not just a ballet body. The ‘ballet body’ that we are so attached to is almost exclusively underweight and is a product of the patriarchal white supremacist societies that it was created under.
It's not a question of athleticism, it's a question of aesthetics. It is not a question of if these dancers are dedicated to the craft or cut out for the job- they are, they are willing to quite literally starve themselves for it, and to delude themselves into believing that's the way it has to be. They know that if they ask questions, they will be replaced with a dancer who doesn’t. That is the way that the dance community works, dancers are continually reminded that they are replaceable and dispensable, especially if they cause “problems”.
Lauren says verbatim in the article that “she may not have starved herself” and then goes on in the same paragraph to say that “if I get picked up in that lift, I can’t have a whole sandwich,” she said. “I need just a couple of carrot sticks or some nuts.” That sounds a bit like starvation to me. To say that it is not, to say that that is a healthy way to look at fueling your body for this extremely physical artform is ridiculous and at this point unacceptable.
Being underweight can cause hormonal imbalances, bone fragility, and therefore increased risk of injury, for women it can cause your period to stop, your hair to fall out, and it can ruin your hunger signals for life. These are only a few of the physical results of being underweight, not to mention all the psychological damage we are giving to young dancers and dancers in general.
We haven’t even gotten into the premise for this article- weight gain as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantine and restrictions. This was the part of the article I felt most insensitive, problematic, and most likely triggering for anyone especially a dancer or athlete struggling with an eating disorder or disordered eating.
Lauren said that she gained six pounds over quarantine. And like I said before, I don’t like talking about the numbers, because eating disorders are competitive, and the numbers on the scale without other context give us NO view on health- but what was said in this article needs to be reframed.
She gained six pounds. SIX. And she says that she no longer has a ballet body because she has developed breasts. Verbatim, she said: “It doesn’t look anything like a dancer.” (And there’s something to be said for the fact that ballet body aesthetics are set by old white men, and seem to share the characteristics of young prepubescent girls).
If you know anything about weight management, have ever worked in the allied health community one of the first things that you learn is that your weight will fluctuate 2-3 lbs a day. This is natural. That is half of the weight that she gained, and it was seen as a potential problem for coming back to work. They talk about it as if she gained five or six pounds and is now overweight when the truth of the matter is that that six pounds barely put her weight at 100 lbs overall.
It is incredibly irresponsible of a major publication like the NYTimes to release something this insensitive and then to laud the article as progressive. This is not progressive, this is archaic.
On top of that, though the directors of NYCB continuously acknowledge there is a problem throughout the article and pretend to have taken steps to protect their dancer's health and wellbeing in actuality very little is being done at all to shift the culture. And since dancers who speak out can lose their jobs and livelihood, it becomes the artistic director and company heads' responsibility to take action.
What is the action that NYCB say that they’ve taken? In one breath they give us a disappointing promise to not degrade dancers or bring up weight in public spaces like class or in passing. “Stafford and Whelan have instituted a new rule: No staff member is allowed to talk to a dancer about a body issue concern without protocols to ensure sensitivity and confidentiality. “It cannot happen in passing,” Stafford said. “It cannot happen in a space that’s maybe a little too public. It’s got to be a healthy environment.”
So comments about weight and body can still be made and it seems there are no real restrictions on who can say what, but simply that it should not be done in front of other people. In my opinion, that seems like it will worsen issues, just behind closed doors now.
After they’ve given us this disappointing promise of accountability towards this issue, they erase any sincerity that these new boundaries could have carried with the rest of the statements published. The only practical positive effect Molnar seemed to see for allowing the dancers to gain weight (and by “gain weight” I mean 5ish pounds, THAT is the difference they are CONSIDERING allowing), was that he “think it would be fun to see if they can maintain the level of their physical activity and not have to lose so much weight and look emaciated.”
Let's break that down quickly- it would be fun to see if these professional athletes were allowed to not have to starve themselves to the point of emaciation and put their health in danger for a role. Fun. Yup seems really fun to me. (Or maybe it seems more like a breach of ethics to not have rules preventing the abuse of your workers...).
But the standing “practical” reason that NYCB isn’t willing to allow dancers to gain weight (and again we are considering 5-6 lbs ‘weight gain’ which is problematic in its own right) is the costumes. If you didn’t know, one of the main decision factors for casting is whether or not a dancer fits into the costume for that piece/role. This is particularly true to soloist roles that are more likely to have been created on a specific dancer, and while these costumes are easily taken in, they cannot so easily be taken out.
In the end, it comes down to what it always does- money. And that is a real practicality in the dance world, we are at a time where the typical dance company is struggling to please donors (an older whiter more affluent demographic) and have shows that remain relevant and interesting enough to fill their audience (audience members tend to be a younger more diverse demographic). Money is a very real concern for today’s dance companies. It would be expensive to say, let go of all of that money that's been invested in costumes, but one cannot help to think that this is a surface practicality. I don’t think that it’s costumes keeping us from allowing dancers to gain five to six pounds, if a dancer is right for a role then whether or not the one costume fits shouldn’t determine if they get that role or not. That’s ridiculous by all standards.
And I don’t believe that costume costs are the reason they aren't taking this reassessment of the validity of the current ‘ballet body’ seriously. It has much more nefarious roots. Ballet has long been an art form created to please the audience, and the audience has long been older richer whiter communities. It is the culture of this demographic that has set the culture of ballet.
This is the culture that we’ve seen rear its ugly head so strongly in 2020. It's the culture that perpetuates white supremacy, the patriarchy, diet culture, fatphobia, implicit basis, and a multitude of different sins. And this looks a lot like covering ballets sins by saying- oh well we don't have enough money to replace the costumes so I guess everything will have to stay the same until we get that money, feels a lot like an excuse to not have to do the hard work of undoing this, as well as an excuse to keep the status quo.
Giving in to this recent pushback against the strict weight requirements requires a shift in the foundations of the way that ballet works. The way that dance works. It would be an active stance against the long-held idea that dancers are replaceable bodies. It rejects the one size fits all mentality. It's the first step toward recognizing that dancers are integral valuable parts of the choreographic process and company as a whole and begins giving them power and agency.
This was not, as it claimed to be, an article reevaluating what a ballet body is. At best it was a defense of the abusive treatment of dancers at the hands of dance companies and at worst it was a triggering insensitive article that perpetuated a culture in which dancers are not valued members of the company but replaceable bodies. Dancers are not just our bodies and we should not be reduced to such.
This is a culture that starves its dancers, it pays them less than minimum wage, and gives them nearly no protections. It makes them fight for roles, they have to be giving 110% to even be considered for a recurring contract, that can be snatched away at any minute if you aren’t entirely compliant with directors. It's an environment that fosters sexual harassment and assault. It is a misogynistic environment in which large groups of women are directed by (usually) a single white man. It is an environment that is inaccessible to poorer communities and therefore black communities. Even if you have the money, training, technique, and passion as a black dancer, your body because it looks different than your white counterparts can be a huge holdback to your success in the dance industry.
It’s not health, costumes, money, or even aesthetics that I believe to be the driving force behind the dance industry being so reluctant to let go of this archaic Balanchine ballet body. It’s a power game and it's wrapped up in our culture as a whole, but particularly highlighted in ballet specifically. This would give power, autonomy, and energy to the dancers. In a literal and figurative sense, it would give them back control over their bodies.
If expensive costumes are what is keeping NYCB from allowing their dancers to be healthy and fighting against oppression and the culture that tries to keep women small, fragile, and childlike, I’m the first to say give me a match. I’ll set fire to them all. It’s been too long and this is too big of a fight with too big consequences- lifelong health complications, devastating mental health effects to give up because of a few expensive pieces of fabric.
If 2020 showed us anything it was that when we sweep things under the rug they don’t go away, they fester and they mold and they grow. It’s time for companies like NYCB to take responsibility for the harm they have caused and the narratives they have perpetuated. It’s time to take action.
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