Last Friday's demonstration against Simone Clarke at the London Coliseum. Photograph: Frank Baron
From the perspective of the dance profession, the story of Simone Clarke's recent outing as the BNP ballerina is weirdly ironic. Even though the company with which Clarke performs sounds like a BNP publicist's dream, English National Ballet is in fact an entirely international institution.
It has always depended on foreign dancers for its survival. Agnes Oaks and Thomas Edur, the company's guest stars, are both from Estonia; Clarke's own partner, Yat-Sen Chang, is Cuban-Chinese; other principals come from Russia, Georgia, Japan, and the Czech Republic.
Right now, apart from Clarke, there is only one other British-born principal dancing with the company. It's pretty much the same situation over at The Royal Ballet - and who would want it otherwise, when there is a choice of Alina Cojocaru, Tamara Rojo, Zenaida Yanowsky, Carlos Acosta and Johan Kobborg in the cast lists, adding such lustre to the UK dance scene?
There are also dancers and choreographers from Britain working just about everywhere in the world, and the dance scene today would be unimaginable without such global movement. This is true historically, too: classical ballet evolved from a mix of Russian, French, Italian and other European influences, while modern dance has borrowed heavily from African and Asian traditions.
How bizarre, then, is it for Clarke, a member of one of the most globally mobile of professions, to ally herself to a party whose aim is to maintain "the identity of this country's indigenous people".
Clarke is free to hold her own political opinions, however tacky. She should also be free to perform without harassment. But she should be asking herself hard questions about what would happen to her profession, and her colleagues, should her party of choice gain political power.
