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What’s the pointe?

What’s the pointe?

‘Ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers and man is the gardener,’ the impresario George Balanchine reflected to Life Magazine in 1965. Ballet is an art form enmeshed with its history: steps drawn up in the court of Louis XIV remain today; blockbuster ballets like ‘The Nutcracker,’ ‘Swan Lake,’ and ‘Giselle’ were choreographed a century ago and gendered roles of prince and princess habitually play out with men lifting and women being lifted en pointe. A ballerina dancing en pointe transcends, she floats but she does not meet her partner on equal footing.

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