Ballet in Music Videos

A Venn diagram of music videos and ballet would have pretty small overlap. Music videos of the MTV-type often rely on dance, but it’s usually popular styles. Ballet film projects are rare outside of a pandemic, and usually rely on classical music. But where pop music, film, and ballet come together is a very happy place for me. So I’ve rounded up some ballet music videos for this post. Only after I put the list together I realized how Iceland-heavy the list is. That’s strange, because ballet is one of the few art forms I don’t particularly associate with Iceland.

Fretland “Do You Think of Me”

The inspiration for this post was Fretland’s new video for “Do You Think of Me.” The band is local to me and so are the dancers. Lucien Postlewaite dances for Pacific Northwest Ballet and Seattle Dance Collective. His partner Stephan Bourgond is retired from Ballet Monte Carlo and also dances with SDC. I heard about this pandemic collab project filmed at the historic Paramount Theatre in Seattle from SDC’s newsletter. I already loved the dancers, but the band was a new discovery for me.

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Ólafur Arnalds “Zero”

For this video, I was already familiar with the musician, Ólafur Arnalds, but know nothing about the dancers. You could argue that Ólafur is not pop music (in fact, I have seen ballets performed to his music before) and you could also argue that the dance in this video is more contemporary than ballet. Choreographer Lauren Bridle‘s biography doesn’t mention dance – she’s a nearly local to me BC-based environmental film maker – and both dancers’ CVs emphasize contemporary dance. That’s fine. I don’t want a semantic argument, I just want the protein, and “Zero” is very satisfying.

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Hozier “Take Me to Church”

Hozier’s “Take Me to Church” has a powerful storytelling video, but bad-boy ballet dancer Sergei Polunin’s viral video version from 2015 would be hard to top.

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Sigur Rós “Fjögur píanó”

Sigur Rós’ “Fjögur píanó” is a music video in the traditional sense, but dance is only a small part of the film, and it’s not really ballet. I love it anyway, though, so I’m linking to it here.

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Kristín Sesselja, “FUCKBOYS”

I love the song “FUCKBOYS” on so many levels, not the least of which is the ballet. But I also love that it flips the traditional music video trope of a male singer surrounded by hot female dancers (but makes it classy with ballet!). And I love that it’s absolutely savage while sounding like sugary pop. And I love what it says, both in the wry punning and the messaging that’s either profound or just bird-flipping, depending on your mood.

Animals as Leaders, “Monomyth”

The line between ballet and contemporary dance is thin and permeable, as evidenced in this video from Animals as Leaders. The most obvious referent for this dance is a music video by another brainy rock band, Tool. But where “Schism” is a creepy piece of body horror with few balletic elements, “Monomyth” has some more classical associations. It shares white-painted bodies and bald heads with “Schsism” but also with the ballet RakU, which is disturbing for entirely different reasons. The all male cast and skirts that act as both costume and prop also seem to refer to The Calling. That piece has a completely different vibe, but the upward stretching arms of the roiling mass of dancers in “Monomyth” seems to indicate the same yearning towards – if not the divine, something higher.