Ballet has garnered a rather prissy reputation in Britain over the years. Ask someone to picture a ballet dancer and your average bod will envision pink tutus and tiaras, unsightly bulges in tights, anorexia and grown women dressed as fairies. Not exactly universally appealing. Jamie Bell did wonders for ballet’s street-cred when Billy Elliot came out in 2000 but since then the art has slowly slipped away from the public platform into its unfashionable satin slippers. The Royal Opera House’s latest advertising campaign, however, is determined to change this. Picking the most stud-like of their principal male dancers, posters around London show a hero-jawed Edward Watson staring into the camera with a smoldering gaze. Alongside are the words “Superhuman. Meet Ed. Fact: When he’s dancing, pound for pound, he’s stronger than a rhino. Superheroes really do wear tights.” The ballet world has been divided over this new approach and many have reacted strongly against it. But perhaps this rebranding is essential for the survival of ballet in Britain into the 21st century and beyond.

Dance in general is undeniably among the most popular of all the arts. But while ballroom and Latin American are out there on the television sparkling in sequins and smiles every Saturday night, it seems ballet remains that marginalized Cinderella sister, left home alone to dance in the dust. Despite the phenomenal beauty of the ballet dancer’s body, and quite often his or her face too, the art fails to attract the same media attention lavished on its Dancesport siblings – Darcey Bussell (Britain’s most famous and recently-retired ballerina) excepted. BBC One’s Strictly Come Dancing regularly attracted more than 10 million viewers each week and fan bases continue to increase for programs such as DanceX and Britain’s Got Talent. Unfortunately, a reality television show in the same model isn’t really plausible for ballet. Amateur competitors in Strictly Come Dancing may be able to master the Foxtrot or Samba to performance level over a few weeks, but it takes years of gruelling practice to perform ballet’s most impressive lifts and jumps - which is why the end result is so astonishing to watch. So in a physical sense at least, ballet dancers really are superheroes in training.

The classics (the most famous ballets even the blokes down the pub will have heard of) are required by the financial departments of ballet companies to guarantee bums on seats, yet these classics are paradoxically one reason why new, especially young adult, audiences are so hard to attract, and even more importantly, sustain. The classics have come to define what ballet means for many young people: girls flapping around in white frills and feathers (Swan Lake) or some bird twirling around on her toes to Christmas advert music (The Nutcracker). Most are unaware of how extraordinarily athletic ballet is, and how innovative and relevant it can be. This is largely because whenever they encounter ballet these classics are all that’s on offer. Every year Russian and British touring companies dust down their productions of Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker and bring them back to provincial towns, while the odd story ballet is slotted into the Christmas TV schedule as a token gesture towards the art. This means, sadly, that the average person’s view of ballet is rarely challenged. They reject ballet altogether based on the pink and white of the classics, yet remain unaware of the Technicolor of new choreography. Funding admittedly makes it difficult to take risks with new works, but when there are financial opportunities to bring a new image of ballet to the masses they are sadly not always seized upon. 

Darcey Bussell made a step in the right direction when she chose the piece that would end her glittering career on the Royal Opera House stage – shown live on BBC 2. Instead of bowing out with Aurora or Juliet, Bussell chose a piece which not only showcased her own beautiful technique, but one which also allowed viewers to flirt with the idea that not all ballets involve tutus and happy endings. Channel Four’s recent series, Ballet Hoo! also did well to showcase the benefits of participating in ballet, by allowing underprivileged adolescents to train and perform with Birmingham Royal Ballet, whilst the rugged pair of Royal Ballet defects, known as Ballet Boyz, continue to bring ballet down to earth with their touring productions. Mathew Bourne’s popularist versions of the classics, such as his all-male 'Swan Lake', have taken ballet to Broadway and, in a small way, done for ballet what Lesley Garrett and Russell Watson have done for opera in recent years. But there is still a long way to go. Great hope lies with Christopher Wheeldon, an ex-Royal Ballet dancer who has recently launched his own company, Morphoses, with the aim of “revitalizing contemporary, classical ballet by marrying dance, music, visual arts and design”. His forward-thinking is demonstrated in one of his latest projects - a collaboration with the Icelandic singer Björk.

Unfortunately many other outreach attempts are failing the art form in their choices. The BBC is currently filming a new production of Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes, set in the 1930’s, but although for an older generation this may be a welcome return to a children’s classic, for the young it may be yet another reinforcement of the notion that ballet has long exceeded its expiry date. Harry Potter fans may be drawn in by the hope of seeing Emma Watson donning a leotard in her role as Pauline Fossil, but it is doubtful that the attaché cases and references to Noel Coward will do anything to inspire them to pick up a pair of pointe shoes. At the Princess Diana concert in July, looking incongruous amongst the line-up of pop acts, the English National Ballet performed excerpts from Swan Lake, and earlier this year, Swan Lake (yet again) was projected live onto a screen in the centre of Liverpool from the Royal Opera House. Reportedly about 150 people stopped to watch initia lly, but the rain narrowed this down swiftly to 50. What could have made them weather it out? What could have made ballet look as relevant to the Wembley audience as Kanye West and P. Diddy? Suppose instead of stumbling upon a screen filled with feathery white tutus, Liverpudlians had come across one taken over by sexy young dancers clad in simple black unitards performing one of Christopher Wheeldon’s new pieces? What if instead of meeting their mental image of a ballerina, the Wembley audience had been confronted with something entirely new in the manner of the revolutionary Royal Opera House advertising campaign?

Yes, ballet dancers are artists before they are athletes, but it is the physical element of their art which is most likely to draw newcomers, and this is something the Royal Opera House should be praised for recognizing. Instead of shunning this rebranding of the art form, it seems the ballet world needs to embrace it if they want to gain the interest of the general public. Why perpetuate the old image and then wonder why people seem reluctant to alter their stereotypes of an art form? Ballet, in reality, is as malleable for the zeitgeist as music and often as universally comprehensible as a Tom and Jerry cartoon – just a little more graceful.

Sarah Wilkinson