'Cancel Culture' Goes Too Far In Censoring Classical Ballets - Philosopher

BRUSSELS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 26th November, 2021) The American-style "cancel culture" has gone too far in Europe in remaking classical ballets from bygone eras over perceived racial stereotypes, says Bernard Feltz, a professor of philosophy at UCLouvain university in Belgium.

Several old European ballet companies said recently they were revisiting Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker," the Christmas classic, to update the Arabian and Chinese-themed dance routines over fears that harem scenes and the use of black and brown body paint would not sit well with the audience.

The artistic director of Berlin's Deutsche Oper, Germany's largest ballet company, told a newspaper in November that the all-time favorite would be replaced with "Don Quixote" this year, while "The Nutcracker," a 2013 reconstruction of the 1892 original by choreograph Marius Petipa, was being "contextualized."

"We must avoid prudishness and not make classic works disappear or rewrite them under the pretext that they cannot be heard or seen as such," Bernard Feltz told Sputnik.

"The problem is that we are going too far in censoring existing masterpieces, which date from the 19th and 20th centuries.

When the directors of the opera feel that they can no longer show 'oriental' dancers with bodies in brown makeup for fear of being considered racist, we are going too far," he added.

Feltz, who studies societal values, said that racial and cultural references in artistic works were made without malice and should be put in perspective of the time in which these works were written. Spectators should be able to tell such things themselves with the help of an introduction in the program.

He explained that people from faraway Asian and African lands were unknown and exotic in European cultures, meaning that "there was certainly no racism involved, at most some naivety."

"Art is always a reflection of its time, the ideology and the dominant culture of an era. The perception of moviegoers is often much more critical of a film than that of opera or ballet fans, more conservative and less inclined to criticize a 19th century masterpiece. Let's keep the full text and initial staging in old masterpieces such as 'Nutcracker,' but with an introductory caveat," Feltz concluded.