Actor Timothée Chalamet recently participated in a discussion about keeping movie theatres alive at a University of Texas event when he mysteriously decided to say this:
“I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though, like, no one cares about this anymore.’ All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there.”
Yes, I feel the respect radiating from this flippant, pointless comment. As do his fellow artists. The backlash from people working in ballet and opera has been all over my social media feeds.
Jordan Strauss / Invision Files
Timothée Chalamet
No one cares. Oh, really? Then why is there — and this is real — a full, multi-chapter work of Heated Rivalry fanfic set at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet during Nutcracker season, written by someone who isn’t even from here?
I’m using that very specific example on purpose. Culture is built on culture. Even if someone has never been to the opera, they’ve probably seen one of the many Bugs Bunny cartoons referencing it. Maybe you’ve never seen Nutcracker, but you’ve probably played Tetris or seen The Simpsons. I saw Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 psychological thriller, long before I ever saw a production of Swan Lake.
The point is, the stuff “no one cares about anymore” serves as a foundation upon which a lot of other art is created. Chalamet didn’t go after theatre, but actors were treading the boards long before they were performing for a camera. And don’t even get me going on how much opera is used in film.
Shakespeare’s oeuvre alone continues to be a cultural engine, showing up in sometimes surprising ways, like the 1999 rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You, which is a loose adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. Or a line from Macbeth providing the title for Gabrielle Zevin’s acclaimed 2022 novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the cover of which also references a different piece of classic art: Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a woodblock print from 1831.
Culture is built on culture. It gets riffed on, adapted, skewered, satirized, modernized, taken apart and put back together by artists who see the source material differently. Even those who are telling new, contemporary stories in old mediums would have learned the classics.
Perhaps that’s what makes Chalamet’s comments so frustrating, other than the fact they are incredibly dismissive of his fellow artists, which include, by the way, many other people, including costumers, lighting designers, musicians and conductors, to name just a few. He talks as though ballet and opera are static, frozen-in-amber artforms, as though they are not constantly being adapted or reimagined for new audiences all the time, all over the world.
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Any ballet or opera organization worth its salt knows it necessarily needs to evolve in order to remain relevant.
Chalamet could have made the argument that high art can be incredibly inaccessible — less accessible, certainly, than the movies, though seeing one in a theatre is becoming prohibitively expensive, too. But he’s not saying that. He’s saying no one “cares,” which is a wild thing for an artist to say about other artists.
Decades from now, people will still marvel over one dancer being able to inhabit both white swan and black in Swan Lake. Or revel in hearing the Queen of the Night aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute live and in person. Those things are pretty AI-proof, too; I suspect the demand for live experiences will only grow, not shrink, in our increasingly technological society.
And I hope people will keep seeing movies in the theatre, too. Because when you truly care about art, you tend to care about all of it.
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Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.
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