As ballet’s gender roles grow increasingly blurred, more men than ever are reaching new heights: the tips of their toes. It’s no longer just Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and the few pointe-clad male character parts, like in Cinderella or Alexei Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream. Some male dancers are starting to experiment with pointe […]

Many techniques, especially older ones like ballet and bharatanatyam, segregate movement into gender-based categories. It’s of little surprise, then, how many schools struggle to welcome dancers who are nonbinary, transgender, gender-fluid, gender-nonconforming or still discovering their gender identities. It gets even more complicated when you factor in how early many start training. While creative people […]

A few months ago, Dayton Ballet’s artistic director, Karen Russo Burke, approached Miranda Dafoe with an unorthodox idea: She wanted to cast a woman in the role of the Nutcracker in the company’s holiday production, and she was tapping Dafoe. “I honestly was pretty shocked,” says the Dayton Ballet dancer. “But the more I thought […]

I love being transgender. It’s an important part of the story of why I choreograph. Although I loved dance from a very young age, I grew up never seeing a single person like me in dance. So how could I imagine a future for myself there? The enormous barriers I had to overcome weren’t internal: […]

I’m a transgender ballet dancer (male to female) who desperately wants to perform in a professional company. I haven’t come out about my gender because I’m afraid it will hurt my career. Yet it feels wrong to do male variations and have my teachers tell me to be more masculine. What can I do? —Anonymous […]