Sugarplumgate: Ballet’s Body Politics and the Limits of Criticism, by Elizabeth Dejanikus

The following essay, written in 2024, won a prize at Yale this year. I have not met its author, but have been sent it by a mutual friend. It seems right to me to publish it on my website

Alastair Macaulay

Sugarplumgate: Ballet’s Body Politics and the Limits of Criticism

by Elizabeth Dejanikus

On November 28, 2010, Alastair Macaulay, then chief dance critic of the “New York Times”, published a review of New York City Ballet’s “The Nutcracker”. He had charged himself with reviewing nearly thirty productions of “The Nutcracker” for the Times across the country that holiday season, and the City Ballet piece was his opening act. The review was fifteen paragraphs long. In it, Macaulay applauded the drama of Tchaikovsky’s score and the vivacity of Balanchine’s choreography. He wrote about the tenderness of a brief violin solo and about the magnificent Christmas tree that brought the magic of The Nutcracker to life onstage. Today, however, these lucid commentaries have been all but forgotten. It was instead the very last paragraph of his review, one that reads practically like an afterthought, that stole the show.

“Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many,” Macaulay concluded his piece, “and Jared Angle, the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm.”<1> Only hours after Macaulay’s review went to print, responses started flooding in. A few celebrated Macaulay’s candor. Many more revolted. Macaulay was a prick, a misogynist (his dig at Ringer, unsurprisingly, got far more attention than did his quip about Angle). I, too, was shocked when I first read Macaulay’s review. One sugar plum too many. What a mean thing to say. And worse: funny.

The controversy didn’t end there. Radio stations and television programs started asking Macaulay to come on as a guest: listeners and viewers wanted to hear the voice and see the face of the man who dared. Instead, Macaulay addressed the matter (now referred to as “Sugarplumgate”) in writing. “Judging the Bodies in Ballet,” published in the “Times” only days after the original review came out, made no apology for what had been labeled an “appalling,” “heartbreaking,” “childish,” “hurtful,” and “incompetent” review, but rather committed Macaulay to what he had long believed to be true: “The body in ballet becomes a subject of the keenest observation and the most intense discussion. I am severe but ballet, as dancers know, is more so.”<2>

Jenifer Ringer, too, was asked to comment. She made an appearance on the “Today Show”, and the “Oprah Winfrey show”, and wrote a book. This was 2010, and commenting on a woman’s weight was beginning to go out of style. Ringer was a beautiful, likeable (and extremely thin) ballerina who’d been publicly wronged by a man who, it seemed, couldn’t keep up. Though Ringer herself never demanded an apology from Macaulay (she instead used the occasion to talk about her own experience with eating disorders in ballet), hers was the perfect face for the movement – a face worth fighting for. Macaulay, on the other hand – the self-righteous, irresponsible, middle-aged critic who had the nerve to write about Ringer’s weight – made for an ideal punching bag.

The outrage launched at Macaulay, however, was grossly misplaced. Outrage was an understandable reaction. The ballerina’s already tiny. Why does she have to be tinier? But outrage at Macaulay was not. In commenting on Ringer’s (and Angle’s) body, Macaulay was simply voicing a truth about the art form that he – and the entire ballet world – knew to be true. I know this in part because, for many years, it was a truth I confronted every day.

***

I distinctly remember the moment I came into consciousness about my body. It was a Thursday afternoon, I was ten years old, and I was standing in first position. My ballet teacher, herself a former dancer with New York City Ballet, was busy correcting my posture. Stand up straight, [name]! Suck in your belly! My belly?! I was 10 years old! I had gotten corrections before, certainly. Straighten your knee. Pick up your elbows. Those corrections made sense to me because those corrections taught me how to dance. But what my belly had to do with any of this was beyond me. I would later learn she was teaching me to engage my core muscles, an important part of ballet technique. But at a mere ten years, the core message was lost on me. All I understood was that there was something wrong with the way I looked.

As a product of twentyfirst-century parenting psychology, I grew up being told to love my body. I grew up thanking my legs for taking me to new heights, thanking my eyes for showing me the world, thanking my heart for giving me blood and love and life. (I went to a Montessori school in Seattle, if that explains anything.) But somewhere along the way – not from my parents, that I am both sure of and thankful for – I began to learn that for all this talk (the genre of body-positivity literature and marketing and psychology was piloted on my generation), there was value in being slender. In not having a belly.

And then I started dancing. Ballet stands contrary to everything Pacific Northwest Montessoris preach. The only legs applauded are those that are long and lean. Standing there in first position, I learned quickly that my body was being judged. Its particular shape, not just what I did with it, was a part of the display. And the display had to look a certain way.

I would go on to stand there in first position, scrutinizing my own body in the mirror, every day for the next eight years. Such self-scrutiny was at times gruesome and, always, exhausting. Such is the beauty of ballet. Unlike Michaelangelo and his brush, a dancer’s only tool is her body. She must perfect both a performing art and a visual art – make a pretty shape, now hold it! – using only what God gave her.

In the twentieth century, certain ideas about what a ballerina’s body should look like became dominant. George Balanchine, perhaps the most influential ballet choreographer of the time, the man whose aesthetic New York City Ballet was created to display, was infamous for preferring a specific build among his female dancers. Many of them shared high arches, long arms, long legs, long necks, small heads, no breasts, no waists. Many more were painfully thin (“Leggy, linear,” as Suzanne Farrell, one of Balanchine’s most important and influential dancers, once put it). Today, such a build is somewhat of a prerequisite for professional ballet. When ballet schools audition young girls for their children’s division classes – schools including the very one I grew up dancing at – they look for a spark, yes. A love of dancing, a natural musicality. But they also screen for physique and proportions. Does this little girl have high arches? Long legs? Will she stand a chance?

This idea of a “ballet body” reaches farther than the ballet world alone. Oftentimes, pretty pink tutus and an unavoidable propensity for eating disorders are all outsiders seem to know about ballerinas. They’re all rail thin and they dance on their toes. Most movies and TV shows about ballet only encourage these assumptions. To a great degree, this is the truth of the art form. And is it not a reviewer’s responsibility to convey to their reader such truths?

***

For 20th century dance critic Edwin Denby,

“a dance journalist’s business is to sketch a lively portrait of the event he is dealing with. His most interesting task is to describe the nature of the dancing — what imaginative spell it aims for, what method it proceeds by, and what it achieves. In relation to the performance, he describes the gifts or the development of artists, the technical basis of aesthetic effects, even the organizational problems that affect artistic production.”<3>

The critic’s task, à la Denby, is to bring a performance to life on paper, and then do something with it. And since a dancer’s body is part of the performance, part of the technical basis of aesthetic effects, why are critics expected to omit any talk of it in their writing?

Critics, for their part, have long written about ballerinas’ bodies. In 1913, the Russian critic Akim Volynsky wrote about prima ballerina Anna Pavlova. “Pavlova’s body is lissome and light,” he explained. “Her shoulders are ravishing, they slope down with soft muscles the color of ivory. Her arms are too extended at the elbow and lack the semicircular lines that make the arabesque and attitude beautiful, but they are lively and tremulous. Her hand is strong and not unfeminine, although the fingers are short, prehensile, and square....”<4> Though Volynsky went on to ultimately claim that these anatomical details mattered less than Pavlova’s musicality and her artistry and the elements of her dancing that went beyond the purely physical, he in no way shied away from examining her body in extreme detail. He used this description of her form to convey a special intimacy between author and dancer, an intimacy that would improve his own legitimacy as critic. The piece was well-received. But Volynsky was writing in 1913.

Macaulay’s same throwaway line – one sugarplum too many – would not have caused the same controversy in 1913 (nor, for that matter, would it have 10, 20, 50 years earlier). Perhaps Macaulay was simply stuck in his old ways, in a climate of criticism that wouldn’t have batted an eye when faced with talk of sugarplums. But 2010 readers didn’t want to read what he had written. Not only had Macaulay described Ringer’s body, but he had gone on to make a categorical judgement about her weight. The dance world judges bodies all the time. But doing the newly un-doable and putting that particular judgement in writing (in a Times review, no less) was one step too far.

***

So what are we to make of Sugarplumgate? No single moment in recent dance criticism drew the line between what critics could say and what critics could not say more clearly than did Macaulay’s one sugar plum too many. Now, fourteen years later, body politics have progressed even further. So too have the limits of criticism.

Beyond the world of ballet, the 2010-2024 era has been defined in great part by an enthusiastic body positivity movement, by campaigns to include plus-size models in the fashion industry, by a rejection of fat-shaming and an appeal to individual health over physical appearance. Today, some have even gone so far as to get legal with it. New York City enacted a law to ban height and weight discrimination in 2023. Many other American cities (and states) are following suit.

Slowly but surely, this movement has made inroads into the ballet world, too. As backlash against the secrecy and toxic culture (an overused though perhaps apt description) of ballet has intensified since 2010, it’s not only not fashionable (or socially acceptable) to demand a certain look, a certain model, out of professional dancers; companies now hire nutritionists and wellness teams to teach dancers how to care about their weight just the right amount (what a cynic might call a crash course on how to stay slim without ending up in the psych ward) to distract the public eye from the fact that, frankly, very little has changed.

Ballet as an art form is, unfortunately, not fully compatible with body positivity. There’s a reason weight matters in ballet, and it isn’t strictly aesthetic. Traditional choreography at times requires men to toss women in the air, to balance them on one shoulder, to hold them every which way. Unless an entire tradition, a complete repertoire, is refashioned to avoid this physical truth, the problem will remain, and ballerinas – even those born with the lean build – will have to work to stay slim. Sure, choreographers can produce new works with fewer acrobatics (and many a dance connoisseur would likely support such a turn). But as long as pieces like “George Balanchine’s ‘The Nutcracker’” is being put on every holiday season, and dancers like Ringer are leaping into the arms and onto the shoulders of their male partners, the problem will remain physically unfixable. The new taboo in criticism – never ever talk about a dancer’s weight – not only does nothing to change this, but only helps to hide this reality of the art.

The expectation of today that both criticism and ballet abide by the laws of positivity is misleading and, ultimately, unattainable. (This is not to say that critics should now go around judging every body in ballet. That certainly wouldn’t make for very interesting reviews, for one. Audiences want to know about the merits of a performance, not the size of some girl’s thigh.) Teachers and companies can (and should) encourage health and wellness in their dancers – just because a ballerina is tiny doesn’t mean she’s unhealthy. But there are also many perfectly, wonderfully, healthy bodies that don’t work for ballet, and never really will. Even professional dancers, about whom a critic writes, who have made it through the sieve of acceptable body types and onto the big stage, must maintain a particular physique.

The fact that, back in 2010, it was Macaulay the critic and not the art of ballet that was denounced so mercilessly for one sugarplum too many – alongside the fact that the wave of contemporary progressive politics has shifted even more resolutely away from Macaulay in the past decade and a half – demonstrates a broader and more pervasive problem: ballet in 2024 does not align with the cultural, political message progressivists of the 21st century so desperately want to make.

This antagonism is one that, at the end of the day, has nothing to do with the critic. The ballet world is having to reckon with a cultural shift that challenges its established order, and critics are, carefully, having to keep up. But in making talk of weight completely unacceptable, criticism today only reinforces the idea – correct though it may be – that some bodies work for ballet, and some don’t. The same applies to the custom of refraining from commenting on anyone’s weight – dancer or not. In assuming offense (or in trying to prevent it), one must have previously assumed value. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any harm in speaking frankly.

Professional companies and teachers and directors are far harsher on the topic of weight than any critic ever would be. Though the critic’s conclusion goes public, they should not become a scapegoat for the ugly truths of an (at times) ugly art form. Discussing weight in a review does not do harm, a ballerina being fired because she gained three pounds does. The uphill battle of body positivity in ballet isn’t one that should be fought through reviews of dancers just the slightest bit out of shape.

As I see it, the ideal would be to return to a pre-Sugarplumgate world – perhaps even back as far as the Volynsky era – where talking about a dancer’s body, her weight included, wasn’t taboo. But that isn’t a change that rests in the hands of the writers themselves. That will have to come from the inside, from the dancers and choreographers and artistic staff who, together, keep the art of ballet alive. Until that change happens – and if it can happen at all, I have yet to be convinced – critics must dance around the subject with sensitivity and grace.

1 https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/arts/dance/29nutcracker.html

2 https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/arts/dance/04ballet.html

3 Edwin Denby, “Dance Criticism” (1948).

4 Week 2: Akim Volynsky on Anna Pavlova

@Elizabeth Dejanikus, 2025