From the Chinese scene in Nutcracker to the Moor in Petrushka, are some ballets now offensively outdated? We ask big names in dance if they should be preserved, changed – or binned

It’s Christmas 1990 and I’m a ballet dancer in an Aladdin panto at Newcastle’s Tyne theatre. For a Chinese number, we wear conical hats and ragged trousers, and hop from one leg to the other, grinning, our elbows bent and index fingers sharply pointed, which is the universal ballet symbol for “Chinese”. (One theory is that the fingers imitate chopsticks.) I’m 12 and it never crosses my mind to ask if this is how people in China actually dance.

As Nutcracker season rolls around, I’m reminded of the same kind of pointy fingers that are traditionally seen in the Chinese dance of the festive favourite’s second act, along with Fu Manchu moustaches, waggling heads and comically springy jumps, all adding up for some people to a gentle mocking of the fools of the far east.

It is just one example of the sometimes jarringly 19th-century worldview that permeates classical ballet but has slowly begun to be questioned. Last year, a group called the Universal Society of Hinduism complained about the Royal Ballet’s staging of La Bayadère. Premiered in 1877, this colourful orientalist tale of scantily clad temple dancers, a lascivious priest and dancing religious icons “trivialised eastern religious traditions, belittling a rich civilisation and … abetting ethnic stereotyping”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I thought it was a solution’ … Anton Savichev as the Moor in Edward Clug’s Petrushka for the Bolshoi. Photograph: Elena Fetisova/ Bolshoi Theatre

English National Ballet is about to open its season with Le Corsaire, first presented in 1856. It’s an entertaining pirate romp around the Ottoman empire with some dazzling virtuoso dancing, but as the African American dancer Misty Copeland told me in an interview: “You think of Corsaire as this light thing, but it’s not really – it’s about slaves, these women chained up.” And it’s all presented as glossy entertainment.

Probably the most blatant example comes in the character of the Moor in Mikhail Fokine’s Petrushka, from 1911. He’s lazy, stupid and prone to violence, praying to a coconut and played by a blacked-up dancer. Last year saw two new versions of Petrushka, by Johan Inger and Edward Clug, that redrew the ballet for modern audiences. But there remains the question of what to do with the original – one of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s most famous roles, with a brilliant Stravinsky score.

Do you drop problematic ballets from the repertoire, tweak them around the edges, or keep them on show for archive value? Ballets are not objects like paintings or books, so they can’t be reflected on at arm’s length. To keep them alive, they have to be re-embodied with those stereotypes acted out all over again. And the dressing up is more crudely literal than, say, the gamelan-inspired music of Debussy, which nobody is boycotting due to cultural appropriation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Abetting ethnic stereotyping’ … La Bayadère by the Royal Ballet in 2018. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Kevin O’Hare began his dancing career in the 1980s with the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet when the application of “wet brown” pancake to play swarthy Gypsy roles was par for the course. When you’re immersed in the ballet world from a young age, he says, “that’s just how things are”. Now that he’s artistic director of the Royal Ballet, however, he takes a more nuanced view. “Suddenly, you look through a different lens, and sometimes I don’t feel things are right for the sensibilities of today’s world.”



The Nutcracker is a prime example. In 2016, O’Hare oversaw a revision of the Chinese dance into a cheery athletic variation. National dances are a fixture of the big 19th-century ballets: Spanish, Ukrainian, Arabian, Hungarian, Polish. But the European dances tend to be based on genuine folk steps, whereas the Arabian and Chinese variations were imaginative guesses and the Middle Eastern dances were invariably slinky, midriff-exposed harem delights.

That jewel-encrusted orientalism, very present in the India-set La Bayadère, is less straightforward to deal with than the sight of a dancer blacking up. O’Hare thought in earnest about the decision to stage La Bayadère last year. It was never intended as a piece of realism – its most famous scene is an opium dream of mesmerising ballerinas in white tutus. But still, he says, “it sits awkwardly now, the idea of what India was”.

I have the feeling that we are going softer and softer, so as not to hurt anybody Jean-Christophe Maillot

Adjustments were made to the makeup, including the soot-stained skin of some characters that could be mistaken for “blackface”. O’Hare wants to put the work in context, with programme notes and talks surrounding the main show (including one from Indian choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, whose own work made in response to La Bayadère was performed at the Royal Opera House in 2015). “You’re encouraging the audience not to take it at face value,” he says. “It’s a history lesson.” Which all sounds very reasonable, even if it doesn’t change the content of the ballet.

The Royal Ballet’s production thankfully does without la danse de négrillons, eight young dancers made up like minstrels, but some versions retain it. During Benjamin Millepied’s recent short-lived directorship of the fiercely traditional Paris Opera Ballet, he attempted an update, turning the négrillons into a “children’s dance”, no face-paint required, and riling the conservative establishment.

Purging offensive elements from modern productions may seem an obvious move in 21st-century Britain, but that view meets surprising resistance. Cultural differences in various countries play a major part, and there’s the fear that once you start “correcting” the rep, you’ll end up with nothing left: the Gypsies in Don Quixote or Two Pigeons, perhaps, and let’s not get started on sexual politics. But more than that, because ballet is not a concrete product and you can’t rely on the foundations of it always to be there, the responsibility to preserve the past must be taken seriously.

Jean-Christophe Maillot is artistic director of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, known for stylish modern remakes of famous titles including Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet and Coppélia. But the company’s repertoire includes original works of the legendary Ballets Russes, including Petrushka. And these, for Maillot, are sacrosanct.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest New approach … Shobana Jeyasingh’s Bayadère – The Ninth Life. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

“When I perform the original Petrushka, it’s exactly like when I go to the Louvre and see a beautiful Renoir painting,” he says. “It’s [an image of] a certain time. If I do Taming of the Shrew, the position of the woman in Shakespeare’s work is truly unacceptable today. So should we destroy Shakespeare? The idea is to respect the memory of the original work. It is out of the question to change anything in it.” And that means absolutely anything, including a white dancer wearing black makeup. “It’s an interesting mark of what the world was at that time – and that’s what art is.”

What about those offended by the portrayal of the Moor? “Can we fight against stupidity?” says Maillot. “It’s clear that this piece is from 1911 and it has to be put in context.” He is obviously energised by the issue. “I have the feeling that, to not hurt anybody, we are going softer and softer to reach a point where everybody everywhere is speaking the same language with the same accent. Everybody is getting contentious about everything, and we should resist that a little bit.” For him, it’s akin to censorship. “We know how to be politically correct, but we’re dying from that. I take the risk of [people] not understanding, being shocked by what I put on stage. If we destroy that freedom, I think it’s very dangerous.”

Maillot celebrates the distinctively different cultures that have contributed to dance history, but the fact is that cultural borders are dissolving and ballet is now a global industry: a performance in Moscow can be beamed to a cinema in Massachusetts. Romanian choreographer Edward Clug recently fell foul of US distributors with his Petrushka for the Bolshoi. In Clug’s version, the setting and characters are starkly abstracted, the Moor no longer a caricature. The Moor’s makeup, however, was a mask-like oval painted in black.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A dancer in minstrel makeup … the 1991 Petrushka by Birmingham Royal Ballet. Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images

“I thought that was a discreet solution,” says Clug, “but already that was too obvious for the American distributors.” They came up with two black dots on the cheeks instead. Clug seems bemused by the whole episode, but open-minded. “I like the idea of being able to share with more people,” he says.



Racism in ballet is often a subtle and subjective question. Some black ballet dancers, for example, wear tights the colour of their own skin, as opposed to standard pink; others don’t see the need. Sometimes it’s less subtle, like the school of thought that there shouldn’t be any black dancers in the corps de ballet of classic “ballet blanc”, because the identical nature of the performers is its whole raison d’etre.

Maillot says: “If you ask me if a traditional Swan Lake at the Mariinsky can have a black girl in the corps de ballet, I can tell you honestly that I don’t have the answer. But I feel like telling you no.” His purism is not so much about race as about not having any deviation from a very particular image. For Maillot, only dancers with the same bodies, schooling and style should dance a traditional Swan Lake. That’s why he made a new version for his own company.

At the Royal Ballet, some variation in swans is allowed, and the approach to casting is colourblind. “It’s not, ‘Oh we’ve got five Asian men in the company, let’s do the Chinese dance,’” says O’Hare. During a show’s run, across different casts there may be white, black and Asian dancers playing the same role “and nobody bats an eyelid”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It’s about slaves, women chained up’ … English National Ballet’s 2013 production of Le Corsaire, with Alina Cojocaru. Photograph: Arnaud Stephenson

For Petrushka, O’Hare thinks it would have to be a remake. But the issue of cultural appropriation is not consigned to historical ballets. He hints at a new commission coming up “from a different culture to ours” and says: “We’re really serious about talking to the right people, making sure we’re going to do it in the right way.”

How about hiring an Indian choreographer if you want to make a ballet about India? “I suppose you could,” he says. “And if an Indian choreographer comes with a great idea, then yes. But there is nothing wrong with somebody who isn’t from that heritage doing it, as long as they respect what they’re doing and have the right collaborators around them to make sure they’re treating that subject in the right way.”

Not that anyone in ballet – or the world at large – can agree about what “the right way” is. But at least the pointy fingers of my panto days are slowly making an exit.

• English National Ballet’s Le Corsaire is at Milton Keynes theatre, 20-23 November and at London Coliseum, 8-14 January.