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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A mother sues the San Francisco Ballet School to demand diversity of body type.
Dec 14, 2000 | Last week, as the presidential fracas hogged the headlines and the Middle East fell to pieces, a scintillating bit of news broke without much fanfare: The mother of a little girl in San Francisco sued the San Francisco Ballet School on the grounds that her daughter's rejection from their program violated her (the daughter's) civil rights.
According to the school, Fredrika Keefer, 8, "did not have the right body" to even audition for the ballet school's program. According to Krissy Keefer, the child's mother and the director of a local dance troupe, Fredrika is "exceptionally talented." This clash of aesthetic evaluation caused Keefer to file a complaint with San Francisco's human rights commission. The complaint alleges that the ballet school, which is the recipient of $550,000 in city funds per year, has violated the new San Francisco ordinance that prohibits discrimination against people based on their height and weight.
On the face of it, this dispute has all the elements of a classic "only in San Francisco" brouhaha. It's local. It's liberal. And it's redolent of some of the yuckier modern values that have made this particular place at this particular time the subject of much criticism. (The vast sense of entitlement felt by women like Keefer being only one of the yuckiest modern values that come to mind.) Although in her own dance career Keefer is known as a proponent of socially relevant dance programs, she is not -- alas! -- a great showpiece for modern mommyhood.
Among other things, Keefer has just held up her child's body for critical public scrutiny, heedless of the damage that such a move could do to her kid's psyche. Moreover, she has said she'll drop the suit if Fredika gets accepted to the school, which leads one to believe she is much more of a litigious bully than a social crusader.
Neither of these stances is easy to defend, but even so there are some ways in which Keefer's suit looks perfectly justified. Given that the ballet school takes public funds, what better way to strike a blow for feminism than to sue a place which is busily institutionalizing anorexia in the name of Art, Beauty and Tradition?
The fact is, the San Francisco Ballet School, like all other serious classical ballet organizations, fetishizes women who are thin, willowy and fragile. It is upholding values and standards of beauty that are frankly reprehensible, by creating an atmosphere where there is only one correct female body type -- and that one is all but unattainable.
Says ballet school spokeswoman Diane Kounalakis in defense of the school's policy of weeding out students by their physical attributes: "We are not a recreation department." And she has a point: Recreation departments tend to promote the health and welfare of their attendees. Three years ago, one of the S.F. Ballet school's graduates, Heidi Guenther, died of anorexia while dancing with the Boston ballet. Subsequent investigation has revealed that this tragic scenario is endemic to the field: A recent PBS documentary, titled "Dying to be Thin," singles out ballet as an area rife with eating disorders.
And so the debate over Fredrika Keefer rages on -- and mostly, it must be said, not in the child's favor. Last Saturday, San Francisco Chronicle dance critic Octavio Roca defended the ballet school on the grounds that to lower its professional and educational standards in the name of democracy would merely promote "the mediocre and the bland." "Classical ballet," sniffs Roca, who trained at the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, "... calls for superhuman technical training and aptitude as well as for extraordinary qualifications. That is why so few people are able to do it."
