At first glance, the 24 swans fluttering across the stage at the Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts in Toronto look as traditional as they come. Their tutus form stiff rings of tulle around their hips. Bodices are adorned with bright white plumage, heads wrapped in feathery wreaths that cover both ears. Arms ripple up and down, the line breaking at the wrist to suggest the curved edge of a wing.
Look a little closer, though, and something is different. Each swan has an individuality that’s unusual in “Swan Lake,” a ballet in which the corps de ballet typically strives for absolute uniformity. The dancers seem more muscular and modern — more like real young women than a flock of anthropomorphized birds. A sharp-eyed audience member might have figured out why: These swans aren’t wearing tights.
Bare legs are one of the defining features of the National Ballet of Canada’s production of “Swan Lake,” which had its premiere in 2022 and is returning this month. In an art form built on traditions and rules, it’s hard to overstate the significance of a “Swan Lake” without tights. It’s a bit like playing in a baseball game without a cap or performing in a symphony orchestra in jogging pants.
As ballet grapples with its history of racial homogeneity, many of its longest-standing conventions are coming under the microscope. Some of this involves reconsidering hiring practices, casting choices and access to training. But it also means taking a hard look at aesthetic practices that can make nonwhite dancers feel excluded. Pale pink tights were introduced to match the skin tone of 19th-century European ballerinas, a tradition that has reinforced whiteness as an industry norm. For dark-skinned dancers, wearing blush-colored hosiery can be a daily, tangible reminder that they don’t satisfy an ideal.
“I never thought I would be onstage in a tutu and bare legs,” said Erica Lall, who joined the National’s corps de ballet in June. “I think it’s beautiful. Swans are aggressive, they’re strong, so it makes sense that you can see the muscularity in our legs and all that definition.”
The decision to forgo tights was the culmination of a conversation about equity and inclusion that began at the National Ballet in 2020. A new “Swan Lake” had been slated to premiere that year, a farewell production for the artistic director Karen Kain, who was an internationally acclaimed ballerina for nearly 30 years before assuming leadership of the company.
Kain wanted to leave the company with a “Swan Lake” that used more of the choreography from Erik Bruhn’s 1967 version, the one she had danced in. She asked the choreographers Robert Binet and Christopher Stowell, both artistic staff at the time, to help realize her vision. What Kain wanted boiled down to two crucial points: to emphasize the love story at the ballet’s heart and for the swans to seem more like real women, not the fragile nymphlike creatures of most productions.
But 2020 had other plans. The pandemic hit, George Floyd was murdered and conversations about race and discrimination became more urgent and widespread. With theaters shuttered and studios closed, ballet companies had time to think about longstanding diversity problems. The National Ballet already had a feedback group in place that gave dancers a space to voice concerns; race and inclusion were suddenly top of the agenda at group meetings. Dancers of color questioned the requirement that they wear pink tights (and pink shoes), regardless of their actual skin color.
“They have always felt a bit oppressive,” said Tene Ward, a Black and South Asian dancer in the corps de ballet. “The point of tights is essentially to elongate your line, right? So if you look like me, and you have brown skin on top and then pink legs below, all of a sudden your line is chopped in half.”
Lall, who danced with American Ballet Theater before coming to Toronto, felt similarly. “Growing up, you learn that tights are pink to match a ballerina’s skin,” she said. “My skin is nowhere near the color pink, so then you’re like, ‘Oh well, I guess I’m not really wanted or accepted.’”
Hearing this feedback was eye-opening for Kain, who came of age at a time when there were no Black female dancers in the National Ballet. Her plan was to have dancers wear flesh-toned tights that matched their skin tones. In 2020, this was uncommon in classical ballet but not new. Women at Dance Theater of Harlem had been wearing tights and shoes in bespoke shades of brown since the 1970s. Lauren Anderson, the first Black principal dancer at Houston Ballet, had started performing classical roles in skin-toned tights in the early 1990s.
(Tights don’t have the same racial connotations for male dancers because they are rarely intended to suggest nude skin. In this production, all the Prince Siegfrieds wear opaque white tights that match their shirts.)
As the Black Lives Matter movement gained international momentum, many major companies were rethinking their shoes and tights policies, too. In 2021, flesh-toned tights in various shades of brown appeared in classical productions at Pacific Northwest Ballet, Washington Ballet and American Ballet Theater’s Studio Company. This created a spike in demand for tights and pointe shoes in different skin tones that manufacturers had trouble meeting, a problem that was exacerbated by lingering supply-chain issues.
So Kain asked the design team: Why not bare legs? When the dancers tried it in rehearsal, she decided it not only looked striking, but it also emphasized the humanity she was going for. “It evolved into a design choice to show the dancers’ vulnerability and individuality,” Kain said.
The choice wasn’t unanimously popular. While Ward said she found the decision hugely meaningful, a symbol of acceptance by her industry and peers, others were wary. Tutus are meant to be worn with tights, and many dancers found the tulle was rough or itchy against their bare thighs. Others complained of a “double-butt” effect, caused by the cut of the tutu’s bottom on bare skin. Tights also keep muscles warm, cover imperfections, and can make a dancer feel less exposed onstage.
Stacy Dimitropoulos, the head of wardrobe for the company, wanted to address the dancers’ concerns while honoring Kain’s vision. She had to find a way to provide the dancers with both comfort and coverage. Tutus have a mesh panty that is too thin and porous to be worn on its own; and the basque, an internal structure that keeps the tutu in place on the hips, isn’t meant to sit on bare skin. “It took some R and D on our end, and then convincing the dancers to actually go forward with it,” Dimitropoulos said.
After some experimenting, she found a solution in seamless, high-waisted underwear that could be dyed to match the dancers’ skin tones.
But another problem didn’t have an easy wardrobe fix. Tights absorb moisture; without them, the dancers’ legs were getting uncomfortably sweaty.
“There’s a lot of intricate partnering in Karen’s version, and when your legs are sweaty and slippery it’s very unpleasant for your partner,” Jurgita Dronina, a former principal dancer said in a phone interview from Vilnius, where she was recently appointed artistic director of the Lithuanian National Ballet. Dronina, who danced Odette-Odile on opening night in 2022, experimented with bare legs in rehearsal, and found it wasn’t going to work. “By the time I got to the third act, I couldn’t even go on pointe,” she said. “Sweat had dripped down my legs and my pointes shoes had basically melted.”
Kain decided to let her Odette-Odiles wear very thin flesh-toned tights that could absorb sweat while still matching the bare legs of the corps de ballet dancers, who didn’t get that option. Binet said this compromise made sense, given the demands of the lead role. “They’re in the spotlight the whole time,” he said. “They’re in big splits a lot more. They go upside down with their legs open. Between the Prince and Rothbart, men have their hands all over them.”
Just as the sweat problem was solved, a more sensitive one arose. The filmmaker Chelsea McMullan and a small camera crew had gone behind the scenes to capture the making of the ballet, a project that culminated in the award-winning documentary “Swan Song.” In the film, Shaelynn Estrada, a corps de ballet dancer, speaks candidly about her struggles with depression and low self-esteem. When the no-tights policy is announced, she tells Binet there are sizable marks on her legs from a recent episode of self-harm.
Binet said he needed to understand whether Estrada was worried about the company’s response to her marks or whether she didn’t want anyone to see them. In the end, Estrada was comfortable working with the makeup department to cover the marks, a fairly straightforward job for a team frequently tasked with camouflaging tattoos. But her case illustrates some of the problems that emerge when a conservative, regimented art form tries to allow dancers more room to be themselves.
Ballet is a visual medium that has always prized a very narrow and idealized notion of femininity. What happens, for example, if a female dancer decides she doesn’t want to shave her legs?
Hope Muir, who succeeded Kain as artistic director in 2022, said she hadn’t come across that issue yet, but she would be open to the conversation. “I think the big thing is giving the dancers the autonomy to make choices about how they present themselves onstage,” she said. “I really want this to be a place where everything is considered and the dancers are empowered.”
The post This ‘Swan Lake’ Keeps the Tutus but Sheds the Tights appeared first on New York Times.
