Black Skin, White Institutions

Ballet is a profoundly international art form in that many young dancers actively seek out training and careers in different countries, familiarizing themselves with different schools of ballet—local, transgenerational sets of aesthetic preferences that produce particular styles of dancing. Consequently, most company rosters include dancers of different nationalities and backgrounds. However, ballet’s corporeality is founded upon a particular aesthetic that idealizes thin and able white bodies with European comportment and manners. The form’s institutional whiteness is perpetuated through strict pedagogy to a degree that young dancers may not even realize when they are made complicit in cultural stereotyping, appropriation, or outright racism. For example, African American dancer and dance critic Dana Nichols (Reference Nichols2019) recalled herself, at age 11, in blackface in a Mariinsky production of La Bayadère, unquestioningly adopting the very role Copeland represented as emblematic of ballet’s real race relations. Significantly, Nichols had to wear blackface despite being Black herself.

In the 2019 discourse around blackface in La Bayadère, Black ballet dancers’ concerns about the systemic whiteness of ballet from discrimination to stereotyping to outright erasure generally went unheard (Brown Reference Brown2018; Bourne Reference Bourne and Akinleye2018; Dixon Gottschild Reference Dixon Gottschild2012). An example of how journalists fail to listen arose in a 2021 interview with Adrian Mitchell, first soloist of the Mikhailovsky company and the first Black dancer to graduate from the prestigious Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg. Asking Mitchell about his support for diversity in ballet, journalist Katia Kuzmina (Reference Kuzmina2021) first framed Copeland as “targeting the children” dancing in the blackface roles and inciting her large fan base to bully them. Mitchell defended Copeland, stressing that although the Bolshoi dancers “had no power” to refuse such roles, all dancers have a duty to hold organizations responsible. When asked about typecasting, Mitchell very politely responded that he wanted to dance the roles he was given, but that “as technique naturally changes, you need to keep it up-to-date. There should not be this thing about Black dancers and singers going to specifically Black roles” (in Kuzmina Reference Kuzmina2021).

Like Nichols (Reference Nichols2019), Mitchell thus stressed how individual dancers are employees, often with little choice in how they get cast, dressed, or what they are required to perform onstage. Collective action is necessary for companies to change their practices, and this action is not only the responsibility of racialized company members.Footnote ⁶ As Mitchell notes, change is a requirement for the survival of the art form:

Obviously, a corporeal practice transmitted from one generation of dancers to the next changes with the development of training systems, and shifts in aesthetic preferences and sociopolitical circumstances. Yet, each iteration of La Bayadère is always-already entangled in the broader genre of Western art that this ballet embodies: Orientalism.

Imaginary India

Over the past two decades, whenever a ballet company has been accused of perpetuating racist stereotypes, one choreographer is more often mentioned than any other: Marius Petipa (1818–1910), the French-born principal ballet master of the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg (see for example Järvinen Reference Järvinen2020:79; Chan and Chase Reference Chan and Chase2023). La Bayadère, too, is a “Petipa ballet” set to the music of Ludwig Minkus, an Austrian best known for his theatrical compositions. It was first staged on 23 January–4 February 1877 in the St. Petersburg Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny TheatreFootnote ⁷ as a benefit performance for Ekaterina Vazem; for such special performances, the star would supplement their salary with a portion of the ticket sales. Vazem created the principal role of Nikiya, a tragic temple dancer in the India of legends, pursued by a religious leader known only as “the High Brahmin,” though she is in love with the warrior Solor, who is himself destined to marry Gamzatti, daughter of the Rajah.Footnote ⁸ As with many grands ballets of the time, part of the success of the work lay in the special effects—such as the ending of the fourth act, where everything onstage collapsed in a simulated earthquake.Footnote ⁹

La Bayadère regurgitated an imaginary Orient, conflating complex local histories into something too often referred to as “mythical” or “legendary.” Its music, costumes, and choreography alluded to the East while adhering to Western representative practices, ballet aesthetics, and sexual economies. Vazem’s costume had a choli-inspired bodice with a very low décolletage and off-the-shoulders sleeves and skirts more European than Indian in cut. Male dancers wore a variety of tunics or robes, and, in true Orientalist fashion, turbans. Some of the dancers darkened their skin with makeup and leotards.Footnote ¹⁰ A very generous interpretation of this hodgepodge would be that it reflects the ostensible setting of the work in Golconda, a citadel west of Hyderabad built by the Hindu Kakatiya emperors but developed by the Bahmani Sultanate and later the seat of the Qutb Shahi dynasty in the early 16th century. In Petipa’s day, Golconda was famous for its diamonds, and it functioned as a symbol of the riches of the fabled East.

Already in 1877, Russian Orientalists—scholarly experts in the service of the empire—complained that La Bayadère misrepresented India (Wiley Reference Wiley1990:291). But historical or ethnographic accuracy was no more a concern for Petipa than it was for his numerous predecessors or followers who imagined sexualized devadasi and nautch girls for their presumptively white spectators.Footnote ¹¹ Even if Petipa had drawn from Indian dancers performing in the European variety theatre circuit, as did Ruth St. Denis and other modern dancers of the 20th century, he was invested in the Orient as a source of inspiration for new works created in the European idiom, a translation of the Other’s anonymous traditions to authored examples of white artistry.Footnote ¹² Whether abject slaves or seductive temple dancers, the characters in this “India” embody Edward Said’s ([1978] Reference Said1994) maxim that the Orient is a projection of both the fears and the desires of the Occident.

As the interest of Russian Orientalists in the accuracy of La Bayadère shows, the Orientalist projection is never neutral. In the Emperor’s theatres, what got staged was always-already suffused with potentialities of political expansion of the empire. Staged the year after Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India and a year before the short détente in Russo-British relations in Central Asia, India, and Afghanistan came to a bloody end, La Bayadère participated in the same creation of purported knowledge about the Orient as the academics critical of its inaccuracies—a knowledge production that justified the treatment of the imaginary as reality (Said [1978] Reference Said1994:esp.5–15; Kemper Reference Kemper2018). Today, as ballet companies can no longer claim that Orientalist works truthfully represent the world, justifications for the place that works like La Bayadère hold in repertories often rely on an insistence on either asserting the inherent value of what are deemed classics or denying that staged representations have repercussions beyond the stage. Ballet companies often advertise La Bayadère as a “fairy-tale ballet” in the manner of other famous Petipa ballets.Footnote ¹³ Such a framing promises the ballet’s imaginary India is so unreal that the reproduction of negative stereotypes is of no consequence. Indeed, revivals of the “classics” of ballet often need no other justification for being revived than that they have always been repertory staples.

White Acts and Blackface Dances

La Bayadère continues to hold a privileged status as a classic in Russia, where it survived the ideological pressures of the Soviet system (Ezrahi Reference Ezrahi2012:79–84, 283n25). The ballet was revived several times, notably by the legendary Soviet pedagogue Agrippina Vaganova for the Kirov (Mariinsky) company in 1932, even if the best-known version is the 1977 film adaptation of Vladimir Ponomarev’s 1941 choreography. In 1980, Natalia Makarova, who had defected from the USSR in 1970, created her version for American Ballet Theatre, for which Copeland was the principal dancer from 2015–2025 (Kaufman Reference Kaufman2020).Footnote ¹⁴ As with most 19th-century ballets, these many versions are considered the same work, despite major differences in their arrangement.

When Copeland commented on the Bolshoi’s use of blackface, the American Ballet Theatre was planning to revive La Bayadère for the 40th anniversary of the Makarova production in 2020 (Kaufman Reference Kaufman2020). When the Covid-19 pandemic caused the cancellation of all performances, the company dancers created an online tribute to closed theatres, dancing the famous “white act” of the ballet, the Kingdom of the Shades,Footnote ¹⁵ sans costumes and in rehearsal spaces (American Ballet Theatre 2020). In Petipa’s choreography, this is the opium-induced vision scene of the male hero, Solor, depressed after the death of Nikiya, his true love. The women of the corps de ballet, dressed in white tutus, appear one after another from the far back of stage left, each repeating a long series of arabesques. The line zigzags until the dancers have filled the stage. In regimented lines, the shades then continue their unison choreography of floating pas de bourrées, arabesques, and tendus, followed by a waltz for three of the shades flanked by the rest of the corps. Finally, the shades frame the grand pas de deux of Nikiya and Solor, united in a vision or in death, that is the culmination of the act and, in many post-Soviet versions, the entire ballet.

Separated into small individual screens, the American Ballet Theatre dancers demonstrate how much the corps dancers rely on each other onstage. The choreography is extremely demanding because it is minimalist; even the slightest error or wobble is very visible, and the video reveals minute differences in each dancers’ execution. Using a limited number of steps and strict, geometric formations to maximum effect, the choreography exemplifies an ideal of homogeneity that, as Arabella Stanger notes, remains beyond the reach of actual dancing bodies (2021:172–73). In the video, this homogeneity is achieved through digital reproduction as the dancers’ bodies are, at times, duplicated, the dancer dancing with themselves in a kind of unison impossible onstage.

Originally, Petipa’s choreography also equated these dancing spirits with a higher spiritual ideal—nirvana imagined as Christian paradise—that contrasted the earthy Orientalist acts of the rest of the ballet and the choreography in the blackface roles in particular. After the Russian Revolution, productions tended to downplay this spirituality by removing the entire fourth act where the final earthquake is divine vengeance for the death of the heroine—a change that conveniently ends the ballet in the reunion of the leading couple.Footnote ¹⁶ In contrast, the blackface roles in La Bayadère—by tradition “Nubian slaves”—are of seemingly no import to the plot. In the Bolshoi production (see Fedotova Reference Fedotova2021), the six young dancers in blackface appear with two whip-wielding guards in the beginning of the second act. They herald the arrival of Gamzatti, and later accompany the dance of the Golden Idol, an addition to a 1948 version by Nikolai Zubkovsky.Footnote ¹⁷ In the Soviet context, the Golden Idol equated the worship of false gods of capitalism and religion with the ballet’s setting as opposites of the future-oriented modernity of the Communist state. That the blackface slaves prostrate themselves around this character thus casts them as unenlightened as well as enslaved, in direct contrast with the white temple dancers and leading characters.

More importantly, the blackface parts function to reinforce the whiteness of the main characters in a non-European setting. Petipa’s “Egyptian” ballet La Fille du Pharaon (1862) and his “Lydian” Le Roi Candaule (1868) had similarly included blackface slave characters to provide contrast, their dark skin making the leading roles appear whiter, reflecting the assumption that the spectators, too, are white. Unlike the ethereal steps of the shades, the La Bayadère blackface characters’ movements draw from the genre of the grotesque, inverting the ideals of ballet: their knees are bent outwards, their arms akimbo, their splayed fingers and facial expressions familiar from other blackface roles (such as those in Mikhail Fokine’s Petrouchka [Järvinen Reference Järvinen2020]). Even though there is no makeup or dark leotards, blackface is choreographed in gesture and dance style as the antithesis to the transcendental ideal of the kind of graceful, floating en pointe technique evident in the Kingdom of the Shades.

The blackface roles are traditionally given to young dancers, even ballet school students, and the choreography is relatively short and simple: the characters only appear for about 10 minutes in an evening-length work, mostly during a scene inserted decades after Petipa’s death. As a character dance amongst many others, it is likely that the dancers receive no applause or acknowledgment in reviews. The Bolshoi production, like Nureyev’s Paris Opéra version (Opéra national de Paris 2012) that also includes these characters, had been performed for decades before Copeland drew attention to the blackface roles. What changed in 2019?

Gradations of Whiteness

In the 21st century, ballet’s blackface, brownface, and yellowface roles have been rightly criticized as racist, but ballet’s obsession with whiteness has deeper roots. As Richard McMahon has explicated, 19th-century racial hierarchies reflected an obsession with gradations of whiteness as theorists sought to identify their nation within the “scientific” consensus of transnational categories (2016:170). In this foundational hierarchy of all whiteness, “Aryan” Brahminic India occupied a particularly unstable and anxious position, both ur-white and not-white-enough. In academic Orientalism and on ballet stages alike, India, like Egypt, was represented as having once had a greatness that it since lost. Hence, La Bayadère’s setting in the distant past means that what is staged can be understood as a whiter version of India than the present.

Russia’s Europeanness was and is similarly precarious, with ballet acting as a sign of the country’s Westernization and modernization. Part of the vehemence of Russian ballet advocates in 2019 doubtless stems from Russia’s recurrent Orientalization in anglophone discourse (Järvinen Reference Järvinen2020:76–77). For example, in their book challenging Orientalist practices in US ballet, Phil Chan and Monica Chase (2023:ch.2) frame Russia as one of the “four Oriental ‘kingdoms’” of ballet—a framing that they posit as “self-generated” by Russians and thus a nonissue. Yet, Orientalism cannot be a self-identity for Russians any more than it can be for the anti-Orientalist authors themselves. This shows in the ways Russian respondents defended La Bayadère and the Bolshoi company against critiques of racism: many of the statements can be understood as invested in protecting the whiteness of the Russian people and Russia as a European state at a time when the country is clinging to past greatness. Responses that position Copeland as a foreign Black ballerina with a chorus of woke fans who understand nothing about Russian ballet (e.g., Chepovskaia and Shestakov Reference Chepovskaia and Shestakov2019) are undeniably nationalistic—but the nation that they defend is imagined to be irreproachably white.

In countries like Russia that did not directly participate in the transatlantic trade in human beings nor in the later division of Africa, claims of historical innocence and exceptionalism work affectively, transferring blame for racism onto other white people. In 2019, defenders of the Bolshoi production placed blackface makeup in the same category as the golden makeup for the Golden Idol (Kovalenko in Kurbov Reference Kurbov2019), or claimed blackface was merely a means of representing Black people in the absence of Black dancers (comment posted to the RIA Novosti 2019 article). Obviously, the makeup of the Golden Idol does not serve the same function as that of the blackface roles, as removing the characters’ makeup would not shift the power relations between them in the ballet. As Dana Nichols’s (Reference Nichols2019) experience of being asked to use blackface makeup demonstrates, the makeup also has less to do with the presence of Black dancers than about preserving stereotypes.

By their very defensiveness, claims to innocence and exceptionalism are admissions of antiblackness, but they are particularly resonant in formerly Communist countries, which, for most of the 20th century, emphasized antiracism as integral to the Communist utopia. In the international union of workers, everyone was equal, regardless of birth or skin color. Racism was a tool of the property-owning classes of capitalism to divide the unified workers of the world. In Russian exceptionalism, much is made of how Imperial Russia never had colonies in Africa or participated in the transatlantic slave trade, or how the USSR fought against colonialism and racism. Yet, as Irina Novikova notes, Russians were and are just as prone to “epistemic fantasies” regarding Africa and Africans as any white people, since these fantasies are integral to the very construction of whiteness—including the ethnonationalist idea of Russia as populated by white people (Novikova 2013:esp. 572–73; see also Zakharov Reference Zakharov2015:4, 8–16, 34–45, 75–77; Alexandrova Reference Alexandrova2016:224). Ballet’s blackface figures are part of a long transnational configuration of the circuits of entertainment encompassing theatrical and cinematic representation to which the performing arts in the Communist bloc were by no means immune (Novikova 2013).Footnote ¹⁸ African American troupes that performed in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s encountered blackface in Russian theatres; and in 1970, Alvin Ailey’s dancers were rather dismayed by Leonid Yakobson’s use of blackface in works like Ebony Concerto (1970) (Mickenberg Reference Mickenberg2017:246–54; illustrations 2, 11, 43 and 44 in Souritz [1979] Reference Souritz1990:182–82; Ross Reference Ross2015:196–97).Footnote ¹⁹ The blackface roles in the 2019 La Bayadère bring together different genealogies of antiblackness, including makeup more familiar from US minstrelsy stereotypes than what in 19th-century ballets would be called blackamoor roles.

The Arab and/as the Blackamoor

Discussing blackface minstrelsy, Kellen Hoxworth notes how theatrical representations “afforded flexible dramaturgies for managing the racial anxieties of empire: they provided scripts and scenarios for an extensive array of racialized performances that animated racial discourses across vast distances and disparate contexts” (2024:4). In ballet, blackface roles most often conflate two anxieties—antiblack racism and Islamophobia—in one character, the blackamoor. In Russian, this character is called арап (Moor), a somewhat archaic word very similar to the Russian word араб (Arab). As Ekaterina Alexandrova (Reference Alexandrova2016:223, 237n8) notes, this similarity is not coincidental, as both words connote the geographic localization of the character in Africa or the Middle East. The blackamoor figure has dark skin and wears luxurious, flowing fabrics and jewelry, and, regardless of gender, a turban—although onstage, the blackamoor is almost always male.

The blackamoor developed from earlier blackface parts, beginning with allegorical representations of the continent of Africa, personified side by side with Asia and Europe. For example, in La Destinée de Monseigneur Le Dauphin (Dubois Reference Dubois1662:3), a ballet celebrating the birth of the first son of Louis XIV of France, Africa was responsible for predicting the future physiognomy of the prince, whereas Asia drew up his horoscope.Footnote ²⁰ Similarly, in celebrations linked to the Epiphany, the Three Magi were often associated with the three continents of the Old World, and thus depicted with distinctly different skin tones.Footnote ²¹ Surviving costume designs from 17th- and 18th-century ballets include many representations of figures with face and limbs crosshatched or painted dark to indicate blackface or brownface of some kind, but also roles explicitly named as Black dances without such coloring. The costumes of such roles varied but often included exotic furs like leopard skins, large feathers, and luxurious fabrics.Footnote ²²

Even if it is difficult to gauge how ballets choreographed racialized difference in practice—let alone when particular corporeal repertories of blackface arose—all these roles resemble the early modern “scripts of Blackness” that Noémie Ndiaye (Reference Ndiaye2022) analyzes in her outstanding work. Crucially, Ndiaye emphasizes that performances by professionals and amateurs alike were integral to the creation of stereotypical ideas about what Black people looked and sounded and moved like, and that these scripts lay the foundations for later discourses of race. Ballet’s blackface, too, owes much to popular festival traditions and amateur practices, specifically events commemorating early modern Europeans’ victories over Islam. For instance, in parts of Spain and former Spanish colonies, the Reconquista—the 1492 victory of the Catholic Christian monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon over Muhammad XII of the Emirate of Granada—has long been commemorated in mock battles between Moors and Christians (Moros y Cristianos) with the former often represented in blackface (Harris Reference Harris2000:esp. 3–27, 237). Similar celebrations of Christian victories over Muslim Others—the Turks or Tatars—occur in cities formerly close to the borders of the Ottoman empire, such as the annual Lajkonik in the Polish city of Krakow (Bujak and Pilichowska Reference Bujak and Pilichowska1983). These representations of Turks, like those of Moors in the Hispanophone world, have darkened skin, turbans, and voluminous costumes made from rich fabrics; they are bombastic but cowardly, objects of ridicule designed to deflect what were once very real fears. Elsewhere in Europe, blackface Turks also appear in popular Christian carnival traditions like the Parata dei Turchi in Potenza (Tagliaferri Reference Tagliaferri2021:390–92), whereas at Christmastime in the Netherlands, the Zwarte Piet, dressed as a Moor, hands out candy to children (Wekker Reference Wekker2016:139–67).

Many of these festivities were revived (or even created) in the 19th century, but they have become an “invented tradition” circulating performances of stereotypes that continue to inform white people’s encounters with blackness (Hobsbawm and Ranger Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1983). As with ballet’s blackface figures, criticism of these kinds of representations gets deflected as foreign, anachronistic, or as just missing the mark (Wekker Reference Wekker2016:139–67; Harris Reference Harris2000:esp. 32; Ndiaye Reference Ndiaye2022), even as such “traditional” performances also offer rallying points for the European far-right, misrepresenting history (Kaufman and Sturtevant Reference Kaufman and Sturtevant2020). These popular representations have influenced very similar scripts on ballet’s stages, especially after the Romantic ballet of the 1830s and 1840s began appropriating “folk culture” into its character dances. Character dances create variety in steps and setting but also contrast the virtuosic academic style of the principal dancers and provide them respite from the physical labor of dancing. Ballet’s hegemonic status as art dance has ensured that its influence also travelled in the other direction, influencing the aesthetics of folk dances. Given this cross-pollination, it is unsurprising that US minstrelsy—a remarkably popular 19th-century performance form—also had an effect on ballet’s blackamoor figures.

Blackamoors in Minstrel Makeup

Minstrel shows, “plantation dances,” and other performance genres from the United States began to appear on the European variety theatre circuit in the 1870s. Unsegregated theatres and better wages attracted Black performers to this circuit and African American dances rapidly became the fashionable social dances and music of the day: cakewalk in the 1890s, ragtime in the 1900s and 1910s, and jazz in the 1920s and 1930s. Although early 20th-century books on various modern dances rarely named the Black dancers who embodied these forms onstage and were usually extremely racist in their praise of Black performers, they nevertheless deemed African American dances “the most notable of the American dances” (Caffin and Caffin Reference Caffin and Caffin1912:255).Footnote ²³

In the 1920s, ballet incorporated these fashionable Black dances, its repertory of blackface influenced by new stereotypes from variety theatres and cinema. The Ballets Suèdois production La Création du Monde (1923) had dancers in black leotards and Cubist Africanist masks, shifting blackface from makeup to costume and conflating African American music with African art (Brender Reference Brender1986; Lavoie Reference Lavoie, Caron, de Medicis and Duchesneau2018). George Balanchine choreographed jazz-inspired blackface for Jack in the Box (1926) and The Triumph of Neptune (1927)—two productions praised by dance scholars as examples of white modernity (Banes Reference Banes1994:58; DeFrantz Reference DeFrantz, Farrugia-Kriel and Jensen2018:576–77). Although such works divorced blackface from the blackamoor figure and slave roles, they remained deeply problematic as representations, especially when revered in dance scholarship and recreated for repertories as historical artifacts (as in Flux Laboratory Reference Laboratory2020). Significantly, most of the ballets with these new stereotypes disappeared quickly, their stereotypes never achieving the same longevity as the earlier blackamoor roles. But there is a distinct minstrelization of blackface makeup practices after the First World War evident in extant photographs. In the Bolshoi La Bayadère, the blackface makeup—white circles around the eyes and/or mouth—thus owes more to minstrelsy than blackface as it was performed in Petipa’s day.Footnote ²⁴

Ella Shohat has argued that, instead of being read through histories of minstrelsy, the blackamoor should be considered “a specific figure within the larger spectrum of colonial exotica and, at times, erotica […] in a context of global movement of goods, ideas, and peoples, which accelerates with colonial modernity” (2018:161–62). Relegated to the realm of character dance, ballet’s blackamoors tend towards the decorative: as in La Bayadère, they appear as servants, pages, slaves, or they are outright dolls or automata, as in Saint-Léon’s Coppélia from 1870 (Mandradjieff Reference Mandradjieff2024) or Fokine’s 1911 ballet Petrouchka (Järvinen Reference Järvinen2020). As such, they illustrate philosopher Achille Mbembe’s argument that 18th-century Europeans bedecked Black pages in rich fabrics and jewelry, with headwraps and turbans, feathers and pearls to occlude the fundamental violence and denial of the humanity of these Black subjects (Mbembe Reference Mbembe and Dubois2017:66–70).

The exotic materiality of ballet’s blackface figures similarly distracts from how Europeans had built their empires through riches accumulated in the transatlantic slave trade, yet represented slavery as something profoundly Oriental onstage—the more so in the second half of the 19th century when the former traders in flesh had professed their enlightened abolition of what had made them prosperous.Footnote ²⁵ Noémie Ndiaye argues that “barbouillage” figures of court ballets represented French colonialist aspirations through and as erotic enslavement to whiteness (Ndiaye Reference Ndiaye2022:48; see also 35–136). In 19th-century ballets, the Orientalized Other was similarly tied to eroticized and violent enslavement, the Other’s unbridled sexuality and inherent cruelty represented by the slaves dancing onstage. This, in turn, both elevated the white spectator as morally superior to their Other and justified the continuing colonization of people considered savage and uncivilized. Unlike the jazz age ballets’ blackface roles, the enslaved Nubians in La Bayadère offer the white spectator the opportunity to become white saviors, enlightened and modern. Apart from actively forgetting the slave trade, this sense of entitlement also requires forgetting the existence of Black people in Europe, including in ballet.

Historical Amnesia

Returning to the idea that blackface compensates for the absence of Black dancers, it is good to remember that the first Black person to claim “ballet master” as their profession did so in the 18th century. Gustav Badin, raised in the Swedish court, danced in the company of Jeanne Du Londel at Bollhuset, the first theatre in Stockholm, in the 1769–1771 seasons. He starred in works devised for him, such as Arlequin sauvage (Wild harlequin, 1770), a work reproducing the noble savage trope and playing on Badin’s reputation as an irreverent trickster. Later, he acted as a ballet master in fraternal organizations—Timmermansorden, Svea Orden, Bar Bricole, and the Freemasons. Because he did not continue in professional theatre, Badin’s work is at best a footnote in histories of dance in Sweden, overshadowed by his intimacy with the royal family that contributed to an afterlife in histories (especially those attacking House Holstein-Gottorp), plays, novels, and, most recently, a graphic novel.Footnote ²⁶

Badin’s ballet career exemplifies not just ballet history’s focus on opera house stages but the long-standing erasure of Black predecessors in the art form—what Theresa Ruth Howard (Reference Howard2015) has called the “Vanishing Ballerinas of Color” phenomenon. In Russia, the dancer who first performed the main character of La Bayadère, Ekaterina Vazem, also taught the most famous Black ballerina of the Imperial Theatres, Maria Skorsiuk. Upon her graduation, Skorsiuk was one of the original Four Young Maidens, the junior group of attendants for Princess Aurora in Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty (1890). Subsequently, however, her career suffered from the racist assumption that a Black dancer was only fit for character parts. Skorsiuk danced Queen Cleopatra in Petipa’s remounting of Mlada in 1896, and numerous dances named as Romani (ballet still uses a slur for these dances), Spanish, Hungarian, Indian, and Abyssinian in operas and ballets—roles that did not allow her to fully demonstrate her academic dance technique or give her the kind of public visibility reserved for the main stars. It is likely her career also suffered from competing with Marie Petipa, the daughter of the ballet master, for similar parts, and tragically, she died quite young (Koppers n.d.; Murray Reference Murray2022).

If Badin’s performance of the noble savage exemplifies how typecasting has an extensive history in ballet, Skorsiuk’s much longer stage career draws attention to the repercussions of being cast in character parts. Badin at least starred in the stereotypical roles he was given, but by Skorsiuk’s day, character parts had become a specialization with limited avenues for advancement to star roles. Even today, typecasting doubly marginalizes Black dancers because career advancement still requires getting cast in increasingly esteemed parts—those requiring flawless academic technique and conforming to aesthetic ideals unmarked as white.Footnote ²⁷

Ballet’s representational logic prizes “classics”—works that have been elevated from the art form’s history as exemplary. These were originally written and performed for white audiences and yet involve countless representations of the global majority in subservient roles designed to provide unindividuated “color” and contrast to the stars who are presumed to be white. This foundational relationality—the white dancer is whiter in contrast to the blackface—is a hidden transcript of ballet’s blackface roles of which La Bayadère is but one instance. The leading male dancer in Mikhail Fokine’s Schéhérazade (1910) is a blackamoor stereotype: he is enslaved by his Muslim master whose white wife he lusts after. This is racist regardless of whether the dancer in the role is Black, or in full blackface in the manner of the much-adored original creator of the part, Vaslav Nijinsky (Järvinen Reference Järvinen2020). That the European Association for Dance History advertised their 2023 conference with an image of Nijinsky in this part exemplifies just how invisible blackface still is, even for dance scholars.Footnote ²⁸ This admittedly minor example of an academic conference blithely reproducing ballet’s racism through their use of a historical photograph nevertheless is indicative of the stubborn and widespread endurance of ballet’s colonialist history in the present. Reproducing earlier white representations of Black people only serves to naturalize assumptions of white superiority inherent in those earlier representations, a vicious circle where a racist precedent proves the truthfulness of the new reproduction of the stereotype (Shohat Reference Shohat2018). As Mara Mandradjieff argues, the issue with blackface in ballet is “choreography’s participation in this object-ifying and racializing process” (2024:38), which cannot be remedied through any amount of reorganization of the objectifying process onstage.

Thus, the “reality” of ballet that Copeland critiqued is not limited to ballet in Russia; the (predominantly white) company leaders, critics, audience members, and fans deflect critiques of their beloved institutions, including accusations of racism, as irrelevant or exaggerated. Despite an increasing number of global-majority dancers in the rosters of ballet companies, removing outright racist characters nevertheless gets treated as a slippery slope endangering the art form by erasing its history—as, for example, Jean-Christophe Maillot argued to Lyndsey Winship (Reference Winship2019).

“Fixing” Blackface

In part thanks to ongoing legacies of colonialism, ballet has a global presence and currency, often in the form of prime real estate in major cities and funding from both private and public sources of which other forms of dance can only dream (DeFrantz Reference DeFrantz, Farrugia-Kriel and Jensen2018:572). Given ballet’s culturally hegemonic position, it is important to consider how to remedy the racist legacy of ballet’s “masterpieces” and its historical repertoire. Ballet seeks to conserve canonical works, and the relative conservatism of its audiences means the so-called classics draw a steady income from ticket sales. Somewhat paradoxically, in the specific instance of La Bayadère this conservatism has occasionally prompted reconsiderations of ballet’s racist histories. Rajan Zed, self-appointed spokesperson of the world’s 1.2 billion Hindus under the umbrella of his Nevada-based Universal Society of Hinduism, regularly attacks any company staging any version of La Bayadère, sight unseen. Regardless of Zed’s exaggerated credentials, ballet companies generally loathe scandal; several companies have cancelled performances of La Bayadère, and some have engaged in discussions of its Orientalism in response to Zed’s criticisms.Footnote ²⁹ Yet, select protests and cancellations have not diminished the status accorded La Bayadère broadly nor has it been removed from the ballet repertoire. Instead, this “classic” continues to be performed, often under the auspices of aesthetic reimaginings intended to mute or otherwise diminish its racism.

In most 21st-century versions of the Orientalist repertoire, two solutions seem to dominate. The first is colonialist evasion where staged Orientalism is justified through alleged historical accuracy, with predominantly white casts dressed in fantasy costumes, no longer in blackface or brownface but still reproducing 19th-century narratives and gestures, and dancing to orchestral arabesques audibly illustrative of “the East” as translated by white composers. Works like Nikolaj Hübbe’s 2012 version for the Royal Danish Ballet and Greg Horsman’s 2018 version for Queensland Ballet that reset(tle) La Bayadère to colonial India, with the High Brahmin replaced by a British colonial officer, fall into this category. These works allude to European colonialism as an issue, but they never address it. Much like Petipa’s imaginary India, these versions stage British colonialism as something in the distant past and foreign to the ballet’s authors (Christensen Reference Christensen2012; Simpson Reference Simpson2012; Sulcas Reference Sulcas2012; Ryan Reference Ryan2018; van Ulzen Reference van Ulzen2024).

The American choreographer Phil Chan has critiqued this kind of adjusting of La Bayadère as unjustified “when we don’t yet have racial equity in the greater field” (2024) and claimed that his own version, retitled Star on the Rise (2020), is able to “bypass the cultural issues altogether” by setting La Bayadère in 1920s Hollywood. Not only is such bypassing an impossibility, Chan’s work represents the second common solution to supposedly saving Orientalist “classics”—masking rather than critically engaging with their troublesome choreographies. Chan’s approach dissociates the work from its original location while keeping the recognizable parts of the choreography. Such adaptations rely on a presumption that the steps are neutral and ahistorical and, moreover, that they retain the essence of the dance divorced from its colonialist meaning and genealogy—the transgenerational continuum of “Petipa’s” choreography that dancers and audiences always-already reference in evaluating the work as a La Bayadère. This kind of formalism only serves to erase the painful entanglement of the art form with whiteness and colonialism that pervades these works beyond scenography, costumes, and makeup.

The third alternative is to completely rethink the effects of this genealogy of transmission; to flip the perspective in the work to engage with the consequences of representation. In 2015, Shobana Jeyasingh created an innovative gender-bending reimagining called Bayadère: The Ninth Life, which, like Alonzo King’s 2009 critical reworking of Fokine’s Schéhérazade (Sirabian Reference Sirabian2012), takes issue with the musical score as well as choreography, scenography, and plot elements (Prokofiev Reference Prokofiev2015; Shobana Jeyasingh DC 2015). Paradoxically, such complete reconceptualizations of the ballet tradition are faithful to any “intention” that can be attributed to a 19th-century choreographer like Petipa, who famously bragged that he rechoreographed all his ballets for each remounting and new cast (in Wiley Reference Wiley1985:2). In other words, it is only the 20th-century formalist obsession with retaining choreography as near-identical in each performance for it to qualify as part of a work’s authentic genealogy that has created the problem with also retaining their explicit. Ballet as a dance technique and as an art form is a lived experience for the dancers who have invested years of labor in what they love, but that lived experience exists in a white supremacist system where Blackness is reduced to racist representation and Black voices criticizing the system go unheard. Instead of evasions, ballets can invite reflection and rethinking of the art form’s racialized hierarchies, entangled in choreography, scenography, music, and narrative alike.

Ballet’s blackface stereotypes have entangled histories. Figures like the blackamoor conflate identifying markers of Islam and the Orient with blackness, all represented as alien and Other to ballet’s white stars. In the post-9/11 cultural climate of rampant Islamophobia and the continuing antiblackness across the global north, driven by extreme right-wing demagogs and conservative thinktanks alike, the predominantly white funders and institutions of ballet still either fail to recognize ballet’s circulation of colonialist legacies or frame their evasion of the issue as engagement. Colonialist evasions—both the superficial removal of dancers’ greasepaint and the resetting of works in different periods or places—are strategies of disengagement with the concrete effects that centuries of racism have had for ballet as an art form, including discrimination global majority dancers still face in the profession. Rethinking what motivates ballet companies to restage racist classics in the first place would involve actively engaging with how blackface is more than greasepaint—how gestures, steps, or musical accompaniment carry it into new versions, for example.Footnote ³⁰

Similarly, focusing on Black predecessors does more than merely add detail to extant maps of the little world of ballet or redraw some of its borders; such attention also points to the recurrence of stereotyping and forgetting in the history of the art form whose colonialist cartography still dominates dance discourse more broadly. Certainly, there are no easy solutions to effect changes in how ballet is taught or how it is discussed on more popular forums than academic journals. Companies need to rethink repertoires, and question genealogies evident in steps as well as settings for salience and renewal of the art form. The repertoire of ballet has never been a stagnant archive of fixed steps and repetitive scripts but always a living tradition because no art can retain relevance without active engagement in the world beyond the stage.