There’s an interesting story in the NYT about Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker’s problematic personal style. Somehow I’m not very surprised she could be a bit…auteur-ish? My hot take, informed by life with a partner of 30 years who’s a choreographer and spending lots of time in Europe’s nether regions: Very, very few people let alone artists can draw a line between the inward- and outward-facing aspects of their leadership style, so the fierce advocacy required to lead a group to worldly success often comes with a pretty wretched approach to “management.” That’s not a forward-looking justification for people to behave poorly, but it is — or at least it should be — a retrospective consideration for others who want to sit in judgment of someone like Keersmaeker. But these are mostly generic considerations, not specific to dance, which has been one of the most heavily freighted when it comes to gender — in good and bad ways. In the ’70s, it was still very dominated by patriarchal visions of geniuses and muses. To succeed as Keersmaeker did — or as Bill T. Jones did, or as Eiko and Koma did, or as Mark Morris did, a list could go on and on — pretty much required people like her to be driven, to put it mildly. And here’s the thing: modern and even more so contemporary dance, more than any other art form, led the way when it came to embracing and advancing all these new values. Open genders, identities, and preferences? ✅ Ethnic and ~racial ways of being and seeing? ✅ Horizontalist ethics and politics? ✅ Diverse body shapes and sizes? ✅ The one area where it came up short in this respect might be neurodoversity, but my guess is anyone who’d condemn dance on those grounds is missing the forest for the trees: dance has always, at its very heart, embraced many forms of neurodiversity. But since it isn’t about language or producing commodities, that hasn’t been obvious. But even more specifically: Keersmaeker’s work has always stood out as unusually balletic, which was central to how and why she succeeded. So, like I said, no surprise she played the role of the auteur. And nor is it surprising that the Belgian response, rather than taking what in the US we might see as a “cancelable moment,” is a funny mix of ideological, pragmatic, and candid.