“Is Ballet Camp?” by Madison Mainwaring (poetry ’19)
An excerpt from “Is Ballet Camp?” by Madison Mainwaring (poetry ’19), published by The New York Times.
Is Ballet Camp?
Is it the moonbeams? The suicide-for-love finale? Or, perhaps, the extravagant gestures that designate women as birds? For Susan Sontag, writing in 1964 in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the camp canon included Aubrey Beardsley drawings, Tiffany lamps, women’s clothes from the 1920s, Flash Gordon comics — and also “Swan Lake.”
“Camp: Notes on Fashion,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, uses Sontag’s essay to consider how clothes can turn into costume or performance. A surprising number of its sections refer to ballet through the ages, from its codification at the court of Versailles in the mid-17th century to Edgar Degas’s fin-de-siècle sketches of dancers.
Camp is a notoriously slippery term. But why do discussions about it so consistently evoke ballet as an example?
