Sugarplumgate

I.

I fell into criticism because I was in love with the performing arts. The task of trying to reconcile my heart and my head about aesthetic experience has occupied me ever since. Over almost forty-three years, nonetheless, I’ve written a number of extremely severe and deliberately controversial reviews, some of them employing extensive sarcasm.  

Say “sarcasm” and someone pious will retort “the lowest form of wit”. Criticism, however, is not an exercise in piety (although there are several ostentatiously pious people writing on the arts these days); and I’m the irreverent type. I learnt my critical style from such exemplars as Clement Crisp, Arlene Croce, and Pauline Kael, all of whom were in their prime when I began in 1978. Crisp: “Béjart and Stravinsky is one of those fabled partnerships, like Romeo and Goneril, or bacon and strawberries.” Croce: “On a grim evening in Stockholm you can throw yourself in a canal or go to the Royal Swedish Ballet.” My own use of sarcasm has varied in quantity more than a few times over the years: I remember paring it away in the early 1990s only to find it burst out not long afterwards. Now that I’m in my mid-sixties, I’m once again using it less. But who knows? I may regress in years to come.

On one occasion, in a magazine over forty years ago, I took sarcasm too far into active malice. I regretted it as soon as it had gone off to print. I only heard from two readers about it – one of whom praised me for writing as I had – but I’ve always known that, in one single paragraph in that piece, I’d gone too far. On at least one other occasion, over thirty years ago, I believe I went right up to the limit of what was acceptable. 

There have been also several times when I’ve written a review with the deliberate intention of causing a furor. A critic is useful when she or he provokes debate, even when sometimes she or he either is wrong or voices an opinion that’s on the losing side of history. I’ve tried to stir up talk throughout my career; I’ve become used to controversy in several art forms.

Yet the single most notoriously controversial piece I’ve ever written, however, was a New York Times review that neither I nor my editors expected to cause a storm. I write about it here not to excuse my conduct or to create any surprise. (I’ve spoken about it before, in Pointe Magazine, on the Conversations on Dance podcast, and in Dance Magazine.) I wish, however, to re-examine some of the issues arising. 

II.

In November-December 2010, I enthusiastically undertook what became known as a “Nutcracker Marathon” for the New York Times, covering at least twenty-seven different productions in November and December, travelling from coast to shining coast of the United States, watching productions in Berkeley, Boston, Brooklyn, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Manhattan, Memphis, Nashville, Phoenix, Richmond, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and West Point. It wasn’t a gimmick: I was (and remain) fascinated by why so many American Nutcrackers are better than all British or European Nutcrackers - and why The Nutcracker has long had a more central place in American culture than in European. “You must do this Nutcracker journey,” one American former director of a company said to me in 2009. “For many Americans, The Nutcracker is simply their first experience of art.” Up to my final two weeks as the New York Times chief dance critic in 2018, I went on travelling to see new productions of The Nutcracker. 

In the United States, Nutcracker season generally begins the night after Thanksgiving. In 2010, that was Friday November 26. (Actually, I’d already seen two Nutcrackers earlier that month.) At New York City Ballet, the Sugarplum Fairy was Jenifer Ringer; her cavalier was Jared Angle. 

Jared Angle was and is one of the superlative partners of ballet - but it was evident on this occasion that he had gained a great deal of weight between hip and knee. When the grand pas de deux ended, a voice in a seat near me exclaimed audibly “God, they’re fat.” After the performance, I asked my companion about that remark. In particular, I was unsure whether Ringer was strikingly overweight. Balanchine’s Sugarplum Fairy wears a tutu whose bodice is low-cut and whose tutu is high-cut: it puts maximum exposure on the ballerina’s physique. My companion, a woman with many years of experience in watching New York City Ballet, concurred with the complaint. Both Sugarplum dancers, she said firmly, were fat,. 

She did not urge me to write about this aspect of the performance; I’d been concentrating on the production, which I’ve watched innumerable times and which continually fascinates me. Ringer was a ballerina I’d admired on several occasions in the past, though not invariably. The year before, I had praised her Sugarplum’s acute musicality. I had singled out Angle’s beautifully placed classical style in 2007-2008; I’d often noted the skill of his partnering. Both dancers had their regular opponents. I, the critic writing most often and in the most high-profile pages about City Ballet, had sometimes been criticized (out of print) for not being harsh enough about them. (When you review ballet for the Times, opinionated balletomanes get mightily heated if you don’t share their opinions.)

Early the next morning (Saturday 27), I flew to Seattle, where I saw two Nutcracker performances; the morning after that (Sunday 28) to Denver, where I saw a Nutcracker matinee. I filed the review of New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker from Seattle and went through several rounds of editing in Denver, chiefly with two women at the Times: a copy-editor and my dance editor. My subject was principally the Balanchine Nutcracker, a core work of annual repertory performed by several American companies as well as New York City Ballet. (It’s now performed by the Royal Danish Ballet, too.) I spent the first thirteen paragraphs of my fifteen-paragraph review on the production, and then wrapped up the cast in the two final paragraphs. The point we discussed most during the editorial process was something we eventually decided to cut from my opening paragraphs: I had originally referred to a New Yorker cartoon that I loved, but my dance editor felt my point wouldn’t work unless we showed the cartoon itself, which at that stage we could not do. In those days (and for years afterwards), I was still in love with the editorial process at the New York Times, relishing the joint effort to make each review clearer and more eloquent. The review was given the title Timeless Alchemy, Even When No One Is Dancing. (Editors, not writers, choose titles at the New York Times.) Business as usual. None of us foresaw that my final paragraph would be seen as incendiary.

III.

The piece was published on Sunday evening on line and in the newsprint edition on Monday. The first response I received was from an old friend and fellow-critic: he wrote with no awareness that my final paragraph contained any trouble. To me, it was the least important paragraph, but to him it was the most valuable. He was one of the longterm balletomanes who objected to Ringer and Angle (principally as dull and underpowered) and to my previous praise of them. On this occasion, for once, he congratulated me: my words about Ringer and Angle were “very sensitive”, he wrote. (The word “sensitive” never occurred again in subsequent discussions of that review.).

I’d rather you read the whole review – if you can find it by googling - but let me quote those final two paragraphs now; 

“At Friday’s performance some of the foppish glee Robert La Fosse displayed as Drosselmeier at the party could be questioned, but this is the interpretative choice of an enjoyably lively stage artist. Children, corps de ballet and soloists all did admirably, with especially fine contributions from Marie (Fiona Brennan), Fritz (Gregor MacKenzie Gillen) and Soldier (Troy Schumacher).

 “This didn’t feel, however, like an opening night. Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many; and Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm. They’re among the few City Ballet principals who dance like adults, but without adult depth or complexity. Ashley Bouder (Dewdrop) has the brilliance they lack, but also a greater and more tough-grained hardness. Even Teresa Reichlen (as Coffee), often one of the company’s freshest and most multidimensional dancers, performed with a glassiness I don’t recall. And Ms. <Clotilde> Otranto’s conducting lacked the moment-by-moment rapport with her dancers that turns a safe performance into a tingling one.”

IV.

By that point, I’d been reviewing dance for over thirty-two years. I suspect that’s the only time I’ve ever criticized a ballerina’s weight in print. My choice of the phrase “one sugar plum too many” was clumsy. I - replying in my head to that voice “God , they’re fat” - meant merely that her weight looked a single sugar plum beyond some ideal. How big is one sugar plum? 

But I accept that it has now come to sound as if I’d accused Ringer of gorging herself in a way I could not accept. As it happens, I’m not keen on the super-thin kind of ballerina; it’s well known that, when I came to ballet in the 1970s, I was wild about Lynn Seymour, whose weight was surely greater than Ringer’s. Nonetheless my “one sugar plum too many” words have led many to assume I’m on the side of anorexia. I’m not, but that’s how many now will always see me. 

As it happens, my close friends included some women who’ve had anorexia and other women who’ve tried to deal with obesity, in some cases consulting doctors. I’m sure I often said the wrong thing to them, but, in the case of one anorexic friend, over thirty years ago, I visited the doctor we both shared to ask advice on what I should or should not say to help matters if I could. It’s a long story, but that friend recovered from anorexia, and our friendship grew closer. As for obesity, I shared a house for five years with one large lady who ran a group of other women addressing the weight issue; I often opened the door or answered the phone to other women who were dealing with the problem. That woman also became an increasingly close friend over years and decades. (Both women have died of cancer in recent years, one over the age of sixty, the other over the age of seventy.)

I’m aware that some male dancers suffer from weight problems and eating disorders, too. Nonetheless, in a few cases before this review, I’d gone into print on the subject of visibly overweight men. Why? Well, those few men were obviously far more overweight than any woman - and much more than their colleagues in their own companies. To be specific, I’ve criticized Mark Morris’s weight in both 1992 (in The New Yorker) and 2001 (in the Times Literary Supplement), on one occasion using the word “obese”. In the New York Times, I singled out New York City Ballet’s Nilas Martins (son of Peter) as “portly”. (After the latter, I wondered if I’d gone too far, but I was later informed that City Ballet’s costume department had three basic sizes of male costume: skinny, ordinary, and Nilas Martins.) Opinions will differ as to whether I was justified in doing so. In the case of this Nutcracker, I did so again with Jared Angle because he had very visibly increased in size. My words about him were far more severe – and more heavily sarcastic – those about Ringer; but they have only ever caused a small fraction of the fuss that my words about her did.

V.

By the time I returned from Denver to the New York Times office on the afternoon of Monday 29, I was told that the “one sugar plum too many” phrase was causing a furor. One reader wrote that the review was “appalling,” “heartbreaking,” “childish, “hurtful” and “incompetent.” I was immediately asked by my Times editors whether I wanted to reply to the complaints. After reading a number of them, I said that I thought it was best to let the storm blow over. That was fine with the Times.

The controversy continued, however. Not only were there letters and emails, but radio and television were interested in covering the story. Although I’d already agreed to speak to British radio and American television about my Nutcracker marathon, I chose not to fan the “one sugarplum too many” flames with any personal appearance. I’ve long taken the line that performers should try to avoid reading reviews of themselves – and I apply that to critics, at any rate to myself. I accept that some reviews cause storms – but I prefer to let readers let off steam without my trying to interfere or justify myself. Although I did read all the emails and letters that came my way about this piece, I avoided reading or watching or listening to any other discussion of the story. 

VI.

After a few days, the continuing deluge of emails made me ask the Times if I might now address the matter in a think piece. My editors agreed. My essay Judging the Bodies in Ballet  was published on line on Friday December 3, and in the print edition of December 4. At the Times, the essay went down well enough for me to win a round of applause the next time I entered the office. With readers, it had the effect of reducing the stream of letters and emails to a trickle. 

The television Today programme formally invited me to appear on it. It made, as I was told, the same invitation to Ringer. I politely declined. Ringer accepted. 

VII.

The Today show in which Ringer spoke was aired, live, on Monday December 13. I was in Tennessee, after a three-Nutcracker weekend in Memphis and Tennessee. For the same reasons that I try not to read about myself, I didn’t watch the programme then or at any later date. Although I’ve still never met Ringer (we’re now Facebook friends, though), I’ve always understood that she’s very likeable. (People have given me contradictory accounts of what she said in that television appearance, but I understand that she did not demand an apology from me. She stood by how she looked onstage.) I knew that my dance editor would watch the Today show. I said I’d watch a replay of it if she felt I should. She told me that she had no complaint with what Ringer said; she confirmed that I didn’t need to watch it. 

What wasn’t predicted was that the story would now go global, viral, and wild. It certainly did. One friend wrote from Paris to say it and I were in Le Figaro. British friends assured me that stories about it were in every British newspaper except the one for which I had written for eighteen years, the Financial Times. I’ve since been sent reports about it in a number of African news outlets. (I didn’t read more than the titles.) I remember finally being made to laugh when one ex-boyfriend of mine in Sydney, Australia, wrote to say, “I was having a quiet evening at home watching the news when suddenly your face popped up.” For nineteen days (December 13-31), a torrent of opinionated emails poured in to my New York Times email address, even faster than one per minute at the peak of the outcry. Many or most correspondents had read neither my November 28 review nor my December 4 essay, but that was no problem for them. 

I remember that one correspondent wrote that America had too many overweight people anyway. Most of these emails, however; fell into four categories: 

   (i) those who felt I should never say a dancer was overweight - and that Ringer was not overweight anyway; 

   (ii) those who felt I should never say a dancer was overweight - even though Ringer certainly was overweight; 

   (iii) those who agreed I should say if a dancer was overweight - but that Ringer’s weight was acceptable;

   (iv) those who felt I should say if a dancer was overweight - and that Ringer certainly was overweight. 

It didn’t matter if these people had never seen Ringer dance at all; they knew they were right. Many of them have not changed. Ten years later (December 2020), a European dancer who had never seen Ringer chose to tell me I had been right about her. I tried to ask him how he knew this. He just knew. One woman wrote “It was high time someone wrote this about her”; one man felt I should have written more strongly. In December 2011, I attended a New York party where another dance critic tried to entertain people with his fairly sadistic account of how disastrously Ringer had been cast in a non-Nutcracker ballet where she was thrown by one man for another to catch. He made Ringer sound far heavier than she had ever seemed to me. 

Most correspondents, however, belonged to category (i): i.e. Ringer was slim and I should never discuss weight anyway. And you may be sure that any sarcasm I had delivered was given back a hundredfold. People told me what was wrong with my face, my skin, my physique. Some also told me that I was a sad person who got my sexual kicks by going to gay saunas and orgy houses. As it happens, I’ve never visited any of those, but my correspondents knew better. I was also, of course, misogynist, evil, unhappy, and warped. And the New York Times should sack me immediately.

Despite the New York Times support for my original November 19 and December 4 pieces, the brouhaha had an effect at editorial level. If I referred to a dancer’s physique thereafter, my words had to be chosen with extreme care. You can praise a dancer for having a wonderful physique: Maria Kowroski’s legs, Wendy Whelan’s face, David Hallberg’s feet – I was allowed and encouraged to describe those known glories – but dancers whose looks fall far from those stunning extremes should be left undescribed. (For a while, if a dancer was overweight, I would use the euphemism “out of shape”.) 

Ringer achieved a new kind of fame. She appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show; she wrote her autobiography. I neither watched the one nor read the other, though I keep telling myself I’ll read the autobiography one day. She danced with City Ballet several more seasons, retiring in 2014; I praised several of her subsequent performances, just as I had several of her earlier ones. Angle, who turned out to live near me, became a friend. We had dinner a few times in 2014-2019; we were fellows at the same time at the NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts; we’ve been in touch since my return to the U.K.; we’ve had happily passionate conversations on many topics, usually in accord.

VIII.

For many readers, it’s clear that there are rights and wrongs in this story. But are there? Nobody has ever complained that I had written that Nilas Martins was “portly”. Nobody has been outraged retrospectively that one Russian critic in 1892 described the original Sugarplum fairy as “pudgy”. While I remained at the New York Times (I stepped down at the end of 2018), several readers would write to me when they wanted me to criticize a dancer’s weight. Others told me to do so in person, though under their breaths.

A central part of my December 4 Judging the Bodies in Ballet piece was that ballet places a greater exposure on physiques than even nudity in the visual arts. I’m by no means one of the foremost body fascists of the ballet world, though I now have a reputation as one. Throughout my forty-plus years around dance, I’ve known teachers, dancers, critics, and fans who are far more intensely opinionated than I about the length of dancers’ arms and necks, the slopes of their pelvises, the relative length of calves and thighs, the arch and length of their feet, and their degrees of turnout. 

Most of us – not all - know that dancers with physical imperfections can reach the heights. The baroque star ballerina Marie-Madeleine Guimard was called “the skeleton of the graces”; the epoch-making Romantic ballerina Marie Taglioni was (as a student) called a “hunchback” with overlong arms (her way of disguising their length by crossing her wrists at waist level remains part of ballet currency today); Nijinsky’s thighs were unconventionally large; the superlative dance actress Lynn Seymour’s neck was too short. These dancers were superlative because they overcame those physical shortcomings. This is part of dance history.

Some people nonetheless argue that these matters of physique, however integral to the art, should be spoken of only in private: that it is bad manners to discuss bodies unless to praise them. To me, this sounds like institutionalized hypocrisy: I don’t admire people who talk one way out of print and another way in it. There are critics who have written about bodies in far greater detail than I, some of them with much more acute analyses of physiques than I possess; I would never want them censored.

Here, however, I am against the fashion. Without my realizing it for some months or even years, my Timeless Alchemy, Even When No One Is Dancing review became the watershed, since which discussion of bodies has been beyond the pale. I don’t like the censorship involved here, but I do accept, as I should have in 2010, that women’s bodies are scrutinised in alarming detail in our culture: a bad situation that I had made worse.

IX.

I’ve read that the 2020-2021 lockdown may cause a change in the ballet physique. That would be fine by me, but common sense prompts me to observe it’s not going to happen unless many other factors change, too. In repertories (modern dance as well as ballet) where women are lifted, thrown, and caught by men, the stress for male partners can be considerable. (Women dancers, from more companies than one, have told me that male partners have complained if they’ve gained even tiny amounts of weight.) I myself would like to see fewer lifts, throws, and catches in theatrical dance - but there, again, the fashion is against me. 

When Leonide Massine choreographed a special overhead lift in Les Présages in 1933, it made such an impact - one man holding a woman above his head with one hand on her waist, the other on her thigh arms that it became known as a “Présages lift.” (Since Présages faded from repertory before the 1950s, dancers soon abbreviated the label to a “press lift.”) By the time Glen Tetley asked six corps men to do simultaneous Présages lifts in Voluntaries (1973), the effect had become unremarkable.

Today, Présages lifts occur across the post-1960 international repertory from Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet to Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH. By all means, tell dancing women they can put on six pounds - but also make sure all those men are truly prepared to those heavier women in Présages lifts. 

And many modern lifts are more arduous than Présages ones - some subtly so, like Frederick Ashton’s frequent use of low lifts, where the male dancer carries the woman across the floor, with her foot or feet just off the surface: a beautifully poetic lift that can be singularly exhausting for the male partner.

You may well want to see fewer of the showier lifts in today’s dance repertory: I’m among those who’ve written that there’s been too much manipulation of women in dance, especially (but not only) in ballet. But plenty of twenty-first-century choreographers have been using them. Is it really time for the twenty-first-century ballerina to start gaining a few pounds?

X.

Ballet is an art of idealism. This, in the twentyfirst century, has become its most disturbing feature. To some extent, to be sure, interpretations of ballet’s ideals are subjective. Currently, most dancers are asked to be more turned-out than their predecessors were a century ago. Extensions above hip-height are now far more widely admired than even when I was first attending ballet in the 1970s.

But the central point of ballet really is enduringly idealist. Again and again, a mere mortal is seen to become a work of ideal geometry and to approach the sublime condition of music. As ballet has been for two centuries, with pointwork, women are more widely seen as emblems of the sublime than men. I’ve always assumed that this is what Alexei Ratmansky meant when he wrote “There is no such thing as equality in ballet”: women in ballet routinely seem ideal creatures, whereas it’s still unusual for a man in dance to seem sublime. This, however, could change. Louis XIV and other male dancers were once the gods of ballet; revisions of technique may bring a new divinity to dancing men. Indeed, this may have begun sixty years ago, with the advent of Rudolf Nureyev. It fascinates me that Margot Fonteyn, of all people, wrote in 1979 “The era of the ballerina is over.” (A good thing too, she added. The ballerina had been ruling the roost too long.)

My own views of ballet have long been conflicted; they have become increasingly so. I love the perfect worlds ballet can often show, not because they’re neatly pretty, but because they’re dramatic on a supreme scale; I love the quality of transcendence with which ballet can show human beings becoming larger than life. But I’m also unhappy with several of ballet’s most basic implications: that some bodies are better than others; that human imperfections are regrettable; and that the world onstage should be predicated on the dualism of gender.    

What does all this have to do with “Sugarplumgate,” as the scandal of my 2010 Nutcracker review was nicknamed? Everything, I’m afraid. You don’t “get” ballet unless you love its idealism, and unless you allow your subjectivity to guide you in your appreciation of its beauty. Subjectivity matters: it’s part of passion, something vital to our response to the arts. You may feel that Jenifer Ringer and Jared Angle were more perfect than I did in one tactlessly worded review; but there’ll be other dancers whose appearance displeases you more than it does me. How you handle that is up to you, but there should be room for debate – and even for tactlessness and provocation - because it’s room for humanity.

In that case, I didn’t mean to provoke, though I fully understand how much I did. In consequence, I still come across people who write in 2021 that I have bizarre, cruel, or unacceptable views of how women should look onstage. I hope those people are wrong; I also hope I’m continuing to learn about the complexities of criticism, an art to which I’ve devoted most of my life. But I also recognise it’s important to many people now to hurl the label “misogynist” around: something all too easy to do.

The Nutcracker returns this winter to repertories the world over. Not all productions have a Sugarplum Fairy (or a Sugar Plum Fairy - the nomenclature varies) - but wherever she is found, the choreography proposes that she inhabits a better world and that she is the one whose beauty illumines that world best. How comfortable are you with that idea? Not wholly, I trust. May other Sugarplumgates await us all.

--
Alastair Macaulay

8 October 2021

Jenifer Ringer and Jared Angle as the Sugarplum Fairy and her Cavalier in New York City Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s version of The Nutcracker. The photograph is undated: they certainly do not look here as if they would prompt anyone to remark “God, they’re fat” as they did in 2010: the remark that started an avalanche.