Blackface in Ballet: The Racist Legacy the Dance World Still Has to Confront

Ballet is one of the world’s most elegant art forms — every movement precise, every detail meaningful. But beneath the grace and discipline of classical dance lies a history that’s far less beautiful.

Today we’re confronting one of ballet’s most uncomfortable truths: the history of blackface in ballet. This isn’t just about outdated makeup or “tradition.” It’s about the racial hierarchies, colonial thinking, and cultural stereotypes that have shaped ballet from its European roots to modern global stages.

In this post, we’ll unpack how blackface entered the ballet canon, why it’s persisted, and what artists and companies can do to finally move beyond it.

The Origins: When Blackface Met Ballet

To understand how blackface became a “tradition” in ballet, we need to go back to the 19th century, when blackface minstrelsy was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in Europe and America.

White performers painted their faces black — with exaggerated lips and wide eyes — to ridicule enslaved and freed Africans. These shows were built to reinforce racist stereotypes for white audiences.

As ballet developed alongside European imperialism, that mindset carried into its storytelling. The fascination with “the exotic” and the “other” — often drawn from colonial fantasies — shaped works like La Bayadère, Petrushka, and Scheherazade.

In these ballets, white dancers would darken their skin to play characters of color — a practice rooted in the same caricatured thinking as minstrelsy. According to scholar Hanna Järvinen in Dance Research Journal, these roles, like the “Golden Slave” or “Blackamoor,” reflected Orientalist and racial stereotypes embedded in early 20th-century ballet cambridge.org.

For early audiences, there was little controversy. When Petrushka debuted in 1911 with Vaslav Nijinsky painted in blackface, critics celebrated it as revolutionary — not problematic. As Wendy Perron later noted in Dance Magazine, “none of the (largely white) audience members in Paris objected to the big, dumb puppet being portrayed as a Moor in blackface” dancemagazine.com.

When “Tradition” Becomes Excuse

For much of ballet’s modern history, blackface and brownface makeup were justified as “costuming” or “authentic character portrayal.”

Even in the 1960s and 70s, major ballet companies in the U.S. and Europe continued to darken white dancers’ skin for roles like Solor in La Bayadère or Othello in various stage adaptations. Dance historian Alastair Macaulay recounts how this practice left literal smears of brown makeup on tutus backstage, a physical residue of racism normalized in performance alastairmacaulay.com.

But while companies claimed these gestures were harmless tradition, Black dancers and scholars recognized them for what they were: a refusal to embrace diversity within the art form.

That harm is more than visual. When a white dancer wears dark paint to signify race, it sends a message — that people of color are roles to be imitated, not artists to be represented.

The Debate Reignited: Misty Copeland’s Viral Post

In 2019, Misty Copeland, the first Black principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, posted an image to Instagram that changed the conversation.

The photo showed two Bolshoi Ballet dancers performing in La Bayadère — their faces painted dark brown, their lips red, eyes outlined in white. Copeland called it exactly what it was: blackface, and an example of why ballet still struggles with racism issuu.com.

Her caption — “Until we can call people out and make people uncomfortable, change can’t happen” — went viral among her 1.8 million followers.

The post divided the global dance community. Many Russian audiences and companies defended the Bolshoi’s makeup as “not racist,” arguing it was simply part of ballet’s tradition. But that defense illustrates the problem itself: the inability to see racism as racism when it’s normalized.

Over on My Ordered Steps, we covered Misty Copeland’s Oscars performance — a moment of progress and visibility. Yet her activism around blackface reminds us that representation on stage means little if the art form refuses to confront prejudice within it.

Why It’s Still a Problem

Blackface in ballet is not “harmless tradition.” It perpetuates stereotypes formed by colonialism — flattening entire cultures into symbols and costumes.

The problem is threefold:

Dehumanization – By using makeup to suggest race, companies treat identity as decoration rather than lived experience.
Exclusion – It signals that dancers of color don’t belong in those roles or that they must conform to an aesthetic defined by whiteness.
Cultural Stagnation – Holding on to racist imagery in the name of “tradition” stops ballet from evolving into an inclusive, living art form.

Writer Jessica Dare explains that even as ballet progresses in diversity — with brands offering pointe shoes in deeper skin tones, for example — it still has “so far to go until dancers of color have the same access and opportunities” and until “blackface is banished from the stage” daretodance.co.

Keeping blackface on stage today is not about preserving history; it’s about refusing change.

Who Still Does It — and Who’s Changing

In 2024, blackface remains most visible in Russian ballet companies. Both the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Theatres continue to perform La Bayadère with dark makeup on white dancers, often defending the choice as “traditional” or “non-political.”

Outside Russia, however, more Western companies are breaking from these customs:

The Royal Ballet (UK) has adapted La Bayadère with race-neutral costuming.
The Dutch National Ballet has modernized choreography to remove racial caricatures.

American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey, and smaller U.S. companies have centered inclusive casting and historically conscious storytelling.

These steps show that artistic excellence doesn’t depend on outdated racial imagery — it depends on vision.

Solutions: Moving from Awareness to Action

There’s no single fix for ballet’s legacy of blackface, but the path forward requires four key shifts:

1. Acknowledge the Problem

Companies must publicly recognize blackface and brownface as forms of racism. Pretending they’re harmless traditions continues the harm.

2. Reimagine the Classics

Ballets can evolve without losing their artistry. Reworking La Bayadère or Petrushka with authentic cultural consultation creates productions that honor heritage rather than stereotype it.

3. Diversify Leadership

Diversity isn’t just about who dances on stage — it’s about whose perspectives shape the repertoire, costumes, and narratives. Ballet needs more Black choreographers, designers, and directors in decision-making roles.

4. Educate the Audience

Audiences drive ballet’s sustainability. Providing program notes, pre-show talks, or online essays about the racist origins of certain imagery helps viewers understand change as progress, not censorship.

Ballet’s Future: Beyond Paint and Pretend

Ballet has always prided itself on beauty, precision, and evolution. So, what does it say when this art clings to practices rooted in mockery and exclusion?

Eliminating blackface isn’t about erasing history; it’s about learning from it. When directors refuse to update productions, they’re saying that aesthetics matter more than people — that art’s past weighs more than its future.

The next century of ballet demands a different vision: one that embraces empathy as deeply as elegance, and authenticity as fiercely as tradition.

In that sense, the true artistry isn’t in keeping ballet perfect — it’s in making it honest.

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