After the noise…
This essay follows a first piece I published at the height of the Chalamet controversy — you can find it on the link below. The noise has settled somewhat since then, but its echo made me reflect further.
What a strange week… A comment I left under a post on social media somehow got more attention from news outlets and commentators than I anticipated. My short comment had more leg to it than the few compressed characters of a social media post — I developed this in a longer essay. Still, with the backlash getting out of proportion, reading some of the comments and watching countless reels with all sorts of takes on it, I find myself reflecting further on the cultural significance of this episode, the conversation it brought to light — old and new — and my own position on the subject.
What struck me and many others around the globe about his take on ballet and opera was not the mere disinterest he was showing — after all everyone, even amongst artists, is more drawn to one art form than another — but the pedantic and pretentious dismissal of a whole profession, its artists, its teams, and its faithful audience. To dismiss ballet and opera as obsolete is not just misreading the situation — it is an uneducated take, a cheap shot at an art form he considers dying. The reactions from the community proved him wrong. Of course, his comment was part of a much wider conversation, and the leading topic was actually about public attention span — among others. Still, it came out of the blue and just proved an ill-informed point of view from his part.
It is also worth noting that we are all, in our own fields, prone to a certain self-absorption — a tendency to place our own art form at the centre and above all else, to treat it as the most serious, the most relevant, the most deserving of attention. A hierarchy that is governing our scales of value both outside and within our arts. Cinema is not exempted from it. Not so long ago, Martin Scorsese made headlines dismissing Marvel films as closer to theme parks than cinema — a comment that, like Chalamet’s, drew its force from the same impulse to defend one’s own work by positioning another as lesser. Chalamet’s comment did not invent the assumption that what he does carries real value and that he didn’t want to see his art shrink to the level of opera and ballet - again, in his view. He absorbed that assumption without examining it, basing his value scale on a very self-centered hollywood/american/capitalist view.
To gauge ballet and opera vs cinema - or any other art forms for that matter - in light of their success is to analyse the intrinsically financial and systemic particularities each are bound to. A major film production carries a financial risk of such magnitude that the industry is compelled to invest heavily in its promotion — creating, in the process, an overexposure of both the film and its actors that artificially inflates their cultural visibility. This machinery is not a luxury, it is a necessity. Consequently, it results in a bigger attendance of cinema venues, present in most of the cities (a network of venues whose reach is simply incomparable to that of a theater). Ballet and opera operate under an entirely different logic — bound to a venue, a city, a specific night, a living audience present in the room. No promotional apparatus can substitute for that. What makes them economically vulnerable is precisely what makes them irreplaceable. You cannot stream a body in space. You cannot scale presence.
Overall, the question of public interest is one of the most recurrent in any art form — that question of its relation to the public and its relevance to society is one we are all facing. Cinema is no exception, as we have seen with the questioning around the rise of streaming platforms, the racial, gender and financial introspection the industry is facing — more visibly perhaps than ballet and opera, but theater, musicals, visual arts and music are all confronting the same. And yet none of the struggles any art form is experiencing would lead us to conclude that it is dead.
But more specifically to the comment “No one cares about it”, it struck a chord, I think, for many artists as they have felt in their cores at least once in their career. One does constantly evaluate one’s own relevance to one’s art, to an audience, to the society. The same introspection happens on a macro level - an exercise that was precisely what Chalamet was performing in this conversation. As a practitioner in the ballet field, I am no stranger to dismissals of the validity of my art, or to disdainful comments about it. Ballet has suffered — and still does — from reductive and ridiculous clichés, ones that films have often amplified, with perhaps the brilliant exception of Billy Elliot, which made ballet itself, in a world of industrial collapse and class conflict, an act of survival — or White Nights, which for an entire generation was simply the first time ballet looked like something undeniably, irresistibly cool, starring the legendary Mikhail Baryshnikov. These prejudgments are embedded in society since centuries and serve either as a deterrent discouraging young artists — boys in particular — or as a way of keeping at distance an art form considered too demanding, too strange, with its own habitus and vocabulary, and therefore easily relegated as niche.
What the visceral rebuttal reactions revealed was a complex landscape on the state of the ballet and opera field. A mix of confident assessments and some revealing Freudian slips — racial representation, financial fragility, programming relevance — comments that, consciously or not, drifted toward entirely different questioning, using the momentum as a vehicle for the internal doubts and struggles the ballet and opera world is genuinely going through. All legitimate and relevant questions in themselves, but not quite addressing the core problem of Chalamet's comment. But there is something this episode also sent back more quietly, and it would be dishonest not to sit with it.
First and foremost, the reactions proved - if that was even necessary - that there are artists and audiences to defend it. But in contrast, it also showed our weaknesses. Yes, there is a public but not everywhere and every time can a theater boast about public attendance. Also, in this whole concert of support, what I somehow missed was the voice of an entire fringe of the dance community. For ages, there has been an internal battle between classical and modern, each disregarding the other, at best co-existing side by side but never crossing over — a division that is damaging dance in a broader way. The silence from the contemporary dance community, which is no stranger to looking past ballet as a symbol of the past, was deafening to me. As if, when Chalamet talked about ballet, they were not concerned by his dismissal. I would argue that in a broader view, Chalamet might have seen any form of dance — classical being the most visible — in the same boat. Which we are. The sad truth is that this comment, 'no one cares about ballet anymore' is one I have heard within the dance world itself, and amongst those driving the politics of funding to the institutions and structures they consider relevant.
About the cultural and societal biases around the different labels of different dance forms and the evaluation linked to it, I want to address this further in a future piece. For a complete and brilliant explanation on the state of ballet, I warmly recommend the book "Créer des ballets au XXIe siècle" from Laura Capelle (in french only) in which she talks in length about the discourse and introspection going through internally and the somewhat false glance of a dusty and stuck art form, that burdens ballet’s image from outsiders and some insiders. I would just say here that in my view — as a former dancer who navigated between different styles, finding value and pleasure in a broad variety of them, and as a choreographer pushing the boundaries of ballet toward contemporary territories — I want to believe in diversity, of styles, of gender, of bodies and of techniques, as much as I believe in interdisciplinarity between all art forms, one inspiring the other and growing together in a symbiotic harmony.
