BALLET DANCERS AS BRANDS

Nowadays, the ballet world is becoming more and more popular, and its international stars are becoming brands and public figures:

“A wave of international ballet stars are increasingly leaping from company to company, creating their own brands and becoming more like world-traveling conductors and opera stars. In doing so, they are upending ballet’s traditional professional path and changing an art form long defined by national styles that dancers perfected as they grew up with — and stayed loyal to — a single company.

“The talented people belong not to one company, but to the dance world,” the Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova said in a recent Skype interview. “In opera, this happens already. You have a chorus, but principals from all over the world.”

Ms. Osipova, 27, is a prime example. On Thursday, she is to dance her first Juliet as a member of Britain’s Royal Ballet, the fourth dance troupe she has joined in two years. Her crowd-pulling virtuosity and charisma have taken her from the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow to the Mikhailovsky Ballet in St. Petersburg to the Royal, even as she belonged to New York City’s American Ballet Theater and danced as a guest with companies from La Scala in Milan to the Australian Ballet.

Ballet has always had a handful of major stars, like Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Sylvie Guillem, whose fame and box-office appeal allowed them to maintain jet-setting careers. But the practice has grown in recent years, with some of the biggest names in the ballet world — Ms. Osipova, David Hallberg, Sergei Polunin, Ivan Vasiliev, Alina Cojocaru — now not only switching among troupes, but often belonging to more than one company at a time.

This is already affecting traditional ballet company structures as less famous dancers emulate these examples, leaving companies like the Royal or the Paris Opera Ballet, which once would have been considered permanent homes, and no longer trusting their career paths to troupes’ all-powerful directors. It also means that audiences have a chance to see more international stars, and that the dancers see more financial rewards.

Those flagship companies are the incubators of national styles that have accrued over generations through training methods and the influence of homegrown choreographers. The Royal Ballet is known for its pure classicism and strong acting, the Paris Opera for its elegant lyricism, the Bolshoi Ballet for its large-scale bravura. But as star dancers now fly in and out of these companies, and dancers jump ship at earlier ages, the purity and continuity of these styles are becoming harder to maintain, leading to fears of homogeneity.

As Johan Kobborg, a former principal with the Royal Ballet, said, major companies “have slowly become more or less the same in regards to the work, the style.”

“You have this handful of choreographers who may belong to a company but work everywhere,” he added. “It’s now much easier for dancers to fit in.”

Benjamin Millepied, who will become the director of the Paris Opera Ballet next September, said that while he was happy for his dancers to build their own brands, the internationalization of repertory and stars could dilute ballet’s impact.

Some stars have asked to join the Paris Opera, he noted. “But I don’t want to do that,” he said. “Then you are like an opera company: You buy your dancers, you buy your productions. That’s very hard on your own dancers, who have worked so hard. A ballet company has to be a team, to come from a vision, or it doesn’t have integrity.”

Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director of American Ballet Theater, said that the shifts in the dance world reflect “the sort of globalization that’s going on all over society.” In a telephone interview, he noted that people in all walks of life are less likely to stay in one place, or even in one career.

In interviews, dancers said they moved around to experience different styles, try new choreography and build international reputations.

“We see more options,” said Ms. Cojocaru, who recently decamped from the Royal Ballet to the English National Ballet, and also holds a contract with the Hamburg Ballet. “Instead of waiting for something to happen in the place where I am, I can go to where it is happening. If companies don’t find a way to challenge their principals, we will find those challenges for ourselves.”

But, as Ms. Cojocaru acknowledged in a telephone interview, there are also pressing financial reasons for these career decisions. Ballet careers are relatively short and require years of training that pose the risk of injury, yet the world’s top dancers earn far less money than their counterparts elsewhere in show business. Belonging to two companies or making numerous guest appearances increases earning power.

Mr. Kobborg said, “If you can be dancing the same works for twice the amount, that’s going to influence you.” Dancers today understand better how they profit a company in terms of press and profile, and that, he said, “comes at a price.”

The big American companies do not have year-round seasons and do not pay annual salaries. Their top dancers earn good, but by no means astronomical, amounts: On its 2011 tax return, Ballet Theater listed three dancers as making more than $190,000 each in total compensation. Mr. McKenzie said that all dancers are paid by the week, not per performance, and that the company did not pay its international stars — who include Ms. Osipova and Polina Semionova, who is a principal at both Ballet Theater and Berlin Ballet — any more than its highest-paid principals. “I don’t, and won’t,” he said. “That’s just a policy.”

At the Paris Opera, an étoile, the top rank, earns, on average, around $125,000 a year. That salary isn’t particularly high compared to those of actors or opera singers. (The Metropolitan Opera pays a top fee of $17,000 per performance; European opera houses can pay even more.)

“Dancers will be paid as opera singers? What are you taking about?” said Sergei Danilian, a ballet agent in New York, adding that the relatively small fees contribute to a general reluctance among people in the dance world to talk about money.

However, top-level dancers, thanks to social media and advertising contracts, are increasingly able to capitalize on their own brands. Ms. Semionova recently appeared on billboards alongside the tennis star Novak Djokovic in a Uniqlo advertisement; Mr. Millepied has appeared in advertisements for Dior and Saint Laurent; Yuan Yuan Tan, a principal dancer at San Francisco Ballet, is a brand ambassador for Van Cleef & Arpels and Rolex.

“Why can’t a ballerina be as public as a tennis figure?” asked Sara Mearns, a principal dancer with New York City Ballet — a tight-knit company that still grows its own talent, rather than relying on outside guest artists. But some City Ballet dancers are also taking on higher profile roles outside the company. Ms. Mearns, who until recently had a behind-the-scenes blog for The Huffington Post, is active on social media and has a publicist.

Globe hopping is not easy on dancers. They need to train every day to maintain their technique and often prefer to work with a single coach over long periods on a role. Mr. Hallberg, who joined the Bolshoi as a principal in 2011 while keeping the same status at Ballet Theater, said that his first year was very difficult.

“My time was spread very thin, two weeks here, three weeks there,” he said. “My performances and health suffered. My mental health suffered.” He added: “I learned the hard way. You really have to be very critical about what you can and can’t do because you are not invincible.”

Ms. Osipova said that “for now” she is committed to being a full-time Royal Ballet member. But she said that freedom of a peripatetic career outweighs the disadvantages. Mr. Vasiliev, her on- and offstage partner, added, “I don’t miss the security of a company.”

(New York Times, 2013)

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