On February 5th and 6th, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB) performed its most recent work at the Sony Centre in Toronto. Entitled Going Home Star, the piece was commissioned by the company and Artistic Director André Lewis to facilitate reconciliation through the medium of ballet, in light of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Canadian government’s supposed attempts to remedy the oppression historically and currently faced by Indigenous peoples. Critics have applauded the work, with the Winnipeg Free Press stating that it “might well be the most important ballet produced by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in its 75-year history.”1 However, there is something about this piece that is fundamentally at odds with its purported intention: none of the dancers are Indigenous. Furthermore, ballet is quite possibly the most offensive art form conceivable to convey the true meaning of reconciliation.
Ballet originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th and 16th centuries before spreading to France and the aristocracies of other European countries. To this day, it continues to depict the otherworldly, through dream-like imagery where light-skinned dancers play traditional European gender roles and push the human body to its physical limits, often at the expense of dancers’ physical and mental health. Uniformity is prized in this art form, which did not feature a black principal dancer in any of the major international ballet companies until the American Ballet Theatre promoted Misty Copeland to principal status in 2015. Furthermore, ballet’s history of dancer abuse, violation of bodily integrity through the encouragement of eating disorders, and classism in both its creation and consumption are downplayed such that the average person is not aware of ballet’s oppressive legacy. This raises the question: how can it be appropriate to tell a story about the violence perpetrated by white settlers against Indigenous peoples using one of the most unabashedly Eurocentric and abusive art forms in history?
The aesthetic of ballet technique is also ill-suited to such an emotionally charged issue. Women wear pointe shoes that restrict their ability to move and run naturally, much like the missing and murdered Indigenous women who have been unable to escape their attackers. The posture required for proper technique mimics the torso isolation of a corset, and the lines drawn by the body are clean and neat, with subtle hyperextension; the products of the European aesthetic. The very purpose of ballet is to embody how one might behave before royalty: emotionally restrained and perfectly poised. In Going Home Star, attempts to challenge this traditional view of the body and the art form are restricted tightly by the bounds of the technique. The result is a narrative about the history of residential schools that lacks the emotional connection necessary to truly convey through movement the impact of Canada’s genocide against Indigenous peoples and cultures.
Moreover, the most emotionally engaging parts of the performance were those that had nothing to do with ballet at all: audio clips of Indigenous voices, tableaus depicting the rape and abuse of Indigenous children, and in particular, the prayer said by an Elder at the beginning of the performance which moved me to tears. The irony of telling this story through the medium of ballet is that my strongest emotional reaction was invoked by the part that I technically did not “understand,” as the Elder spoke in his native language. Yet there was something about his voice, his gentleness and humbleness, his honesty and his presence overall, that moved me tremendously. Dance, like all art forms, can create social change—not by regurgitating narratives that anyone can discover with a quick Google search, but by invoking a visceral and subconscious reaction and appreciation in a recipient of that information. Indeed, reconciliation is not elusive because Canadians do not know about the abuse of Indigenous peoples, but because the people who have the ability to create justice most profoundly lack the empathy and emotional connection to the situation that would inspire them to achieve more than empty promises.
This raises questions surrounding the most effective means of advocating for Indigenous rights in Canada. The benefit of using ballet to tell Indigenous stories is that the types of privileged audiences likely to attend the performances will be reminded of the reality that they of all people need most to understand. However, perhaps the greatest evidence of white privilege in current “reconciliation” efforts is the fact that Indigenous voices are the ones having to adjust and indeed reconcile their substance with white forums and forms of expression, compromising their very essence to accommodate the stubborn and intrusive ignorance that is the hallmark of colonialism.
Martha Graham, one of the great pioneers of modern dance in the 20th century, once said the following about why the particular body chosen to tell a story matters fundamentally to artistic expression:
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”
Martha Graham tells us that it matters who is doing the storytelling. Conveying an Indigenous story through a settler body is fundamentally different from the expression that would result from a person of Indigenous identity telling his or her story through movement. And yet the RWB cast Asian and white dancers as the main characters in this narrative, suggesting that Indigenous stories can be told through settler performance arts, but only in predominantly white forums, using non-Indigenous bodies, and catering to privileged audiences who pay a preclusive amount of money to be there. The divorce of Indigenous stories from their cultural means of communication is itself an act of oppression that results in loss of the value of stories embodied in particular forms of expression. Even the sharp boundary between the “performers” on stage and the audience members who sit directly opposite them is antithetical to many forms of Indigenous art premised upon the sanctity and symbolism of the circle. Moreover, reconciliation is not a commodity to be consumed and enjoyed by those who fail to truly fathom the extent to which Indigenous peoples have suffered from attempted eradication of their physical and cultural existence.
We badly need Indigenous stories expressed to all people living in Canada, but we need them told by Indigenous bodies, through Indigenous forms, and on Indigenous terms. It is a testament to the futility of the government’s current attempts at “reconciliation” that success on the frontiers of advocacy for the rights of Indigenous peoples is currently happening at the margins of white privilege. Surely more effective and meaningful dialogue would result from the support and encouragement of authentic Indigenous expression, without compromising its form or substance, to make it more palatable to individuals who dislike the lingering aftertaste of the tremendous injustices suffered by those who were here first, at the hands of those who were not.