If the camp object or person is always in quotation marks, as Sontag says, then ballet’s fairy-tale romances lend this treatment to gender. In his novel “The World in the Evening” (1954), he places Mae West drag on one end of the camp spectrum and classical dance on the other. “High Camp is the whole emotional basis of the ballet,” he writes. For Isherwood, the camp attitude takes serious subject matters — in ballet’s case, love — and expresses them, “in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.”But styles, even in classical dance, change. It was always them doing the part.”If there is a camp essence in this Romantic style of ballet, with its jeweled costumes and feathered headdresses, it is related to the worship of a style that is no longer of its time.

Source: New York Times May 28, 2019 15:57 UTC