10 Years Later, Ballerinas Still Hate 'Black Swan'

“I really just wanted to walk out."

black swan, natalie portman
Natalie Portman in 'Black Swan.' | Searchlight Pictures
Natalie Portman in 'Black Swan.' | Searchlight Pictures

Ask any dancer: Ten years in the backbreaking world of ballet can be a lifetime, and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is certainly starting to show its age. To some, it’s a time capsule from an ancient age in dance history, when misogyny and sexual exploitation went unchecked. But beneath its theatrics and fever dream of a third act, Black Swan still presents a mirror those dancers would rather bash and shatter—a reality whose reflection is uncomfortably close to a scandal that would rock the legendary New York City Ballet many years later.
 
In 2010, the ballet world erupted when Black Swan took a stab at depicting the life of a perfection-crazed ballerina. Though the movie received critical acclaim, earning numerous Oscar nominations with Natalie Portman taking home the Best Actress prize, Tamara Rojo, a ballerina at the Royal Ballet, told The Guardian that Black Swan “is a very lazy movie, featuring every ballet cliche going.” Other dancers, like New York City Ballet’s Ashley Bouder, found deeper truths in the film. She wrote for Huffpost, “At its worst the movie is a bunch of horribly overdone clichés. But at its best, where I see it, the movie is a version of real issues taken to an extreme level to prove a point.”

Although she agrees the film is an intensely maximalist depiction of a dancer’s daily life, Michele Gifford, repetiteur for the George Balanchine Trust and NYCB dancer from 1988 to 2000, tells Thrillist “there is a touch of truth” to its behind-the-scenes politics. 

black swan, natalie portman
Natalie Portman performing 'Swan Lake' in 'Black Swan.' | Searchlight Pictures

One of the aspects of Black Swan Gifford says crosses into absurdity is its hypersexual presentation of dance. Midway through the film, brooding artistic director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) glowers at Nina (Portman) as she rehearses choreography for the Black Swan. “Honestly, would you fuck this girl?” he asks a male dancer. The dancer laughs dismissively. Nina recoils in shame.
 
But in the ballet Swan Lake, the Black Swan “is not a sexual character,” says Gifford. “I think she just knows who she is. There is no doubt. There is no questioning.” Gifford says if she were teaching Swan Lake, “I would tell somebody don't try to be sexy. That is ridiculous. Find a confidence, find a self-assuredness.”

“I really just wanted to walk out,” says Sara Mearns, remembering when she saw Black Swan in theaters. Like Nina, Mearns is a principal dancer at New York City Ballet. “Everything that she was going through was completely wrong and opposite of what I had gone through and what I think every ballerina goes through.” 
 
Throughout the film, Thomas praises the Black Swan’s mesmeric sexuality, harassing Nina to loosen up and live on the wild side—in and out of rehearsal. What the seemingly godlike director never mentions is that in Swan Lake, the Black Swan is not the commander of her fate. Just as Thomas mutates Nina into being his little princess, the stage-version of the Black Swan is in thrall to the sorcerer Rothbart, the man who created her swan-curse.
 
Rothbart “has used her, and he has manipulated these women to look a certain way and be a certain way and he has puppeteered it,” says Jessica Zeller, author of Shapes of American Ballet: Teachers and Training Before Balanchine. “There is a bit of the notion that everything is governed from a man’s perspective.”

vincent cassel, natalie portman, black swan
Vincent Cassel and Natalie Portman filming 'Black Swan.' | James Devaney/WireImage

Zeller says Black Swan is similarly a relic of a time when ballerinas were voiceless—when, like the swans of Swan Lake, ballet was trapped under the spell of patriarchal leadership. “Women have been raised from such a young age to be a certain degree of deferent in ballet,” she says. “In their training, they don't have a voice; they don't speak; they don't have agency or license.”
 
Many dancers reclaimed that voice when, only a month after Hollywood’s Harvey Weinstein scandal in 2017, NYCB’s Artistic Director, Peter Martins, was accused of sexual harassment and physical and verbal abuse—plunging the ballet community into a #MeToo revolution of its own.
 
“When I was in New York City Ballet, obviously all the stuff that Peter Martins got let go for happened,” Gifford says. “That's my time period. I think it's a sad reality of what we all kind of had to deal with.”
 
Although Martins vehemently denies the allegations, he retired in January 2018 after over 35 years in leadership at NYCB, dividing the company’s dancers, many of whom took to Instagram. Responding to the announcement of Martins’ exit, Ashley Bouder, an NYCB principal ballerina, reposted an image on Instagram from Natalie Portman that reads in part, “Time’s up on tolerating discrimination, harassment, and abuse. #TimesUp.”
 
Likewise, Zeller says the Martins controversy is the product of a patriarchal lineage at NYCB—beginning with the company’s founding ballet master, George Balanchine. “There was this side of him and his life and his choices and his ways of operating around his dancers that I think any breathing person would see as misogyny,” she says. When men like Martins then step into that position, Zeller says, “there is an arrogance to that role, and it's enabled because the field has historically felt like it needed those people.” 

black swan, mila kunis
Mila Kunis in 'Black Swan.' | Searchlight Pictures

Still, Mearns says that gender diversity in ballet “has shifted a lot since [Black Swan]. In my experience, [the movie] was a total, like, blown-out-of-proportion thing that I've never experienced in my career at New York City Ballet.” In Black Swan, Nina cries on the rehearsal studio floor after an alarming display of sexual aggression from her own faux-Martins. “I just had a hard day,” she tells her fellow dancer Lily (Mila Kunis). Lily jokingly asks if Thomas was “playing a little too rough.” After a beat, Lily calls him a prick. Nina replies: “He’s brilliant.”
 
A report by the Dance Data Project found that only 26% of works featured in major ballet companies’ 2019-2020 season were choreographed by women. Ballet’s progress toward gender diversity and equality in its leadership has been slow, Zeller says, but growing empowerment and activism among young dancers since the age of Black Swan present some hope.
 
Through the rise of social media in the past decade, Zeller says that dancers are finally able to speak truth to their experience rather than being hidden behind the voice of the companies they work for. She says, “I do think that it is generational and a decade is enough time…for us to make enough changes.”

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Parker Herren (@parkerdelrey) is a freelance journalist, professional dancer, and host of the podcast What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie.