A bewigged Johann Kobborg with Alina Cojocaru in the Royal Ballet's Giselle. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
It's been over two decades since overly sheltered ballet critics raised the alarm about a nastily hirsute trend emerging in modern dance. During the mid-to-late 1970s, women on the cutting edge of choreography tended to hold equivalently radical views with regard to body hair, and a quite remarkable number of reviews from that period featured outraged references to unshaven armpits, coupled with wistful asides about the immaculate grooming standards upheld in ballet.
Times and fashions change, along with political correctness. But hair does still mark a profound divide between ballet and modern dance - even if the focus has shifted from the women to the men, and from the body to the scalp.
It is now established practice for all alpha males in British modern dance to shave their heads. I don't know exactly when this started - it may have been with Lloyd Newson, or with Laurie Booth - but it has certainly got to the stage when one can't imagine Wayne McGregor having had any kind of career without his trademark pointy-headed baldness.
This is in direct opposition to the world of ballet, where status has traditionally been equated with flowing locks. Would Nureyev have achieved superstar status without his sexy shaggy mane, would all those Kirov and Bolshoi dancers have been heroes of the Soviet ballet without their floppy hair- and their vividly liberal use of blonde dye?
Even among the dancers in today's Royal Ballet hair remains de rigueur.
Take Johan Kobborg. Off-stage his receding hairline and fetchingly stubbled scalp are the ideal frame for his slightly wolfish charm. Yet on stage this look never features, and even when Kobborg is dancing 21st-century repertory he is always wearing a discreet old-fashioned auburn wig.
Frankly I think this is a shame. Kobborg's unique presence as a dancer is that his polished Danish style comes edged with a dangerous unpredictability. Wouldn't it altogether be more exciting for Aurora to be awoken by a Prince with a shaven head, for Manon to be in love with a bald Des Grieux, for Juliet to kill herself over a buzz-cut Romeo? Isn't it time for the wigs to come off?
