Abstract
Over the last several years Instagram has significantly reshaped how ballet and ballet practice appear as gestures. Compared to its institutional sites of display, ballet on Instagram shows shifts in visual ideology, aesthetic materiality, and relationship to its audience. The platform’s technological, digital, and visual specificities transformed the operating image of ballet on it. I argue that Instagram changed ballet’s mode of representation by reformulating its social and temporal profile, while shifts in ballet’s contextual and visual appearance overhauled its ideological workings.In Instagram’s environments, the body exists as ballet’s proxy—held in place by the collective digital labour of social media users. Moreover, ballet on Instagram is an infinite diary of the body in becoming, powerfully reflecting Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘end of the world that is of no end’ (Nancy 1993: 5). I employ Nancy’s ideas of image, sense, and singularity, and I look into the dialectics between the matter and the sign to describe the body’s digital outline in relation to its material signature. Ballet on Instagram is embedded in the vast, propulsive, yet unpredictable environment of the digital and is both reshaped and challenged by it.
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