In a recent Instagram story, the dancer and model Alexandra Waterbury posted that she had just seen the preview for the latest “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” on television. She wrote, “I’ll be watching the ‘Kardashians’ instead.”
The “SVU” episode, “Dance, Lies and Videotape,” shown Thursday night, seemed to be loosely modeled on an incident at New York City Ballet. In 2018, two principal male dancers were fired after they were accused of sharing texts of sexually explicit photos of women, including of Ms. Waterbury. (An arbitrator ordered the company to reinstate them.) A third, Chase Finlay, resigned before he could be fired. Ms. Waterbury filed a lawsuit against the company, the affiliated School of American Ballet and Mr. Finlay, her ex-boyfriend.
In the end, Ms. Waterbury watched “SVU” and wrote a response in her Instagram stories. The episode, which takes her story to a darker place, is unflagging in its attempt to include every ballet stereotype, most predominantly, that all the women in ballet are victims. One character, naturally the gay male friend, sums up their world: “Straight male can’t fail. Gay men, it depends. But girls in ballet? Do what we say.”
It’s telling that the word is girls, not women. Infantilizing ballet dancers is a real thing. In bringing it out into the open, both on television and in life, progress is being made to give women more empowerment.
As for the way the scandal was portrayed? This was very much a TV version, typical in depicting the dance world in impossibly broad strokes. There were so many sordid twists that it was more farcical than shocking, making it seem that the original incident needed to be pumped up in order to be truly horrifying.
The plot went something like this: Male dancers make secret videos of their sexual conquests; a male choreographer says he can keep the videos offline as long as the women have sex with him (which sounds more like rape); and, finally, an artistic director promises to make that nightmare go away as long as the dancer in question — elevated to the rank “prima ballerina” somewhere along the way — agrees to be auctioned off to the highest-paying bidder, I mean donor, expecting more than just dinner on a big gala night.
A dancer, in other words, has never been more of an object.
The blandly emotive choreography, seen in brief flashes is not worthy of a prima ballerina, much less an apprentice. (The dancers don’t even wear point shoes.) It’s all very B-movie: The sex scenes take place in Studio X — so nicknamed by the dancers — where a barre replaces a bed, as if it were a thing for a ballet dancer to want to have sex and stretch her hamstring at the same time.
Delia, the young dancer whose video has gone viral — she’s the one who brings in the police — ultimately quits the profession. She can’t imagine being onstage with “everyone in the audience leering at me on the internet.”
I understand Ms. Waterbury’s reticence to watch the episode. On TV, the story is somewhat resolved; the bad guys here — the choreographer and the artistic director — are arrested, even if the male dancers go largely unpunished. “I think it’s weird to think that they took my story and then changed the ending even though my story hasn’t ended yet,” Ms. Waterbury said in her video. (Her lawsuit is still being contested.)
The episode does have one shining moment: the appearance of the filmmaker John Waters, who plays the mastermind behind a website called Pornmonger, which hosts Delia’s viral video. As his character puts it: “Ballerina getting nailed in a tutu? That’s a whole genre, but what isn’t?”
Mr. Waters nails it, too — he’s perfectly sleazy — but sadly he appears in one all-too-brief scene. He tells the detectives: “I can scrub this from our site, but it’s not going to mean anything. Nothing disappears from the internet.” This episode, in the bigger dance picture, doesn’t mean much of anything, either: It takes a serious issue and turns it into something silly.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
