Thread by @awkwardlefty_cj

@HJoyceGender Hello! Actual ballet dancer/teacher/director here and I would like to briefly discuss all the ways this tweet is ignorant, misleading, and wrong. 1/

@HJoyceGender First of all, a number of dance forms, from certain ritual and folk dances to a few modern dance styles, are based on improvisation rather than codified technique, and the movement itself is not necessarily dictated by gender roles even if the culture is. +

@HJoyceGender Secondly, in a number of dance forms, performance roles are gendered but that doesn't necessarily mean the technique itself is. Even in ballet, there is a large overlap between men's and women's vocabulary, and in smaller schools it's common for boys and girls to train together.+

@HJoyceGender Men's and women's bodies are different, on average, but there's as much diversity within genders as between them. Hip shape is a really big one. Dancers with narrow hips tend to be better jumpers. On average, boys tend to have narrower hips than post-pubertal girls. +

@HJoyceGender However, I've had several female students, usually with narrow hips, who were incredibly strong jumpers, and when they train with boys their jumps can be competitive with their male counterparts.' which leads back to training. +

@HJoyceGender In ballet, boys' and girls' training diverges when girls start to focus on pointe work and boys on jumps and turns. A significant part of training is devoted to developing these two different techniques, so of course you're going to see differences in the outcomes. +

@HJoyceGender Boys become better jumpers than girls not just because of their average physiology, but because they spend a lot more time developing their jumps then girls do, and girls spend a significant amount of their training wearing shoes that restrict their jumping ability. +

@HJoyceGender This is not the case in all forms of dance. I happen to know that Garth Fagan (choreographer of The Lion King musical) trained men and women together and insisted on women jumping as high as men, a standard his company continues to uphold today. +

@HJoyceGender Back to ballet. Let's talk about pointe work. In the early days of ballet, only men were allowed to perform because of the gender roles enforced by European culture. This started to change in the 18th century, but men still predominated throughout the 1700s. +

@HJoyceGender The first attempts at what we might call pointe work were, therefore, done by men. To balance or even turn on one's toes was a feat of strength. This changed in 1832 with the ballet La Sylphide. +

@HJoyceGender In this ballet, Marie Taglioni portrayed a sylph by dancing on her toes with a lightness and softness that came to typify not only the Romantic period but the aesthetic of female ballet dancers as a whole. From that period, pointe became more and more exclusively "feminine." +

@HJoyceGender A fair number of men do study pointe work, but it's not part classical ballet so you'll only see them perform it outside that paradigm, such as in some of Mark Morris' works. So a lot of men don't bother learning. +

@HJoyceGender You see, ballet training doesn't exist in a vacuum; we train a certain way in order to perform certain roles, and those roles were created to tell stories that themselves exist within a cultural context. +

@HJoyceGender Odette, Aurora, Nikiya, Giselle, etc. are delicate, graceful, even fragile beings because that is what the culture in which their stories are told sees women as. Siegfried, Désiré, Solor, Albrecht et al are powerful and strong because they are archetypes of masculinity. +

@HJoyceGender This is the real reason ballet continues to be so gender-split today. It's not that we developed a technique to accommodate the natural differences between men and women. We *assumed* those differences and *imposed them onto performance, and built a technique to match. +

@HJoyceGender This is why you usually have to look outside ballet to see "nontraditional" partnering and gender-indifferent casting. These forms of dance do exist and to assert so confidently that they don't is the height of ignorance.

@HJoyceGender *Note: in this thread I used jumping and pointe as examples of areas in which men's and women's skill level differs; however, the point (pun not intended) that ability develops due to training and is not entirely biologically predetermined applies to every area of technique.

@HJoyceGender Update: thank you for the lovely feedback! I don't have notifications turned on but I tried to read through all the comments and QTs as of this post. Please consider donating to a #transcrowdfund as trans people are more likely to live in poverty than the general population.