https://www.city-journal.org/sniffing-out-racism-and-white-supremacy-at-the-ballet
The New York Times has published the latest installment in its running tally of alleged racism in the high arts: the Staatsballett Berlin (Berlin State Ballet) treated a black ballerina differently because of the color of her skin. Oh, wait! That was yesterday’s template. Today’s is that a black ballerina was treated the same as white ballerinas. The search for racism requires just such rhetorical nimbleness.
Since the nineteenth century, dancers in a corps de ballet often applied white body paint in works, such as Giselle or Les Sylphides, that feature a supernatural element. The intent was to create an impression of ghostly creatures from beyond the grave who might doom any red-blooded prince who crosses them. The use of white makeup was not a statement about white supremacy: there were virtually no black dancers in Russian or Parisian ballet troupes at the time against which a statement about skin color might be made. If one is looking for slurs, the body paint could be seen as anti-white, in its association of whiteness with death.
In 2018, the Staatsballett Berlin mounted Swan Lake, another ballet where white body paint has traditionally been used, in this case to increase the illusion that the dancers were swans. One of the company’s ballet mistresses told the company’s one black dancer, Chloé Lopes Gomes, to use the paint as well. Gomes says she told the ballet mistress, “I’ll never look white,” to which the mistress responded: “well, you will have to put on more than the other girls.”
