Men in Ballet: Inhabitation and the Double Bind

          Turn after turn, a ballet dancer must be graceful, flexible, and light as a feather in order to successfully entice an audience by their movements on stage. The femininity of moving one’s body in this fashion is confirmed by our culture’s gender stereotype inherent in this style of dance. We assume ballet dancers are supposed to wear white or pink tutus with a tight leotard and slippers, but more importantly, we assume that they are female. This information is produced by mass media and confirmed by popular culture in the US that links femininity and womanhood to this style. Because of this systematic connection, a man dancing ballet is instantly perceived as feminine due to his movements and often assumed to be homosexual. In other words, it is not cool for guys to do ballet even if they are skilled. They appear to need something more than talent to be appreciated by the public.   

            One male ballet dancer who managed to make ballet cool for some people and more attractive to male dancers was Edward Villella (shown below), a former boxer who brought to the stage his muscular build and masculinity that swayed those who watched to appreciate the talent he exuded. His face is serious, not soft like the dancer above, and his costume accentuates his rippling muscles. Alex Wong, a trained ballet dancer and past contestant on the hit TV show So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD), admitted that “[Edward] was known as the most masculine ballet dancer in America at the time and, really, made it cool for guys like me to do ballet." Wong’s statement confirms the fear male ballet dancers have about their perceived lack of masculinity and the need for an outsider to help normalize gendered performances.

This need for a gendered performance to be normalized or improved by an outsider is located by Erica Rand in Court and Sparkle, which varies slightly from the previous example (p. 448-9). She describes the phenomena as alien inhabitation and analyzes Wong’s SYTYCD crunking routine with hip-hop dancer tWitch. Wong, being trained in ballet, needed tWitch to improve his crunking skills. Wong’s crunking skills increased to the level of tWitch’s natural rhythm throughout the routine, but Wong challenges him at the end with three quick and elegant turns to which tWitch responds with less skilled and ungraceful turns. The judging panel not only confirms the concept of alien inhabitation but also fuels the transformative model to the public by exclaiming their incredulity toward Wong being able to dance like tWitch. Because many people do not understand the technicality of dance, it is up to the dance experts on the judging panel to frame what is going on. In this case, they were astonished by Wong’s ability to crunk despite him being trained in only ballet and classical dance. 

           This leaves us with an interesting question: how was Wong able to acclimate effortlessly once he was shown the rhythm whereas tWitch was unable to cross the boundary to ballet (or choreographed to do so)? As the subject, Wong has the autonomy to be able to learn and adapt to tWitch’s effortless movements, but not the other way around. tWitch is seemingly stuck in his ways as a hip-hop dancer and cannot cross the boundary to another discipline, which makes him an object that is used as an instrument to improve Wong’s crunking abilities. Objectification of an individual reduces their personhood and steals their autonomy to be perceived as they would like to.

            This same objectification happens with male ballet dancers who wish to be perceived as masculine but are tied by our cultural stigma that all male ballet dancers are feminine and therefore, gay. Wong’s fear of being objectified is totally warranted – the stereotype of male ballet dancers being gay exists in many Americans’ minds. Edward Villella’s masculine presence in ballet showed many people that this stereotype is flawed and that it is cool for men to dance ballet. Luckily, Wong and many others found inspiration in Villella and put aside their anxieties to follow their dreams. What is unfortunate and problematic is that Villella, performing as hyper masculine, set a precedent for men in ballet that many Americans continue to expect as the accepted standard. In a way, he only made it OK for masculine, heterosexual men to dance ballet. This creates a double bind in which feminine and non-muscular men are still objectified and not seen as they wish to even though it is the graceful, feminine movements that make a ballet dancer successful.

            Of course, this argument would be incomplete without addressing other traits such as ethnicity that can lead an individual to be objectified and expected to act a certain way. We can infer from racial stereotypes that since tWitch is African-American, he is objectified and expected to have a natural hip-hop rhythm with aggressive and sharp movements. A Latinx person might be expected to have a similar natural rhythm with salsa-like movements, regardless of who they are and how they would like to be seen. This has the power to make individuals of a certain look to feel out casted when they do not fulfill the racist, homophobic, or xenophobic expectations produced by the media in television, movies, and popular culture. On the other hand, those who do align themselves with these expectations may feel that their culture is being exploited by our capitalist and consumer culture in the US. Either way, expectations about a certain group of people should not be assumed or inferred from their physical appearance.