The ballet is no place for clumsy transgendered men
By Kathy Gyngell, The Conservative Woman:
Fat ballet dancers used to be the stuff of jokes and music hall slapstick. Chaps performing Swan Lake used to be guaranteed to make us laugh. So did men dressed up as women.
That was until Matthew Bourne’s male Swan Lake came along in a two fingers up gesture to tradition. Now the done thing is to take men in tutus very seriously indeed.
As a long-term ballet aficionado, Bourne’s company of muscly swans in half drag and bare chests never appealed to me. I objected to what was being asked of me, which was to pretend that something was beautiful and appropriate when I did not find it so. I objected too to being treated as an un-sophisticate when I intimated that I found the whole shebang unattractive if not repellent; that men pretending to be women was fine when it was funny.
When my eye fell on the headline ‘Giant Leap for Transgender Dancers’ my first thought was that’s what this was – meant to be funny. The photo of an oversized dancer tightly tutu’ed up on points didn’t help. I began to laugh at the parody.
Except it wasn’t, as became clear when I read the copy. The Times was taking the matter very seriously indeed. The article by one Jack Malvern was no send up.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
