Time & Perspective Quote by Graeme Murphy

Thrill, here, isn’t about artistic triumph so much as cultural math: Graeme Murphy is savoring a shift in who feels entitled to watch dance. The line lands with an almost comic understatement - “you know, they...” - as if the obviousness of the breakthrough still surprises him. That trailing pause functions like a wink at an old, stubborn assumption: that dance, especially ballet and contemporary work, is “for” women, or at least socially coded that way.

Murphy’s delight at “50% male” isn’t simple bragging. It’s a diagnosis of a market and a stigma. He’s talking about legitimacy in a world where arts organizations live and die by ticket sales and sponsorship narratives. If men are showing up in equal numbers, the art form gains an aura of neutrality - less niche, less “soft,” more broadly sanctioned. It’s unfair, but it’s real: cultural prestige often arrives wearing the costume of male approval.

There’s also an artist’s subtext: audiences shape programming. A more gender-balanced house can loosen what companies feel pressured to perform - not just story ballets with familiar romance beats, but work that’s stranger, harder, funnier, more physically abrasive. Murphy, a choreographer known for modernizing ballet’s emotional register, sounds relieved that the room is widening.

The quote doubles as a quiet rebuke to the macho taboo that keeps men from buying tickets even when they’ll happily watch athletic bodies on a field. He’s thrilled because a doorway has opened - not to men alone, but to dance being treated as public culture rather than a gendered hobby.