In the United States the use of dark makeup evokes the painful legacy of racism and minstrel shows, in which performers darkened their skin with burnt cork to play characters that perpetuated racist stereotypes about African-Americans. But while the practice is increasingly rare in North America — notwithstanding several recent instances in which politicians in the United States and Canada apologized for wearing blackface or dark makeup long after it was widely seen as offensive — it persists in parts of Europe and Russia.

“I’ve smeared my face and body with a stain a thousand times,” wrote Anna Okuneva, a dancer at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko company in Moscow, on Instagram. “This is my creative work, and this is not racism.”

Some African-American dancers disagree. Calvin Royal III, a soloist at the American Ballet Theater, said in a telephone interview that his immediate reaction on seeing the image was to cringe and ask, “How is it we’re heading into 2020 and this is a reality in some places?”

Dana Nichols, a dancer with the Philadanco company in Philadelphia, said that, as a child, she had been made to wear dark makeup by another leading Russian ballet company, the Mariinsky, despite being black. “It’s easy to be trapped into doing things like this in the name of an art form you love,” she said of the Bolshoi photo. “But you also have to be a citizen of the world and know this is stereotyping and degrading.”