Dance.

[acelightning]

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Dance is about creating beauty from the ways the human body can move. Human bodies come in a fantastic range of beautiful skin colors! And their shoes (and costumes and makeup) need to contribute to the beauty of the performance. This entry was also posted at https://acelightning.dreamwidth.org/202557.html. Reply wherever you read it.

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[acelightning]

There are quite a few people of color in contemporary dance. There are plenty of Japanese- and Chinese-American girls who grew up wanting to be ballerinas. And Native American Women - Maria Tallchief was a major ballet star in the early to middle 20th century, and there are a few rising stars of Native descent in modern ballet. And Buffy Sainte-Marie wanted to grow up to be a ballerina (she wanted to grow up to be a WASP, which is why she took the name "Buffy")

I don't know whether there are any ballet sequences in the opera Aida, but the title character is supposed to be the daughter of the king of the Ethiopians, who are fighting a war against Egypt. So the ballet role (if there is one) should be danced by a dark-skinned ballerina, in appropriately dark ballet shoes. There are many classical ballets involving "exotic" characters who should be danced by ballerinas of color - in brown pointe shoes and whatever colorful costume the wardrobe department can come up with. (Or they could just go full Josephine Baker and wear a tutu made of bananas.)