Ballerinas are quintessential icons of femininity. Ethereal, almost otherworldly, perfection in a tulle dress. If we look at the stories about ballerinas in the media however, more often than not they speak of how these gifted dancers’ almost maniacal obsession with their art almost always ends up consuming them entirely. Beautiful yes, but bat shit bonkers.

Is everyone who’s involved in the ballet world the perfect image of mental stability?If the news stories that have been coming out of the Bolshoi Ballet in the last year are any indication, probably not. In a way it makes sense: drama and conflict always makes for great headlines, but this is a narrative that has persisted for centuries. This tendency to put women on a pedestal and victimize them at the same time — all the while condemning them for their drive and pathologizing their emotions has plagued ballet since its earliest beginnings.

Ballet, as we know it today, coincided with the rise of Romanticism in Europe in the 19th century. What used to be a mere display of mostly male athleticism for the nobility, was later infused with popular narratives of the time –folk tales of nymphs and supernatural creatures living in the woods– and put onto the stage with a woman at its center. Theophile Gautier, a celebrated librettist and literary critic at the time, went so far to argue that men who dance in public were nothing short of vulgar. “Nothing is more distasteful than a man who shows his red neck, his big muscular arms, his legs with the calves of a parish beadle, and all his strong massive frame shaken by leaps and pirouettes,” he wrote.

Ballet was to be a woman’s world, but as it were, it was a world that celebrated femininity as much as it subjugated it.

Looking at the two seminal ballet works that emerged at the time and are still performed everywhere in the world, La Sylphide and Giselle, the theme is common : a woman meets her death after the betrayal of her lover. In almost every dramatic ballet that emerged after that, the ballerina must suffer and die on stage: Swan Lake, La Bayadere, Manon, The Rite of Spring, the list goes on.

The most telling example of this recurring theme can be found in the character of Giselle, one of the most important and coveted roles in the ballet repertory. Giselle is a peasant girl who lives a peaceful life in a small village in Rhineland. She loves to dance but is advised against it by her mother, who knows her daughter is frail and has a weak heart. Her mother’s worst fears come true when Giselle discovers that the man who seduced her and promised to marry her is in fact a nobleman betrothed to a duchess. Giselle descends into madness and ultimately dances to her death.

The narrative of the ballerina as a beautiful but tortured being started to move away from her roles on stage and ultimately became the way she was identified in the media. She is an accomplished artist and a fierce athlete too, but always a little broken, always treading the line between sanity and madness. In the 1948 film “The Red Shoes,” ballet consumes dancer Victoria Page’s life in such a way that she ends up throwing herself in front of a moving train.

Ugh.

Sixty-two years later, the narrative remains the same in Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film “Black Swan,” a two-hour celebration of every ballet stereotype known to man: overbearing mother, check; anorexic, virginal ballerina on the verge of insanity, check; creepy, sexually aggressive director, check; death on stage in service of the “art”, check check check.

Uuuugh.

Tamara Rojo, a principal of the Royal Ballet at the time, said the film was nothing short of an insult to her profession and laughed at its cheesiness. “I tell people it’s not like that,” she said in an interview with The Guardian, “and if anyone makes you work like that, walk away.” Rojo is an extremely accomplished dancer, a consummate artist who was named Director of the English National Ballet last year. The story of a successful, well-adjusted dancer however, never makes headlines outside the ballet world.

In fact, if we take a look at the stories of dancers who have made headlines in the past, the same storyline continues. Broken, mad women, victims of their own ambition. Gelsey Kirland, the acclaimed American ballerina, became famous after revealing her struggle with drugs and an eating disorder. In a fabulous stroke of meta-narrative, the Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtseva’s struggle with depression and mental illness became the focus of the ballet Red Giselle. Even in coverage of modern day ballet scandals, such as the dramatic exit of wunderkind Sergei Polunin from the Royal Ballet and the horrific acid attack on the Bolshoi Ballet’s artistic director Sergei Filin, the theme of “tortured geniuses” is still alive and well.

Ballet companies around the world have been struggling for years to approach audiences that see ballet as an elitist, antiquated art form that has little relevance to their lives and the telling and retelling of stories like these only serves in alienating them further. What the ballet world needs most is a shift in the conversation. There’s a reason why ballet has survived throughout the years, there’s a different story to tell and there are many tools to tell it (such as this here blog, hopefully.) All we need is to start talking.