Nijinsky

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. Fonteyn said that if people knew what she endured only those

I feel sorry for those stupid enough to believe that ballet is racist or transphobic

Sick though one may be of the way that the poison dart of ‘woke’ is lazily flung at what is a real and complex set of problems, I fear that it’s deservedly winging its way towards Leeds’s Northern School of Contemporary Dance. Last month it announced that it would no longer require a competence in ballet for its auditions on the grounds that it is ‘an essentially elitist form’ built around ‘white European ideas and body shapes that are often alienating’. Stifle your groans for a moment, and let me unwrap this and offer some context. First of all, it is not uncommon for schools specialising in contemporary dance to