One Quick Question: How vital to our culture is ballet?
During a February town hall with Matthew McConaughey that was sponsored by Variety and CNN at the University of Texas at Austin, Timothée Chalamet said, "I don't want to be working in ballet or opera, or you know, things where it's like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive,' even though it's like, no one cares about this anymore.”
He followed this comment with, "All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership. I just took shots for no reason."
WWU Director of Dance Susan Haines responded to the question, “How vital to our culture is ballet? And how do art forms and ballet inform the very art form Chalamet participates in: film and theater?”
Her response is below.
"The ballet world is outraged by the suggestion that it is not a relevant art form, and the backlash from Chalamet's statement has taken social media by storm, with ballet fans fiercely defending the art form. The visual design choices seen onstage in ballet inspire visual and performing arts, fashion, film, photography, and more. The field of ballet is informed by all of these genres as well. I believe that anyone working in the performing arts today should have an understanding of the history and the classics that have informed the field; however, we are living in an era where the "viral factor" matters more than iconic artworks that have been vital to moving the field forward.
To me, this controversy brings up the issue of producing art in the attention economy and the filter bubble forced upon us by the search algorithms. Our digital culture, with its quick video clips and endless scrolling, has created a viewership that seeks instant gratification of the punchline or "gotcha moment" within a fifteen-second time frame. This mental conditioning has resulted in a loss of understanding of subtlety, nuance, and complexity, traits that are required to understand the mastery of form and inexhaustible depth that exist in classic artworks. Living within our search engine bubble means that viewers are not pushed outside of their comfort zone and only fed ads that reinforce their preferences. Fans of the movie "Dune" are not seeing targeted ads for tickets to their local ballet company; however, they will see the same beauty in visual design, trajectory of momentum, and attention to detail onstage in a ballet as in this film, with a greater appreciation of human physicality and mastery of form."