Hard on the coattails of the Oscar and box-office success of Black Swan comes an initiative to revamp ballet’s image for a more pop and style-conscious audience.
The English National Ballet will this month stage a catwalk show of tutus created by leading fashion designers. Erdem, Giles Deacon, Moschino and Bruce Oldfield are among those who have designed tutus that will be worn on the catwalk by star ballerinas. The tutus will then be auctioned to raise money for the company.
The evening, to be held at the Orangery in Kensington Palace in London, is intended as “a gear change in terms of what ballet is,” according to Craig Hassall, managing director of the English National Ballet. The party will capitalize on “this season’s obsession with all things ballet.”
Photo: AFP
This is not the first time ballet has used fashion to maneuver itself closer to the cutting edge. In the 1920s, Sergei Diaghilev collaborated with Coco Chanel, and the simple, modernist silk-jersey costumes she created for the 1924 ballet Le Train Bleu played a role in Diaghilev’s audacious strategy to place his Ballets Russes at the center of fashionable life in Paris.
Links between ballet and fashion have remained strong ever since, with designers including Christian Lacroix and Jasper Conran designing tutus for major ballets. The costumes of the Ballets Russes have in turn inspired many fashion designs, including Yves Saint Laurent’s autumn 1976 collection and the current collection by the London-based designer Erdem.
“In France or Spain, going to the ballet is not seen as so elitist. It’s more like going to the football. It’s part of the culture. That’s what I want for ballet here,” says Hassall, who ran the cultural program for the Sydney Olympics and has recently signed up as associate director of cultural celebrations for next year’s London Games. “The point is to make young people realize that ballet is fun and glamorous — that it might be for them, after all.”
Lauretta Summerscales, a 20-year-old rising star of the corps de ballet, will model a tutu by Agent Provocateur at the fundraising event on 29 June. She describes the costume as “very sexy. It kind of lures you in. I feel great in it, very in control.”
While the focus on fashion is targeting younger women, the more muscular side of ballet is also reaching new audiences, boosted by the success of the recent UK television documentary Agony and Ecstasy.
Max Westwell, a 25-year-old English National Ballet dancer who featured in the program, was inundated by Facebook messages from new converts to ballet after the broadcast.
“The response was incredible. People tend to think of ballet as a bit dainty and a bit ethereal, but the program showed its physicality, the working as a team, the levels of stress. I’ve got rugby player friends who come and watch me now. It’s becoming quite cool to be a dancer.”
The avant-garde credentials of ballet will be further boosted this September with the opening of Degas and the Ballet, an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, that aims to challenge the “chocolate box” reputation of Degas and show the painter as “a conceptual and extremely radical, highly innovative artist”, according to the curator, Ann Dumas.
Last year, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes drew 100,000 visitors, and ballet has seeped into popular culture.
But not everyone welcomes ballet forging closer links with the fashion world. The English National Ballet experimented with designer tutus two years ago, when Karl Lagerfeld designed a costume for Elena Glurdjidze to dance The Dying Swan.
Lagerfeld’s involvement gave the show top billing in glossy magazines and delivered a paparazzi-friendly crowd to the opening night, but dance critics were less impressed. The high ostrich-feather neck ruff, which was felt to obscure the graceful lines central to the role, came in for particular criticism.
Perhaps in reaction to this, the new tutus will be shown on a catwalk, not a stage.
“Ballet is a very technical art form and one with a very strong tradition,” says Hassall. “There is no doubt that we run the risk of upsetting people. But it’s a risk we have to take.”
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