Her behavior, not her grievance, was frequently commented on, the expectation apparently being that ballerinas are supposed to remain as mute and malleable as they were in the Romantic era, no matter what abuses they might be suffering in the workplace. Glasco was accused of lacking class, as if by fighting for her rights she had somehow violated the ballerina’s unspoken code of displaying courtly manners at all times. “Anyway, she shouldn’t have done that. I mean who’s going to keep somebody in the company who is a nuisance?” said Franca of Glasco at the time. “It has nothing to do with how old you are—38 years of age is okay, and you can go on. Now, I don’t know what’s going to happen to Kim Glasco, because I don’t think she’s been using her head. I mean, what a silly thing, to publicly go against your boss. If you don’t like the job you’re in, then get out and get a new one. I don’t think any dancer should expect to change the direction of a company.”34
This, then, became the issue: the insistence of artistic directors that they have autocratic powers and should not be held accountable to the law. The expectation that they, like everyone else in society, be subject to labor and human rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on freedom of association, as much as discrimination based on sex, race, creed, or color, was anathema to them. That Glasco might have been fired for non-artistic reasons seemed, to them, to be beside the point. Her cries of injustice were drowned out by the self-righteous outrage of artistic elites who wanted to maintain the despotic rule of artistic directors at all costs, even if that meant terminating a dancer without cause.
But it wasn’t so much art itself that the artistic directors and their vocal supporters wanted to defend; it was an antiquated mindset. Astonishing for a group calling itself artistic was their utter lack of open-mindedness on this count. They wanted the arts to be run as they always had, with little regard for employees’ rights. Glasco, the one in the starchy old tutu and a tiara on her head, was herself advocating for reform. In asking that the ballerina, for once, be respected as a working woman with rights in addition to significant talents, she was moving with the times and faster than those lining up to oppose her, despite Kudelka’s claims to the contrary.
Yet, Glasco had her supporters. Her fans rallied to create a national booster club, the Bring Back Kimberly Glasco Network, spearheaded by ballerina Svea Eklof, formerly a principal dancer with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Alberta Ballet, and the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, together with Julie Houle, formerly a soloist with the National Ballet of Canada. Their view, shared by the network’s approximately five hundred supporters, was that ballerinas were vulnerable to exploitation and entitled to the protection of labor and human rights laws governing the rest of society.
Vanessa Harwood was a top-notch ballerina who had performed with the National Ballet as a principal dancer from the 1970s until her retirement from the stage in 1985 at age thirty-eight, and she had been handpicked by Rudolf Nureyev as one of his dancing partners and also by photographer André Kertesz as one of his subjects. She drew attention to the role played by senior ballerinas like Glasco in maintaining the high standards of the art form. “First of all, I am glad that someone in ballet is finally earning a decent living. I never did,” Harwood said, referring to Glasco’s higher-than-average salary, which had been negotiated by the company just three years earlier in an effort to keep her from straying into the arms of another, more international, ballet troupe. “And second, you can bring in lots of apprentices at $200 a week, but when an audience is paying $75 a ticket, they don’t want to see children, they want to see artists. If you want to see children, go to the National Ballet School. The tickets are a lot cheaper and the performances quite fine.”35
Lois Gochnauer, a former National Ballet dancer who had gone on to serve as senior advisor on violence against women in the U.S. State Department, took a broader feminist perspective; she described what was happening to Glasco as a form of abuse: “I don’t know about in Canada, but in the U.S. there are laws preventing an employer from terminating a woman from her place of employment because of age. It’s discrimination against women.”36 (Mandatory retirement has since been abolished in Canada.)
The negativity surrounding the ballet was getting to be too much to bear. The National Ballet went to the courts and arbitration five times and with four different sets of lawyers and lost on every occasion.37 It was time to throw in the towel. On July 20, 2000, the case was settled. Glasco was given a substantial monetary settlement, said to be worth $1.6 million, in exchange for waiving her right to return to the National Ballet. The company’s insurers, American Home Assurance Co. and Chubb Insurance Co., picked up the tab and also paid the legal bills, said to be in excess of $1 million. The National Ballet issued a press release that read like a formal apology for wrongs done Glasco by management:38
Ms. Glasco is an outstanding ballerina in both classical and contemporary ballets who has many years left in her career as a principal dancer. She is a widely acclaimed artist of unique abilities who has performed a broad range of ballets and will continue to do so in the future. Neither the National Ballet’s original decision not to renew Ms. Glasco’s contract nor any subsequent public statements regarding the matter by the Ballet’s representatives were intended to reflect in any way on Ms. Glasco’s fine qualities as a dancer. The National Ballet regrets any adverse effects caused to Ms. Glasco.39
Glasco had won, and won big. But she did not go back to the stage, and for her supporters that made the victory bittersweet. Glasco had decided of her own volition not to return. She said later that she feared an adverse reaction from her peers if she returned. Indeed, some of her colleagues had gone public about wanting to distance themselves from her: “We tried to close ranks and protect her at first,” said principal dancer Jennifer Fournier in an interview at the time. “We didn’t want to hurt her. But now this has gotten to the point where it is doing serious damage to the company and to relations between the dancers.”40 Few, it seems, can tolerate an outspoken ballerina. But although her fellow dancers showed little appreciation for her efforts on their behalf, the arbitrator’s decision, which was subsequently upheld by the courts, established an important precedent: the right of a dismissed ballerina, where dismissal is based on non-artistic reasons, to reinstatement as well as damages.
But not all ballerinas have been willing to take advantage of the precedent, fearing reprisals. Andrea Boardman, a long-time principal dancer with Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, was forcibly removed from her position by company director Gradimir Pankov around the same time that Glasco lost her job. Like Glasco, she was thirty-eight and had been with her company for twenty years. A popular dancer, Boardman wasn’t ready to retire and was crushed when her director made the decision for her. Friends within the company urged her to fight for her job as Glasco had done, but Boardman thought otherwise: “I did not want to split the company and force people to take sides,” she said in a 2001 interview, presumably taking a swipe at Glasco in the fashion typical of dancers as a vulnerable, oppressed, and victimized class of women. “I have no patience with the diva mentality.”41 Boardman went on to have a second career dancing in Montreal choreographer Edouard Lock’s La La La Human Steps troupe. Lock had come to her after he heard of her split from Les Grands Ballets, eager to work with a dancer with a dynamic stage presence. Displeasing one director, she had been banished; pleasing another, she was brought back into the fold.
It all goes to show just how subjective and arbitrary ballet can be.
Here are two more examples. In 1988, then directors of the National Ballet of Canada, Valerie Wilder and Lynn Wallis, fired American-born soloist Summer Lee Rhatigan for having a tall, big-boned, and muscular body, saying her look was no longer in line with their vision for the company. Rhatigan eventually moved on to the English National Ballet, among other companies, where how her body looked was never a problem but rather a plus. She later became director of t
he San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, never having lost her love of dance. Sometimes the sting of body criticism can be mitigated when both sides—director and dancer—are able to reach a mutually satisfactory plan for handling a perceived problem. This is the case of Morgann Rose, a naturally muscular ballerina with the Washington Ballet whose athletic shape has frequently brought her into conflict with her artistic director. “I’ve been with Washington Ballet 10 years and every year we’ve had a conversation about my body,” she said.42 Those conversations, she continued, usually ended up with her being told to “lean up” or “lose five pounds.” Frustrated, she eventually sat down with her director to determine a plan of action. By asking specific questions—and demanding clear-cut answers—she discovered that, in fact, he didn’t want her to be thinner; he wanted her muscles to look lengthened so that she’d fit in with the rest of the women in her troupe. Rose then came up with a workable solution that not only safeguarded her career but saw her advancing to perform lead roles in company programs as recently as March 2012. “Lean and lengthen are different,” she said. “Lean means lose weight; lengthen means lengthen—and I can totally do that. You can do certain exercises and hold your upper body in a way that will help change the look and line of your muscle.”
These are ballerina stories with happy endings, mainly, it seems, because these dancers kept quiet about the injustices they were enduring in the workplace, ensuring for themselves a future in dance. Because, like it or not, ballerinas who do speak out are ostracized. It isn’t fair, and it shouldn’t happen, but it does. Repeatedly. A recent case involves Italian-born ballerina Mariafrancesca Garritano, who was fired from La Scala in Milan in February 2012 for publicly claiming that her company, and its school affiliate, coerced dancers into severe eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia in pursuit of an unattainable female ideal. Speaking to the British paper the Observer in December 2011, the thirty-three-year-old ballerina told stories of fellow dancers being rushed to hospital to have food forced into them and of others who had become infertile, as a result of unnaturally low body weights, and who were depressed. She described the ballet world as “an anorexic emergency” that has already claimed many lives.43 Garritano cited statistics, saying seven in ten dancers at the La Scala Academy in Milan have had their menstrual cycles stop, one in five have anorexia, and many are unable to have children. She also said she had lost her period between the ages of sixteen and seventeen, when she had dropped below ninety-five pounds, and added that the bone fractures and intestinal pain she currently suffers is a result of the strict dieting she imposed on herself as a young dancer following the dictates of her profession. Her teachers had called her “Mozzarella” and “Chinese dumpling” when she was a plump adolescent. She starved herself as a result, hoping to gain their approval. Other girls, she said, would resort to breast reduction operations to keep their slim frames: “They’re crazy,” Garritano added, “I am a woman first, then a ballerina.”
Garritano was speaking as part of an interview for a book she had just written called, appropriately enough, La verità, vi prego, sulla danza! (The Truth, Please, About Ballet!). For that she got herself terminated; La Scala accused her of willfully damaging its brand.
The initial story positioned her as a well-intentioned whistle-blower: “The chance of getting fired has crossed my mind, but I love La Scala, I care about it, and that’s why I really hope things can change.”44 But others in the blogosphere have been quick to lambaste the dancer for breaking ballet’s code of silence, accusing her of working out a personal issue and, worse, biting the hand that feeds her. Garritano’s supporters, however, say that she is telling the truth: ballet has a long history of eating disorders and she should not have been fired without an investigation.
But the point is that skinny is already well out of the closet. It’s no longer ballet’s dirty little secret. Ballet companies have started recognizing the widespread problem of eating disorders within their ranks. The goal for many now is to eradicate eating disorders from the ballet world, as announced by Canada’s National Ballet School, a forerunner of the trend. Even La Scala says it’s changed, claiming that the rampant eating disorders Garritano describes are a thing of the past. Garritano’s own experience with anorexia nervosa, it adds, happened fifteen years ago, when ballet was still enslaved to a skinny ideal. “Management at the dance corps completely changed six years ago,” said a theater spokesman.45
The culture has changed, artistic directors and dancers finally agree. Endorsing this view are other ballerinas, Garritano’s dancer colleagues, who are speaking up, issuing collective statements that they resent being depicted as victims: “There is no anorexia emergency, and whoever is part of our world knows that well.”46
How true a statement that is will be explored in the next chapter. In addition to being recognized as workers, ballerinas today increasingly want it known that their art is also something more than a job. As the British sociologists Bryan Turner and Steven Wainwright have written in their study of the corps de ballet, the ballet company “is more than a site of work... [it is] a calling rather than an occupation... designed to produce a distinctive ‘personality’ or self.”47 Ballet, in other words, is not just something you do; it is what you are. Whether they are primas or members of the corps de ballet, ballerinas seek acknowledgement that they are whole persons, and women, too, with a variety of attributes and desires. They want increased autonomy within their profession, even if, reluctantly, ballet is acquiescing to their demands, dancing with them into the future.
6. Changes Afoot
The Ballerina of the Future
Ballerinas today are healthier than they used to be, as a result of a growing awareness of what the body needs to function at optimum levels of athletic performance. Enlightened directors and teachers of ballet are developing a new generation of curvier ballerinas in the understanding that scrawny dancers are weak dancers, unable to keep up with the accelerated pace and heightened athleticism of today’s ballets.
Ballerinas of the twenty-first century tend to be more muscular and less emaciated than they have been in the recent past. Anorexic chic is no longer in vogue. “Bodies are more athletic looking and more womanly, shapely with curves as a result of muscle mass,” says Beverly Bagg, the South African ballerina now employed as the ballet mistress for Canada’s Alberta Ballet. “The technical demands are such that a ballerina today can’t be thin anymore; she has to have muscle mass in order to facilitate performing to the new athletic standard. She can’t fulfill her obligations as a dancer if she doesn’t have the power. That’s why holistic training is important; it creates a more capable instrument, a more empowered dancer.”1
Joysanne Sidimus has staged ballets all over the world. Over the last forty years she has personally witnessed the ballet evolve into a more responsible and socially aware endeavor, repositioning ballerinas’ needs closer to the center of the art: “We’ve come a long way, baby,” Sidimus says. “I am not saying that anorexia no longer exists—you and I know that it does—but companies just aren’t allowing it, anymore. If there are dancers who are overly anorexic they are encouraged to get help, leave until they can get it together again. And the schools are changing: they now have psychiatrists, social workers, nutritionists—the works—on staff, teaching young dancers what it means to be healthy and helping them stay that way. It really is a different world.”2
American-born Svea Eklof, who danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, today coaches young dancers at Toronto’s George Brown College, a feeder school for Ballet Jörgen in Toronto. She concurs that the culture is changing—and ballerinas along with it. “There are extreme regulations in place,” Eklof says. “In dance schools in the United States a teacher can’t even say the word weight. It’s not allowed. It’s a result of an attitude change, I think. People have begun to understand that girls between fifteen and eighteen are at the heaviest period of their lives because of hormonal chan
ges within their own bodies. They have to have a little plumpness in order to grow into women. So that’s better understood now, and I think that’s good for the art form as a whole.”3
The dancers now being created as a result of this shift in focus “are not sticks anymore,” Eklof continues. “Lean and mean is now seen as better than thin and frail and constantly having stress fractures. It also makes better sense for the art form as well as companies worried about their bottom line. If you have dancers unable to dance because they get injured all the time as a result of brittle bones caused by poor nutrition then you can’t operate your business. So the thinking today is more take better care of the talent and the talent will take care of you, which is a good thing, of course, all around.”
To keep up with the growing demands of their profession, ballerinas today have to take better care of their bodies. It is no longer acceptable, or prudent, to abuse them, as in the second half of the twentieth century, when eating disorders and substance abuse among ballet dancers were on the rise. The new generation of ballerinas shows sinew, not bone. Some, like the Royal Ballet’s Tamara Rojo and the New York City Ballet’s Sara Mearns, to name just two new contemporary dancers making a name for themselves, show rounded hips and breasts. It’s a brave new look, and Mearns says it’s a sign of empowerment. “I think that ballerinas today are going from strength to strength.”4
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