Barbie, Ballet and the Male Gaze

The Nutcracker is arguably the most famous classical ballet (alongside Swan Lake), familiar to balletomanes and novices alike. Even those who avoid the art form of ballet would be aware of the cultural reach of Marius Petipa’s 1892 Christmas Eve tale.

Based on Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann’s 1816 fairy tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, The Nutcracker has taken on a multitude of incarnations over the last 200-plus years. From Fantasia to The Simpsons and Care Bears, The Nutcracker has been used as consistent inspiration in popular culture. Tchaikovsky’s The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies even appears in a version of the video game Tetris.

There is also unsurprisingly a Barbie adaptation of The Nutcracker. First released in 2001, and heralded as Barbie’s first feature length film, the computer-generated animation was the ideal format to launch a new era of the iconic doll and capture audiences with the cross-sectional appeal of both high and low art.

The mass market appeal of Barbie merged seamlessly with the nostalgic familiarity of The Nutcracker combining fairy tale elements and pop culture with Tchaikovsky’s classical score. Through adaptation, The Nutcracker achieves what few ballets can, a hyper-self-aware reproduction that reinforces the traditional gender roles of Western culture.

Similar to Barbie, the world created within The Nutcracker is that of a young girl’s fantasy. In almost parallel constructions, the female protagonist takes centre stage, but only under the permission of the male creatives that have so carefully designed her.

Within this structure, traditional western stereotypes are reinforced through traditional ballet, both in narrative and choreography. Female characters are presented as ultra-feminine, highlighted through her ethereal, delicate movements and supported by their masculine partner.

In 1964, choreographer George Balanchine famously quoted that “ballet is a woman” on the cover of Newsweek.

In principle, this seems like a magnanimous gift to a dancer, to have a work created on you is an extraordinary honour, but for Balanchine to place the ballerina at the centre of his and in turn, the audiences’ universe makes her more object than subject. The ballerina is reduced to the story and the steps that are created on her, for her, but never by her.

The very concept that he created for his dancers immediately shifts the balance of power from the dancer to the creator. It becomes a more voyeuristic fetishization of what the creator wants the women to look like and to be.

More recently choreographer Pam Tanowitz made the important distinction from Balanchine’s original quote. Ballet isn’t a woman, but more accurately, “ballet is a man’s idea of woman.”

Tanowitz understood the inherent gender structures at the heart of ballet and how they have been historically reinforced by the male creatives at the helm of productions. When you think of the classical repertoire, choreographers the likes of Marius Petipa, Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine and Rudolf Nureyev come to mind. Additionally, when entering the term ‘ballet composers” into your search engine the entire list is made up of male creatives.

Balanchine’s pedestal is a precarious one to balance on. In this world, a woman’s value is measured by her male creator but embraced by all genders. The cultural fascination with the ballerina is comparable to Barbie in that she is positioned as a fantasy, an “ideal’ of femininity that contradicts itself but is somehow still appealing.

Ballet, like Barbie, is selling a fairytale, a glorious fairytale of Nutcrackers that come to life to fight a mouse king, of sugar plum fairies and a land of sweets more colourful than Barbieland. Historically, both ballet and Barbie have represented conservative gender stereotypes. However, there is an exciting revolution taking place within both spaces that aims to move into a more inclusive and diverse narrative, creating art that represents a far wider community of consumers.

Each year as the Christmas season approaches, audiences will attend The Nutcracker in all its various adaptations and revel in the grand ballet, the familiar score and the festive spirit it conjures. On Christmas morning children will unwrap various Barbie dolls, rewriting their own narrative, creating and imagining stories beyond the constrictions of 19th-century ballet. In a world no longer bound by rigid concepts of gender and sexuality, ballet’s boundaries have extended beyond patriarchal philosophies but still retain the spectacular elements that audiences have adored for centuries.

Ballet is no longer “a woman”, or even “a man’s idea of a woman”, ballet, like Barbie, is whatever it wants to be. A fairy tale world of fantasy creatures and supernatural beings with superhuman strength reaching beyond the binary to represent the highest calibre of artists and their unique ability to convey story through movement.