On April 18, I attended your production of “Return to a Strange Land,” “Summerspace” and “The Shakespeare Suite.” As a Shakespeare scholar and lover of dance, I appreciated the pairing of the larger-than-life characters with the Duke Ellington score.
However, I cannot stress how disappointed I was to see a white dancer take the stage to portray Othello. As the importance of representation comes to the forefront of our national and international conversations, I felt this was a grave misstep on the part of Ballet West.
One of the central themes of “Othello” is racism. The story falls apart if you have a white man portraying Othello and a white woman playing Desdemona.