“IF I HAD A KNIFE…”

by lukejennings1

Afterthoughts on the BBC Panorama film ‘The Dark Side of Ballet Schools’.

The Panorama film which aired on 12 September, and to which I contributed, was a tough watch. A series of former students described the ways in which they had been bullied and body-shamed by teachers at the Royal Ballet School and Elmhurst, and the long-term physical and psychological effects of this treatment.

I’ve been observing and writing about the Royal Ballet School for two decades, and in that time have been contacted by many former students and parents who have had bad experiences. Almost all told similar stories: how they (or their sons and daughters) were transformed from happy children who loved dancing into traumatised adolescents who wanted to give the whole thing up. It’s been going on for decades. As I write, I’ve just received an email from a woman in her fifties ending with the words: “I live a life stunted by the hurt and humiliation meted out to me by the Royal Ballet School.” 

Why does this happen? It’s tempting to blame individual teachers. When I listen to the accounts of bullied students, the same names come up again and again. But it’s not, ultimately, a supply-side problem. It’s a demand-side problem. These teachers are, like their students, victims of the warped perspective with which the ballet establishment views the female body. They may be misguided, but they’re doing what they think is right.

The schools say that they’re fashioning the dancers that ballet companies demand. Female graduates are required to be preternaturally slender, with short backs, long legs and highly arched feet. When ballet schools admit children in year seven, aged eleven, they are gambling that, when fully formed, their students will look like this. But perfectly proportioned classical dancers are extraordinarily rare. Most of those eleven year-olds will sooner or later be measured against the ideal, and found wanting..

Classical dance exists in an enchanted realm. As the Chorus Line song puts it: ‘Everything is beautiful at the ballet.’ But everything is beautiful because nothing is real, and the greatest threat to this unreality is the immoderate, ungovernable female body. This is why many female ballet students learn to be repelled by their own developing physiques (one former RBS student featured in the BBC film describes a teacher telling her which body-parts she’d cut off “If I had a knife”), and why they are implicitly or explicitly encouraged to diet to the point where menstruation, and by extension sexual adulthood, is arrested.

The notion of female biology as hostile and disordering is internalised by young dancers, at a grievous and often life-long cost to their self-esteem. If they make it through ballet school into companies these dancers will continue to rigourously police and control their own bodies. Fearful of criticism and rejection, they will be compliant and unquestioningly obedient employees. Bullying by teachers at ballet schools is not anomalous. It is an initiation into ballet’s deep beliefs, and an instrument of long-term control.

Remember the ballet director Boris Lermontov in the 1948 film The Red Shoes? As played by Anton Wallbrook, Lermontov is an obsessively controlling figure who tests the dedication of star dancer Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) to destruction. With his ballerina fetishism and refined horror of female sexuality, Lermontov appears very much a figure of his day. But, vampire-like, he has adapted. His autocratic attitudes live on in too many present-day choreographers and directors. His misogyny – let’s call it by its name – has been internalised by succeeding generations of female ballet dancers and teachers.

Ballet must evolve if it is to survive as an art form, rather than as a comforting adjunct to a moneyed lifestyle, and if it is to evolve it needs to take a long hard look at the world outside its doors. Body culture has changed, as have audience expectations. Outside of ballet and the creepier realms of fashion, hyper-thinness no longer rules. Most of us prefer to see powerful, relatable performers on stage. Dancers with strong, authentic selves.

It will take visionary company directors working in tandem with visionary school principals to achieve the necessary top-down changes, and put an end to the body shaming of vulnerable young women. The process will certainly be resisted by the latter-day Lermontovs, and may not happen. But for as long as it doesn’t, I know that I’m going to continue hearing horror stories like those in the BBC film. And I’ve heard far too many of those already.