Madison Mainwaring

“Camp: Notes on Fashion,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, uses Sontag’s essay to consider how clothes can turn into costume or performance. A surprising number of its sections refer to ballet through the ages, from its codification at the court of Versailles in the mid-17th century to Edgar Degas’ fin-de-siècle sketches of dancers.

Camp is a notoriously slippery term. But why do discussions about it so consistently evoke ballet as an example?

Ballet might have been considered camp from the start in its original French context. “Se camper” means adopting an exaggerated, stylized pose, which at one point could have described the entire form as a genre. Louis XIV, the dancing king, used his physique to assert power with spectacles like the “Royal Ballet of the Night,” which had 45 scenes and took about 13 hours to perform.

This attitude of extravagance is still alive in ballet’s cast of fantastical characters. Sontag observes that it is not an art form that “can easily do justice to the complexity of human nature.” The half-woman, half-spirit nymphs, wilis and sylphs are supposed to be instantly knowable archetypes rather than psychologically realistic.

At the Met, a display devoted to “Being-as-Playing-a-Role” highlights the stock personalities on the proscenium stage. “Swan Lake” appears as a theme itself, with dresses that nod to the ballet by Alexander McQueen for Givenchy and by Marjan Pejoski.

While Bjork might have mimed laying an egg on the red carpet in her Pejoski swan costume, ballet seems to be beside the point with these dresses. When contemporary fashion cites the art form, the statement is less about classical dance than it is about the perils of glamorous femininity. Moschino’s 1989 trompe l’oeil evening dress shows the lower half of a ballerina’s one-legged stance, suggestive of this precarious balancing act.

The Met show points out mainstream ideas about ballet that are nonetheless revealing of the expectations built up around it. George Balanchine said “ballet is Woman,” and the Belgian Symbolist poet Georges Rodenbach came up with expression “the eternal feminine” when observing female dancers in 1896.

If the camp object or person is always in quotation marks, as Sontag says, then ballet’s fairy-tale romances lend this treatment to gender. We do not see a woman in point shoes. We see a “woman,” just as the ornate Tiffany shade makes the lamp a “lamp.” (Tights and prince tunics can do the same thing for men.)

Christopher Isherwood was among the first writers to observe this citation effect. In his novel “The World in the Evening” (1954), he places Mae West drag on one end of the camp spectrum and classical dance on the other. “High Camp is the whole emotional basis of the ballet,” he writes. For Isherwood, the camp attitude takes serious subject matters — in ballet’s case, love — and expresses them, “in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.”

But styles, even in classical dance, change. When Isherwood used ballet to make his point in the 1950s, the art form’s athletic feats were padded with triumphant presentational flourishes, emphatic acting and pauses that demanded the audience’s applause. The old Russian touring companies had not quite died, with their “smell of the greasepaint, the ballerina in excelsis, the demented fans,” as Joan Acocella described in a 2005 The New Yorker article about the drag troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, who parody this mode.

Ballet’s marginal status in the cultural sphere only enhanced ballerinas’ rarefied, self-conscious celebrity and the cultishness of their followers. Peter Anastos, the founder of the Trockaderos, said in a phone interview: “You would never see one of these dancers in a store or in a restaurant. They were like silent-movie stars. And they would never really get into the role. It was always them doing the part.”

If there is a camp essence in this Romantic style of ballet, with its jeweled costumes and feathered headdresses, it is related to the worship of a style that is no longer of its time. In an art form that prides itself on tradition, passed down from one generation to the next, the steps and costumes remain basically unchanged even if the audience, and sometimes the dancers themselves, no longer know what it all means.

To embrace the art form’s classicism, especially as exhibited in 19th-century story ballets like “Le Corsaire” and “Don Quixote,” you have to put aside a sense of contemporary tastefulness. Their landscapes are so artificial, their plots so dreamlike, that they require a different kind of appreciation from the audience — “tender” is the word Sontag uses — than the latest in, say, conceptual art.

The set designer Jan Versweyveld, who created the displays for the Met exhibition, is famous for the functionality of his opera stages — even for works which can slip into camp, like “Salomé.” His strategy: Avoid the libretto’s historical references. “When people put a work back in time, it can become camp so easily,” he said. “We cannot read a dress in Louis XIV style. It’s totally out of our world.”

When many of the canonical classical ballets had their premieres, they were not expected to solemnly recapture a lost sublime. The French poet Théophile Gautier, the librettist responsible for “Giselle” (1841), “wrote about the ideal — and then women’s underskirts,” Felicia McCarren, a dance historian and professor of French at Tulane University, said in a phone interview. “It was all in the same grab bag of ideas.”

A certain irreverence toward ballet actually allowed it to be more accessible. “By restricting ballet to pure romance, the art form loses its power to make critical commentary on the state of things,” McCarren said.

The once-popular practice of ballet satire lives on with the Trockaderos. In the troupe’s version of “Swan Lake,” the lovers are always losing each other in plain sight on a bare stage. Odette shimmies in her prince’s face, and makes a big fuss about keeping his hands off her tutu.

The brilliance of the Trocks’ satire is nevertheless its closeness to the original form. The steps and story are recognizable from those in traditional productions. “When you think about ballet as an art form, it’s so artificial, codified and regimented,” Anastos said. “It becomes easy to dismantle it, because there are just so many moving parts.”

In an age when female dancers often cultivate an understated elegance, the Trocks’ over-the-top performances allow “Swan Lake” to indulge in its melodrama in a way that is otherwise no longer permissible. “People who are good at camp are absolute believers,” Anastos said. “They are real keepers of the flame.”

Still, the notion that ballet is camp — or that it contains elements of camp — is one that many balletomanes find offensive or silly.

“The idea that ‘Swan Lake’ is camp is just ridiculous,” said Robert Gottlieb, the dance critic at The New York Observer and the former editor of The New Yorker. “Anyone who is familiar with the rigors ballet dancers go through cannot find it campy.”

George Dorris, the founding editor of Dance Chronicle, views it similarly. “Even if someone doesn’t identify with Giselle or Odette, I don’t think that turns them anywhere near camp,” he said in an email.

Then again, as both Sontag and Isherwood observed, as soon as a genre holds itself above camp, it risks becoming it. “The best camp is unintentional and innocent,” Versweyveld said. When it is intentional, “that is not camp — or it is low camp.”

Every time ballet fails in its seriousness, we are reminded of just how hard it is to pull off. In the mid-20th century, ballet would be reimagined in a sleek, plotless Neo-Classicism that made the go-for-broke enchantments of the old librettos all the more difficult to believe in. But sometimes in those Romantic ballets, the movement and emotion fuse, making the illusion seem so real that whatever might be camp about it vanishes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="280daf66-05ab-3133-ac69-ce3ed024ac93" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/arts/dance/met-camp-ballet.html">The New York Times</a>.

Is it the moonbeams? The suicide-for-love finale? Or, perhaps, the extravagant gestures that designate women as birds? For Susan Sontag, writing in 1964 in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the camp canon included Aubrey Beardsley drawings, Tiffany lamps, women’s clothes from the 1920s, Flash Gordon comics — and also “Swan Lake.”

Is Ballet Camp?

<h1>NEW YORK — In a typical morning class at American Ballet Theater, the brightly lit studio feels like a laboratory. If you have watched these dancers in performance, you might be surprised at how messy they can be when practicing, falling out of turns, missing the landing of jumps.</h1>

On a Friday before “Nutcracker” season, ballet master Vladilen Semenov remained relatively quiet, explaining a combination before stepping back to watch the mixed class of men and women. But the dancers had their own agendas, testing their bodies in experiments of strength, flexibility and physics. A handful of the women, instead of going on point, stayed in slippers to try the men’s steps.

Ballet is widely seen as putting women on a pedestal — male dancers literally lift them over their heads — reinforcing conventional ideas about masculinity and femininity. The pas de deux, or romantic male-female duet, is considered by many to be the art form’s linchpin, but it can seem sentimental, or worse, sexist. Can ballet reflect contemporary ideas about gender? This question is crucial in determining its future standing and reception, especially among audience members unfamiliar with its traditions.

These stereotypes, though, are being challenged on a daily basis in company studios, as ballet dancers everywhere ask why their gender identity should determine the way they dance. Women can jump higher and complete more turns than ever before, skills traditionally associated with male dancers. For their part, men are training to incorporate the stretch and finesse that has long been standard for female dancers.

Rather than distorting the form as some ballet purists fear, dancers who push the gendered boundaries of training “are more versatile and can be stretched in different ways,” said Jonathan Stafford, a ballet master who is overseeing City Ballet’s interim leadership team. Ballet’s codified positions may not change, but this trend is bringing a new dynamic to its old steps.

Ashley Bouder, a New York City Ballet principal, credits the teachers she had growing up for giving her an expansive sense of her capabilities.

“They didn’t see why I couldn’t do what the guys were doing,” she said.

For Bouder, this practice has helped make her jumps famous, defiant of gravity as she seems to hang in the air. Men’s classes, with their slower music (so the dancers can work on lift), have been the crucial supplement to hone this technique. She goes whenever she can.

And she is not alone. Many City Ballet female principals go to men’s class. And those numbers have been growing everywhere, especially at companies with top talent such as the Royal Ballet, the Bolshoi and Miami City Ballet. The advent of strength training for female dancers about two decades ago gave them new scope and range in the studio. More important, the continuing discussion about gender has led them to rethink what they can do with their bodies on their own terms.

Put a woman in men’s class and the effect is liberating, allowing her to escape the image she has cultivated of herself in the studio mirror.

“Some women constrain themselves to get the step right,” said Skylar Brandt, a soloist at Ballet Theater. “Men just grab the floor to get themselves off the ground.”

Brandt is petite, but when she moves across the floor, her body lifts off the ground like a firecracker, an effect she credits to learning from and practicing with male dancers.

“It has made me feel free,” Katherine Williams, another Ballet Theater soloist said, about attending men’s class, “less confined to a certain look I need to maintain as a woman onstage.”

Male ballet dancers must jump high enough to complete two turns in the air in a variety of positions before landing. After spending years perfecting dancing on point, women who try to do the same come up against the limits of their conditioning. Williams decided last year to take all the men’s classes she could. A strong technician and natural jumper, she still sometimes misses the full rotation of the second turn by inches.

“It comes down to how you were trained as a child,” she said.

In the 20th century, George Balanchine, the founding choreographer of City Ballet, led the way, asking women to do what was thought impossible for their physiques. To those wedded to the old image of the art form, the female dancers at City Ballet could hardly be considered “ballerinas” at all, so radically athletic was their dancing.

Now male dancers, too, are extending ideas about their physical capabilities. Men are under less pressure than women to hit 180 degrees with their legs in a leap. But Keith Roberts, a ballet master at Ballet Theater, has started insisting that men improve their split while jumping in variations like those in “Swan Lake.” And it has also “become standard that men’s feet are just as arched and beautiful as women’s, sometimes better,” Roberts said. “They have to be more refined than ever before.”

The first male dancers who became famous in this country were bent on proving they were athletes. Asserting physical prowess was a way to disprove the old stereotype that ballet was not manly.

Today’s male dancers are transforming this legacy. Rather than posting pictures on Instagram of himself jumping or turning, like so many male dancers do, Carlos Gonzalez of the Ballet Theater corps poses in high extensions.

“I want to show other guys that they can do this, too,” he said.

It is not unusual for women to lift their legs above their heads, but when a male dancer does, the effect is arresting.

To do so, men have to learn from their female colleagues. Studying women “shaped the way I dance,” said Jose Sebastian, also a corps member at Ballet Theater. “I saw things the women had that I needed to apply to myself.”

There is a reason choreographers can now highlight male dancers’ bodies in innovative ways. Many are acquiring the stretch and polish usually demonstrated by the female body in ballet, movement qualities customarily used to convey vulnerability and emotional depth.

Point work is a separate issue. Some men take it up just to strengthen their ankles and propel their arch.But today’s male dancers do not want to go on point as a caricature of femininity, as has historically been the case with drag roles. As it stands, “they don’t have access to proper training,” Bouder said. “To get good — really good — at it, to be taken seriously, they would have to pay out of pocket for private lessons.”

Fear of injury can discourage dancers from training across genders. Without the usual apprenticeship, point work can be dangerous. And no amount of technical study can prepare women to try men’s jumps. Going for double the torque and lift needed for two turns in the air is a huge shift, and botched landings often result in twisted ankles.

Women are even more constrained when it comes to men’s partnering moves.

“If I beefed up enough to be able to lift a woman above my head, or even just partner her properly when she’s balancing, I would not look good in a tutu,” Bouder said.

Brandt too said that because most women have less upper-body strength, they “fake” lift, doing so for a few seconds as their partner jumps into it.

A dancer’s skill set is ultimately dictated by the job market. Girls do not learn boys’ jumps because “they’re not asked to do them in 99 percent of the repertoire,” Stafford said. He added that should this change, the curriculum will be adjusted.

In 2017, Justin Peck, City Ballet’s resident choreographer, made headlines when he included gender-neutral roles in “The Times Are Racing,” showing that male and female dancers could swap roles. For his “Principia,” debuting Jan. 31 as part of the company’s winter season (through March 3), Peck has incorporated a pas de deux, but without the usual romance. The new duet instead explores things like “teamwork, construction, opposition, physical tension and compromise,” he wrote in an email.

Bouder notes that it is precisely this shift that will lead to a trickle-down effect.

“If you have established choreographers creating gender-neutral roles and same-sex dances, then the kids coming out of schools will need to be capable of performing them,” she said.

Back in the Ballet Theater studio, Connor Holloway, a corps member, and Sebastian were lifting their legs out to the side in one of ballet’s age-old steps, as they warmed up at the barre. They did not quite hit the height of the female dancers surrounding them — but they were close, and their feet are just as curved.

“Before I got into the company,” Holloway said, “I thought I maybe needed to butch it up, because that’s what people wanted to see.” But he attributes landing his job in 2015 to “knowing and being secure in who I am — not thinking about labels.”

That stretch, polish and struggle he showed in the studio to keep the leg taught in the air might be expected from a woman. But it was arresting on a man. It made you want to watch him. It makes ballet look new again.

This article originally appeared in <a id="d5a64108-7803-46df-b83a-6f004749b336" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/arts/the-place-to-challenge-ballets-gender-stereotypes-in-daily-class.html">The New York Times</a>.

The Place to Challenge Ballet's Gender Stereotypes? In Daily Class

On a Friday before “Nutcracker” season, ballet master Vladilen Semenov remained relatively quiet, explaining a combination before stepping back to watch the mixed class of men and women.

The place to challenge ballet's gender stereotypes? In daily class

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Madison Mainwaring

Articles written by the author

Is Ballet Camp?

The place to challenge ballet's gender stereotypes? In daily class