ENB’s Swan Lake: the rights and wrongs of ballet thighs

There’s been heated disagreement over the past week about what’s right and wrong. Is the rocket-propelled ex-Bolshoi enfant terrible Ivan Vasiliev ‘right’ for Swan Lake? Is English National Ballet right to accept such huge thighs in this of all classics, when the sizeist cohorts of the Russian establishment always said nyet to the sturdy, forceful Belarussian? That peculiar balletic categorisation ‘emploi’ has been invoked even by British critics. Emploi means ‘rightness’ as a ‘type’ for a role. Emploi was what drove Mikhail Baryshnikov, another short man condemned at home by his build to demi-caractère parts, to quit Russia and its narrowmindedness and redefine himself as danseur noble in the West.

So when does concern for rectitude become narrowmindedness? The Vasiliev debate has echoes of comments 25 years ago when another Bolshoi superman with tremendous thighs, Irek Mukhamedov, joined the Royal Ballet pleading to explore the lyrical classics that he had been typecast away from.