I recently watched the first season of the Netflix series, The Royals, which has a character named Ophelia who is ostensibly a professional-level dancer who has been invited to audition for “Mr. Ballantine’s” dance company in New York. This is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Mr. Balanchine (George Balanchine, the longtime director of The New York City Ballet). Throughout the series Ophelia is almost never in the dance studio, has the body of a non-dancer, and is also a full-time college student with loads of time to study art history, jet off to vacations with her prince boyfriend, and get drunk at parties. When she wears her hair in a bun it is huge, the kind that a hairstylist might make for a wedding, and looks nothing like the way actual dancers wear their hair up and out of the way for turns.
None of this is too troublesome on its face – the rest of the plot is ludicrous and unrealistic as well – for example, Elizabeth Hurley plays the Queen of England as if she is a Kardashian. What tipped the scales from camp to unwatchable, though, is when the series treats us to 30 seconds or so of Ophelia’s professional dance audition. She gestures, she reaches, she rolls on the floor. It isn’t unpleasant but it isn’t ballet, it isn’t contemporary, and it isn’t expert or skilled. And yet we, as the audience of the show, are meant to believe that she is ready to start a dance career at a top company in the dance capital of the world.
Why did they do this to us? My guess is that they assume the watchers of the series either can’t tell them difference between dance and non-dance or that if they can tell the difference they don’t care. I would like to think this is wrong and that they should have hired a body double for the dance audition scene. I’d also like to know (I don’t) whether current or former polo players would be bothered by the depictions of polo on the show. I want to know whether they are trivializing dance in particular. Assuming that it doesn’t matter and isn’t important to get right.
I was similarly distressed watching Netflix’s This Is Us, a wonderful series with skilled and sensitive actors. It has a complex and compelling plotline that revolves around three siblings, of which one is adopted. The adopted son is married to a woman who is supposedly a professional-level dancer with her own studio. Again, they supply unnecessary scenes of the character dancing – this time in the studio. Again, they are brutally off-key and low quality, showing a thoroughly untrained actress doing movements in a pedestrian way. Instead of allowing us to suspend disbelief they force us to watch non-dance movements and accept them as dance, which for some of us ruins not just the dance scene but the illusion of reality of the whole series.
WHY do producers/directors often assume that their audience is entirely ignorant of what professional-level dance looks like? Why do they think that an unskilled substitution for dance is all that is needed to convey a character that is supposedly a dancer? Is the cost to hire a real dancer really that high? Or are the standards for art in their series really that low?
Movies that are not series often do a bit better. Classically trained dancer, Moira Shearer, was the lead in The Red Shoes (1948). Savion Glover choreographed high-level tap dance for Happy Feet (2006), which an animated penguin performed admirably. Natalie Portman in Black Swan (2010) was passable in terms of the dance scenes. Here we at least had a good actress who seemed to understand and incorporate some of the nuances of the world of ballet. Here there was actual dance training, showing some respect for the artform. Similarly, Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft simulated ballerinas with respect and some semblance of grace and elegance in The Turning Point (1977), incorporating actual dancers, Leslie Browne and Mikhail Baryshnikov, in lead roles. A few years later Alex Owens (the main character played by Jennifer Beals) in Flashdance (1983) has a body double that can actually dance (the uncredited Marine Jahan). Let me say that again. The uncredited Marine Jahan. Sigh.
The often disregard of what dancers actually do and are is not limited to TV and movies. There were the Vogue magazine photos (2016) of model Kendall Jenner in pointe shoes that depicted her lounging back against the barre in a dress that fell below her knees, on pointe in a way that showed feet that had never before worn pointe shoes. Why reference ballet but then care so little for balletic aesthetic values?
Seated Ballerina (Jeff Koons) was a 45-foot-tall nylon “ballerina” that loomed over Rockefeller Center for several months in 2017. Supposedly it was inspired by a porcelain figurine. She had a yellow ponytail and her body, carriage, and foot position was, again, that of a non-dancer. Because why would Jeff Koons choose an actual ballerina for inspiration when he could choose a porcelain figure? The piece should have been entitled “Kitsch Ornament” (referencing a toddler’s idea of ballet).
I’m not sure whether I’m criticizing the banality of a life experience that has no actual knowledge of the art of dance it or whether I’m just kvetching about popular taste being simplified and low. I think that people could be interested and educated in seeing what high-level dance is and that when they are they won’t settle for the Muzak version. If I am wrong about this then my view is that popular taste still ought not to be pandered to in a way that allows people to drink a watered-down version of something as if it is real. It’s cheating. It harms both the public in allowed them to remain underdeveloped in their taste and sensibility and it harms the perception of dance overall – at worst leading to undervaluing high-level dance as something necessary for human art and culture.
Copyright © Aili Whalen 2025. All rights reserved.
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