#royal ballet
Comparing the POB and RB 22/23 season is just… painful.
So, it’s not that I don’t appreciate what they were trying to do with the documentary “Men at the barre”, but I think that the approach, and the way it was thought out completly missed point.
They put a lot on emphasis on the rethoric “oh, people think that ballet is just a girly, easy thing, with lots of pink stuff, but it’s actually strenght and it has manly stuff too.”, and that’s…partially true, but still a problematic and wrong approach.
The statement of the documentary should have been that ballet is defintely hard work and doesn’t have anything to do with gender, but also, even if it wasn’t and men danced around in pink tutus and glitters, being super graceful and delicate, that wouldn’t make one any less of a man. Men shouldn’t be ridiculed for loving delicate, pretty things. That’s not what being a man should be about.
So yeah, I get where they were coming from with that perspective, but it still reeks of toxic masculinity and sexism.
Btw, it seems that Ryoichi Hirano will be the one to play Rudolph in the next live stream of Mayerling.