Episode 1 - Chalamet
In many ways, I agree with Timothee Chalamet’s latest remarks about ballet. What’s the point in churning out the same forms of art simply because of tradition. Who should care about art that plays by rules which were decided a long time ago?
“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’ – Chalamet in an interview with CNN and Variety.
What Chalamet seems unaware of are the choreographers of ballet, the directors of opera, new composers, dancers and musicians with different perspectives that don’t play by the rules. It’s these people that keep these art forms ‘alive’ and worth keeping in our conversations. Decision makers on who gets to see this work might not be championing them, though.
A lot (a lot) of funding and philanthropy of the arts does seemingly go into the preservation of art forms rather than trying to find new perspectives of them. If this were not the case, Chalamet would sound even more ludicrous. But, quite different to his assumption that audiences don’t care, it’s also true that a lot of audiences want to see tradition. Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, La Traviata, they all sell out. Chalamet’s remarks are reviving questions that have been asked many times before, then. How much tradition of an art form do we keep when going forward? How much has to change in order to survive? When does an art form start to become a new form altogether?
Let’s go back in time.
It’s September 2025. I’ve decided to go back to studying, to carry on with a research masters in dance that I never quite finished. Not because I’m deluded and actually believe that a research masters in dance will get me my much needed, secure employment, but because I felt a need for some kind of structured output for my thoughts that kept coming up. Why do I dance? What actually is dance? And why does it bug me so much?
To make ends meet, (sort of), I take up a job as a cleaner at The Royal Ballet School. It’s ‘Upper School’ building is on Floral Street in the heart of Covent Garden, tucked quite conspicuously underneath the twisting bridge that connects it to the Royal Ballet Company. The optics of school connected to institution is one that serves as a stark reminder of their emblematic and structural connection. Something which, as I will explore, could become problematic.
The Royal Ballet and it’s school was one that I had met before, as an outsider. I had been an audience member of ballets across the ‘bridge of aspiration’ at the Royal Opera House for around five years and, I suppose, I was a slightly unconventional fan of what I saw. I remember, for example, watching Jerome Robbins’ Dances At A Gathering (with the then Prince of Wales opposite me in the royal box), whilst wearing a baseball cap, Nike joggers and trainers with holes where the big toe should be. I didn’t think much of it at the time but I wasn’t a match for the long winter coats and sparkly flats. I was young. Broke. And I was there for the dancing rather than the champagne.
My first time at the Royal Opera House was when I was seventeen. I had been watching The Royal Ballet on YouTube through their ‘insight’ videos growing up. It’s something that I had been doing for such a long time that I can’t remember why or how I came across them. The annual World Ballet Day was a live stream for which I would take myself off to the school library and quietly watch at break times and, from the beginning, I was fascinated less with the product of the dancing itself, but more by how these dancers, muscular, very quiet, very other-worldly, rehearsed and rehearsed, how they spoke in code to each other and shared a whole way of life that just felt like it was pure fantasy against mine.
I saved up to see the company perform by working at a local shop, (I remember that the ticket was £70!) in 2019. I wasn’t really learning to dance at this time. I had done a bit as a small child but things like writing and acting were much more accessible to do growing up on rural Dartmoor, where I’m from. These hobbies didn’t require special shoes. So they overtook. I skived off school and got on a train to London. I’m aware that this, even as a one off event, is still a privilege that wouldn’t be possible for many. I don’t think I really cared about what I saw, I just booked what was on - a double bill, it turned out, of Asphodel Meadows by Liam Scarlett and Frederick Ashton’s The Two Pigeons. I remember only a few details. The dancer Matthew Ball making me cry, simply because I thought he was beautiful, I think, I’m not sure it had anything to do with the actual dancing. I remember Scarlett’s musicality and the rush that gave me, seeing music on stage. I remember jealous, evening greens and black in the stage design. And I remember two regular ballet goers (I suppose), sat next to me, leaving halfway through after announcing ‘oh the next one is the one with the pigeons. Too much faff’. They had been planning their kitchen renovations in each interval come to think of it.
It was a head on collision with the world that I had studied from a far. This precious ticket, that I had waited and waited for, was just a Thursday night out for some, to accompany their glass of wine. I remember the idea of casual ballet and that it needn’t be much of an occasion feeling odd. The dancing itself, Ashton’s narrative language particularly, had me whirling around through, to be fair what is quite a faffy and strange, but quite wonderful story. The music, live, loud and stirring from the pit. The glass ballroom where everyone schmoozed up to figures known in the dance world, the faces I had seen on YouTube, was the first building I had seen that I’m sure was actually made of glitter. It was surreal. And all my senses had something to cling onto and work out what they were registering, so it was easy for them to understand that this was a rich event.
I had never cried in the theatre before that day, not properly. Actually, Toy Story 3 when Jessy and gang are heading for the lava, that had got me. But I think it was because I cried at Scarlett’s abstract dance, because I’m sure there was more to it then Matthew Ball’s abs, so unannounced and unexpected, that I decided to pursue dance. I started to train properly and then went to college the next year.
Perhaps there was always a dream. As I write now, it’s becoming quite obvious that there still is, a dream to choreograph big dance productions. It was always swimming around. I think I was a fan of the music initially. I had bought with my mum, aged five, a CD from the Newton Abbott market that had ‘Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Hits’ on, and I pushed the armchairs back in the living room and asked the dog to leave, so that I could make up stories to the music. I remember some of those ideas. The runs and swirls of the string sections halfway through The Nutcracker March sounded, to me, like a huge bubble growing and then popping. As a teenager, I set Swan Lake between two gay hockey players (heated rivalry before heated rivalry!). I was improvising a weaving sleeping beauty waltz whilst my dad watched MasterChef with the sound down and the subtitles on.
So, for whatever reason, I felt compelled to be in this world of fantasy, of ballet and dance and, because geographically, financially, bodily (because I absolutely did not have the wanted natural shape of a ballet dancer, at all), this urge didn’t lead me into a royal ballet school associate programme, but, instead, into just making stuff up.
Chalamet’s comments on ballet, I think, are rooted not from the actual art form, but all the pretence that happens off stage. I didn’t know, as a five year old, that ballet was an ancient art form, exclusive and picky. I just copied steps, well, the feeling of what I thought the steps were, that I had researched online and improvised them to music that I liked.
In the end, the urge was enough to bring me, as a seventeen year old, to see the work of two choreographers who had, sort of, done exactly the same thing. They had been taught steps and they had put them to music that they like. They had the disposal of The Royal Ballet Company and Orchestra, but the urge is the same, isn’t it?
So, how did they get there? And how did I end up being a cleaner?
Liam Scarlett was an Ipswich born ballet choreographer and dancer who attended the local dance school before attending The Royal Ballet School and then graduated into the Royal Ballet Company in 2005. For some time, he took up the role as one of The Royal Ballet’s next, home grown choreographers, similar to Christopher Wheeldon in having gone through the school, and turned to creating from performing. Scarlett made the 2018 production of Swan Lake for the company (which they still perform), Frankenstein, Asphodel Meadows, The Age of Anxiety, and many other works. Alongside his role as The Royal Ballet’s artist in residence, he was artistic associate at Queensland Ballet, making work across the world.
Scarlett died aged 35 following an independent investigation of misconduct between Scarlett and students at The Royal Ballet School (in which he was cleared of all accusations) and after further accusations from the Royal Danish Theatre about his behaviour towards staff. He had already established himself as someone who was asking how ballet might fit in with the present day.
Scarlett was a dancer with the company and, from this, was given more and more responsibility to make his own work. He knew and was trusted by people that could give him big choreographic opportunities. Scarlett’s choreographic approaches and shifts in his career are, therefore, documented quite well. He’s working stuff out, about his choreographic style, on some of the largest dance platforms, first at the most prestigious ballet school in the world and then the world’s most celebrated company. Talk about pressure.
Asphodel Meadows
I notice the dancers creating murky versions of classical technique, adjusting the gaze and pathway of the limbs so it says something slightly different from class. I notice the backspace being used, the dancers taking their limbs out behind them, away from their centre. I notice the dancers changing between scrunching their bodies up into held, closed positions and positions where their limbs fling open wide. I notice arms and legs being asked to float around their axis like air underneath their wingspan. I notice careful choreography of eyelines, the first section making sure their eyes don’t meet and the long stare at each other towards the end.
I imagine bird-like creatures. I think of something melancholic. Something trapped.
And it feels sleepy, like it’s lulling me away, but uneasily.
I first came across Frederick Ashton in a YouTube video of Tamara Rojo performing one of his dances based on Isadora Duncan. I remember finding it funny. It felt like the dances that I would have done in my bedroom. Over the top, flamboyant and really performed. I loved it. I never thought it was particularly good, I didn’t watch it and think, I wish I could do that, I watched it and thought, oh I understand how that felt.
Ashton is marketed, albeit by the Frederick Ashton Foundation, as the ‘father of British Styled ballet’. He has a trademark of humorous, musical and romantic dancing, often storytelling. The first public work that Ashton choreographed was called A Tragedy of Fashion in 1926, a story of a tailor who, after his autumn fashion collection fails miserably, kills himself with a pair of scissors. He joined the Vic Wells ballet as resident choreographer under Ninette De Valois and danced with Peggy Hookham, who later rebranded as Margot Fonteyn. Ashton was doing well enough in his career to be given leave from World War 2 to continue making work with the company at Sadlers Wells, and eventually became director of The Royal Ballet in 1963. There is hope, then, if Donald Trump does start World War 3, that we can dance our way out of it.
When I say that Frederick Ashton’s ballet, The Two Pigeons, is about a girl who has a mental health crisis because a man she quite likes doesn’t appreciate, enough, the pigeons flying outside her window, it might sound like I’m making all of that up. I’m not.
The ballet was created in 1961.
The Two Pigeons – (First Pas De Deux)
I notice the gesture of the pigeon. I notice the upper body and the hips moving outside of ‘classical’ positions. Isolations of the body. I notice the dance is cheeky, playful, childlike. I notice the pas de deux takes care to establish the relationship between the couple. I notice the musicality of it all. I notice, I think, that it’s aware that is ridiculous, but I’m not entirely sure. I notice Ashton fusing a language of one body, a quirky character, with the classical ballet language. I notice that it’s actually fusion, pigeon, Ashton, dancer, character, ballet technique.
These works were my first two introductions to The Royal Ballet company and to the institution I was about to join and clean for.
End of episode 1.
The Cleaning Chronicles is a dance history series exploring the relevance of ballet, told through my brief time working as a cleaner at the Royal Ballet School. It reflects my personal experiences and opinions only and does not represent the views of any institution. My role was short-lived and firmly on the periphery.
