Ballet World Research Articles

Ballet and pain: reflections on a risk-dance culture

This qualitative study of Western Canadian dancers explores how elements of the ballet world, and associated risk-taking behaviours, affect the physical and emotional health of dancers. Authoritarian power structures, intensely competitive training and performing environments, and hyper-critical and perfectionist attitudes of instructors and performers are found to be ubiquitous pressures that initially appear to facilitate success in dance but may ultimately compromise health. Drawing upon existing knowledge from the sociology of sport, we conceive of ballet as a ‘culture of risk’ that normalises pain and injury and encourages dancers to understand and talk about their pain in ways that both suppress and trivialise it. In addition, the pain–injury experience was found to have negative emotional consequences, such as feelings of crisis and loss, shame, guilt and anxiety for dancers who are complicit in accepting the often unhealthy conventions of the dance subculture, including problem approaches to eating and weight. Finally, because existing literatures have shown that gender and risk intersect in human movement cultures (such as sport and dance), the paper also considers the gender dimensions of ballet, and the ways in which the core identities of participants grow uneasily out of a setting that both rewards and hurts dancers.

Blurring the Boundaries of Genre, Gender, and Geopolitics: Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg's Transatlantic Collaboration in the 1930s

In 1933, the year Hitler was named chancellor of Germany, Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg launched a “new and rather surprising partnership” with a joint recital in Chicago. Page and Kreutzberg were, on the surface, unlikely artistic collaborators: she, an American ballerina and he, an exponent of the German new dance. Nevertheless, their partnership lasted four years—from 1932 through 1936—a fairly long term considering the usual obstacles to collaboration magnified by physical distance. With Chicago as the focal point they toured the Midwest and other regions of the United States, Japan, and Canada. The collaboration offered the two artists a number of advantages. Page had certain difficulties to surmount in achieving her goal of becoming a choreographic entrepreneur in the post-Diaghilev international ballet world: besides being a woman—a decided disadvantage when it came to being taken seriously as a choreographer, artistic director, and impresario in the ballet world—she lived in Chicago, outside the dance mecca of New York. She could parlay her collaboration with Kreutzberg into a cosmopolitan, modernist identity, thus preempting the threat of consignment to Midwestern obscurity. Kreutzberg, for his part, was in need of a continuous and widening stream of performance venues in which to develop his unique gifts as a solo performer; moreover, he had to contend with the rising fascism and homophobic militancy of the Third Reich as a gay man whose identity was antithetical to the nation-state of which he was ultimately to become a pawn.

<i>Byron at the Theatre</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Byron at the Theatre Richard Foulkes Byron at the Theatre. Edited by Peter Cochran. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008. Pp. ix +218. ISBN (10) 1 84718 427 8. £34.99. This collection of essays is based on a conference on Byron and the Theatre organised by the Newstead Abbey Byron Society and the Midland Romantic Seminar, and held at Nottingham Trent University on 12 May 2007. The range of contributors and their subjects is very diverse, with the editor responsible for no less than three chapters and co-authoring another, reflecting the fact that three speakers had to 'drop out' of the conference (and evidently the book) at short notice. Happily other speakers made their way to Nottingham from far afield: Cologne, Verona, Krakow, Yekaterinburg, Prague and Moscow, reflecting the strong interest that Byron still commands beyond his native heath. Although not structured chronologically the book virtually provides an account of Byron's [End Page 68] interest and involvement in the theatre from his schooldays to a continuing afterlife in the twenty-first century. Thus David Herbert and Peter Cochran recount the young Byron's recitations not only at the Harrow School Speech Day of 1805, but also in Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza over a decade later (9 November 1816), where he gave a reprise of the Chorus from Euripides' The Phoenician Women. In between he had taken part in theatricals at Southwell and made three speeches in the House of Lords, the delivery of which clearly owed something to his youthful acting experience. As the authors say: 'Byron knew himself, then, to be a good actor: but he could never, of course, be a professional one'. Neither, it seems, could he be a professional dramatist, for though he wrote half a dozen or so plays, he did so without any intention of their being performed on the stage of either of the patent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane – and this despite the fact that he was involved with the latter, going so far as to write the address for its reopening in 1812. It is all the more remarkable therefore that Byron's plays assumed such a prominent place in the theatrical repertoire from, in the case of Werner, for example, Macready at Drury Lane in January 1830 (lagging two years behind Thomas Barry in New York) to Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in June 1887 (admittedly just one special benefit performance). In between, as the lists of productions in the bibliography show, Byron's plays were performed widely by leading actor-managers (Phelps, Charles Kean and Calvert amongst them) in and beyond Britain. Margaret J. Howell did of course explore several of the most interesting of these productions in Byron Tonight: A Poet's Plays on the Nineteenth Century Stage (1982), and, although Byron at the Theatre complements her work with its useful listings, it does not add significantly to our knowledge about and appreciation of this phenomenon. The appeal was undoubtedly largely scenic, with Byron demanding exotic locations that the increasingly sophisticated technology of the Victorian stage was able to realise, but with Macready at least this did not eclipse his own performance as Werner, which G. H. Lewes considered to be 'one of his greatest parts', in which 'he represented the anguish of a weak mind prostrate, with a pathos almost as remarkable as the heroic agony of Kean's Othello'. The forlorn look and wailing accent when his son retorts upon him his own plea – 'Who taught me there were crimes made venial by the occasion?' – were not to be forgotten. Byron and the Theatre presses on into the twentieth century and beyond with Cochran revisiting productions of Cain by Stanislavski and Grotowski, in little more depth than Margaret J. Howell but with the addition of John Barton's 1995 production: 'very interesting, but […] not Byron'. Shona Allen transports readers to the world of ballet with her account of Nureyev's Manfred in the 1979 Paris and the 1981 Zurich versions and subsequent revisions, but again it is a case of 'not Byron's play, but Nureyev's ballet'. Not that this should be regarded as a criticism, since it...

Ethereal expression

Set in 19th-century Romanticism, classical ballets are still playing to full opera houses across the globe. This article explores paradoxes of time, cultural capital and gender in ballet as a global physical culture on- and off-stage. Drawing on ethnography of three national ballet companies in Stockholm, London and New York and a contemporary company in Frankfurt-am-Main, I suggest that classical ballet is preserved because it is not only a `high' culture, but also a physical culture which has been taught and cultivated between bodies for centuries. Scrutinizing the stories of the Romantic ballets that originated during an era in Europe when the supernatural was à la mode and class and cultural background had a greater impact on marriage choice than today, we note that ballets still have the ability to touch audiences through the archetypical themes of love in relation to social structure and norms, desire and morality. The most popular classical ballet productions such as Swan Lake, La Sylphide and Giselle have been challenged in radical contemporary versions which confirm the prominent position of classical ballet both in the ballet world and society at large. Comparative ethnographic work on ballet schools in different locations helps to uncover the global connections that point to the robust existence of ballet as a unitary form of physical culture.

Globalization, Habitus, and the Balletic Body

The aim in this article is to write an evocative ethnography of the embodiment of ballet as a cultural practice. The authors draw on their fieldwork at the Royal Ballet (London), where they conducted 20 in-depth interviews with ballet staff (and watched "the company at work" in class, rehearsal, and performance). They explored dancers' (n = 9) and ex-dancers' (who are now teachers, administrators, and character dancers; n = 11) perceptions of their bodies, dancing careers, and the major changes that have occurred in the world of ballet over their professional lives. They focus on their accounts of the homogenizing effects of globalization on the culture of the Royal Ballet. Although this research is set within the elite and narrow cultural field of dance, the authors hope that it is an interesting addition to broader debates on the interrelationships between individuals and institutions, the body and society, and globalization and culture.

Varieties of habitus and the embodiment of ballet

The overall aim of our research was to produce an ethnography of ballet as a social practice. We draw upon our fieldwork at the Royal Ballet (London) where we conducted 20 in-depth interviews with ballet staff, and observed ‘the company at work’, in class, rehearsal, and performance. We explored dancers’ ( n = 9) and ex-dancers’ (who are now administrators, teachers, and character dancers: n = 11) perceptions of their bodies, dancing careers, and the major changes that have occurred in the world of ballet over their professional lives. In this article, we draw upon Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, physical capital and cultural capital. The main focus of our article is an extended discussion of our threefold distinction between individual habitus, institutional habitus and choreographic habitus. Although our ethnography of the body is set within the elite cultural field of professional classical ballet, we hope that our research adds to debates on the interrelationships between individuals and institutions, the body and society, and on the salience of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus for understandings of the social world.

The Turning (review)

Reviewed by: The Turning Deborah Stevenson Whelan, Gloria The Turning. HarperCollins, 2006 [224p] Library ed. ISBN 0-06-075594-6$16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-075593-8$15.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 5-8 Tatiana is a young dancer in Leningrad's Kirov Ballet in 1991, thrilled to be finally getting principal roles, fond of her artist boyfriend, and adored by her family. Nonetheless, she's doubtful that the Soviet Union offers her the ballet opportunities for which she yearns, and she secretly, with her friend and fellow dancer Vera, plans to defect when the company tours to Paris. Growing political ferment endangers her prospects (her grandfather is a pro-Yeltsin activist) but doesn't deter her from her plan, and she embarks with the company on their tour's first stop in Moscow—where she's caught inside the Parliament building during the August [End Page 291] coup. This is pretty stock historical fare, with a collection of contrivances helping to place the protagonist so as to make her a useful witness to significant events, and characters more functionary than human; subplots, especially the side story about Tatiana's boyfriend's involvement with a shady British art dealer, add little to the main story. The ballet world is still an enticing milieu, and the book gives it its heady due, providing evocative details of rehearsal and company politics and making it plausible that Tatiana would be willing to leave everything she knows behind for her art. The coverage of the Soviet factions is careful and clear, differentiating old hard-liners from Gorbachev backers from Yeltsin supporters sufficiently for even readers totally unfamiliar with Russian history. Ballet fans who enjoyed Carolyn Meyer's tale of nineteenth-century dancers, Marie, Dancing (BCCB 1/06), may enjoy taking a tour jeté in another pair of historical toe shoes. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

In the Presence of the Body: Theorizing Training, Injuries and Pain in Ballet

After an injury; a dancer learns, at least for a short time, to heed his [sic] body if only because pain speaks a language almost anyone can understand. This heightened awareness should not disappear once the dancer returns to form; rather it should help him continue to learn about the ways his body moves and reacts (Ashley 1984, 217–218).In this statement the American dancer Merrill Ashley, who had a memorable 30-year career with the New York City Ballet, expresses a view on injuries that goes against the grain of dominant thinking within the world of ballet. According to Ashley, who suffered from several injuries in her first two years with the company, an injury can be a positive experience for a dancer, because it heightens her awareness of her body and teaches her about its possibilities and limitations. This is a rather exceptional view in a world where the vast majority of professionals commonly see injuries as a disaster (Wulff 1998; Wainwright, Williams and Turner 2005). The dominant realization that a dancer's career is short makes dancers fear an injury, because it will prevent them from dancing and cause them to lose roles. Because “there is a rule in the ballet world against casting or promoting dancers who are injured” (Wulff 1998, 106), dancers who suffer from an injury will wait as long as possible before letting others know, because they are afraid it will stop them dancing (Mainwaring, Krasnow and Kerr 2001).

British subjects: an anthropology of Britain

Nigel Rapport, ed., British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002, 340 pages.Despite its subtitle, British Subjects is intended to highlight anthropological endeavour which addresses contemporary rather than, as Rapport writes, to offer a definitive anthropological account of Britain or British. Rapport argues for strengths of such an approach, as well as ways anthropology about can be paradigmatic of discipline's possibilities, skills and significance (p. 15). Such aspirations are largely borne by collection of 17 essays which make up this volume.The essays are grouped into five broad topical clusters: Nationalism, Contestation and Performance of Tradition; Strategies of Modernity: Heritage, Leisure, Dissociation; The Appropriation of Discourse; Methodologies and Ethnomethodologies; and The Making (and Unmaking) of Community: Ethnicity, Religiosity, Locality. This placing of chapters within groupings is well thought and Rapport has written useful introductions to each cluster, drawing thematic intersections amongst chapters appearing in them. The first cluster begins with Anne Rowbottom's considerations of paradoxical relationship between hereditary privilege and democracy. Through fieldwork with people who regularly attend events where members of royal family appear in public, Rowbottom builds an argument about practices of vernacular religiosity amongst this dedicated group of people who call themselves Royalists. She demonstrates in turn how Real Royalists alternate between frameworks of difference and of unity in order to circumnavigate inherent contradictions of civil religion, constitutional monarchy, and democracy in Britain. The second chapter in this cluster is based on Isle of Man where Susan Lewis describes a different sort of civic event: Tynwald Day. She traces some of contested meanings this day holds and argues that despite such contradictions, event can still serve as a site of collective identity. Helena Wulff's chapter, exploring styles, is final contribution to this section. Her research, based on British Royal Ballet, demonstrates the ongoing symbolic construction of difference in transnational world of ballet (p. 79); ways in which aesthetics, dance styles, performance costumes, rehearsal clothing, and bodily decoration are employed towards these ends; and contradictions of a discourse of a national style in face of transnational flow of dancers.The second topical cluster, Strategies of Modernity, begins with a contribution by Sharon Macdonald. She draws on fieldwork at Museum of Island Life on Isle of Skye, Scotland, to explore the 'fetishization' of past everyday life (p. 89) as a form of cultural practice. Macdonald's illuminating piece describes how once everyday objects (tools, crafts, domestic items, mass-produced goods) come to reside in a museum, they become in effect sacralized, and in turn de-alienated from being just commodities. She goes on to contextualize this practice within particular contours of social uncertainty, arguing that valorization of everyday things is a way of seeking existential anchors (p. 103) in face of social fragmentation as well as a way perhaps of talking back against an all-pervasive consumerism. The next chapter, from Andrew Dawson, takes up theme of social upheaval and strategies for managing it but within context of a former coal-mining town in north-east of England. Dawson is first author in collection to explicitly address gender relations. He does so through an exploration of ways in which pursuit of leisure (allotments, writing poetry, attending local football matches) serve to help people work out social change, and postindustrial change in particular. Dawson interweaves ethnography of postindustrial transformations, gender relations, and lived experiences of older people with notion of leisure practices as cultural resource. …

Between Scylla and Charybdis. Nutritional education versus body culture and the ballet aesthetic: The effects on the lives of female dancers

A key objective of this empirical study was to investigate whether improved education for dancers about nutrition has made a positive change to the body culture of the ballet world and lifestyle of female dancers. The issues were foreshadowed by sociological theories of the body, performance nutrition, and disordered eating. An interpretive, critical research approach was used to maximise the 'insider perspective' of the researcher, with over 20 years experience of the training and professional ballet culture. A small-scale qualitative research project aimed to capture 'thick description' and authentic accounts of the human realities of ballet culture from the inside. Interview and questionnaire responses were gathered from student-dancers, professional dancers, teachers/managers, and medics at a UK vocational ballet school and a company fed, to some extent, from that training school. Findings were collated with experiential observations in the daily workplace, retrospective participant observation through personal diaries and documentation including some biographies and autobiographies of professional dancers. The findings indicated that there is still a gap between the rhetoric of nutritional education and the reality of the ballet world's aesthetic and practices. 'Cult-like', authoritarian behaviour and 'docile' submissive attitudes were apparent and contributed to problems with self-esteem, body image and eating disorders. Whilst dancers in training were better informed, pressures related to the body inside the profession dominated attitudes and behaviour. The recommendations include a re-appraisal of the ballet aesthetic and body culture in the management of the profession and more empowerment of dancers to encourage them to question, critique and improve the culture of their art form rather than merely accept its ideals and demands.

Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet

There is a wood-preserving product advertised as ‘doing exactly what it says on the tin’. Moving Music is the first book on the analysis of choreo-musical relationships to be written by a dance scholar and it provides an excellent and much-needed contribution to the discipline but it does not do exactly what it says on the back cover. In one instance this is a fairly trivial failure to match up to a piece of promotional writing in which we are told that the ‘different musical concepts’ of a number of choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, are included. Admittedly it does say ‘in a broad overview’ but, in fact, Cunningham is given only one paragraph and a sentence pointing out that ‘his extreme method of independence has had no obvious impact on the ballet world’ (p. 60). The other misleading claim, however, is of fundamental importance since it reflects a misconception about choreo-musical relationships that has pervaded thinking in the subject throughout its development. The cover says that ‘using ideas drawn from recent dance theory and musicology, Jordan ... proposes a new way of understanding musical-choreographic meanings and of analysing the style and structure from which they arise’. My contention is that, on the contrary, a large part of the value of the book is that Jordan is engaging in the same sort of detailed structural analysis of dance as was undertaken in music through the last century. In so doing, she has gone a long way towards redressing a previous imbalance in choreo-musical analysis and it is important for the discipline that this is recognised. dance research

American Indian ballerinas

The authorized biography of four 20th-century American Indian ballerinas, all raised in Oklahoma during the 1920s and 1930s and internationally famous in the ballet world. Livingston explores the tribal backgrounds of the women, showing how their rich cultural heritage contributed to their style.

Joseph Cornell's theater of the mind: selected diaries, letters, and files

Joseph Cornell's reputation has only grown since his death in 1973. His boxes - stuffed with such objects as flowers, buttons and toys - are among the most unique achievements in the modernist canon. His life seems as mysterious as his boxes. For virtually all of his adult existence, he lived in New York with his mother and brother, amid the mass of materials he had accumulated. Though he showed his work regularly, his isolation and eccentric force made him appear an idiot savant. This is a selection of his diaries and other writings. Cornell used his diaries as he used his boxes, to hold and preserve his feelings. We see here his deep immersion in French Symbolist poetry, and his intense interest in his Surrealist contemporaries. We also see his poignant yearning for les sylphides, the fairies of the ballet world. He also corresponded with an astonishing range of people, including Marianne Moore, Tony Curtis and Susan Sontag. His letters were often sent as collages, several of which are reproduced.

The family therapy of anorexia nervosa

ANOREXIA nervosa is a condition which affects a population of predominantly young women preoccupied by their weight and their (misperceived) shape. The largest proportion of papers presented at this conference are concerned with the investigation of the incidence and nature of the condition and less so with the therapy. This is quite proper in the light of the many uncertainties about the subject. However, a priority of interest in causes over treatment is shared by the entire system with which we are involved. That is to say the population of anorexic subjects, their informal and family networks, and the group of professional helpers who become involved with them. All members of this system express a great interest in the causes of the condition. Certain elements in the system also express considerable commitment to preventing drastic changes in the anorexic youngsters’ weight. The young person with the symptoms of the condition is liable to avoid treatment, believing that it will impose a terrifying change on her. At the same time, she may suffer a great deal of distress about the condition and its probable consequences. The fact that the parents’ cooperation is often thought of as incomplete by the professional helpers, has been taken to suggest that they are resisting change in their daughter. The social network appears to support change, in the direction of increased weight, girth and appetite, but this is not so always, for example, in the world of ballet and fashion modelling, as GARNER and GARFINKEL (1980) and LOWENKOPF and VINCENT (1982) have suggested. From time to time we have observed ourselves and our colleagues acting in ways that appear to be the contrary of therapeutic. This is not, I hasten to add, because we have an investment in keeping our workload high but as an aspect of what can only be termed a “countertransference enactment”. We have observed ourselves or others apparently feeling so closely identified with the patient’s symptomatic anxieties, that we come, momentarily, to share her misperceptions, and to believe that therapy is making progress when in fact the patient has merely permitted herself to evade weight gain. These various locations of resistance to change are important if the subject of the family therapy of anorexia nervosa is to be put in its right context. It is important to make another, preliminary, position statement. An interest in causes has certain “associations”. Knowledge of causes sounds as if it is likely to lead to rational therapy but this is not necessarily true. Therapy that is effective may turn out, eventually, to owe its efficacy to links with causes, but a clear aetiological understanding does not have any necessary connection with the development of therapy. For example the cultural preoccupation with thinness has been suggested by GARFINKEL and GARNER (1982) to be one of the multi-factorial components in the aetiology of anorexia. Even if shown to be indubitably important, it is not readily susceptible to intervention by mental health