The Shape of Things to Come

Bony is still great and chunky still awful in the obsessive realm of classical ballet, with women continuing to suffer everything from heartbreak to death if they don’t measure up.

However, the realities of evolving taste may force the dance world to abandon the kind of thinking that perpetuates its most enduring scandal. The robust look of women athletes could be prompting the Euro-American dance world to rethink its unquestioning adoration of extreme thinness. Furthermore, a number of recent legal actions have turned the uncompromising and often dangerous physical standards of classical ballet into a public issue.

In June, for example, the mother of the late Boston Ballet dancer Heidi Gunther sued the company, alleging that pressures from staff members to lose weight caused her 5-foot, 3-inch daughter to starve herself down to 97 pounds, resulting in her death at age 22 from complications of anorexia (in mid-March, the case was dismissed on a technicality, but an appeal is under consideration).

In another case, the prestigious San Francisco Ballet School was charged with unlawful discrimination under a new city ordinance for rejecting 9-year-old Fredrika Keefer because she allegedly was deemed too short and chunky for admission.

The school has denied the charges, although its published criteria mandate “a well-proportioned, slender body,” a phrase vague enough to cover a number of different body types as well as conceal a multitude of sins.

Sex discrimination, for starters. As the Keefer complaint alleges, height and weight standards are far more stringent for women in ballet than for men. Beyond sexism, the reasons for this disparity have to do with lower numbers of males to choose from, but also include the emphasis on virtuosity that defines male excellence. Because bravura feats and partnering abilities (e.g., lifting) prove more essential to a male’s career than any other factor, male dancers are allowed to look like athletes. Women, however, rise or fall by how closely they resemble incorporeal, weightless and wholly imaginary sylphs and wilis.

“Ballet condemns itself by enforcing the deformation of the beautiful woman’s body,” modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan warned nearly a century ago, describing a situation she found to be “the result of the training necessary to the ballet.”

At the heart of this training is something one might call natural selection, or anatomy-is-destiny. This principle holds that ballet isn’t just a matter of a woman mastering difficult steps, but of being able to define an idealized silhouette, that flowing, unbroken, sculptural arrangement of hyper-extended limbs and torso called ballet line.

In other words, if you happen to be born with the “wrong” body, all the classes in the world won’t make you look right in a tutu-the uniform for classical conquest and symbol of the sylph sisterhood. Alas, the small, compact Fredrika Keefers just don’t fit the mold.

Of course, it sounds unfair to say that an aspiring ballerina shouldn’t be allowed to do 32 fouettes, or even learn them, because somebody says her legs or waist or neck may be too short or her frame too large, but that’s exactly the issue. And it doesn’t matter that such “unsuitable” trainees might be talented enough to land positions with Nederlands Dans Theater, Mark Morris or other nonclassical ensembles that now define the art of dance. Dancers’ physical proportions remain the gauge of acceptance in the classical arena.

Moreover, as those proportions became unnaturally stylized in the late 20th century, a breastless and all-but-fleshless vision of femininity emerged on our stages. That vision, in turn, made radical weight management and, with it, rampant eating disorders increasingly visible to the general public.

A year ago, the Hollywood teen-oriented feature film “Center Stage” depicted weight issues bedeviling three aspiring ballerinas-with two dropping out of dance and one switching to a less classical form. And since Hollywood seldom talks about things that people don’t already know, a plot that depicted adults repeatedly forcing adolescents into actions and ways of thinking destructive to their health and self-esteem signaled a shift in popular consciousness.

Sometime after 1977’s “The Turning Point” (a hit film about ballet with no reference to weight issues), the vast moviegoing public learned enough about classical dancing to begin to think of it as intrinsically oppressive.

This awareness had been a long time coming. In 1933, just before he left Europe to work in America, George Balanchine choreographed “The Seven Deadly Sins,” a satiric opera-ballet by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in which one episode depicted a dancer forced to constantly diet in order to keep her job.

The sequence ended with the repeated warning that “Gluttons never go to Heaven,” a nasty jo ke on middle-class morality in Brecht/Weill, but something that might have served as holy writ for dancers in Balanchine’s own New York City Ballet.

“[Balanchine] knocked on my chest and he said, ‘You know, dear, what is important is to see bones,”’ former City Ballet dancer Gelsey Kirkland told “60 Minutes” in a 1987 interview. “ ... Down to the bone. That is what he believed was truly beautiful.”

That opinion, coupled with choreographic priorities in which, as Kirkland said, “you were pushed to the limit in terms of what your body can take,” created the distinctive, influential Balanchine style as well as the conditions in which dancers like Kirkland starved themselves to become what he wanted to see.

In 1983, the year Balanchine died, Suzanne Gordon published her groundbreaking expose, “Off Balance: The Real World of Ballet,” which cited alarming evidence that female ballet dancers constituted “an at-risk population.” Balanchine got his share of the blame as what Gordon calls “America’s chief arbiter of ballet taste, style and aesthetics,” though she noted that “no one man can dictate taste if his taste does not coincide with that of the culture in which he lives and works.”

As Gordon documented, the consequences of that cultural taste for extreme thinness could be catastrophic: not just such eating disorders as anorexia and bulimia, but equally dangerous medical conditions that arise when dancers remain malnourished for decades-’malnourished as in Biafra,” Gordon wrote.

‘Off Balance” created a big stir in dance circles, but the breakthrough in public awareness of the price ballet expects its women to pay for a career truly began in 1986 with the publication of Kirkland’s tell-all autobiography, “Dancing on My Grave.” An international bestseller, the book had everything: drugs, sex, celebrities, backstage secrets, plus a heroine who never hesitated to degrade, deform and nearly destroy herself to please the men in her life.

But Kirkland was also one of the most brilliant dancers of her generation: the only one, male or female, to inspire works by the four greatest classical choreographers of the 20th century: George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Antony Tudor and Frederick Ashton. And, besides its shocking personal revelations, her book contained a deeply informed critique of traditional ballet training and the unending pain it can inflict.

Put her story and that critique together, and you have one of the key “Center Stage” plot lines. That film softened and sentimentalized the problem, to be sure, but it remained potent for its assumption that training methods and physical standards in the ballet world represent a form of victimization inflicted by one generation upon the next.

Whether you accept the assumption or not, the 1990s challenged entrenched ballet weight standards in a number of ways. Both Sylvie Guillem of the Paris Opera Ballet and Darcey Bussell of the Royal Ballet became international stars despite looking more like shapely Valkyries than emaciated sylphs, while the growing public interest in women’s athletics transformed females with muscles into a new kind of icon. The Age of Xena had arrived.

Unfortunately, it came too late for the misguided Heidi Gunther, but not, it seems, for the more liberated-and litigious-Fredrika Keefers. And time seems to be on their side, with new legal mandates of public arts funding and the history of the art form itself.

All the tutu roles of the 19th century were originally danced by women with bosoms, hips, flesh on their bones-and ballet line galore. More curvaceous line, of course, than the current sylph standard, but pretty much what audiences readily embrace when such companies as Dance Theatre of Harlem or National Ballet of Cuba come calling.

Thus what we accept as the “tradition” of extreme thinness is arguably just a mid-to-late 20th century whim of the white ballet establishment. And it needs to stop, for the health of the art form and the women dedicated to it, before ballet training becomes a symbol, like Chinese foot binding, of a society’s cruel subjugation of women to a crippling, inhuman illusion.