Interview: Chloe Angyal, author of Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers is Saving Ballet from Itself

In this episode Jessica Luther interviews journalist Chloe Angyal about her new book Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself. They discuss if ballet is a sport, an art or both, how gender and race impact dancers' success, and how safety and equity in ballet has a long ways to go.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Jessica Luther, and I'm very excited about today's guest, Chloe Angyal. This is very fun for me to have Chloe here. It's a real full circle moment for me. We've known each other for about nine years now, I think. And I talk about Chloe a fair amount, even if I don't always say her name, because it was Chloe at the beginning of 2013 who said to me, point blank, “You should get paid to write,” and then pitched a story for me to different outlets that landed at Bitch Magazine on Valentine's day that year, and it was about romance novels. I learned so much from Chloe about how to pitch, and she gave me confidence to strike out on my own. Chloe played such a large part in my freelance career, and you can draw a straight line from that moment in 2013 to this one right now. And that makes me so happy. Chloe, will you tell our listeners who you are and what you do?

Chloe: Hi, I'm Chloe Angyal.

Jessica: Hi!

Chloe: [laughs] I'm Chloe Angyal, and I am a journalist and author and the author of the new book, Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself, which is a reported work about ballet and about the future of ballet, about what has to change to make sure that ballet is a safe and fair and relevant and equitable art form that can survive and thrive in the 21st century.

Jessica: Yes. So you've written this new important book that like pulls the curtain back on the ballet world. And now I'm going to do the thing that I always hate when people do to me, and I'm doing it to you, and I'm going to read the first paragraph of your book at you.

Chloe: Okay. I can also recite it for you by heart– [Jessica gasps] I'm not going to! But I could, because that's what I do when I do book events. So I think I could probably do it verbatim. [laughs] 

Jessica: It's perfect. So this is, I mean, you set it up really quickly for the reader. You write, “Every day in dance studios all across America, legions of children line up at the barre and take a ballet class. This book is about what they learn there, not just about dance, but about gender, race, and power, about the value of their bodies and minds, about their place in the world, both in and outside of dance.” And we're definitely going to get to some of that in a minute, but first, Chloe, let's get the tough question out of the way, because you're here on Burn It All Down, a feminist sports podcast. Is ballet sport?

Chloe: It doesn't matter. [laughter] So, this is a debate that sort of periodically roils the dance world – is dance a sport? Is it an art? Is it both? Is it somehow some other third category? And what I usually say is whether or not ballet is a sport is kind of irrelevant, because dancers get injured like athletes and get paid as well as artists. You know, they sustain the kind of physical toll that athletes do with none of the support and very little of the cultural respect and resources that athletes get. And so whether or not they fall into either category is really irrelevant. I'm sort of more interested in what their experiences are rather than what label we should be slapping on them. And yes, I did just dodge the question. [laughs]

Jessica: It was such a good answer. I was like, man, [Chloe laughs] I don't even know how to get at this. What is your personal relationship to ballet? Were you a ballerina? 

Chloe: I was a very enthusiastic ballet dancer as a child. And like a lot of girls, I did a range of styles – ballet, jazz, and what, in Australia in the 1990s, passed for hip hop.

Jessica: [laughs] Oh no!

Chloe: Oh, it's even worse than you think. [laughter] And like a lot of girls who who grew up dancing, it was made clear to me that my body was wrong. Part of that was because I took a detour into gymnastics for about six or seven years, and that sort of reshaped my young body in ways that I was told were incompatible with serious ballet training and other kinds of dance training. Part of it was that when I quit gymnastics, as happens for a lot of former gymnasts, I usually say I hit puberty, but really it feels more like puberty hits you like an 18-wheeler truck, you know? Within one to four months of quitting serious gymnastics training, it's just like, kapow! And I went back to dancing, but it was obvious that my body was just wrong in a range of ways, including the injuries that I had sustained in gymnastics, the sort of long-term repetitive stress injuries that are still in my body now, 20 years later. And so I kept dancing you know, for love, for passion. I danced all through college. I danced with an all-women’s dance company on my college campus, which I loved.

And when I moved to New York after college, I kept taking open adult drop in dance classes in New York city, which means you're taking a class with some really gifted, ambitious dancers. It's sort of a magnet for everyone who wants to make it as a dancer who isn't already in LA. And so that's my relationship to doing ballet. And my relationship to watching ballet is that, you know, when I moved to New York, I thought...I mean, I was living handful of subway stops from Lincoln Center. I mean, how could I not see as much ballet as I could? And it has become increasingly difficult to sit still through a ballet performance–

Jessica: Interesting.

Chloe: – since I wrote this book, in the same way that I suspect it became difficult for you to sit still or even sit at all through a football game after you wrote Unsportsmanlike Conduct.

Jessica: Yeah. I know exactly what you're talking about. Before we get into the details of the book, I thought it would be useful to our listeners to have an understanding of the ballet world in general. I wrote a piece on a ballerina a few years ago, and I really had to do a lot of work to understand how it all operates. But I thought…So, how big is ballet? Like how many little girls and boys are taking ballet in the US, and like how many make it to the top? What do we need to understand about the ballet world to understand the way that it operates? 

Chloe: It's hard to put a firm number on it, in part because organizations are so severely underfunded that they can't afford to do a regular census of themselves.

Jessica: Sure.

Chloe: They can't afford to regularly count how many schools there are, how many students there are, and get a sense of that. But you know, I think of ballet as the cultural equivalent to football, and on the numerical scale of soccer, of girl's soccer. 

Jessica: So, big.

Chloe: It’s big. I mean, there's a dance school in basically every town of any size in America. And while those may not be, you know, the kinds of dance schools that are turning out elite students, they may be giving those people their initial training and then sending them on to a more elite institution, you know? Girls outnumber boys in ballet classes about 20 to 1.

Jessica: Wow. 

Chloe: So, the vast, vast majority of the students that we're talking about, the athletes, artists, dancers that we're talking about, are girls. But boys are definitely there. And I've had it said to me that masculinity actually sits at the heart of this book about ballet, which is interesting. 

Jessica: Oh, that's funny! My first question after this is about masculinity. [laughter] 

Chloe: And so you have the sort of local dance schools where students will take ballet and a range of other styles – jazz, lyrical, hip hop, tap, what have you – and then you have the sort of more serious training environments, whether that means the dancers are competing in competitions or they're preparing sort of for a full-time pre-professional track. And then you have the schools that are housed under the auspices of dance companies and are often feeder schools into the companies. And then you have a considerable and at least before the pandemic a growing competition scene where dancers compete either by themselves or in a large group and are often competing for scholarship money or for exposure to gatekeepers who could give them training contracts or spots in companies. 

Jessica: And then you were talking before about like all the time that you spent, you know, doing this when, even when you were doing it, like…One thing about the ballet world, it's very – especially as you get towards, like, if you're an elite ballet dancer – we’re talking about a very insular space. It reminds me of when I learned about like the gymnastics world, like, all of your friends are other gymnasts, you spend all your time in the gym. That's very similar, right? For ballerinas. 

Chloe: Yes. It's enormously time consuming, and it also similarly to gymnastics, because you have people starting careers at 18, 19 – it used to be earlier, it's generally sort of post-high school at this point – you get what Australians would call streamed. You start specializing very, very early on, which means by the time you get your first job at 18, you have already been practicing this art form for like maybe 13 years. Maybe you started late at 7 or 8, but realistically you started at 4 or 5 or 6. Which means, you know, by the time  you're a fully fledged adult, you have spent functionally your entire life and certainly all of your formative years in this world, in this culture, and in this sort of mindset.

Jessica: So interesting to think about. About your book, I did write my first question about masculinity, because it’s so interesting. You have a chapter titled Dance like a man, and you start the chapter by telling us that almost every man you interviewed for this book and his parents, that they had a story about bullying. And then you end that chapter though and you say, “Within the subculture of ballet, boys are rare and precious, sought after and recruited with scholarships and special programming. They're held to lower standards of talent and behavior. Girls are dispensable in ballet, boys are untouchable.” And then you follow that chapter, Dance like a man, with a chapter titled, Princes and predators, about gendered abuse and violence within the sport. So there's so much here, just in these two chapters. And I was like, how do I even…My first question is: you make all these connections, and they're so clear and concise in, in the book. Do the men that you talk to from the ballet world, do they make these connections too? 

Chloe: I think a lot of the young men that I talked to understood that they had been subject to special treatment. And I think a lot of them would also say, you know, the very understandable sort of second half of that sentence, which is, “But I also work very hard,” and this is sort of the two part sentence that you always say, when someone says, you know, “Hey, you've had an unearned leg up,” and you can say, well, yes, I acknowledge my privilege, but also I worked really hard. And both of those things can be true at the same time. Those young men do work really hard. And for me, the question is, do they also acknowledge that their hard work takes them further than an equivalent amount of hard work done by a woman who was one of 19 girls in her dance class, and he's one of one boy in his dance class.

To me, it's sort of when I was researching the original reported piece that I wrote about bullying, which was the article that made me think that there could really be a book here – in part because I just kept blowing my word count over and over again [laughter] and saying to my editor, like, I'll be done soon, I promise! And it just kept going and going and going. But when I was researching that earlier article, you know, it was late 2017, which was a time when anyone who worked in media was thinking about what are the exact environmental attributes that set someone up perfectly to be a predator, to abuse power in a workplace situation? Because that's what most of the cases that I write about in the book are. They are workplace situations. Dancers are workers, and they are going in to work every day. Their work just happens to be done in tights and pointe shoes.

And looking at the ways in which boys in ballet treated differently, and then they're in a sort of privileged minority and are also coming into the metaphorical ballet studio with a really well-earned chip on their shoulder because of the mistreatment and the bullying that they experienced outside of the ballet world. I just sort of thought, like, this seems like a perfect way to set someone up to abuse the power that they have. This just seems like all the conditions seem right for abuse of power here. So I was not surprised at all when there was a sort of cascade of allegations of sexual harassment and worse in the ballet world. And I also think it's important to remember that a lot of the sexual harassment and abuse in the ballet world has just sort of, historically, has just happened in plain sight and has just been considered normal and an acceptable way for someone like a George Balanchine to treat the dozens of young women who come through his company on a sort of endless hamster wheel of talent.

Jessica: And like he's famous for it, right? Like, people knew it, that was part of the whole mystique even.

Chloe: Yeah. When I set out to write this book, I was like, okay, I can't write a book that is naive and shocked to find that there's a dirty, ugly underbelly to this beautiful art form, because like, well, yeah. The dirty, ugly underbelly is part of the mystique. It's part of the appeal, it’s part of that dichotomy, it's part of what fascinates people about ballet. And so I didn't want to write a book that was like, “Did you know the ballet is secretly fucked?” [laughter] Well, yeah, that's not that much of a secret. It was out in the open. I'm sorry if you’ll have to bleep that.

Jessica: We do not bleep on this show, you do not have to apologize for cursing. So, did the women that you interviewed, did they understand this power dynamic? It was very clear to them? Or is it so normalized within ballet that even they have a hard time articulating it?

Chloe: I think for people who have left, it's easier to articulate that. It's easier to look back and say, oh boy, that wasn't great. That was probably not okay when it happened, and I thought it was okay. And so it's a fairly tangled mix of, you know, when you've grown up in a culture that normalizes that kind of thing, and then you leave, and only then can you look back at it and be like, oh god, I was really young to have that kind of a comment made to me, or to have had that teacher relate to me in the way that they did. And that's good that people are sort of after the fact coming to those realizations. And also, I would love to move the timeline up so that people can recognize as it's happening, that that's not okay, and that it's not only the people who have left or who are on their way out, you know, because of retirement or some other reason, who speak out and then sort of object. 

Jessica: Yeah, then it's hard to change, right?

Chloe: Yeah. And to be clear, that's not a criticism of the people who choose that kind of timing, because it is a really small insular world and the incentives are completely aligned to silence and acquiescence. You know, you need a job. You want to get your next job. You want to keep your current job. You want to be able to teach after you retire from dancing, whatever reason it is. There are lots of reasons not to speak up until you have very little left to lose.

Jessica: Right. Well, let's move on to talk about race, because you have a great chapter called The unbearable whiteness of ballet. And I think when most people imagine ballet, they imagine the tall, thin white woman in her tutu, up on her pointe shoes, Swan Lake. I mean, I just think that’s our idea of it. What did you learn from Black ballerinas and other ballerinas of color about the ballet world? Because I would guess there's probably way more of them than our media or even our cultural ideas suggest that there are. What kind of stuff did you learn from them when you were talking to them about being a person of color in the ballet world? 

Chloe: Well, and before I answer that, I do want to call attention to how incredibly white that sort of default mental image that you just conjured is. So, she is herself a white woman. She's imagined to be slender, which is a body type that exists across all races and ethnicities, but is like coded as white. If she's doing Swan Lake she's in a white tutu, and if she's wearing pointe shoes, she's probably in, you know, quote, “flesh toned” pale pink pointe shoes with matching tights. Like, it is the whitest possible….The only way the person is whiter is if she's holding a sign that says “Live, laugh, love.” [Jessica laughs] Like, it's the whitest possible image I could conjure in my brain. And so what I learned from dancers of color – and there are lots of east Asian dancers, there are lots of Latinx dancers. There are lots more Black dancers, both men and women, than a lot of media portrayals suggest, as you say. And there have been for a really long time. This is not a phenomenon that began with Misty Copeland. And I think she herself would acknowledge that she sort of stands on the shoulders of lots and lots of people.

You know, what I learned is that the work of pushing back that default is really tiring and often very lonely because a lot of these dancers are the only in their company, you know? Only Latina dancer, only Black dancer in particular. And the work of constantly saying like, hey, this ballet in which all of the women have their hair down and long and flowing was literally not designed for my body. So, what are we going to do to sort of make sure that my body works in this ballet? You know, just even the bare minimum of asking to be able to wear tights and pointe shoes that match their skin tone…It was only in 2020 after the sort of renewal of the Black Lives Matter movement that a critical mass of dancewear companies committed to making pointe shoes in all skin tones.

Until then, a lot of dancers had to…It’s called pancaking. You basically buy a foundation that matches your skin tone and you paint the ribbons and the shoes yourself. It's enormously time-consuming, it degrades the quality of the pointe shoes, it's costly. I mean, foundation ain't free. It's just like a constant reminder that you have to find a way to make this default white art form work for you. And once companies did start making those pointe shoes, they would only make them in a couple of models. You know, the pointe shoes come in all kinds of makes and hardness levels of stiffness and shapes. Everyone's looking for something slightly different in a pointe shoe. And so it was still a pretty nascent, bespoke product.

And so even just asking for bare minimum things like that…I mean, I had a 16 year old girl who was at one of the best dance schools in the world, who was sort of backstage at her student showcase performance, and there's like a bin of makeup. And guess how many makeup shades there were for her? Zero makeup shades. Guess how many quote “nude” undergarments there were for her? None. And so what it really illustrates, I think, is that as hard as white girls and women are working in ballet because they're up against so many other girls and women – there's such a glut of girls and such a dearth of boys – as hard as the white girls and women are working, what I really wanted to do was to illustrate to white dance parents and to white dancers, you could be working even harder, as the Black girl or the Latino girl next to you is, to achieve what she's achieved. 

Jessica: As you're talking, it makes me think the other thing that…I mean, ballet is a sport in the way that, like sport, is lower ‘c’ conservative, right? Like, people just hang on to tradition for tradition’s sake and will fight that so hard without any real reason outside of like, we've always done it this way. But that's such a force that is so difficult to shift in any other direction. And I imagine that's what, as you said at the beginning, like if it's going to make it and be relevant, that's a lot of work that people have to do. And the final chapter of your book is titled How ballet survives. So you're suggesting that it will. I don't want you to tell us all the things, because people should go read your book and find out all the things. But what are one or two things that need to change in order to help ballet survive at this point?

Chloe: To your earlier point about holding on to tradition for tradition’s sake, one of the most valuable tools I had when I was writing this book was that I was living with and being edited by non-ballet people. So, my fiancé who did not grow up in the dance world and my editor who also did not really have much familiarity with ballet. And so they both acted as sort of an outsider perspective to pull me up when I found my insider ballet logic taking over. So they were there to say like, okay, but why do it that way? Is there not a better way to do it? And like the ballet part of me was like, well, yeah, there is a better way to make pointe shoes, but they don't look as good on stage. And it's like, who gives a shit? It's going to stop 14 year olds from breaking their ankles. It's going to allow dancing adults to have a prolonged career, like, who gives a shit what it looks like? And obviously this is where the tension between, you know, “is ballet a sport or an art” comes into play.

But one thing I noticed was that every time you try and make an argument for functional progress it's like, well, we can't do that. It will look bad. And since we're an aesthetic art form, we we can't deliberately do things that will look bad. I had a physical therapist tell me that there are basically no safe ways to dance on pointe, but there are safer ways than what we currently do.

Jessica: Interesting. Okay. So this is like football, playing American football, right? You're not going to find a safe way, but we should be moving towards a safer way. That's interesting. 

Chloe: And again, like, if you look at the technological advances that we've made in football and in helmets and cleats, all of these tools of those sports have been engineered to within an inch of their lives and they're constantly being improved. How can we make this safer? How can we make this better? Pointe shoes have barely evolved in like a century. And when someone came along and designed a pointe shoe that was safer for the feet and by the way did not get exhausted and have to be thrown out nearly as often as a traditional pointe shoe, there was a huge backlash. People said it was ugly and it was cheating and you know, it was against tradition. 

Jessica: Cheating! Interesting.

Kelly: Oh yeah. “They’re a cheater shoe because they do a lot of the work for you” – and the not particularly well veiled undertone was “this is too comfortable and too easy, and you should be uncomfortable and you should be suffering.” [laughs]

Jessica: Ohh. That says so much about ballet. [laughs] 

Chloe: It does. It does. So, we could do that. We could prioritize what one physical therapist called a foot forward shoe, and say, “We don't care what it does to the line of the leg. We don't care what it looks like. We are interested in protecting the feet, ankles, knees, hips, and lower backs of dancers.” That's one thing we could do. And then dancers could actually buy them, like, ensure that there is a market for that product. That's one thing we could do. We could also get really serious about gender neutral pedagogy, and that doesn't just mean holding boys to the same standards of skill and behavior as the girls in the class, you know, not giving them special treatment or special attention, just because they're rare and, you know, let's do anything we can to keep them from quitting.

That means really looking at the places in ballet where there are steps that are “for boys and men” and steps that are “for girls” and say, well, everyone gets to do everything. And we're going to refer to students as dancers and not as girls and boys or ladies and gentlemen, which is very common in both schools and companies. And it also means thinking about, okay, let's assume that in this small dance school in rural Iowa, we are going to have gender nonconforming students. We're going to have non binary students. How are we going to make sure that they feel welcome and valued and like they can come to the school and develop their ballet talent, even though ballet traditionally has this incredibly rigid gender binary that traditionally would not have a place for them? How are we going to make sure that we make a place for them?

Jessica: I love it. That's beautiful. Do you have a favorite ballet? 

Chloe: It's like asking if I have a favorite rom-com…

Jessica: [laughs] I would like to hear that one too!

Chloe: I do. Okay. Favorite rom-com is Notting Hill. Favorite ballet is a really lovely excerpt from a contemporary ballet by Christopher Wheeldon, who was a dancer at the Royal Ballet and then a choreography at New York city ballet, and won a Tony for An American in Paris. And it's called After the Rain. It's a beautiful pas de deux set to Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt. And it is just a really gorgeous, simple looking but I'm sure not simple to execute, pas de deux that I love. 

Jessica: Thank you so much, Chloe. Thanks for coming on Burn It All Down. 

Chloe: Thank you for having me. 

Jessica: Like, such a thrill for me. You've made my whole day. I'm smiling so hard during this whole thing just looking at your face. 

Chloe: I’m so glad. [laughs] I'm so glad to be here. 

Jessica: Tell our listeners where they can find you and your work.

Chloe: You can buy Turning Pointe anywhere you buy books. And if buying books is not in the budget right now, you can ask your local library to purchase it for you – which, by the way, like a gift not just to you, but to the entire community for a really long time. Big fan of people asking their libraries to buy the book. You can find me on Twitter @ChloeAngyal, and on Instagram @Chloe.Angyal.writes.

Jessica: But also on Instagram is your dog, Zelda.

Chloe: Oh yeah, the puppy.

Jessica: Like, the cutest dog. So you should definitely go follow Chloe at all the different places. 

Chloe: Thank you.