Germany’s leading ballet has agreed to pay its first and only black dancer €16,000 and to renew her contract after she complained of racism, including being asked to whiten her skin.
The Berlin State Ballet said the case was a “wake-up call” and welcomed that its dispute with the French ballerina Chloé Lopes Gomes had been resolved at a labour court.
She joined the ballet in 2018 and took legal action after being told that her contract would not be renewed beyond the summer. At a hearing on Wednesday the ballet agreed to keep her on until the end of the 2021-22 season.
The dancer, who has family roots in Algeria and Cape Verde, said that a teacher at the ballet ordered her to apply whitening powder for a performance of Swan Lake and claimed that she had been hired only because she was black.
Lopes Gomes, 29, said a ballet mistress had told a colleague “she thought it had been a mistake to hire me because a black woman spoils the aesthetics”.
She also alleged that she was mocked by a mistress for the contrast between her white veil and dark skin during rehearsals for La Bayadère, a 19th- century ballet by the Austrian composer Ludwig Minkus.
Lopes Gomes’s lawyer, Christoph Partsch, said she was pleased with the outcome, which went well beyond the usual compensation under Germany’s anti-discrimination law. The one-year extension to her contract was the maximum possible. “The state ballet must now do its homework,” Partsch said.
One of the national state broadcasters was widely derided last year for staging a discussion about Black Lives Matter with a panel of white German men. This month the regional public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk banned a comedian from repeating sketches in which he applied black make-up to portray a fictional African son of the former Bavarian governor Franz Josef Strauss.
