#50pics

[40/50] pictures of → Maria Tallchief

Elizabeth Marie Tallchief, also known as Betty and Ki-He-Kah-Stah-Tsa Tall Chief, was an Osage prima ballerina – America’s first dancer to attain such a rank – and first principal dancer of the New York City Ballet. As a child, Betty and her sister took weekly ballet lessons in Oklahoma, a luxury that she was afforded as one of the daughters of a wealthy tribal leader – in Betty’s infancy, her family were firebombed as part of the Osage Reign of Terror, the systematic attempt by White ranchers to murder the Osage for their tribal headrights. From the time she was three years old, however, she trained as a dancer and became a fixture in Oklahoma’s vaudeville and rodeo circuit (which Betty hated, as she was afraid of bulls).

By 1933, the combination of a promise of child stardom for Betty and her sister Marjorie and the increasingly violent and sexual abuses of the eldest Tallchief brother led to Betty, Marjorie, and their parents resettling in Los Angeles. It was here that Betty trained under the legendary Bronislava Nijinska of the Ballet Russes; she worked with Nijinska all through high school. When she graduated at seventeen, she moved alone to New York City and joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. It was here that she became Maria; choreographer Agnes de Mille wanted her to “Russify” her name to Tallchieva, but Betty refused. Instead, she began to use a Russification of her middle name.

By 1944, she danced the lead in Nijinska’s Ancient Russia and the soloist in Le Beau Danube. It was also in 1944 that she was promoted to a soloist by the company’s new contract choreographer: Maria’s future husband, iconic choreographer, leading ballet mind of the 20th century, and noted raging misogynist George Balanchine. In 1947, she followed him to Paris and danced in the notoriously difficult (and gorgeous) composition Apollo, a performance for which she was praised – and heinously racially slurred – by the European press. When the couple returned to America in 1948 and Balanchine founded the New York City Ballet, Maria became America’s first prima ballerina and originated the spellbinding, unmatched role of the Firebird in Prokofiev’s eponymous ballet. She remained with the NYCB until 1960 (long outlasting her marriage to Balanchine), but she often took sabbaticals from her home company to guest-feature with other ballet companies: for an 18-month guest stay with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1954-1955, Maria became the highest-paid ballerina of the era.

After permanently leaving the NYCB in 1960, Maria joined the American Ballet Theater, and later, in 1966, the Hamburg Ballet. She retired from performance in 1968 after dancing the prima role in van Dyk’s Cinderella. She moved to Chicago where she became a noted art patron, dance teacher (including for one week to yours truly, in a conservatory workshop), and philanthropist; she served on the board of the Chicago Festival Ballet for 13 years, the Lyric Opera of Chicago for six years, and co-founded the short-lived Chicago City Ballet in 1981.

[22/50] pictures of → Emilia Clarke

[10/100] pictures of → Kelly Marie Tran

Trần Loan, known professionally as Kelly Marie Tran, is a Vietnamese-American actor best known for her role as Rose Tico in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy (beginning with Episode VIII: The Last Jedi) and associated media, including the Star Wars: Forces of Destiny cartoon series. Although cast in Star Wars in 2015, Kelly’s career began in 2011 with the Los Angeles improv troupes Upright Citizens Brigade and The Second City. Since TLJ, Kelly received critical and audience acclaim for her role of Jules in Sorry For Your Loss, in which she is praised for “tapping into her characters’ intrinsic empathy.”

However, also since TLJ, Kelly Marie Tran has borne the brunt of audience hatred for the film as the intersection of anti-Asian racism and misogyny collided in both her once effervescent online personality and the irresponsibly-underwritten role of Rose Tico. Of this targeted campaign of harassment, I’ll defer to KMT’s own words:

“I had been brainwashed into believing that my existence was limited to the boundaries of another person’s approval. I had been tricked into thinking that my body was not my own, that I was beautiful only if someone else believed it, regardless of my own opinion. I had been told and retold this by everyone: by the media, by Hollywood, by companies that profited from my insecurities, manipulating me so that I would buy their clothes, their makeup, their shoes, in order to fill a void that was perpetuated by them in the first place.

Yes, I have been lied to. We all have.

And it was in this realization that I felt a different shame — not a shame for who I was, but a shame for the world I grew up in. And a shame for how that world treats anyone who is different.I am not the first person to have grown up this way. This is what it is to grow up as a person of color in a white-dominated world. This is what it is to be a woman in a society that has taught its daughters that we are worthy of love only if we are deemed attractive by its sons. This is the world I grew up in, but not the world I want to leave behind.

[…T]hese are the thoughts that run through my head every time I pick up a script or a screenplay or a book. I know the opportunity given to me is rare. I know that I now belong to a small group of privileged people who get to tell stories for a living, stories that are heard and seen and digested by a world that for so long has tasted only one thing. I know how important that is. And I am not giving up.

You might know me as Kelly.

I am the first woman of color to have a leading role in a “Star Wars” movie.

I am the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair.

[17/50] pictures of → Emilia Clarke

[18/50] pictures of → Emilia Clarke