The body as a tool: professional classical ballet dancers’ embodiment

Abstract

This article is a qualitative study, which adopts the approach of social construction in order to comprehend the role played by the body in the formation of social behaviour. Using the concept of embodiment, professional ballet dancers have been chosen in order to investigate the particular attitude they form towards their bodies. The use of their bodies as tools on which they invest (capital) and which are expected to ‘indemnify’ them in the future, show the difference between this attitude and the one prevailing in the western commercial societies (the body as an object of short-lived delight and pleasure). The phenomenology of the healthy, athletic, thin and injured body offers the possibility of understanding the social dimension of the body, as generated in the sociology of the body. Professional ballet dancers form an almost ascetic, abstinent attitude towards their bodies in order to have it work at the limits of its biological basis (overcoming even pain and serious injuries) and offer them profits (in a wider sense including financial remuneration as well as prestige and professional development and distinction). The presentation of the way in which professional ballet dancers use their bodies is an example which may increase the understanding of the function of embodiment in the generation of social behaviour.