As a dancer, I have no issue with Vogue Spain's Kendall Jenner ballet video. If you haven’t already seen the video that has the ballet world taking sides and verbally harassing Jenner for “demeaning ballet,” I recommend you watch it with an open mind.
Nothing about the video is meant to show Jenner as a ballerina. Even the title is just, “Kendall Jenner, portada de Vogue España” which loosely translates to “Kendall Jenner, the cover of Vogue Spain.” It’s not “Kendall Jenner, ballet dancer in her free time.” It honestly says nothing about her being a ballet dancer. I think the purpose of the video is to show Jenner as a child again—someone who just dances around in her room. The video isn’t saying that dancing is easy and carefree, but more so that it’s okay to just dance for yourself and not care about what other people think. The purpose is not to debase the hard work professional dancers do; I don’t even think the video is really about ballet.
This is not another case of the Free People ad. In case you are unfamiliar, the ad displays a model who speaks of her training as a dancer, yet demonstrates a strong lack of training in her dancing en pointe. This is different; Free People specifically attempted to call an ill-trained model a dancer to sell dance clothing to dancers, and endangered the safety of a poor model, while Vogue never even labels Jenner as a dancer. It’s not as if she’s dressed like an actual dancer, in a leotard, tights, and pointe shoes*. No, in the video she is wearing flats with pom-poms and fluffy tutus.
Margaret Fuhrer from Dance Spirit wrote an article titled, “We Need to Talk About the Kendall Jenner “Ballet” Video for Vogue Spain.” She writes, “But to [dancer] eyes, the whole thing reads as pretty disrespectful to the artists who devote their lives to this demanding craft.” I have to respectfully disagree with this statement. I think that dancers are taking this video as an attack to their art, when it really has nothing to do with it. I think the idea Vogue had was to take a young famous person, one whom we have seen grow up quickly, and show that she can still be carefree and still has some childhood within her.
You can interpret the video as you would like, but if you have already formed strong opinions on the video, I would rewatch it and truly question if what you are thinking is sensible. Overall, I don’t think people should be harassing Kendall Jenner for this video because she did not come up with the concept, and is just “a beautiful young girl who's job is to do what she's asked to do” (Allison Debona, soloist for Ballet West.) As dancers, we should encourage people to experience our art form as they choose, and not discriminate against those who aren’t as trained.
*Kendall did post a picture standing in pointe shoes on her Instagram which is amazingly dangerous, but everyone is giving her flack about the video itself in which she does not wear pointe shoes.
