'It's like a cult': how sexual misconduct permeates the world of ballet

'It's like a cult': how sexual misconduct permeates the world of ballet

The #MeToo movement has slowly started to have an effect on the men who’ve abused their position with ballet dancers but there’s still a long way to go


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When Alexandra Waterbury was a student at the School of American Ballet, she caught Chase Finlay staring at her in the studio.“At the time, I was flattered. I was an 18-year-old girl, and he was this star that I grew up watching since I was 11” Waterbury said. At New York City Ballet’s fall 2016 gala, Waterbury formally met Finlay, then a principal dancer with the company. They dated for a year and a half, until one morning she decided to check her email on his laptop. As his iMessages updated, she saw a photo of another woman’s intimate anatomy pop on to the screen. A shocked Waterbury combed through Finlay’s texts with other male dancers and found images they had swapped of their partners performing sex acts or stripped naked. There was one of her. She had no idea he had even taken it.

Waterbury, now 21, attributes her abuse by Finlay to a boys’ club mentality at New York City Ballet, complete with locker room talk, unwanted groping and other indiscretions. Hers is not a story about a lone bad actor. She believes it reflects a system that condones inappropriate behavior. “Dance is not the issue,” said Waterbury, who sued both Finlay and New York City Ballet. “It’s bigger institutions that are very much in it for money, very much in it for protecting an image and prolonging this lineage of something like (George) Balanchine.” American ballet has a long history of men whose unsavory attitudes have gone unchecked. Even Balanchine – father of the American ballet technique and founder of both New York City Ballet and its training program, the School of American Ballet (SAB) – was known for choosing “muses” from his company to inspire his choreography.

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After his final performance with the New York City Ballet, Peter Martins (right) is greeted by Jerome Robbins in 1983. Photograph: Linda Vartoogian/Getty Images/Getty Images


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American Ballet Theatre, for example, launched a multi-year “women’s movement” to foster female talent, and its first installment this fall featured choreography by Stefanie Batten Bland, Michelle Dorrance, Jessica Lang, Lauren Lovette and Claudia Schreier. Before the initiative, the prestigious New York-based company had presented works by 183 choreographers, only 41 of whom were women.

For dancers who have been in the industry since they were toddlers, it’s hard to question the existing power structure that gives authority primarily to men. It’s what they know, and as Garafola pointed out, dancers in the US are rarely encouraged to seriously pursue an education outside the studio. With mid-morning classes and otherwise demanding training schedules, they often end up in correspondence programs or at schools with low academic standards.

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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/nov/02/ballet-stage-me-too-sexual-abuse-harassment