The good, the bad, the ugly and the avant garde – ballet and music videos

Maura Edmond trawls YouTube for the best ballet-themed music videos

Pointe. It’s perhaps the only thing Beyonce can’t do. But if pop stars can’t do ballet, then how do you represent the classic music video themes of innocence, lost innocence, and repressed female hysteria ? The answer, hire professionals:

Hot off the presses, The Presets’ If I Know You looks like a musical directed by Gus Van Sant (or Greg Araki or Larry Clark). An awkward adolescent suburbanite pirouettes and jetes across the streets of LA, collecting kindred spirits for a tribal beach party.

While not strictly ‘music videos’, post-punk cult favourites The Fall worked with a who’s-who of avant-garde 80s London to produce some of the strangest pop-ballet collaborations. Hail the New Puritan (1985-1986) was an experimental documentary by British video artist Charles Atlas, featuring Mark E. Smith and wife Brix, performance artist Leigh Bowery, and this cheeky Michael Clark ballet.

Directed by 80s music video pioneer David Mallet, Queen’s I Want To Break Free opens with a cross-dressing parody of Coronation Street, with Freddie Mercury as a bored (moustached) housewife vacuuming the carpet in a vinyl mini skirt. It ends with Freddie playing Vaslav Nijinsky (sans moustache) in a performance of Afternoon of a Faun with the Royal Ballet. Seventy years after the premiere of Faun it seemed Nijinsky was still scandalising audiences; the clip was banned on MTV until shortly before Freddie’s death in 1991.

Maura Edmond is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication, writing her thesis on music videos