Can ballet survive the culture wars?

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. Bloomsbury ogled, and rumours about his pederastic relationship with his patron Serge Diaghilev circulated scandalously.

But Diaghilev didn’t much care what people thought, and in 1923 his Ballets Russes commissioned Nijinsky’s distinctly mannish sister Bronislava to choreograph Les Biches, a slyly witty satire of Riviera chic in which silly girls kiss each other suggestively and the central female figure, dressed like a boy, disdains the advances of absurd muscle men and comports herself in non-binary fashion. Homosexuality became advertised rather than concealed: in ballets such as Le Train Bleu and La Chatte, Nijinsky’s successors such as Anton Dolin and Serge Lifar wore costumes that made no attempt to evade bulges of genitals and buttocks, eroticising their bodies as graphically as those of the ballerinas. Sex had become not so much a compulsion as a game of whims and choices.

Aroused by such provocations, a distinctly fruity section of the ballet audience was consolidated, as the tabloid press primly noted: ‘I should enjoy ballet very much,’ harrumphed a columnist in the Evening Standard, ‘if the intervals were not marred (for me) by willowy young men who call each other “darling” and lissom young women who lean against each other in raptures.’ This imputation would dog ballet in Britain for the next 50 years – a man with a taste for men in tights wouldn’t help us win the next war, and anyone who wore them on stage was at best an exotic, at worst a degenerate.