What is a ballet body?

Ballet is about bodies. Right from its origins, this was an art form concerned with the presentation of a specific, highly curated vision of the human form. The body of the aristocratic man was a subject of great fascination to aristocratic men (and probably also women, but we hear a lot less from them) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is an enormous amount of scholarship on masculinity in this period, but you don't need to be an academic to recognize that Baroque-era Europeans were OBSESSED with the beauty and suavity of the aristocratic male body. In the famous Rigaud portrait of Louis XIV, the original premier danseur, of course we have the assiduous attention to the Sun King's gorgeous gams, clad in snowy stockings, exposed to the thigh, and framed by his ermine-lined doublet of blue silk brocaded with the fleur-de-lys in gold and his frilly trunk hose. He stands in a relaxed fourth position, the better to show off his white satin shoes, with their red heels, diamond buckles, and coral ribbon bows. There's another Rigaud portrait of Louis in the Prado in Madrid, less often cited in ballet histories, but identical in its fixation on Louis' sexy legs. Here, he's wearing armor, standing in essentially the same pose, looking essentially the same, a bit like the 63-year-old Mark Morris (Louis was 63 when both portraits were painted in 1701); now the legs are shiny steel and the shoes are black, but just as in the other portrait there's a lot of visual attention to the tops of his thighs and his pelvis -- here, it's achieved by an absolutely fabulous, theatrical sash worn low on his hips, fluttering between his thighs and puffing out over his ass.  

Mark Morris, photographed at the Mark Morris
 Dance Center in Brooklyn, NY, August 9, 2019
Photo by Chris Sorenson for the Wall Street Journal

Hyancithe Rigaud, Louis XIV of France,
1701. Prado, Madrid (photo: Prado)

Louis' panache, his cocked leg, his inscrutable gaze, the jut of his elbow, add up to his ineffable physical expression of power and assurance. He is not just a (very manly) man, but The Man. Rigaud imagines Louis very much as one supposes Louis imagined himself, the ideal instance of the divine right of kings, his body with its ease, its beauty, and its mastery of everything from dancing to horsemanship the arts of violence (war, hunting) an expression of God's favor. 

The sexuality of a figure like Louis, or of many of the male courtiers with whom he surrounded himself, is almost irrelevant here; to call these super-powerful, hyper-masculine aristocrats "queer" would be doing an injustice to the term, though certainly some (most? many?) of them had more fluid notions of what constituted "normal" sexual appetites than your average 21st century conservative. They were certainly fairly polyamorous -- while the Catholic Church would not marry you to more than one person, for a king to have a mistress (or two or three) as well as (on the q.t.) male lovers would surprise exactly nobody. It was an expression of a man's dominance and potency to be literally, sexually, dominant and potent in that way.

The sexiness, or just the sexuality of the ballet body is one of those things that people often feel uncomfortable discussing. In some parts of the popular imagination, the body of the dancer, or specifically, of the ballerina, is a kind of pink-washed blank spot on the map of human sexuality, a sugar-coated vision of innocence and prettiness. This is of course ridiculous and a product of the infantilization of women generally, and of ballet dancers specifically. One of the things I really struggle against as an adult dancer and now dance teacher is this idea that ballet is specifically for children, when nothing could be farther from the truth, from the 17th century up to now.

Ballet is intrinsically about the most fundamental human impulses and emotions: desire, loss, love, heartbreak, hope, despair, joy, hatred, grief, envy, cunning, delight, dreaming... And since ballet is an art form that speaks through and with the body, it falls upon the dancing body to express and represent these states. While there are some ballets that are literally all about sexual desire, lust, fulfillment, and kinks (Petite Mort being the prime example), most of the major story ballets trade in this coin at some level as well. Swan Lake, anyone? Romeo and Juliet? Manon? Even La Fille Mal Gardee (after all, what does she need to be "gardee"d from?). The simple fact that the pas de deux joins two human bodies together in a very intimate way means that you simply cannot scrub sex and sexuality from the picture.

Okay, so here is where things get kind of weird, and what I've been thinking about since the 2024 Olympics wrapped up. This was the first Olympics in which break dancing was a medal sport, which led to a lot of talk about whether ballet would ever be considered (I hope not), and in the run-up to the games, there was a public barre session led by the POB dancers that looked like fun, but that is not the connection that has me ruminating. Rather, it is the brouhaha over the women boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, who were accused (by other competitors) of being "men," which then sparked a whole firestorm of commentary from anti-trans celebrity voices who jumped on the bandwagon of saying that these two women were men (they're not), and then people from the trans-positive community also claiming them as intersex or trans people (they are women -- it's a matter of public record). 

What does boxing have to do with ballet? At the most basic level, they're both about bodies, and about the relationships between bodies. They're about grace, and in their own ways, violence, and a kind of stylized movement. As this rather fluffy piece from GQ notes, Muhammad Ali, in old videos, moves with "the nimbleness of Nureyev." They require extreme physical fitness for those who engage with them at a competitive level, and they are both styled as art forms with connotations of nobility -- indeed, one epithet for boxing is "the noble art." This term came about in the 19th century, and it coincided with the British aristocracy's adoption of boxing as one of the legitimate forms of upper-class masculine sport, along with the longstanding martial arts of swordsmanship and marksmanship, and of course, things like etiquette and yes, dancing. More relevantly to this little thought piece, they both began as explicitly masculine pursuits, but were "invaded" early on by women of the lower social classes; by the 1720s, both female ballet dancers and female boxers were scandalizing these bastions of male, aristocratic expertise, and titillating audiences that included large numbers of those same male aristocrats. 

Hattie Madders, London, 1883

Marie-Anne de Camargo, flashing her ankles in about 1730

But there's a huge difference between these early women on the stage and in the ring: the dancers were highly sexualized, becoming sought-after partners for upper class men, whereas the boxers were generally thought of as unfeminine and frightening (indeed, Hattie Madders, shown above, bore the title, "Scariest Woman in England" for a time).

As ballet choreographers and companies grow more adventuresome about and comfortable with representing and exploring a plurality of genders and a range of sensualities and sexualities, I am hopeful that this classical art form will evolve, as the sport of boxing is evolving, and as other sports traditionally. gendered feminine or masculine (ice skating, gymnastics, rugby...) to be not only more inclusive, but also, more fertile as spaces for the imagination of what gender and sexuality can and might look like or feel like. I'm particularly hopeful about the work of choreographers like Christopher Rudd and Adriana Pierce, and companies like Ballez, or even Pacific Northwest Ballet, which numbers among its corps de ballet the gender fluid dancer Ashton Edwards, who performs both in traditionally male and female roles. 

But at the same time, I am terrified. I have a transgender child, and I have seen how unbelievably cruel and difficult the world can be towards people whose sexuality and gender identity don't match up with the binaries of western patriarchy. If ballet and sports can help by presenting the wider public with a humane view of the plurality of gender and sexuality that exists out there, fantastic. But by the same token, when the mass media phenomenon of something like the Olympics brings attention to the frailties and fracture points of the binary system, there are bound to be those who will exploit this exposure to whip up anxiety, fear, and hatred. These can and do have very real, very embodied consequences; violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people is escalating even as public acknowledgement of their existence rises -- one study by UCLA Law School found that transgender people are four times as likely to become victims of violent assault (sexual or otherwise) than gender-conforming people. And among these victims, the overwhelming majority are trans women of color. 

I think that institutions, like the Olympics, need to be extra cautious about how they manage the discussion around and representation of gender and sexuality. And they need to get out ahead of the ball so that athletes like Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting are not exposed to the truly life-threatening hostilities that they are now dealing with as a result of the Games' failure to provide preventative measures around an issue that officials must have known would arise, given that both athletes had already been the target of persecution. There's also the whole way in which most Olympic sports are so adamantly gender-binary, purportedly for reasons of fairness; but what if athletes could elect to compete in non-binary events? Just a thought, and a thought inspired, at least in part, by the complex gender history of classical ballet, an art form about bodies, but also about their mutability (swan maidens, rose-spirits, and all that...)