Before Monday night when I attended the annual American Ballet Theater June gala, I had never been to the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. I recognized the twinkling chandeliers dripping from its ceilings only from Gossip Girl and The defeat , in which Nicole Kidman’s character helps plan a fundraiser for Reardon’s early private school. It is no coincidence, then, that the ties between exclusive upper-class parties and the culture of American ballet institutions have remained so strained – almost inextricable from each other, both in pop culture and in the world. real.

As a lifelong dance enthusiast, that’s what ballet has sometimes felt like to people like me and even to younger generations: a fantasy land rich in history, something people frequent in movies when they would like to exhibit societal relevance or bask in the honor of naming themselves donors of an artistic “elite” organization. For my part, I did not grow up in the city attending ballet performances or galas. I was lucky enough to see professional ballet companies every time they passed through LA – mostly more The Nutcracker than I can count and an ABT performance of “La Bayadere” once. So that group of slim, hoity-toity moms that Kidman paraded around the Met always seemed more in tune with the core of ballet — or at least the institutionalized ballets and not the rinky-dink hometown studios in which I live. grew up – than I ever did. No matter how much I loved ballet, ballet didn’t seem to love most of America back; it felt more like a see-and-be-seen for the upper echelon of New York society.

Yet this week I – someone who has never been shy about demanding that ballet be less white , less abusive , less exclusive — found myself sitting front and center of American Ballet Theater’s grand return to the Met after several seasons blighted by the pandemic. The company opened its summer season with a performance of the classic ballet “Don Quixote,” which was staged one last time by the company’s longtime artistic director, Kevin McKenzie. The former principal ballet dancer was on hand to bid farewell to the company after more than 30 years and hand over the reins to Susan Jaffe: ABT’s first female solo artistic director in the company’s history. As feminism hit a bigger cultural wall in the outer and political sphere, in which her corporate shilling has submerged and all but obliterated the true meaning of intersectionality, there is room, indeed urgency, for a feminist awakening in ballet. And maybe the awakening starts here.

That evening, as I gazed into the orchestra pit and admired the spiritual movement of dancers Catherine Hurlin, Aran Bell, Devon Teuscher, Thomas Forster, Hee Seo, Joo Won Ahn, Katherine Williams, Calvin Royal III , Christine Shevchenko and more From the front row in a booming house of applause, there seemed to be a shift in energy. As if, after all these years of promising change, promoting change, promoting change, this new guard could actually pull it off. Finally, it looked like ABT opened its doors to the next generation in a meaningful and ceremonious way.

On the one hand, Janet Rollé, managing director and managing director of the company which started in January of this year and Beyoncé’s former chief executive of Parkwood Entertainment, is the first person of color to lead the company. Bringing more diverse leaders into the bureaucratic structures of an 83-year-old ballet company with its roots in the Italian Renaissance of the 1500s is the first step in overhauling and modernizing ballet, and Rollé, a black woman raised by a Jamaican immigrant mother, seems to have the right nerve and vision for the job.

“We want to make sure we stay culturally relevant so people understand that ballet is for everyone,” Rollé told me on the red carpet Monday. “I hope to see the culture of American Ballet Theater be truly relevant to the world we live in now, but to get to the world we all envision is going to take time…we’re not going to reinvent the wheel overnight.”

Michaela DePrince, Boston Ballet’s second soloist and alumnus of ABT’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (JKO) School who was in attendance that night, has long witnessed the slow pace of change in the art world. She told me she looks forward to a day when blackness isn’t celebrated just once a year during Black History Month. When I asked her if, at the very least, she was relieved that she no longer had to backcomb her pointe shoes (a process by which dancers of color have to paint their shoes with makeup to match their skin tone), she admitted that even if Bloch offered her brown pointe shoes, she still has none left. “I’m black every day, and I wish I could see more black and brown dancers wearing skin tone, because I think it’s so beautiful when you can see someone being authentically themselves and not having to adapt to this standard of classic pink tights.

In 2015, ABT made history by anointed Misty Copeland became a principal dancer, making her the first black woman to do so with a major American company and widely praising the fact that ballet could finally shed its porcelain skin. The company has since added Calvin Royal III as principal, Gabe Stone Shayer as soloist, and Erica Lall and Courtney Lavine as members of the corps de ballet among a few others, but little overhaul of the company’s diversity lineup has taken place. since then. (It should be noted, however, that the company has spotlighted and promoted a number of talented Asian American dancers.)

The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, Lall was highlighted ahead of Monday night’s performance as she introduced administrator Susan Fales-Hill, who led the nine-month artistic director search for the role of Jaffe. Lall credited Fales-Hill for creating the Josephine Premice Fales Award — an award Lall had won twice — which gives a young dancer of color a full scholarship to ABT’s training school. Boldly, Fales-Hill then referred to the history of a “well-meaning, but separate and unequal black wing” of 16 dancers within the ABT in 1940, calling it “a wing destined to be cut off”. . This story made it all the more amazing to see two black women show up on stage that night. But soon after Fales-Hill and Lall left the stage, the curtains gave way to a handful of beautiful ballet dancers, with only a few people of color to be seen.

The impression I got from Rollé and Aubrey Lynch, Dean of Faculty and Student Affairs at ABT, is that ABT is painfully aware of its shortcomings and does not try to avoid them. “If you never recognize what’s wrong, you can never get past it,” Rollé told me.

“Well, they call us pioneers, and we are. It’s very scary up front, but we’re committed to making American Ballet Theater as diverse with its beliefs, with its economic status, with its race, ethnicity…all those parts that make up the beauty of America,” Lynch added in an interview. “And we wonder what it means to be American today, and what it will mean in the future, and what will make it more interesting to watch ballet? We need to talk about today, stories about today, people from today, and look like today.

For this very reason, however dazzling the performance, the choice to open the season with “Don Quixote” – a staple of the company’s repertoire but certainly not a reflection of American culture – remained puzzling. Largely white women were adorned in Spanish-style costumes holding fans and wearing necklaces, slicked back buns and earrings. But Jaffe, who reshaped Swan Lake’s ending when she was at the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, Told the Washington Post she’s ready to dismantle some of the company’s most problematic and archaic storylines, including “The Corsair,” which tells the story of a Greek woman sold into slavery whose hero is also a “slaver,” and ” La Bayadère”, which is set in a fictional India presented through a white lens. She also plans to institute audience surveys and a listening tour, in which the opinions of those interested in ballet are genuinely taken into consideration.

But my conversation with Lynch also inspired some hope for the future of ballet and its dancers, however they identify. The company works with intimacy coordinators to help smooth out some of the more physical interactions between dancers on stage, according to Lynch. The JKO school welcomed non-binary dancers, giving them the choice of learning roles traditionally meant for men or women and allowing them to step onto pointe, a practice once reserved for ballerinas. And Lynch told me they’re offering more mental health services than ever before and trying to move away from the world of eating disorder-friendly insecurities once fostered by relentless ballet thinness.

I know that over time, promises of evolution have succeeded in the field of ballet. But just as Jaffe turned a swan’s tragic end into a feminist sacrifice driven by a desire to free her young daughters, American Ballet Theater also seems poised to morph into something grander…something for all of us. . It was a magical evening, and I sincerely hope that all this magic will remain.

As Kevin McKenize noted in his farewell remarks, “ABT is on the brink of a new era. And we know what happens when ABT enters a new era: it soars.”