Timothée Chalamet Picked the Wrong Year to Count Ballet Out

In February, Timothée Chalamet said he did not want to spend his career propping up art forms he thought had been left behind. Ballet was the example he reached for.

Then the year happened.

The quote

Speaking at a town hall in Austin on February 24, Chalamet said he did not want to be working in ballet or opera, "things where it's like, hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore."

In the same breath he added a line that usually gets left off: "All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there."

Companies on both sides of the Atlantic wrote back. So did his old high school. What follows is not a rebuttal anyone organized. It is just what the calendar did next.

March: Rosalía opens a tour on pointe

Rosalía opened the Lux tour in Lyon on March 18 by stepping out of a white box in a blush tutu and pointe shoes.

The choreography came in part from the directors of Ballet National de Marseille, with ballet coaching from Tatiana Yerakhavets, formerly of the Bolshoi.

April: Giveon brings a soloist to Coachella

At Coachella, Giveon performed "Garden Kisses" with a full orchestra and India Bradley, the first Black woman promoted to soloist at New York City Ballet. Fatima Robinson choreographed.

June: a troupe follows Olivia Rodrigo down the Upper West Side

The video for "stupid song," released June 12, is built around a troupe of dancers from New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre in pointe shoes, clustering around Rodrigo on the Upper West Side and eventually moshing with her.

Tiler Peck, a principal at City Ballet, choreographed it and dances in it. The troupe included India Bradley, Grace Scheffel, Kayla Mak, Kennedy Targosz, Kloe Walker, Lauren Collett and Rommie Tomasini.

They shot the whole thing between 6 and 11 in the morning, because the dancers had rehearsal at 11:30. Rodrigo sent each of them flowers at the theater that night.

August: Gus Dapperton directs his own ballet

Dapperton wrote, shot and directed the video for "Take Me Out To The Disco" himself. Filmed in Brooklyn, it runs a full narrative and builds to an eighties-styled ballet performance from the lead.

A week later: an album named after them

jigitz released a debut called 50 ballerinas on August 21. The rule behind it is that every dancer in his artwork, his videos and his live shows is a real trained ballerina, not a model posing.

It started after a breakup, when he choreographed an eight minute ballet to his own music and hired a dancer to perform it at a DIY show. "So I just started doing that with every show."

September: Adéla was a ballerina first

Every other artist here hired a dancer. Adéla trained in ballet from the age of three, and still performs in pointe shoes.

Her debut album is called Prima, after the prima ballerina, the top rank in a company. On the title: "It's something I'm striving to be in pop music." It entered at number four.