CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Female Choreographers Are Reimagining What Story Ballets Can Be

Dance Magazine: An iconic yet tortured female painter. A mistress wrapped up in a witch hunt in an early American colony. A talented cellist whose life ended prematurely after her battle with multiple sclerosis. These women are a far cry from classical ballet's standard fare of supernatural fairies, sylphs and swans. But some female choreographers are starting to bring stories like theirs to major ballet stages.

1 comment:

Margaret Shumate said...

This article really got me excited. I've loved ballet for years, but it is often inaccessible, and is often very stuck on a few works by white men that largely fail to tell intersting stories about women. Often, it seems that ballet lacks some of the innovation that is present in a lot of theatre. Partially this is driven by scale and expense. Ballets are often expensive to produce, and it's difficult for small ballet companies to exist and to expirement: large productions of classic works are sure sellers. But this article gives me a lot of hope, both for that innovation and for the strong set of women choreographers that are finding success and reshaping the ballet world. Reading this article, I found myself really wanting to go see the pieces about Frida Kahlo and the cellist, in a way that I'm not often driven towards ballet. Even loving it as I do, it's rare that I'm excited to see a specific work or a specific production, rather than just looking forward to the experience of the ballet. These are very exciting works, and I hope the rest of the ballet world looks to them for inspiration.