Due to fashion trends, TikTok, and the increased celebration of femininity, the pop culture fanaticism for the ballerina has been reawakened. Olivia Rodrigo’s “Brutal” MV depicts a depressed and tearful ballet dancer wearing fishnets, crawling around the floor while her counterparts in pink tights dance with poise. Natalie Portman’s Black Swan character has a mental breakdown onstage during a psychosexual performance of Swan Lake. These icon images have inspired people to start wearing clothing items like ballet flats, wrap skirts and sweaters, leg warmers, and leotards. While Natalie Portman never acknowledged her dance double for Black Swan, those participating in the balletcore aesthetic also fail to acknowledge, or are even unaware of the ugly and inconvenient truths of the dance world. As someone who was a dancer that had to quit because of these damaging aspects of dance, it pains me to see aspects of ballet glamorized.
Conveniently, the revival of the ballet aesthetic leaves out the systematic sexual assault and grooming that is rampant in almost every level of dance, while also ignoring ballet’s institutional ability to isolate people of color dancers, and perpetuate body dysmorphia and eating disorders. Balletcore fails to celebrate actual dance because it only focuses on the (stereotypical/inaccurate) fashion and the toxicity of the art.
Don’t get me started on Black Swan. I love the film as an exploration of identity, NOT as an exploration of the dance industry. As a former dancer myself, the idea that the Black Swan is the new “it girl” is terrifying, because it is easy to see both how damaging that is, but also how far-removed it is from so many people’s experiences in the industry. Those who aren’t in the dance/ballet world might think that driving yourself to madness and destroying your own mind is the one way to achieve greatness, and this mindset is a horrific and untrue one. Ballet is extremely demanding, gruesome, and challenging, but that shouldn’t take away from the fact that many beautiful, expressive and athletic art pieces have come from it. Almost all ballet media these days just focuses on the “tortured artist” aspect, which then just makes suffering beautiful and digestible instead of addressing any of those issues, many of which are still present today! The beauty and ugliness of ballet are extremely complicated subjects, but creating an aesthetic out of ballet communicates none of that.
The skinny ballerina aesthetic is EVERYWHERE. Instead of appreciating their art, some people are only focused on how skinny, white, and beautiful dancers are. In the heads of many ballet dancers is their idea of a perfect, petite, beautiful, and emotional girl who is okay with putting themselves in harm’s way to achieve beauty and perfection.
I don’t see many Black or Brown women represented in the balletcore aesthetic, and the amount of comments gushing over how thin ballerinas are and how they wish they could be that skinny is alarming. When the toxic parts of ballet culture make it into mainstream culture, where there aren’t as many active discussions about progressing ballet past its problematic past, those toxic parts become the norm. Balletcore ends up amplifying the negatives of the ballet world because they’re going unchecked and unscrutinized.