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On June 1st, 23-year-old American ballet dancer, cellist, and classical choreographer Nicholas Rose filmed himself in front of the Walter Carsen Center to declare, “I have a love for the National Ballet of Canada (NBoC), but for me to maintain this love I have to let you know when you have failed us.” Two months later on August 1st, Rose stood in the back of a pick-up truck at the head of the Emancipation Day march and continued to share—now with a megaphone before a crowd outside the Four Seasons Centre—the pattern of discriminatory exclusion that he’d experienced behind the scenes during his two years with the company. Barely a week later, he took flight for a mentorship program in London, England after crowdfunding over $15,000 from the followers, ballet lovers, donors, audience members, and fellow dancers who had rallied around him since his first video. How did this young American win the hearts of so many Canadians after putting himself on the line to hold a beloved institution accountable? It started with a belief—deeply entrenched and rarely questioned in either country—that Canada would be an escape from the well-known racism of the United States.
This IGTV video and others that followed sparked a movement across the ballet world that illustrates the need for an industry-wide reckoning, branching from the unprecedented global response to the murder of George Floyd on May 25th. Many other Black ballet dancers brought to light varied forms of racial bias that have significantly impacted their career mobility, artistry, and mental health. Principal Dancer Jonathan Batista spoke up about how the Oklahoma City Ballet has never used a picture of him in a classical principal role in their marketing; Samuel Akins reported being told by the director of an Australian arts foundation that ‘ballet was created for and envisioned to be danced by a certain type of person’ when companies consistently passed him over; Solomon Golding tweeted about the hypocrisy of companies using Black dancers in diversity campaigns for public funding while remaining silent on global issues affecting their racialized dancers; Felipe Domingoes of the Finnish National Ballet reported being cut from a ballet by a choreographer who told him the line needed to be uniform and he would draw too much attention. And very recently, French dancer Chloé Lopes Gomes accused Staatsballett, Berlin’s principal ballet company, of a pronounced pattern of racial harassment. This chorus of dancers, whose voices will no longer be drowned out by orchestras or corporate messaging, expose another pernicious belief—antithetical to the values of virtuosity and enlightenment that ballet was born of centuries ago—that Black dancers don’t belong in ballet.
But Rose ended his video with a hopeful call to action: “Because I love you, if you are watching this, it’s because I have faith in you. I’m saying this because I believe there’s still time for change ... because I believe in you but I also know that I have to say this out loud.” His challenge coincided with one of the most fertile times for change that Toronto’s performing arts landscape has seen in decades. With the Toronto Symphony Orchestra welcoming Gustavo Gimeno as Music Director for the 20/21 season, Alexander Neef departing the Canadian Opera Company for Paris, and Karen Kain poised to pass along the role of Artistic Director after fifty years with the company, there has never been a more ideal or urgent opportunity to evaluate systemic barriers and discriminatory practices as these classical forms find their footing forward in the 21st century. Kevin Ormsby, program manager of Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario (CPAMO) and advisor to the NBoC’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Task Force spoke with me at length about the intricacies of integrating lasting, meaningful change into an institution of the National Ballet’s size. “Sometimes it’s really hard,” he shared. “You have good intentions as an organization, but there’s a larger societal force that pulls you back into a cycle.”
Though Rose’s activism sparked promising action items set to roll out across the company this season which will be detailed further on, the National Ballet declined to comment on if the new Director of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion will investigate his allegations.
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Photo by Alexander Sargent
“The only reason I signed the contract was because I thought that the racism was not going to be as bad,” Rose tells me in an interview held after his decision to leave the company in mid-July. When he was contacted by the NBoC two years ago to cross the border for a Toronto audition, “I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, a way out, finally.’ But I ran into a bigger problem.” We need only look at our own assumptions and beliefs about Canada to understand why the then 21-year-old dancer grabbed at what he believed would be a ticket to acceptance and inclusivity. Rose had already sustained a history of abuses that stretches back to his adolescence at the Harid Conservatory in Florida, where he managed to keep up with the rigours of ballet training while living and sleeping in a car—a fact he says was used by a teacher to silence him when he reported racial bullying. Nicholas would rent VHS tapings of older ballets from the library, citing Cynthia Harvey as a favourite, until the Dance Theatre of Harlem performed at the Kravis Centre when he was sixteen. “I remember thinking ‘I definitely can be a professional dancer’ because that was the first time I saw Black people dance on pointe in a turned out position… I never gave up after that.”
After graduating, Rose auditioned for but was rejected by multiple companies despite being commended as eminently qualified. He was told by the Dresden Centre Opera Ballet that his background in neoclassical technique made him an ideal fit for the Forsythe repertoire, but that they ‘couldn’t picture him in white tights.’ He was told by Boston Ballet that his technique wasn’t good enough for the main company but too good for the second company. He even flew on his own limited dime to Holland at the request of the Dutch National Ballet to audition, only to be told they had no contracts to offer and had just wanted to meet him.
He was then contacted by the NBoC shortly after a concentration of articles had been published through 2017 pointing out how the company’s lack of ethnic diversity didn’t reflect contemporary Canadian values or demographics. Bob Ramsay with The Toronto Star pointed out in August 2017 that Cornell Wright was the only person of colour serving on the National Ballet’s Board of Directors, and by October, Wright was promoted to Chair. Executive Director Barry Hughson was quoted by Ludwig Van in a December article by Anya Wassenberg as acknowledging that classical ballet is “an art form that was brought to this continent through the lens of colonialism” and that true diversity was aspirational for reasons beyond attracting an untapped audience base. Since then, the company has prioritized the hiring of dancers of colour, but this by itself doesn’t interrupt the implicit standards of whiteness that have ruled ballet—and countless aspects of modern society—for centuries.
An anonymous dancer with the company (Anon.) recalls a reviewer writing that they wanted to see somebody other than the frequently featured Guillaume Côté on opening night. They speculate that the company may have prioritized the hiring of dancers of colour “maybe to check a box”, but that these new dancers of colour weren’t featured as frequently as peers in their ranking and often have to fight for the same opportunities. Checking a box can be an honest first step but it doesn’t prevent unconscious biases from influencing every stage of that process, beginning with the tone of an audition. Nicholas describes how Artistic Director Karen Kain barely looked at him and had no questions during his audition, which he found odd given that the company had reached out to recruit him from across the border.
This tepid interest seemed to continue throughout his contract: though on the payroll, Rose was rarely on stage. “You can’t hire Nicholas Rose and then tell him to sit quietly on the side for two years,” Anon. sums up. The NBoC is not alone in this; industry-wide, many large ballet companies have responded to calls for diversification by spot-treating the surface of a deeper institutional problem. Even when there are sincere intentions behind these efforts, it doesn’t target the powerful social mechanisms beneath that can make the path to the stage miserable for Black dancers who are frequently told they’re disrupting visual cohesion, need to lighten their skin, or aren’t believable as a Prince or Princess. Kevin Ormsby speaks to this discrepancy between optical diversity and meaningful inclusion, saying that meeting BIPOC dancers where they are requires a fundamental framework shift. He asks, “are we looking to secure dancers from various spaces around the world and if we are, how do they arrive in the Canadian space, in the National Ballet space? How do they arrive so they feel comfortable actualizing their fullest artistic potential?”
Early in his contract, a senior dancer of colour warned Nicholas that it would be difficult for him in the company, but he began to suspect this in his first rehearsal. The continuum of racial discrimination encompasses many manifestations besides explicit contempt, including well-intentioned but problematic attempts to celebrate difference. Nicholas cites Senior Ballet Mistress Mandy-Jayne Richardson as one of the few people in authority who was warm and welcoming to him, but felt stereotyped in a rehearsal for Anna Karenina when she asked him to hook his phone up to the auxiliary cord assuming he must have ‘an amazing hip-hop playlist’ to accompany the Tchaikovsky-scored hip-hop section of the ballet. A trained cellist who was listening to composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges when our interview began, Nicholas tried to find some humour in the situation by putting on ‘Milkshake’ by Kelis—but came away self-conscious about how he was perceived and concerned about how this would translate into his work life.
He next knew something was awry when Principal Ballet Master Lindsay Fischer, one of the dancers whom Rose had idolized in library VHS tapes, called him ‘Siphe’—a nickname for Siphesihle November, a South African dancer who looks significantly different from Nicholas and had been with the company for a year at that point. Rose expressed his frustration with this in his second video, dryly remarking “you know all these different breeds of dogs but you can’t tell one Black boy from the other?” These gaffes may not have been intentionally hurtful, but they were portents of the exclusion to come. In his first holiday season with the company while rehearsing The Nutcracker, Nicholas was an understudy to the ‘Chocolate’ sequence’s fourth cast “even though I was the only Black dancer in the room.” He eagerly volunteered when a spot opened, but “no one wanted to dance with me… I danced by myself—partnered the air—and people were laughing. And it was real, and I was embarrassed, and I never got to dance it [on stage].” He was cut from the sequence and reports that “I was the only person in the company not cast in Act II of The Nutcracker my first year. I was only put in to do fat-suit dad [in Act I] nine times out of the twenty-six shows of Nutcracker… that was the definition of exclusion.”
When he approached Karen Kain to ask if he could be used, he was told that as a new member he would need to work his way up. But even apprentices were cast ahead of him, which he later learned was a violation of Section 15 in CAEA’s 2019-2022 National Ballet of Canada Agreement, stating that apprentice members can be cast in a production only when all Corps members are unavailable. He was given the role of a waiter after the conversation—a concession he interpreted to have racial implications, remarking “you’re not going to cast the Black person, the one African American man in the company, as the help.” Anon. weighed in on the ambiguity of the situation, citing the waiter as a goofy rite of passage for all male dancers, but agreeing it was unacceptable that Rose wasn’t cast in the first place, “because then that makes him think that he’s just hired to be hired, not to actually go on stage.” When he brought the issue up over a company-wide Zoom conference, he was stunned by Kain’s portrayal of his concerns. “I said this in front of the whole company,” he tells me. “The whole story, and you know what she said? ‘Oh Nicholas, I’m so sorry you can’t find it within yourself to see the beauty of those costumes by Santo Loquasto. We need to work on being more grateful.’”
Though gratitude is a personal element in any creative process, Rose describes how the concept is often misused to control, intimidate and silence in ballet hierarchies—particularly dancers of colour who are more keenly aware of how precarious their upward career trajectories can be. “We’re taught to adopt this ‘I’m just so lucky to be here’ mentality that causes us to live in a state of fear,” he shared in a video on mental health, explaining the harsher expectations on Black people suffering with anxiety and depression to ‘be strong’, ‘overcome’, and frequently, to ‘be grateful’. Gratitude was also difficult to muster when he never made it to the stage in a classical work that required ballet shoes, frequently being cut and replaced as the performance date approached. He reports that when he asked why he wasn’t used more, Kain replied that they didn’t know what he was good at. Nicholas addressed this in his first video, pointing out that he can’t show them what he can do if he’s consistently cut from roles before they go to stage. The most recent instance of this occurred when an apprentice was promoted to Corps and put into a performance while Rose was an understudy. He clarifies that this young man “tore up the stage” and was undoubtedly an exceptional dancer. “But it’s not about him,” he adds firmly. “It’s about the company’s relationship with Black people.”
Beginning to seriously question if this was normal for a Corps dancer after completing their first year with the company, he then had an encounter that he describes in a video on disability discrimination. Rose details how he, a neoclassical specialist versed in afrocentric movement, never had a chance to be considered for Wayne MacGregor’s Chroma. While healing from a minor injury and receiving emails encouraging him to return to company class, Rose describes how he was prevented from joining the warm-up that MacGregor would be sitting in on by Associate Artistic Director Christopher Stowell, saying that Rose wasn’t ready to participate in the exercises. However, Nicholas was then expected to go on as ‘fat-suit dad’ in The Nutcracker that very evening and to read the land acknowledgement—apparently performance-ready, yet too seriously injured to strengthen his recovering muscles at his own pace off-stage. In this video, Rose stated that “dancers are always given the chance to use modifications as they see fit. Class is optional and artists come and go depending on how they're feeling. I felt dehumanized when I was told I couldn’t participate in barre for just thirty-five minutes with dancers in the company who’ve had way worse injuries than me and they were still cheered on to be seen by choreographers.”
He explained that the company commonly advocates for dancers who can’t be physically present when a choreographer is visiting. But MacGregor, who has since asked Nicholas to be a part of RESET 2020 (a freelance artist mentorship program in London) had to ask who the young man was when they met for the first time in the wings. Regardless of intentions, Rose cites this as discriminatory exclusion from a professional opportunity based on a perceived disability, and connects how it followed a pattern of visiting choreographers noticing him—most notably John Neumeier. Announcing during a rehearsal in October 2019 that Nicholas “was the only one in the room dancing with his whole heart”, Neumeier went on to say that the Corps member should be regarded as an example and made everyone in the studio clap for him. But what should have been a spotlight seemed to become a target when “a couple weeks later I was taken out of The Nutcracker. See how that happens? Retribution.” Anon. corroborates that outside choreographers have had the most influence on the careers of many dancers of colour, providing the vast majority of opportunities to dance principal roles.
One of those outside choreographers was William Forsythe, choreographer of The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, who reportedly asked Nicholas why he wasn’t cast in the neoclassical work before asking a more serious question. “He pulled me aside and literally said ‘Is this company racist? The casting is segregated.’” ‘Segregated’ is not a word we’re used to associating with Canada; images of lunch counters and the Little Rock Nine come to mind—not Canadian ballet. “I feel like that particular situation was very unfortunate. It really was cast very poorly,” Anon. agreed. In a ballet of only five dancers, it’s hard to ignore when the first two casts are Caucasian while all dancers of colour are relegated to a third cast. Rose describes seeing this often, stating that he frequently observed the casting to follow a model of “first cast: blonde hair, blue eyes. Second cast: Americans. Third cast: Blacks, Latinos, Asians, ‘the coloured people’.” Even though any audience member can see how common this has been when leafing through a program, it’s risky and uncomfortable for dancers of colour to point it out. “You just never want to be the person that’s thinking something that’s not true,” Anon. goes on, explaining that being put in situations where they’re left to wonder if their skin colour factors into casting is damaging enough in and of itself.
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Photo by Alexander Sargent
There’s a serious mental health impact from dynamics that force artists of colour to question how much faith they should put in the good intentions of executive leadership, an impact that the NBoC is now working towards addressing internally. Rose suggested in the meeting held after his first video that multicultural therapists should be a resource offered to dancers who have already sustained racial trauma within the company. This suggestion was integrated into the EDI Task Force’s action items by Kevin Ormsby, who credits Nicholas as sparking a conversation about the importance of investing in mental as well as physical health in ballet companies. “There needs to be at least a roster of designated counsellors, supporters,” Ormsby agrees. “Not just for all the dancers, but given the context of the time we’re in and given how more pressure is placed on POC bodies, primarily POC bodies, Black POC bodies, that there are counsellors that are able to be there to support them through acclimatizing to Toronto, being in a new community [and] through the challenges they might have.”
“I don’t think half of the things that have happened would have happened if there were somebody that’s hearing what people have to say,” Anon. stresses, agreeing that the mental as well as physical health of their dancers is extremely important for the company to invest in. Ormsby acknowledges the substantial challenge of providing these resources to an institution of over two hundred employees, but says there is now a platform to ask important questions like “who is checking in with these dancers? If issues are arising when they’re checking in, where do they go with those particular concerns? Where do they address them without feeling scared or intimidated that their job is going to be at risk?” He goes on to say that CPAMO had already been tabulating the needs of dancers so that support services and counsellors can be recommended to address mental health concerns specific to racialization and ethnicity.
Despite these commendable planned developments, Rose says he could not continue with the NBoC after the meeting that produced this action item. “You cannot heal in the same place that made you mentally sick to your stomach,” he tells me, saying that it would be dangerous to his recovery process to remain in exposure to an environment that may take a long time to change. “You’re obviously living in survival mode any minute you’re in ballet being a Black person,” he tells me. Diagnosed with PTSD in March of 2020, he confesses that “even going down the streetcar on Spadina [towards the Walter Carsen Centre] gives me extreme PTSD… it’s become too traumatic to even go back there. These people are abusers and they’ve been hurting me behind closed doors for a very long time.” But when I point out how his videos have gathered hundreds of thankful comments from dancers with similar experiences, creating a space that empowers them to speak out and connect with one another, Nicholas lights up. He shares how after experiencing predation and abuse as a student, he’s been thinking since 2016 about going to school for psychology so that he can develop a syllabus for dance companies and dancers, helping them identify and address patterns of abuse.
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Photo by Karolina Kuras
While Kevin Ormsby provided encouraging insight into internal action items set to be rolled out in the coming years, the NBoC’s response to Rose’s plea for justice left many questions unanswered. After nine days of silence in which Nicholas posted multiple videos expanding on the need to candidly redress racial discrimination in the company, the NBoC posted a square that read ‘We Are Listening’ and a list of commitments. However, they never publicly credited Nicholas for catalyzing that listening, excluding him from subsequent social media acknowledgements that celebrated every other dancer of colour under contract. Anon. concedes that the potential damage to their reputation and donor base could have been frightening, saying “I feel like if they acknowledge too much they’re in position of maybe being fired at, and they wouldn’t let that happen. So, I feel like they were very strategic about what they put out.”
The initial strategy involved listing the diversity programs and anti-bias training the company was already engaged in, saying they would continue this work—but not evaluate why it hadn’t protected Rose from experiencing the marginalization it was meant to prevent. They also announced that a Director of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion would be hired, but added no extrapolation on what power this individual would have to prioritize the hiring of BIPOC choreographers or to consult on programming choices. When I asked Kevin Ormsby if this Director would have a failsafe power to hold executive leadership accountable, he assured me “they will have that capacity”, elaborating on how “EDI is embedded in every single aspect of the organization. So no one is spared. All departments go through it, all department heads go through it… so the recommendation to have [the Director] means that this person would definitely be involved in the work that CPAMO is instigating and the action items we’re putting forward.”
Anon. observes that this individual will need to be “someone very specific that knows the dance world and knows what the biases have been so far,” and someone who will push the company to make changes beyond just saying the right things. Rose called this a tokenizing position, remarking that from his own experience, “just because you’re at the table doesn’t mean you’re being fed.” While some may say only time will tell if this unique opportunity for change will be built upon meaningfully, Anon. went on to share how some dancers aren’t willing to take that chance and don’t want to merely wait for a leadership turnover. “I know that one of the senior first soloists took it upon herself to do her own research for the company to really make sure that things are changed,” they related, citing a general exhaustion amongst racialized dancers with messaging that feels like lip service.
Though there hasn’t been a public acknowledgement of Rose’s role in the new conversations happening across departments, Ormsby discussed a promising resource document to be used in anti-Black racism training within the NBoC. Currently being compiled by himself, CPAMO Executive Director charles c. smith, and another dancer in the community, the document will detail their experiences as Black consultants in the arts and serve as a dissertation on Black ballet dancing in Canada. Ormsby described experiencing many times what Nicholas reported as his first impressions of the NBoC: that of walking into ballet organizations, “so many of them, and never feeling welcomed. From the moment I push that door open, I need to feel like I belong... so it’s great to take it from the space of experiencing it internally, from knowing it intimately, and amplifying the conversation.”
Experienced as an artistic director of his own company, KasheDance, Ormsby concedes that “a large, entrenched organization with a different way of working” will necessarily take longer to change, and that immediate attempts at solutions should be regarded as ‘smoke from the fire’ rather than sustainable coals. “And I’m not talking about a checkbox… with CPAMO for the National Ballet, we don’t do checkboxes. We’re here for the long haul, we’re here for the long run. Anyone in the organization has us for support, also knowledge, also education.” And despite needing to see action to believe it’ll be taken, Anon. qualifies their doubt by saying “I feel like they still need an opportunity to try,” and that “as dancers, it’s hard to think that it’s just going to change overnight; I feel like we’re doing this work for the ten-year-olds of the world right now.” Ormsby also credits Nicholas with the currently tabled action item to do “a huge session with everybody in the organization around the anti-Black racism framework.”
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Matthew Powell
These are the kinds of action items we should see from every arts organization, particularly ones that celebrate classical forms rooted in a history of white supremacy and colonialism. For example, Tapestry Opera recently staged Shanawdithit with a libretto by Yvette Nolan, recounting an Indigenous genocide as told by the last surviving member of the Beothuk tribe. Nicholas Rose agrees that opera and ballet have “a huge role and a huge responsibility” in anti-racism work and dismantling contemporary forms of colonialism. Anon. concurs that classical forms “have the most to do”, citing the Stratford Festival as an institution that’s begun to embrace this in their increasingly multicultural musical theatre programming. “Minorities are Canada; these people are the ones that want to buy the tickets and want to see themselves represented on stage.” Ormsby acknowledges that Canada is just beginning to grapple with its colonial past, saying that “in this time, in this moment, it is problematic that large organizations, the National Ballet included … do not reflect or look like Canada today” and that they “are working with a historical lineage that has supported whiteness, that has not supported enough diversity, not supported inclusivity.”
His overarching goal is to embed an understanding of equity, diversity, and inclusion from the audience to decision-makers, asserting that “the National Ballet, Tapestry Opera and others are going to be spaces where they will be thinking differently about choices in casting, choices in creation, choices in choreographers, choices in ballet masters” among other roles. At the time of our interview, Ormsby had a session scheduled with the Metcalf Foundation’s Staging Change program of which the NBoC is a part, to ask questions about these casting and hiring practices. “What role does the National Ballet play in reflecting Canada of today and in what ways can they animate space differently?” he asks. In a banner-worthy remark, Anon. agrees that “I don’t think I’m going to be personally satisfied until the stage looks like the streets, and we are nowhere close to that.”
In those streets, Black Torontonians are twenty times more likely to be shot by police than white citizens as reported by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Our institutions, particularly those influential with moneyed voters, have a significant power to platform storytellers of colour who can raise awareness, empathy, and understanding in audience members who, like myself pre-June, had no idea this went beyond an observable casting disparity and an apparent melanin ceiling between the First Soloist and Principal rankings. But in Rose’s words, “the ballet world is just a microcosm of the real world. We’re not dancing to be abused, we’re just dancing and the abuse is happening. Just like Black people in the real world. We’re not waking up trying to be hurt; we’re just hurt because we’re Black. Just for existing. So what’s happening in the real world is happening in the dance world.”
When asked how racism manifests differently in Canada in contrast to the United States, I was not prepared for Nicholas to state with grave, grounded confidence that “it’s more racist than when I was in the States. And I’m from the South; I’m from Florida, the white supremacist capital of America, and I’m very comfortable with saying that it’s far more discriminatory.” This prompted me to consider how white Americans may become individually defensive when confronted about personal bias, but systemic racism in the U.S. is simply too visible and verifiable to credibly deny the problem. However, white Canadians tend communally believe in a version of our larger national identity, and may therefore be even more resistant to discussions of our own history with slavery, or how anti-Black racism continues to covertly pervade our social structures. If we regard our country as a proverbial North Star, a multicultural promised land for the oppressed that could never import ideologies from our neighbours, then we’re not able to recognize racism and root it out. The overt, well-publicized bigotry and violence of the United States serves us well in denying that similar patterns resound in our police forces, institutions, and cultural sectors. “People think America is worse because America is straight-up about their craziness,” Rose summed up. “People make it seem like America is just a big meth lab cooking beneath us when in reality, Canada is an even bigger meth lab—we just got better Febreze.”
When I listened to Nicholas speak outside the glass monolith of the Four Seasons Centre on Emancipation Day, I remembered the many times I’d stood there outside the box office years ago at 4:30 a.m.—with a pillow, book, and Tim Hortons—determined to be first in line for rush tickets. I made friends of every generation in that line, sharing the kind of rapture that doesn’t age. Works staged by the National Ballet of Canada were my therapeutic escape for over ten years, providing transfusions of transcendent beauty that helped me heal from my own traumas. But I also know personally how risky it is to speak up about one’s history of abuse, and had to trade my rose-coloured glasses for prescription lenses in order to regard my favourite company more clearly going forwards. I believed in the NBoC for a decade and continue to believe in what they’re capable of—if leaders are prepared to thoroughly, compassionately engage with issues of racial bias and representation. In many ways, the worldwide movement this year augers one of the most exciting opportunities for ballet to adapt to a new century, just like it did one hundred years ago when a young Nijinsky was instrumental in transforming what the art form would look like long past his lifetime. Ballet changed athletically and aesthetically in that time and will continue evolving to reflect our world whether institutions rise to meet the moment or not.
Nicholas Rose said something prophetic in September of 2019 when he shared his experience via social media of being physically threatened on the TTC and called vicious racial slurs. Though a stranger who only knew him for his choreography work, I thanked him for being vocal about manifestations of Canadian racism and interrupting a dangerous complacency. His oracular answer was that “if someone’s gotta speak up, it’s gonna be me.” Having done his part by speaking up, it falls to us to listen, evaluate, and adapt for the sake of dancers now and dancers to come. Ballet requires unparalleled tenacity to render its beauty, but there are some challenges which have no place in our studios, on our stages, or in the future of the form.