Geez, look at all the white people

So I got to user for Texas Ballet Theater’s Sleeping Beauty on Saturday. I loves me a sparkly tutu. And a prince with a butt you could bounce a quarter off of. Gorgeous music. Little girls their party dresses with big round eyes. Great evening.

Here was the thing I found weird – the entire cast was white. Everybody. I mean EVERYBODY. Well, the prince with the butt might have been Puerto Rican. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if he was just half Italian. No Asians. No blacks. No people of color. Pretty much no melanin on the entire stage. Kinda freaky.

I guess it’s just a sign of the times that I’ve become used to “colorblind” casting. Sometimes it’s full-on United Colors of Benetton, where they’re making a point about the multi-cultural world we live in (yes, even in Dallas). Sometimes it’s used to make a point about stereotypes (how many times have you seen the “Asian kid who thinks he’s black” in a comedy?). And sometimes it’s just about who is the best actor for the job – Japanese mom, white dad, black kids, whatever, get over it.

Which makes the Sleeping Beauty cast just that much weirder. Was there not one black dancer who was the best qualified for even one of those fairy roles? Okay, so it takes place in Russia. Fer crissakes, there were 4 “foreign” princes to woo Princess Aurora! You couldn’t throw a bone to some Chinese dancer? Instead you slap a turban and a fu manchu on some blond kid and call it good?

I guess in the past, the ideal was to have everybody look basically the same – height, weight, coloring. So that the emphasis was on the perfection of the dance. But, for me at least, the uniformity has become a bigger distraction than variation would be. The “cookie cutter” ideal is vanishing everywhere else. And given the fact that this was the least multicultural audiences I've seen so far at the Performing Arts Center (and one of the most undersold houses), perhaps it's time for the ballet to catch up and start representing (and selling to) a broader audience.