Rupert Christiansen

Can ballet survive the culture wars?

Despite #MeToo and the new resistance to male bullying, the dance world is still ferocious and unforgiving

Control freak: George Balanchine in rehearsal with the New York City Ballet in 1960. © Neil Libbert / Bridgeman Images 
issue 22 July 2023

Through several phases of the culture wars, ballet has served as a canary in the coal mine, its intense and exposed physicality highlighting all the issues surrounding sexuality, gender and power that have currently become our unhealthily narcissistic preoccupation.

Perhaps the warnings started with the phenomenon of Vaslav Nijinsky. Against the defined masculinity and femininity of the Edwardian era, he stood out as seductively androgynous and effeminate as well as staggeringly charismatic – a godlike hero unashamed to represent le spectre de la rose.

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