Ballet Doesn’t Need Saving — It Needs Rethinking

A couple of weeks ago, Timothée Chalamet said in an interview: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or you know, things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive,’ even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore.”

As someone who spent over a decade in ballet studios — or rather, as someone who once thought ballet would be their entire life for the rest of their life — hearing that made me feel two things at once: angry and deeply sad. Angry because the statement is so casually dismissive of an art form that has shaped generations of artists, and sad because it reflects a widespread misunderstanding of what ballet actually is.

One of the most visible dancers in the world, Misty Copeland, responded to Chalamet’s comment during promotion for his recent film Marty Supreme. 

“I think that it’s important that we acknowledge that, yes, this is an art form that’s not ‘popular’ and a part of pop culture as movies are,” she said in an interview with Page Six. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have enduring relevance in culture.” Ballet and opera, she pointed out, have persisted for more than four centuries — not by accident, but because they continue to resonate with audiences across generations. “That’s the work that I’ve been doing my whole career to bring more people into it, so that people do understand the importance and the relevance of it in our communities and our culture,” she said.

I’ve seen plenty of Chalamet’s movies. I can say honestly that no film he has appeared in — with the possible exception of “Call Me by Your Name” — has moved me with the same intensity as the ballets I’ve watched. I have seen countless performances over the years: “Swan Lake,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Coppélia,” “The Nutcracker,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Giselle,” among many other newer ones  — and I have cried at every single one.

Chalamet is wrong in the sense that ballet is, in fact, not dying. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to change significantly.

If the general public thinks ballet is fading, part of the reason may be that many people don’t actually know what ballet is beyond its stereotypes. They imagine pink tights at age five, twirling tutus, or what they call “toe shoes.” And while ballet is often perceived as overwhelmingly white and traditionally feminine, that image only captures a narrow slice of the form. There are vast histories and dimensions of ballet that are frequently overlooked. Yes, one of the most significant is its legacy of racial exclusion — a history that could fill article after article, and already has. Entire books have been written on that subject, and many more still need to be. Still, that is only one part of the story. For this, I want to turn to another dimension that is just as central, yet often overlooked: the history and futures of queerness inside ballet. 

When I was growing up, my ballet world was pink — pink tights, pink slippers, pink ribbons on my pointe shoes sewn just so. I learned quickly that ballet’s entire aesthetic rests on the tension that the body must transcend itself while obeying impossible rules. It must be human and ethereal, sensual and sexless, powerful and delicate all at once.

I was constantly told to “lengthen” and “lift” my body as though gravity itself were indecent. If my expression showed effort, I had failed. When my body grew stronger, more muscular, I was warned not to look “too athletic,” to make sure my “legs didn’t look like logs.” In ballet, beauty and strength are always at odds — one must be concealed for the other to exist. “Feminine is beautiful,” we were told, but beauty could always be replaced. Every dancer works with the knowledge that someone is waiting to take their job. A younger, thinner, softer dancer is always waiting for your body to give out.

What I loved most in ballet were the jumps — the moment of suspension where the body seems to forget gravity. The grand jetés slicing through the air, the tours en l’air, the bounding freedom of men’s choreography. I watched the boys — the few we had — practice the Corsaire variation, all leaps and turns and power, while we rehearsed things like La Bayadère and Sleeping Beauty, our wrists soft and our smiles composed. Their movement looked like flight; ours looked like containment. And I remember standing in the dressing room when I last performed in “The Nutcracker,” tugging at a costume that itched at the waist and left red lines across my skin, waiting for my partner to come to the stage, knowing the stage crew would not start the second act until he was ready. As a corp de ballet member, we all looked like replicas of each other. I didn’t want to be a flower in a garden — I wanted to be the gardener. But in ballet, the flowers don’t choose how they bloom.

When we ran short on boys, girls sometimes filled in for them — makeshift “boy parts.” I loved those moments. Being the one who lifted, who steadied, who held someone else in balance felt right. But I also remember the embarrassment of not being strong enough yet, my wrists shaking when I tried to lift someone high. I wanted to build that strength — not because I wanted to be a man, but because I wanted to dance like one. 

Eventually, the exhaustion both mentally and physically became too heavy to disguise. My mental health was collapsing under the constant pressure to be smaller, lighter, better. I started to believe I would never amount to anything — especially after being told, more than once, that I’d probably have a better career if I were a boy.

Queering Ballet’s History

Ballet has always pretended to be the purest, most orderly of art forms — a world of white tutus, straight lines, and heterosexual fairy tales — but its history is threaded with undercurrents of queerness. 

Ballet was born in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century but was popularized in the 17th-century courts of Louis XIV. The Sun King himself danced the role of Apollo, the god of order and light, embodying divine masculinity. In those early court ballets, men played women’s roles because women weren’t allowed on stage. Gender was costume, literally performed. Seventeenth-century ballets were filled with travesti performers, men in corsets and wigs, playing nymphs, queens, and goddesses. It wasn’t seen as subversive then; it was simply convention. But what that convention reveals is that ballet’s gender boundaries have never been as solid as the art form would like to imagine.

When women finally took the stage, they also inherited the travesti tradition — sometimes performing men’s roles in training and even in performance. The 19th-century ballet La Fille du Régiment featured women in soldier’s uniforms; La Cachucha in Le Diable Boiteux among some other variations allowed ballerinas to play with masculine sharpness and rhythm. There were also the “en travesti” roles — women as pages, cupids, and jesters — allowed brief access to power and humor, only to return to softness by the ballet’s end. The dancer’s task was not to be male or female, but to make gender visible — to perform its illusion convincingly enough that the audience believed it. Also, just to make it clear, most of this history is rooted in opera, but it also applies to ballet.

Even the most canonical ballets — “Swan Lake,” “Giselle,” “La Sylphide” — are built around transformation, though very damsel in distress and heteronormative. Women turn into swans, ghosts, and fairies; men fall in love with illusions. These ballets constantly blurred the line between human and supernatural, masculine and feminine, real and performed. The ballerina’s body becomes a site of metamorphosis, of transition. What could be more queer than that?

Dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, whose L’Après-midi d’un faune scandalized Paris in 1912 with its erotic charge, was not only a genius but openly, painfully queer in an era that refused him language or safety. Rudolf Nureyev, who defected from the Soviet Union and became one of the 20th century’s most famous dancers, lived as a gay man in a world that worshiped his body but ignored his desire. 

Queerness in ballet has always been both hypervisible and invisible. The stereotype of the “gay male ballet dancer” has existed for decades. Ballet has long been one of the few spaces where men can express softness, emotion, and intimacy with other men without social punishment — as long as it remains onstage, confined within art. 

The dancer’s life is a cycle of reinvention: girl to ballerina, student to sylph, human to spirit. Queer people know this choreography instinctively. We know what it means to rehearse a self, to perform identity until it feels like truth. Even ballet’s artifice — its theatricality, its stylization, its devotion to beauty — is basically camp. Think of the exaggerated gestures, the makeup, the melodrama of Tchaikovsky’s scores. Camp, as Susan Sontag wrote, is the love of exaggeration, of style over content — and ballet is nothing if not style made flesh. To call ballet straight is to ignore its essence: It is drag in pointe shoes, discipline masquerading as ecstasy.

Since the romantic era, the ballerina has become the emblem of beauty itself. Her power lay in her lightness, her ability to disappear into air. The male dancer, meanwhile, was defined by his ability to lift her. The entire form depended on this duality. George Balanchine, one of American ballet’s most revered figures, famously said, “The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.” 

Reading Lucy Jones ’27’s article The Epic Highs and Lows of Queer Basketball Theory made me think about the role community plays in reshaping activities that are often structured by rigid hierarchies. It made me think about the communities I have found in dance, both here in Western Massachusetts and back home. Ballet as an institution has often been rigid and exclusionary, but the smaller communities that gather around it can look very different.

My Return to Ballet

Ballet at Amherst College has been the most supportive environment I have ever danced in. For someone whose earlier ballet training was defined by mirrors, constant corrections, and quiet but relentless comparison, that difference matters. Here, even the structure of class feels different. Corrections aren’t imposed on your body without warning; touch is consent-based, something offered rather than assumed. No one is grabbing your hips or adjusting your legs without asking first — and I’m definitely not being hit with a stick to fix my posture anymore. That alone changes the atmosphere of the room. It makes it possible to stay present in your body instead of bracing against it. There’s also a freedom to practice — to try, fail, repeat — without the immediate weight of judgment. Dancers mark combinations without shame, ask questions mid-combination, and laugh when something doesn’t land. That might sound simple, but in most ballet spaces, it isn’t. There, every movement can feel like a test, every mistake something to hide. At Amherst, it feels like learning again. Dancers arrive with very different levels of experience, and that range is acknowledged — by instructors and by the dancers themselves — rather than flattened into a hierarchy. People are here because they want to dance, not because they are trying to prove they deserve to stay. That shift has allowed me to begin rebuilding a relationship with ballet that I once thought was permanently broken. As a traumatized ballet dancer dealing with significant mental health struggles and disordered eating habits, I thought I could never go back.

It took significant effort for me to consider returning to ballet at all, and I had no way of knowing how supportive the Amherst community would be. My decision to return in the first place was instead motivated by New York City-based choreographer Kade Pyle, who founded the queer ballet company Ballez. 

After I quit ballet, I wasn’t ready to sever my connection to it entirely. I tried to manage the distance — unfollowing most dance accounts because they felt too painful to look at, then gradually returning to a few. I kept going to performances, too, and found myself sobbing through them, less out of appreciation than from a more complicated sense of loss. Ballet, even at a distance, still felt like something I belonged to and something I had been shut out of at the same time. With that distance, though, came a shift in perspective. Outside the structure of the traditional studio, I began to imagine what ballet might look like if it weren’t so tightly bound to control and limitation. That line of thinking eventually led me to Ballez, which reworks classical narratives for bodies and identities that have historically been excluded from the form. Its mission is straightforward but expansive: to create space for dancers who are trans, nonbinary, fat, disabled, and queer to participate in ballet without apology, and to rethink the canon itself. Where my earlier experiences of ballet emphasized restriction, Ballez suggests a different approach — one that treats the form as adaptable rather than stagnant.

When I took Pyle’s class at Gibney, in Manhattan, it immediately felt like home. The atmosphere was different from any studio I had ever known: warm, collaborative, and patient, yet full of energy and ambition. One of the first things Pyle emphasized was that we were allowed to make mistakes — that falling, fumbling, or getting a step wrong wasn’t just tolerated, it was part of learning. It sounds simple, almost obvious, but for a former traumatized ballet dancer, those words felt revolutionary. I was only able to go once, but even that single class was transformative. For the first time, the focus wasn’t on perfection or comparison, but on exploration and presence in my own body. It was the first time I had ever done ballet without shame, without fear of judgment, without the constant sense that I was failing even when I was succeeding.

This is where I return, briefly, to Chalamet — to point out that what he describes as a dying art  has never depended on mainstream attention to survive. I think ballet’s endurance isn’t a product of cultural attention. It lives in bodily memory, in repetition and muscle, in movements that remain even when the dancing stops.

My relationship with ballet has never been linear — it has existed in phases, sometimes consuming my entire sense of self, sometimes something I avoided entirely — but it has never fully disappeared. Even when I left, it stayed in my body: in the way I stand, in the way I listen to music, in the way I understand effort and beauty and control. That kind of imprint isn’t something that fades with popularity.

Ballet doesn’t need to be rescued by relevance, because it doesn’t operate on the same terms as relevance. It isn’t sustained by constant visibility or mass appeal, but by repetition, memory, and the people who continue to remake it. What looks, from the outside, like decline can also be a kind of transformation — slower, less visible, but no less real.

If anything, what I’ve come to understand is that ballet is not a fixed tradition waiting to be preserved, but a language that keeps shifting depending on who is speaking it. And for those of us who have lived inside it — imperfectly, even painfully — it doesn’t simply end. It changes shape. It waits. It makes room, eventually, for a different kind of return. 

So no, ballet doesn’t need saving. But it does need to be rethought — not because it’s dying, but because it’s still here, still unfolding, whether or not anyone is paying attention.