A few months ago, I had the all too common––and what can only be described as demonic—experience of slipping into my first Instagram rage spiral. Amidst a mindless scroll, I landed on a post by Isabella Boylston, principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, one of the highest paid dancers of one of the most prestigious ballet companies in the world. In it, she chaîné turns en pointe across the pavement outside her newly renovated Boerum Hill apartment, underneath her toe shoes a quote by Twyla Tharp is written in sidewalk chalk Art is the only way to travel without leaving home. The ballerina peddles the hashtag #youjuststartedabook, and underneath her bluecheck in small script reads: “paid partnership with amazonbooks”—how quaint. 


Anyone who has fallen into a digital thread of antagonism and critique understands the ensuing actions failed in their attempt to assail my own unease. The hundreds of comments that followed the post were mostly praises of Boylston’s form, while a handful of protests pointed to their concern for independent book sellers. Very few of Boylston’s followers mention Amazon’s exploitative labor practices in pre- and post-pandemic reality. One comment read: “Y’all really gonna top off your principal salary with an AMAZON partnership?? Practice what tf you preach. Amazon is a cancer on society” and was later deleted. Compulsively, I followed up with a direct message to Ms. Boylston herself, emphasizing that during the pandemic, Jeff Bezos has become $97 billion richer by increasing prices up to 1000% on essential items and denying hazard pay and sick leave to over 450,000 of his workers (his net worth growing to $188 billion as of December 2020). More recently, as Amazon workers in Alabama have pushed to unionize in the face of inhumane working conditions at the warehouses, we’re learning more about the company’s disregard for the wellbeing of thousands of its employees. As my anonymous tirade was met with dancerly stoicism and my messages were left unread, a friend reminded me that the prima ballerina is married to an investment banker (an executive director of UBS and formerly of J.P. Morgan) and has graced the pages of numerous features in Forbes. 


I should not have been surprised. And yet, the spectacle and the post (which Ms. Boylston has yet to remove or comment on) is a modern spin on a deeply sinister virtue of the dance industry, which has a history as old as ballet itself. In addition to endless accounts of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse in ballet, the commodification of bodies in the name of capital—and the indifference to the exploitation of labor that goes unregulated across the dance field—is ominous at best. In the essay that follows, I elucidate ways capitalism dictates the illusion of artistry in New York dance institutions, and how dancers (or laborers)—are absorbed into it, evade naming it, and become ignorant to the pervasiveness of their own commodification. The question is not whether dancers are victims but rather, if they will allow for the continuation of exploitative labor practices in a field built entirely on servitude—and why those components are perhaps central to the professionalization of a dancer.

Across the fountain from American Ballet Theatre (ABT), is New York City Ballet (NYCB) at Lincoln Center. While both companies have employed some of the most significant figures in ballet throughout history, only one holds the bragging rights to being established under a choreographer of such unparalleled artistry as George Balanchine.  For those unfamiliar with the history of ballet, George Balanchine is perhaps the single most important name to know in the canon, and—as far as American ballet is considered—he is the canon. In 1933, Balanchine was invited from Europe to New York to co-found the New York City Ballet, and its affiliate school the School of American Ballet, with patron Lincoln Kirstein. Balanchine preeminently defined the genre of neoclassical ballet for over 50 years, choreographing over 400 ballets, the likes of which can only be compared to the oeuvre of Mozart or Bach. Needless to say, Balanchine was both a creative genius and a cult of personality. Consequently, his most devout followers—his dancers—would not dream of defying him.


In 1981, Toni Bentley, a twenty-three year-old corps de ballet dancer of New York City Ballet wrote one of the first and only tell-alls of its kind. Known as an unflinching account of depression and fatigue throughout a season with the company, A Winter Season (Random House, 1982) lifts the curtain behind the iconic institution and shares Bentley’s reckoning with melancholy, masochism, and servitude as a professional ballerina.


The memoir found its popularity with aspiring dancers and an audience eager to romanticize a career built on suffering in the name of artistic genius. Bentley dances around a solid institutional critique of the company, at times disorienting both herself and the reader. One portion of the memoir—which is rarely, if ever, mentioned in its paratext—depicts a year-long contract negotiation between the NYCB board of directors/general management, and the unionized workers of NYCB, which includes the dancers. In it, Bentley is one of the few dancers (about 20-30% of the company) to regularly attend negotiations despite her lack of interest in the goals of NYCB’s union American Guild of Musical Arts (AGMA), and her disidentification with the union laborers working in the theater, whom she describes as “middle -aged rotund, complacent union people” (Bentley, 33.) Bentley and a handful of other ballet dancers attend the meeting to argue against a company strike, in defense of artistic director and choreographer, George Balanchine, while collectively admitting to a desire for a living wage. 


For context, in 1981, the youngest member of the corps de ballet (at entry level) would get a weekly check for $176, working generally 12 hour days and weekends during a performance season, which translates to $524.07 in 2021 considering inflation. This salary will likely double upon promotion, if and when a dancer climbs the ranks of the company. Generally, a ballet company consists of 20-50 corps members and only a select few make it to the rank of principal dancers who have the potential to earn well over a living wage. Ballet dancers, highly specialized professionals akin to Olympic athletes in the singularity of their talent, get compensated nearly the same as someone working as a server in a New York City restaurant in 2020. Bentley herself never made it past the corps, and despite the lack of pension and financial security a ballet dancer inevitably faces after a generally short-lived career, she had continued success with her writing in retirement. (A Winter Season was followed by a handful of other dance biographies, and a second memoir by Bentley, The Surrender (Harper Perennial, 2006) which details her late-in-life appreciation of BDSM and anal sex—idiosyncratic but not irrelavant to her lifetime as a dancer.)


In considering this book a historical testament to the institution of NYCB and the lifestyle of its dancers, Bentley’s account of poorly attended union meetings, perhaps unintentionally, reveals some of the most perplexing behaviors and ethical choices a ballet dancer of NYCB stature must assimilate to, if she wishes to succeed. The lifestyle choices of a dancer are, as Balanchine would say “une question morale”.  If you are regularly presented with the opportunity to negotiate better working and living conditions for yourself and others in an industry built on the exploitation of your labor and the objectification of your body—why wouldn’t you? 


According to Bentley, dancers never brought complaints to Balanchine, and upon his learning of the vote for a potential strike, (mostly voted on by non-dancer laborers at the theater) he would relentlessly guilt his dancers. In this instance in 1981, Bentley recalls him expressing his disappointment with the company for voting to strike for a living wage. “If you don’t like it, leave. Don’t stay and complain,” Balanchine would regularly say, noting he and Sergei Diaghilev slept on the floor in Paris as starving young dancers in the 1930s. “I feel cheated of a time of suffering such as Mr. B had,” writes Bentley, “we have had no opportunity to starve and work and live on the edge. We starve ourselves only out of neurosis. We are spoiled.” Toni Bentley claims that she and her colleagues at NYCB danced for love and devotion to Balanchine, not money. To negotiate the terms of her contract and a living wage is to negotiate the value of George Balanchine’s artistry, something that could not (and would not) ever be negotiated.

Throughout the following decades of NYCB’s history, this precedent is recalled in a number of controversial ways. After Bentley’s tenure with the company, and only recently before the corporate sponsorships of ABT icons such as Isabella Boylston, there was a great scandal around New York City Ballet very few have missed. In 2019, The New Yorker published a salacious piece titled, “What Went Wrong at New York City Ballet.” The article details the company’s long history of sexual abuse and violence predating the 2018 lawsuit filed against the company and principal dancer Chase Finlay, by Alexandra Waterbury, a then 19-year-old student at the School of American Ballet and Finlay’s girlfriend. The lawsuit filed was in regards to Finlay’s text exchanges with at least three other men tied to the company. The text receipts between the four powerful young men read like a demented screenplay for a corporate tele-drama like Billions or Succession; “I bet we could tie some of them up and abuse them like farm animals,” wrote Jared Longhitano, a company donor to the three male dancers, Amar Ramasar, Zachary Catazaro, and Finlay. The men shared pornographic photos and videos of female dancers in the company without their consent, and discussed getting a half kilo of cocaine to “pour it over the ... girls and just violate them.” 


In her piece for the New Yorker, Joan Acocella traces the history of NYCB following Balanchine’s death, and how the subsequent appointment of Peter Martins to artistic director may have accelerated the company’s moral decline. From the 1980s onwards, Martins allegedly had a history of aggressive behavior and violence that went unchecked for years until his resignation in 2018 (right before the Finlay/Waterbury scandal and shortly after an arrest for drunk driving.) Acocella reports: 

More relevant to this essay than the numerous tales of abuse that prevailed not only New York City Ballet, but countless companies in its tier—is how money ties into it all. My intention is not to frame young, female ballet dancers as victims (though in many of these cases it would be appropriate) nor do I intend to criticize the choice to pursue the life of a professional dancer (as it is a choice, often a privilege.) Rather, I am questioning the commodification and objectification of the labor of the body in dance institutions: Who actually benefits from it? On what terms?  Peter Martins makes a number of appearances in Toni Bentley’s memoir; she fondly describes him as a golden boy—“the cream of the crop” as a romantic prospect and “Mr. Clean” in rehearsals. Martins appears in the contract negotiations too, vehemently opposing a strike in the name of Balanchine, whom, following Balanchine’s death and throughout his future as director of the ballet, Martins more openly resents. With that in mind, it’s perplexing that Martins would defend his predecessor, although he would later go on to fill his shoes where—despite the valorization of abjection in ballet—money would not be an issue for him. 


In NYCB’s 2019 tax filing, the year following the Finlay/Waterbury scandal and his retirement, Peter Martins was still paid $975,273 as an independent contractor for the rights to his choreographies. This is a year after his retirement, while no American ballet dancers have pension plans provided for them by their companies despite their long held unionization with AGMA. For an investment banker, a salary of $986,000 (Martins’ salary in 2018) may be comparable, but for ballet dancers, it’s twice the salary of the highest paid female dancers in the company, and at least 32 times greater than a starting salary in the company, which can vary greatly. Let’s not forget that Longhitano, one of the men exchanging pornography of these woefully underpaid dancers (and students), was a donor to the company. 

I began this essay with an excerpt from Tiqqun’s flippant and foreboding text “Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl.” The theory that Tiqqun (the anonymous French leftist collective ) puts forth is the concept of the Young-Girl, which, as the publishers at Semiotext(e) frame it, “traces consumer society’s colonization of sexuality and youth... ‘The Young-Girl is not always young and, increasingly, not even a girl.’” In a chapter titled “The Young-Girl Against Herself” Tiqqun fixates on anorexia as a component of the Young-Girl:

Certainly this ascetic lifestyle is not unfamiliar to the majority of those who relentlessly pursue the career of a professional ballet dancer. Throughout A Winter Season, but especially in the scenes of contract negotiations and in discussions of anorexia, Bentley reveals a practice of self-sacrifice, masochism, and amorality which in her words, define the life of a ballet dancer (Bentley, 20). As these tropes evolve over dance history alongside the career of a ballerina,  I am curious how a dancer of Bentley’s era—romantic, abject, and poetic about her own abjection—evolves into someone like Boylston, difference of rank and company aside. How does the rejection (or starvation) of appropriate compensation for tireless labor evolve into an insatiable appetite for wealth?


Perhaps what I find endearing about Toni Bentley is her unselfconscious suggestion that ballet dancers are amoral and apolitical. She is not ascetic, and although she starved herself often throughout her career (not uncommon amongst ballet dancers) she admittedly is not a saintly anorexic. Bentley spends pages of her memoir lamenting over her lack of self-discipline: to entirely abstain from sex, to entirely abstain from food. She writes of the joy that she feels upon receiving her third period in a row, a first since she was 14 (missed due to regular starvation and repetitive physical stress on the body), while her peers ask, “Are you sure you’re really a dancer?” (Bentley, 35.) In this—and in her consistent moral questioning of her choices, despite her devotion to her god, Balanchine—Bentley is plagued by her corporeality. She says she knows that she thinks too much to be a dancer (or a great one, like Peter Martins and his slew of iconic girlfriends), and that feels honest. In this honesty, Bentley is more human than the dancer she wishes she could be. 


The scrappiness of Toni Bentley appeals to me far more than the sleekness of Isabella Boylston’s monetized Instagram presence. Toni Bentley is of a different era of dance history. She danced in a time where $176 a week might pay her bills in New York City, and she likely wasn’t tempted to spend her paycheck on a costly vegan or keto diet, like any career dancer today. Her generation of dancers “ate music, not food” to survive. In the 1980s, dancers and artists of New York City could afford to be poor, this we know. Ballet dancers especially could romanticize their poverty despite their own exploitation. This is quite a different image of a ballerina than the one presented on the Instagram of Isabella Boylston or any dancer who, to compensate for their imbalanced wages, take up paid corporate sponsorships with companies like Amazon. However, it’s worth repeating that Boylston is perhaps one of the few professional dancers in the United States whose wages and status do compensate for her labor. In addition to her marriage to an investment banker, Boylston has seemingly no need to accept such a sponsorship. Moreover, unlike NYCB, ABT has a considerable history of organizing strikes with AGMA to negotiate better wages and benefits for its dancers and has succeeded in doing so as recently as 2018. Here we return to the question of survival versus greed. 


Our current reality is a harrowing one; a deeply insidious capitalist system, which  chooses our roles for us, and in which everyone inside of it must choose between honoring humanity or survival. There is a gray area in this dilemma where most of us live—and there is a paradox here—for while dancers are indeed laborers, and as indicated, shockingly underpaid, the further we lean on highly funded arts institutions and the corporate entities that back them, the more indebted to their capitalist functions we become. 


It is difficult to envision a reality where ballerinas can fraternize with “rotund, complacent union people” as equals, who make nearly the same amount as they might in a corps de ballet, and who could find similar grievances of tireless labor. A concerning quality of contemporary American society is its insistence upon individualization. To be an individual or cling to an identity, is what separates ballerinas from their fellow union members; it’s what separates poor white Americans from poor people of color it’s what separates you from me. These distinctions, while important, can work against solidarity, allowing divisions to occur where the focus in public discourse is not on how this system is oppressive to all of us, but on how many degrees from the bottom we sit—how closely we dance next to power, how much status one has because of their race, gender, occupation, followers, fans—without our actually holding any power at all. We live in a society where underpaid dancers, artists, and laborers in general, don’t realize how bad we have it because we’re fooled into believing that whatever immaterial status we’ve been given is enough to pay our way in a system that only respects how much you’re willing to buy into it.

Amidst the allegations of rampant sexual abuse in 2018, the NYCB dancers held a fall fashion gala where they professed that morality is a paramount virtue to their work as dancers. But is it actually paramount to the work of a ballet dancer? What would happen if these contemporary superstars stopped supporting corporate greed and pressed their own (massively financialized) company for the wages it’s been hoarding from them? What if they joined forces with the other unionized laborers at the theater to argue for better wages and benefits not just for themselves, but the others working alongside them?  What if, instead of expressing on social media about the abuse they’ve had to endure in these companies, NYCB dancers actually decided to strike for once (as their musicians have)? While ABT actually has a significant track record of negotiating better wages and menial retirement plans for corps level dancers, there is still something left to be desired from these actions. Questions of morality—when it comes to anything outside of the ballet, and especially in regards to the pervasiveness of global capitalism—is not really a part of the job. As it happens, I am not convinced that Toni Bentley is (or even was) an ominous symbol of the Young-Girl, perhaps a symptom, at worst. However, this new brand of NYCB or ABT ballerina—who have inherited ballet’s cumulative history of degradation, exploitation, abuse, and massive economic disparities—they might be.