On Pointe but Off Balance: the Harm Behind the Male Dancers’ Privilege in Ballet

Last February, the prestigious Prix de Lausanne took place in Geneva to reveal the future stars of ballet. The Prix de Lausanne is like the Super Bowl for ballet dancers, where each year young talents from all over the world compete to win a prize or at least be scouted by a dance school or company. This prize has highlighted many of today’s biggest stars in ballet such as Hannah O’Neil and Sae Eun Park, both principals at the Paris Opera. Usually, around ten dancers are awarded with scholarships at the end of the competition, and they are all ranked to designate a winner of the Prix. And this year the first place was attributed to YounJae Park. A man. Again.

The first prize of the Prix de Lausanne has not been won by a female dancer since 2019. Maybe female competitors are just less good than their male counterparts, but I highly doubt that. This year, out of the nine scholarships that were awarded, only three women received one. This is a clear imbalance as the estimated ratio of male and female dancers in a ballet class is one man for 20 women. Clearly, the Prix de Lausanne shows an issue that has been going on for a long time in ballet: male dancers are heavily favoured.

This is because ballet is lacking male dancers. The stereotypes surrounding ballet as a sport for girls make it difficult to attract young male dancers who are often mocked by their peers at school. But once men make it into the world of ballet, they are heavily coddled. Teachers tend to be more forgiving for male dancers when it comes to making mistakes and boys have many more opportunities to obtain scholarships. It is not unusual to see ballet schools where female students pay an exorbitant amount while male students pay no tuition. For example, all male dancers at the University of Arizona receive a scholarship (even when they have little experience) while this is not the case for their female classmates.

We can firmly state that affirmative action for male dancers in ballet does exist. Getting solos and scholarships is so much easier when you are a man because ballet companies are lacking male dancers. In my former ballet school, the few boys would automatically have principal roles in the productions while girls would have to fight to get a good part, even though a lot of them were better dancers. Women have much less freedom and opportunities despite being usually better technicians than their male partners. While being a woman in a male-dominated field is incredibly difficult, being a man in a female-dominated field is the dream.

But this problem of favouring men in ballet does not stop there. While ballet is largely dominated by women, more than 70% of artistic directors are men and more than 80% of annual performances are choreographed by men. Moreover, female artistic directors are on average paid one-third less compared to their male counterparts.

In ballet, women are seen as more easily replaceable, thus speaking out is difficult for them because it usually equates to losing their jobs. This results in unbalanced and abusive power dynamics between young dancers and powerful teachers and choreographers. For instance, Neil Harris, who taught at the Ann Harris School of Dance, was convicted in 2018 for having sexually assaulted 15 students. Harris might have faced justice for what he did, but a lot of artistic directors still enjoy positions of power and abuse those dynamics with dancers without facing any consequences. Those issues are also enhanced by the aesthetic of ballet itself. Because ballet is an art as much as it is a sport, we learn to suffer in silence and make it seem to the audience that very demanding and painful movements are easy for the sake of beauty. Having been taught since kids to ‘smile through the pain’, it can be difficult to go against ideas ingrained in our body and speak up when abuses are committed.

Of course gender inequality is just one of the many problems in ballet. Black dancers are still facing a lot of obstacles today due to ballet’s traditional obsession with the colour white, associated with the idea of purity (we literally have ‘white acts’ in classical ballet such as Swan Lake or La Bayadère) and uniformity. Black dancers still struggle to find tights and pointe shoes adapted to their skin colours, and a lot of dancers still have to paint their pointe shoes to match their skin tone. The first black principal dancer of the American Ballet Theatre, Misty Copeland, was only promoted 10 years ago. And sexism also intertwines with racism, as nowadays in the African American dancer community, men are twice as many as women. Diversity in companies and international competitions like the Prix de Lausanne still has a long way to go.