Can ballet survive the culture wars?

Through several phases of the culture wars, ballet has served as a canary in the coal mine, its intense and exposed physicality highlighting all the issues surrounding sexuality, gender and power that have currently become our unhealthily narcissistic preoccupation.

Perhaps the warnings started with the phenomenon of Vaslav Nijinsky. Against the defined masculinity and femininity of the Edwardian era, he stood out as seductively androgynous and effeminate as well as staggeringly charismatic – a godlike hero unashamed to represent le spectre de la rose. Bloomsbury ogled, and rumours about his pederastic relationship with his patron Serge Diaghilev circulated scandalously.

Fonteyn said that if people knew what she endured only those who enjoyed bullfights would applaud

But Diaghilev didn’t much care what people thought, and in 1923 his Ballets Russes commissioned Nijinsky’s distinctly mannish sister Bronislava to choreograph Les Biches, a slyly witty satire of Riviera chic in which silly girls kiss each other suggestively and the central female figure, dressed like a boy, disdains the advances of absurd muscle men and comports herself in non-binary fashion.