Anna Pavlova, ballet’s most famous prima ballerina, died at least 4,000 times. As the swan immortalized in death, the director of the Imperial Russian Ballet fought death on point for four minutes each performance before finally succumbing to the pain. The swan followed Pavlova to her deathbed in 1931, where ballet lore claims her last words were “Get my swan costume ready.”
Tragedy is a major tenet of iconic classical dances. Giselle’s broken heart and Manon’s exhausted pas de deux finale follow their namesake ballet, while Swan LakeHis lovers Odette and Siegfried, and Romeo and Juliet, reunite in suicide. Sopranos are often doomed to die in grand operas, in tubercular Violetta La TraviataCarmen stabbed by the envious Don José, Butterly’s last bear where she commits ritual suicide.
Classical ballet and opera are the arts of death on the stage: their performers will also die for their art. One of the most unfortunate is that of the last romantic ballet star, Emma Livry, who died in 1863 of infection after a rehearsal at the Paris Opera went up in flames.
This week, however, attention has been drawn to another death: the death of ballet itself. Actor Timothée Chalamet, lauded for his blatant ambition and expected to win at the Oscars tonight (March 15), has gone viral for denouncing art in a CNN Town Hall and Variety with Matthew McConaughey. Speaking to a room of University of Texas students, Chalamet reclined in a leather armchair and said he “doesn’t want to work 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 nobody cares about it anymore.’
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Chalamet improvised a few jokes and seemed to cover his tracks to declare “all due respect to all the ballet and opera people out there … I just took pictures for no reason.” However, the city 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 on Instagram and TikTok in the past two weeks and even a satirical news story sparked. Saturday Night Live.
Memes quickly became an irresistible PR opportunity. Ballet and opera companies, from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to London’s Royal Opera House, seized on the viral moment to praise their casts and crews, offering discounts under the actor’s name or reminding viewers that the shows were sadly alive and well, and in fact long sold out.
What Chalamet perhaps inadvertently illuminated was the long and intertwined history of decline and death in ballet and opera. Both industries continue to suffer from high entry barriers, reduced public funding and struggling education. It was announced last summer that, in the US, over half of major ballet companies ended the fiscal year in deficit, while last November the Royal Opera House defended demand-led pricing models to “maximize ticket revenue and support a financially sustainable future”.
The argument that ballet is a dying art is quite widespread in the dance world. For a discipline with a history of more than 500 years, with opera at a slightly younger 400 years, death is part of its relevance to the audience. In 2010, the former ballerina and The New Yorker Dance critic Jennifer Homans wrote an epilogue to classical ballet in her comprehensive history Angels of Apollo. After the death in 1983 of choreographer George Balanchine, “the father of American ballet,” Homans eventually despaired that “after years of trying to convince myself otherwise, I now feel certain that ballet is dying … we’re watching ballet go.”
Ballet and opera critics reappear periodically, and the industry uses this attention to attract audiences to performances, opening a debate over exclusivity. In the January 1998 issue of OUTLOOK magazine, Nadine Meisner argued that “ordinary Britons don’t care for ballet at all”. For Meisner, and other dance critics such as Alastair Macaulay i New York Timesthe lack of young choreographers was the weakness of the discipline, along with the financial limitations of its theaters.
Ballet has always had a penchant for the morbid and the macabre. As noted contemporary dance choreographer Martha Graham said, “a dancer dies twice—once when they stop dancing, and that first death is more painful.” Pavlova’s refusal of an operation that would limit her career is a testament to this ethic.
Perhaps it is this loss of self and hope for the future of cinema that compels Chalamet to make his comments, perhaps it is from a place of ill-judged ignorance. It is impossible today to see a work by Matthew Bourne, Crystal Pite, Wayne McGregor or Christopher Wheeldon and feel the end of dance, but only evolution. For an actor in “fierce pursuit of greatness,” a powerful reminder of the longevity of ballet and opera and his own acceptance of mortality can provide solace.
“Time flies, love flies, life flies, but the red shoes go on,” said Red shoes (1948) reminds us, referring to a pair of fairy shoes that compel the wearer to dance to his death. Ballet is cursed, just as fiery-haired ballerina Moira Shearer was forced to dance, to live beyond its stages, even as its dancers departed. To live is to dance; the death of the dance would be the end of the fascination.
(Further reading: Passion of Self Will)
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