Timothée Chalamet is right: ballet is ready to die
Anna Pavlova, ballet’s most celebrated prima ballerina, died at least 4,000 times. As the immortalised Dying Swan, the Imperial Russian Ballet principal battled with death on pointe for four minutes each performance before eventually succumbing to the pain. The swan followed Pavlova to her deathbed in 1931, where ballet lore claims her final words were “get my swan costume ready”.
Tragedy is a key tenet of iconic classical dances. Giselle’s broken heart and Manon’s final, exhausted pas de deux haunt their eponymous ballets, while Swan Lake’s lovers Odette and Siegfried, and Romeo and Juliet, reunite in suicide. Sopranos are often doomed to die in the great operas, tubercular Violetta in La Traviata, Carmen stabbed by the envious Don José, Butterly’s final aria where she performs a ritual suicide.
Classical ballet and opera are the arts of dying onstage: their performers too will die for their art. One of the most ill-fated is that of the last star of Romantic ballet, Emma Livry, who died in 1863 from infection after a rehearsal at the Paris Opera was engulfed in flames.
This week, though, attention has been drawn to another death: the death of ballet itself. The actor Timothée Chalamet, lauded for his flagrant ambition and expected to win at the Oscars tonight (15 March), went viral for denouncing the art in a CNN and Variety town hall with Matthew McConaughey. Speaking in front of a room of University of Texas students, Chalamet stretched on a leather armchair and opined that he doesn’t “want to be working in ballet or opera”. He smiled knowingly and explained those career choices as “things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this any more.’”
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Chalamet improvised some banter, and seemed to cover his tracks to declare “all respect to all the ballet and opera people out there … I just took shots for no reason.” Still, the town hall now has over 750,000 views on YouTube, with waves of artists’ responses to the controversial exchange on dying art forms gaining millions of views across Instagram and TikTok in the past fortnight and even a satirical news flash on Saturday Night Live.
Memes swiftly became an irresistible PR opportunity. Ballet and opera companies from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to London’s Royal Opera House spun the viral moment to credit their cast and crews, offering discounted seats under the actor’s name or reminding viewers that performances were sadly alive and well, and in fact long sold-out.
What Chalamet perhaps inadvertently illuminated was the long and entwined history of decline and death in ballet and opera. Both industries continue to suffer from high thresholds to entry, reduced public funding and struggling education. It was announced last summer that, in the US, over half of top ballet companies ended the fiscal year in deficit, while last November the Royal Opera House defended demand-led pricing models to “maximise ticket revenue and support a financially sustainable future”.
The argument that ballet is a dying art is well-worn in the dance world. For a discipline with a 500 year-plus history, with opera at a slightly more youthful 400 years, death is part of its relevance with audiences. In 2010, former dancer and New Yorker dance critic Jennifer Homans wrote an epilogue to classical ballet in her comprehensive history Apollo’s Angels. Following choreographer George Balanchine’s death in 1983, the “father of American ballet”, Homans ultimately despaired that “after years of trying to convince myself otherwise, I now feel sure that ballet is dying … we are watching ballet go.”
Critics of ballet and opera resurface periodically, and the industry uses this attention to draw audiences to performances, opening a debate on exclusivity. In the January 1998 issue of Prospect magazine, Nadine Meisner argued that “the average Briton does not give a damn about ballet.” For Meisner, and other dance critics such as Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times, a lack of new choreographers was the discipline’s hamartia, along with its theatres’ financial constraints.
Ballet has always had an inclination for the morbid and macabre. As famed contemporary dance choreographer Martha Graham said, “a dancer dies twice – once when they stop dancing, and this first death is more painful.” Pavlova’s refusal of a surgery that would curtail her career is a testament to this ethos.
Perhaps it is this loss of self and hope in the future of cinema that compelled Chalamet to make his comments, perhaps it is from a place of ill-judged ignorance. It is impossible to see a work today by Matthew Bourne, Crystal Pite, Wayne McGregor or Christopher Wheeldon and feel the end of dance, but only evolution. For an actor in fervent “pursuit of greatness”, a forceful reminder of the longevity of ballet and opera and its acceptance of death may provide comfort.
“Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes go on,” as the Red Shoes (1948) reminds us, referencing a fairy tale pair of shoes that force its wearer to dance until death. Ballet is cursed, much like fiery-haired ballerina Moira Shearer was bound to dance, to live on beyond its stages, even as its dancers depart. To live is to dance; the death of dance would be the end of enrapture.
[Further reading: The passion of Will Self]
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