Ballet for the people!!!

[the_future_modernes]

Black ballet: Pointe break

Ballet is typically a white upper-class pursuit, right? Hannah Pool on a company trying to change all that…

Cira Robinson started "pancaking" her ballet shoes when she was 18: "I use foundation. The colour is Caribbean coffee – it's basic cheap make-up, but it works. Pointe shoes come only in the traditional pink, unless they're red for a show. It would look strange if there was a pink shoe at the end of a brown leg, so it helps with the line. My pointe shoes are brown because my skin is brown."

Robinson is one of eight dancers with Ballet Black, the company started in 2001 by Cassa Pancho with a mission to "provide dancers and students of black and Asian descent with inspiring opportunities in classical ballet". Of Trinidadian and British parentage, Pancho studied classical ballet at the Royal Academy. "All through ballet school I was really aware of the lack of black people around me," she says. "So for my dissertation I thought I would interview black women working in ballet and see what they had to say – but I couldn't find a single black woman working in ballet, and that really stunned me. When I graduated, I decided, very naively, to do something about it myself."

Cira Robinson, 24

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Oh my GOD! I LOVE watching dance, although ballet squicks me a little bit because I read very realistic dance fics and now I can't get over how much pain it takes to look so graceful. But I didn't really know how much I needed to see this until I did. Oh my LORD, look at this woman. Look at the other women, and the men. And read the rest of the story. I just can't, I feel so happy now!!!!