Acclaimed actor Timothée Chalamet has recently come under fire for comments expressing that nobody cares about ballet and opera. Although Chalamet’s delivery was harsh and insensitive, the backlash he has received is not entirely deserved. Chalamet was right. Ballet and opera are dying arts, with dwindling audiences. His comments – while perhaps ill-delivered – provide an opportunity to reflect on these arts and bring them back from the dead.
In a Variety & CNN Town Hall conversation between Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey, Chalamet described his feelings about the amount of attention his field (film) receives. In establishing his point, Chalamet misstepped: “I don’t wanna be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, things where it’s like, hey, keep this thing alive. Even though it’s like … no one cares… about this anymore.” He quickly realized how his comment came off, following it up with “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there.”
Backlash online flooded in immediately, scolding Chalamet for what the public perceived to be disregard for the honed crafts of ballet and opera. “Ballet has never been in the center of pop culture for a while, which is why I wouldn’t consider it dying. It’s not meant to be something that everyone will enjoy like movies or music; it’s crafted to appeal to a much smaller, specific audience,” said B-CC sophomore and ballet dancer Kami Rivas-Rogers. Both opera and ballet are skilled arts that inherently take a lifetime of dedication to achieve niche success, differing in nature from Chalamet’s background in film. Prestige amongst the “smaller, specific audience” of ballet and opera has a certain cache very unlike the mass enjoyment of Chalamet’s box office hits.
However, Chalamet is not necessarily wrong about the unfortunate objective decline of said arts.
American ballet companies grew in the 1920s and 1930s, many of which still perform today. Relatively recent strides have been made in American ballet, such as Misty Copeland becoming the first Black woman to be made a principal dancer in the American Ballet Theatre. Nevertheless, there is still an observed decline in attendance for both ballet and opera. Statistically, the American public simply does not make as large an effort to attend ballets or operas as they have in the past. Every holiday season, seats sell out at countless performances of the Nutcracker ballet, but the rest of the year forces ballet companies to lie comparatively dormant. The National Endowment for the Arts reports a consistent and drastic trend downwards, with attendance at ballets down over 50% and attendance at operas down about 75% since 1982. Even in more recent years, this trend has persisted. Between 2017 and 2022, ballet attendance decreased 35%, while opera attendance decreased 68%.
So, to correct Chalamet, the numbers don’t exactly suggest that no one cares about ballet and opera, but they do show that the fanbase is dwindling.
In reflecting on Chalamet’s insensitive yet not untrue claim, the American public should make an effort to appreciate the highly skilled crafts of ballet and opera. B-CC students are just miles from downtown Washington, D.C., a major metropolitan hub of culture.
Barons can catch a matinee of The Washington Ballet’s upcoming run of Cinderella at The National Theatre, or Washington National Opera’s production of West Side Story at the nearby Strathmore Music Center this May.
