Girly Pop is a biweekly column that explores gender, politics, power and how all three are reflected in the culture we consume.
During its brief but impactful run, with sparkle-loaded costumes from Wicked’s Paul Tazewell and Northwest-inspired scenic design by Preston Singletary, Pacific Northwest Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty was met with a barrage of approving attention, including from the 8-year-old who attended opening night as my plus-one, because I take my cool-ballet-aunt duties extremely seriously. She did get a little bored with the late-breaking fairytale dances that come after Princess Aurora (Angelica Generosa, an angel on earth) wakes up from her 100-year nap, but we both loved the fussy pas de deux between anthropomorphized cats, the cute galumphing ogre, and almost everything else about this reinvigorated fairy tale. Given that it draws on source material that debuted in 1890, it’s kind of amazing it felt contemporary at all.
But it did, in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. What I loved most about it was how it subtly but meaningfully challenged ballet’s often-rigid gender binary—something classical ballet companies will have to do more often if they hope to exist in the decades to come.
During the famous Rose Adagio, a balance-heavy sequence that even the most skilled ballerinas wobble through sometimes, one of the suitors attending Princess Aurora was played by female corps de ballet dancer Melisa Guilliams. In another moment, a number of girls performed the traditionally male part in a partnered dance alongside other girls. Given the gender ratios in classical dance, this isn’t unusual. But I noticed and appreciated that very little was done to obscure the fact that these were girls dancing with girls. And one of this run’s many Auroras is Ashton Edwards, a nonbinary dancer in the corps de ballet who dances both male and female roles. On opening night, Edwards was extremely charming as Fairy Canari, whose high-energy movements can look odd if the dancer isn’t fully committed to the part’s gentle goofiness.
While much has been made of this production’s budget and aesthetic, these moments when the performance slipped out of classical dance’s rigid gender binary felt subversive because they weren’t treated like they were. And they shouldn’t be.
But in classical ballet, gender roles are strict, with a baked-in white supremacy that’s still the norm at most major companies despite some welcome moves toward inclusion in the past decade, a body ideal that prizes thinness, and gendered practices that extend even to what dancers can wear in class: girls in black leotards and pink tights, boys in white T-shirts and black tights, and little or no acknowledgment of anyone outside this binary. This division informs the steps men and women learn, a rigid approach that elides the reality that women dancers can often jump just as high as their male counterparts, and pointe shoes come in all sizes.
I’m lucky that as a dancer, I’ve found studios and teachers who’ve been open to challenging these norms in their pedagogy, with classes where you wear whatever you want and everyone learns the same steps regardless of gender. But while these norms are shifting in more progressive dance spaces, the professional ballet world is taking much longer to catch up.
So I was delighted that when I saw The Sleeping Beauty, a Romantic-era story ballet that’s always struck me as even more fusty than classics like Swan Lake and Giselle, I could see some huge leaps forward, making room for both nonbinary performers and cisgender dancers who happen to have physical attributes or capacities that put them outside of ballet’s limiting norm—dancers like Amanda Morgan. PNB’s first Black woman soloist, Morgan brings gravitas and technical heft to every role she performs, and is significantly taller than your average ballerina at 5 feet 10 (even taller en pointe).
I love watching Morgan perform whenever I possibly can. Height can look incredible onstage and even serve a character function for ballerinas—retired PNB principal Laura Tisserand had the longest lines as Odette in Swan Lake—but in unimaginative companies, height can relegate dancers to so-called “tall girl” parts. They can lose out on partnering opportunities, which can mean being passed over for major roles that require the pas de deux that dominate classical story ballets like The Sleeping Beauty.
On opening night, Morgan brought regal stage presence to Queen Papillon, Aurora’s mother. (And it was a wonderful relief to see a political leader who looked like she knew what she was doing, even if we had to settle for a fictional one!) But during the ballet’s run, Morgan also took a turn as Carabosse, the cranky fairy who curses Princess Aurora over a missing party invite. (Social anxiety was the real enemy all along!)
Typically, Carabosse is played by a male dancer. She’s supposed to be big, imposing, somewhat camp, and genuinely kind of scary. Morgan is so capable of embodying all of those qualities that casting her in this role feels obvious, and yet it’s a choice I don’t think many major ballet companies would be smart enough to consider.
This production of The Sleeping Beauty also corrects some of the source material’s more off-putting elements: Aurora is 20, not 16 (so no more forcing 40-year-old principal dancers to play a teenager); her parents tell her she can marry whoever she wants (we love a love match!); and when she’s awakened from her slumber, it’s with a nice little kiss on the forehead. Cute and not creepy!
When we’re open to challenging gender norms, it can make the world—and the ballet—more beautiful and interesting. It can help us find richness and complexity right where we are, with whoever is in front of us. And in a country where reactionary forces are fighting every day to maintain the illusion that gender is simple and small, seeing its expansive reality reflected onstage in this production, even in small ways, was a beautiful, necessary counterpoint—and something I never expected to see from classical ballet.
But I’ve always wanted to. I’m a freak for story ballets: Swan Lake and Giselle are my favorites because they’re the wildest, with, respectively, a bird Animorph princess and a collective of glamorous ghost separatists who kill men for sport. Don’t be fooled by the pink satin and starched tutus: There’s blood in those pointe shoes (or at least some bunions), and story ballets share more narrative DNA with the collected works of Iron Maiden than the Disneyfied versions of Grimm’s (actually very dark) fairy tales. Seeing Giselle when it first debuted in 1842, with its corps de ballet of undead brides gliding across the stage, would have been beautiful, but it also would’ve been legitimately terrifying. Clinging to outdated ideas about gender within this imaginative, otherworldly context has always felt wrong to me, like when you see a crow hobbling around on the sidewalk even though it knows how to fly.
Knowing what other ballets today look like and who they leave out—and what political reality awaited us outside the lobby—I was glad to take a ballet-loving kid to see this production of The Sleeping Beauty. And I was glad to be reminded that at its best—with fabulous rat-festooned evil fairies, dignified queens, gender-fluid casting, and princesses balancing on just one pointe shoe—the weird, gorgeous world of classical dance has room for everything that makes us sparkle.
And confidential to PNB: I hope this is just the beginning.
