Stereotypes in Ballet

I was getting nostalgic this weekend and I started thinking about the 15 years I spent dancing ballet. For nine of those years I performed in our local production of the Nutcracker. As I was remembering all the fun we had backstage listening to the music and trying to sneak upstairs to see the older company members in their costumes and performing, it hit me. I had a TE 448 lightbulb moment. I remembered that in the second half of the ballet dancers that are supposed to represent countries from all over the world come to the court of the Sugar Plum Faerie to dance for Clara who had saved the Nutcracker from the giant king mouse. While some of those dances are more authentic than others (to the best of my knowledge seeing as I am not extremely familiar with all of the cultures represented), some that I can recal are relatively ridiculous.

The one that sticks out the most in my memory is that of the Chinese dance. They are coming and bringing the gift of tea to Clara, and the dance that the company performing these parts of the show had been choreographed around a giant teapot. The dancers entered behind the teapot, wore a costume that many Americans would automatically link with China or Japan (brightly colored, embroidered shirts with tighter black pants, and those hats that look like flattened cones). The part that bothers me the most though is that I remember they had put makeup on their eyes to try and give them a slanted appearance and throughout the dance they squinted their eyes and scrunched up their faces a little bit, to make them 'look more Chinese.' And I remember copying their example starting from when I was about 6 years old. I had no idea that doing that might be wrong, or that some people might be offended (or as I would have thought of it then that some people might not like that I was doing that). I simply wanted to be as good a dancer as those dancers were. And I thought that by mimicking them I was doing something needed to become better.

I did not look at it as making fun of another culture, but it can easily be construed that way. I am not saying that these cultural dances should be cut out of the program, but perhaps the companies should look into a more authentic representation. It is possible to represent other culture's styles of dance without squinting your eyes. And many companies have done this well, because I searched for a youtube.com video that would show you what I'm talking about, and I could not find one that was similar to my memories. The ones I found were, in my opinion, much less offensive. I would be very interested to hear what an insider's perspecitive would be on this issue.