Lack of Diversity in Professional Ballet

Raven Wilkinson

         Becoming a professional dancer in the ballet world is difficult, to say the least.  One’s body has to meet the height, width, and length of limbs requirements as well as natural turn out and flexibility.  A dancer must also demonstrate proper and flawless technique and the stamina to dance all day, every day.  Most importantly,  when applying for a company position, a dancer must have the “uniform look” in order to fit in with the corp dancers.  This last reason often means that only white dancers are accepted into companies. 

There has never really been much diversity in the ballet world, although efforts for diversity started in 1933, when  

...Lincoln Kirstein wrote a passionate 16-page letter to his friend A. Everett Austin Jr., the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, introducing a man named George Balanchine and a dream: to remake ballet for America. The plan, as Kirstein wrote, was to have “four white girls and four white boys, about 16 years old, and eight of the same, negros.

                                                                          Kourlas, New York Times

Recently, there have been more profiles done on up and coming dancers of minority, like Misty Copeland, who are trying to make there way in predominantly white trade.  At the School of American Ballet, the enrollment of minority students “in the children’s division of the school has risen to 22 percent,from 13 percent. But in the advanced division there is just one black female student” (Kourlas).  Misty Copeland said in her memoir that while most of her struggles had to do with the change her body went through at the age of 19, she remembers being “a little brown-skinned girl in a sea of whiteness” (Copeland).

The reasons for the lack of diversity in the ballet world starts at the beginning.  Ballet lessons are expensive and in order to receive enough training to be eligible to audition for a school one must dance three to five times a week.  Shoes are also very expensive.  Pointe shoes cost from $60 to $100 dollars a pair and don’t last very long, sometimes only for one performance.  One also has the added cost of transport to the lessons, leotards, and tights.  If a child’s family can’t afford to pay for training beyond Boy’s and Girl’s clubs or YMCA classes, the children have very little chance of being accepted to a dance academy or making it through all the years of the school without being cut.  

While lack of finances does hurt ones chances of making it as a prima ballerina, Misty Copeland was accepted to the American Ballet Theatre without attending a famous academy because she was considered a prodigy.  Still, she has only been promoted to the level of a soloist, when some believe that she has the skill and technique to be a principle dancer.  The editor of Pointe Magazine said that she believes that “the reluctance of ballet companies to recruit black ballerinas of Ms. Graf’s caliber had more to do with vision than with talent” (Kourlas).  

It’s going to take a lot of change in the vision of creative directors of companies to make the ballet world more diverse.  However, some companies are already trying to solve the problem by addressing the financial side.  Project Plié is a new company that “will collaborate with local Boys & Girls Clubs of America and talk with other Project Plié participants about outreach that works in their respective communities” (Carman).  This company will try to improve upon the classes offered at local clubs and also help out any children who show promise so that they might  make it to an academy and receive contracts with companies.

Sources:

Kourlas, Gia. Where Are All The Black Swans?. New York Times.  May 6, 2007.

Cassidy, Susan.  Blacks Dance With the Royal Ballet.  New York Times.  December 29, 1990.

Copeland, Misty. Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina. Teen Vogue. March 4th, 2014.

Carman, Joseph. Behind Ballet’s Diversity Problem. Pointe Magazine. Jun/July 2014.