The Routledge Introduction to Ballet, its Culture and Issues
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This chapter examines the history and practice of skin color prejudices in the ballet world, especially as they relate to conceptions of “whiteness.” The ethnic roots of ballet (Kealiinohomoku) and Africanist influences on George Balanchine, which led him to invent a new kind of classicism (Dixon Gottschild), are considered, as is the dance world’s reception of these topics. It is suggested that Balanchine might have been a strong force for the integration of ballet had he not been limited by his racially hidebound context. It is also suggested that ballet might always be “the kingdom of the pale” unless the ballet world moves beyond superficial ways of seeing.
Onstage, a nineteenth-century German girl waits for her first encounter with the Middle East, which will come courtesy of Tchaikovsky and the many years of choreographic evolution that have preceded the current version of The Nutcracker in which she is performing. The girl's name is Clara (or sometimes Marie), and she has come to a fantasy land, where a lively Spanish dance has been given in her honor. Now, there is softer, slower music with a steady, insistent rhythm and a snaking melody carried by an English horn. Dancers glide onto the stage wearing gauzy harem pants and jeweled headdresses, their faces impassive, their gait deliberate and stately. Who are they? Clara's face seems to ask, and what will they do? Certainly it will be like nothing she has ever seen before because they are dressed like people from far away, a hot climate perhaps, where no one moves quickly and different customs prevail. There is a woman who walks like a princess, with a cool, internal gaze and limbs that stretch out imperially. A consort picks her up and swirls her arched figure around as if she were in need of a breeze. Then they stand side by side, pausing as if transfixed by a greater power, their hands drifting above them with palms facing the sky. When they disappear, Clara stares after them, wondering, no doubt, where they came from and what on earth that was all about.
This essay explores culturally derived and institutionally sanctioned gender portrayals in classical ballet by focusing on the historical evolution of pointe work. Despite some recent experiments, ballet men tend to dance on pointe only for comic effect, as in Les Ballets Trockadero. The contempormy exception of a scene from choreographer Edouard Lock's Amelia is examined and, for comparison, hermeneutical dance analysis is also applied to the practice of Georgian folk dance men, who dance on their toes in a form where women do not. It is suggested that both ballet women on pointe and Georgian men on their toes embody the qualities of athletic strength (often coded male) and softly graceful elegance (often coded female), and that examining and challenging these culturally rooted practices reveals underlying, persistent stereotypes that inhibit the evolution of both ballet and theatricalized folk dance.
Classical ballet technique is commonly taught through the use of authoritarian practices and normalizing aesthetic values, but the construction of the ballet dancer as a docile subject in opposition to an all-knowing instructor might impede ballet's progression. In this article I explore my development of a feminist or democratic ballet pedagogy that transforms the ballet studio into an environment that engages individual participants’ learning styles and life experiences, and encourages experimentation and collaboration. Using data collected from students enrolled in my ballet technique courses, I examine a pedagogical approach in which alternative teacher–student relationships are created and practiced. My intervention on tradition uses the classroom as the site in which to interrogate ballet's traditional teaching methods and values, and I seek an approach for the twenty-first century that preserves rigor and is invested in the maintenance of the form at the same time that it generates and uses best practices.
Recently, the field of somatics has provided dance scholarship with a growing body of literature. Research has been conducted in the areas of dance science and education. Dance medicine and somatic education scholars have been able to help dance teachers find ways of using the body effectively in technique classes. For example, Glenna Batson (1990, 1993) and Sylvie Fortin (1993, 1995) have investigated the role of somatics in the improvement of technical dance skills. Further, Fortin (1995) has investigated learning and teaching theory as applied to somatics and dance pedagogy.
As a somaticist and educator, I acknowledge and appreciate the impressive work conducted by these researchers and educators. However, my current work moves somatics into another direction. I am interested in looking at somatic theory and practice through a socio-cultural lens. I am particularly interested in investigating how the body is shaped by society and the dance world, in which performers constantly strive for perfection.
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet is the first work of its kind to treat contemporary ballet as a genre within ballet history. In contrast to many, the anthology prioritizes connections between communities as it interweaves chapters authored by scholars, critics, choreographers, and working professional dancers. The work broadens the scope of ballet studies in the twenty-first century. In considering contemporary ballet as a noted moment in ballet’s historiography deserved of chronicling and further study, the Handbook provides new perspectives on ballet’s past, present, and future. In an effort to dismantle the linearity of academic canons, the seven parts, and fifty-three chapters within, provide multiple entry points for readers to engage in the balletic discourse through the lenses of dance criticism, choreography, and dance theory. With choices to rename pioneers as “game changers,” an emphasis on composition and process alongside dances created, and the postulation that contemporary ballet is a definitive era, the book carves out space for critical inquiry as it makes plain the inequalities, struggles, and lack of diversity in the form. The chapters can be read independently or collectively, as each contributes valuable, often experiential, knowledge while simultaneously adding to the larger project. Many of the chapters consider whether or not ballet can reconcile its past and actually become present, while others see ballet as flexible and willing to be remolded at the hands of those with tools to do so. The anthology is a resource for the general public as well as researchers; it positions twenty-first-century ballet from an international scope and brings forth contemporary issues and polemics, while pointing to possible directions for the future of the form.
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet is the first work of its kind to treat contemporary ballet as a genre within ballet history. In contrast to many, the anthology prioritizes connections between communities as it interweaves chapters authored by scholars, critics, choreographers, and working professional dancers. The work broadens the scope of ballet studies in the twenty-first century. In considering contemporary ballet as a noted moment in ballet’s historiography deserved of chronicling and further study, the Handbook provides new perspectives on ballet’s past, present, and future. In an effort to dismantle the linearity of academic canons, the seven parts, and fifty-three chapters within, provide multiple entry points for readers to engage in the balletic discourse through the lenses of dance criticism, choreography, and dance theory. With choices to rename pioneers as “game changers,” an emphasis on composition and process alongside dances created, and the postulation that contemporary ballet is a definitive era, the book carves out space for critical inquiry as it makes plain the inequalities, struggles, and lack of diversity in the form. The chapters can be read independently or collectively, as each contributes valuable, often experiential, knowledge while simultaneously adding to the larger project. Many of the chapters consider whether or not ballet can reconcile its past and actually become present, while others see ballet as flexible and willing to be remolded at the hands of those with tools to do so. The anthology is a resource for the general public as well as researchers; it positions twenty-first-century ballet from an international scope and brings forth contemporary issues and polemics, while pointing to possible directions for the future of the form.
Tchaikovsky's Ballets combines analysis of the music of Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and Nutcracker with a description based on rare and not easily accessible documents of the first productions of these works in imperial Russia. Essential background concerning the ballet audience, the collaboration of composer and ballet-master, and Moscow in the 1860s leads into an account of the first production of Swan Lake in 1877. A discussion of the theatre reforms initiated by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theatres and Tchaikovsky's patron, prepares us for a study of the still-famous 1890 production of Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky's first collaboration with the choreographer Marius Petipa. Professor Wiley then explains how Nutcracker, which followed two years after Sleeping Beauty, was seen by its producers and audiences in a much less favourable light in 1882 than it is now. The final chapter discusses the celebrated revival of Swan Lake in 1985 by Petipa and Leve Ivanov.
The Life and Works of Lev Ivanov is the first book-length study in any language about this Russian artist - Marius Petipa’s colleague and Tchaikovsky’s collaborator - who is widely celebrated and yet virtually unknown. It follows Ivanov from his infancy in a St Petersburg foundling home through his training in the Imperial Theatre School and his celebrity marriage, to a career as a dancer, régisseur, and choreographer in the St Petersburg Imperial Ballet. Ivanov’s artistic world is described, as is his legacy - some dozen works, including Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and the famous dances from Prince Igor - which inspired Mikhail Fokine in the next generation. The book is richly documented, including the first complete publication of Ivanov’s memoirs, and hundreds of citations, many published here for the first time, from state documents, reminiscences, and criticism.
Mindy Aloff, a leading dance critic who has written for The Nation, The New Republic, and The New Yorker, has brought together here a marvelous book of stories by and about dancers--entertaining and informative anecdotes that capture the boundless variety and richness of dance as an art, a tradition, a profession, a pastime, an obsession, a reality, and, for the dancer, an ideal. George Balanchine is here, and so are Fred Astaire, Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, Savion Glover, Martha Graham, and Lola Montez, and also stars from other arts--such as Akira Kurosawa and Bob Dylan--who have spoken about dancing with wit or illumination. There are stories about Irene and Vernon Castle, Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, Paul Taylor and Mark Morris. We read about the charisma and spontaneity of Anna Pavlova, about the secret to Vaslav Nijinsky’ s success ("I worked like an ox and I lived like a martyr"), about George Balanchine racing to a union dispute with a bag of dimes. Many of the stories are amusing, but some are rueful, even sad, and a few are dark. Aloff concludes the volume with an essay about how dancing has been able to record its past, sometimes over centuries, and about how the art of the dancer, apparently as ephemeral in performance as cloud patterns, turns out, when conditions are hospitable, to be much more hardy and resilient than many people suppose. A glorious promenade of stories that stretch as far back as classical times and as far afield as Japan, India, and Java, this superb collection will be treasured by everyone who loves dance, whether young or old.
In her scholarship on pedagogy, Gloria Ladson-Billings describes COVID-19 as a call to re-set education using a more culturally relevant pedagogy. As ballet teachers and researchers working in higher education and pre-professional settings, we teach a form of dance often associated with the characteristics of white supremacy. Through this collaborative institutional ethnography, we generated methods for posing questions, critiquing choices, and imagining alternatives to create more equitable educational settings. We connect the process of addressing and challenging systemic exclusions in ballet with tangible steps toward creating more inclusive classes and performances that value the joy and pleasure in moving.
This anthology explores alternative and parallel influences that shape the culture of ballet. The ‘we’ of ballet is complex, encompassing individuals and communities, often marginalized, who contribute to discourses about ballet beyond the mainstream White, patriarchal, Eurocentric, heterosexual constructs of gender, race and class.
Focuses on ethical issues confronting Western theatrical dance, from treatment of dancers to choreography, dance criticism, presenting and paradigm shifts in the dance field. It aims to equip dance artists with alternative frameworks and ethical decision-making skills for different stages of their careers and with dignity and respect.
This anthology explores alternative and parallel influences that shape the culture of ballet. The ‘we’ of ballet is complex, encompassing individuals and communities, often marginalized, who contribute to discourses about ballet beyond the mainstream White, patriarchal, Eurocentric, heterosexual constructs of gender, race and class.
The first of its kind, this volume presents research-based fictionalized case studies from experts in the field of dance education, examining theory and practice developed from real-world scenarios that call for ethical decision-making. Dilemmas faced by dance educators in the studio, on stage, in recreation centers and correctional facilities, and on social media are explored, accompanied by activities for humanizing dance pedagogy. These challenges converge from educational policies and mandates developed over the past two decades, including teacher-proof “scripted” curriculum, high-stakes testing, standardization, and methods-centered teacher preparation; difficulties are often perpetuated by those who want to make change happen but do not know how.
Surveying American ballet in 1913, Willa Cather reported that few girls expressed any interest in taking ballet class and that those who did were hard-pressed to find anything other than dingy studios and imperious teachers. A century later, ballet is everywhere. There are ballet companies across the United States; ballet is commonly featured in film, television, literature, and social media; professional ballet dancers are spokespeople for all kinds of products; nail polish companies market colors like “Ballet Slippers”; and, most importantly, millions of American children have taken ballet class. Beginning with the arrival of Russian dancers like Anna Pavlova in the early 1900s, Ballet Class: An American History explores the growth of ballet from an ancillary part of nineteenth-century musical theater, opera, and vaudeville to the quintessential extracurricular activity it is today, pursued by countless children nationwide and an integral part of twentieth-century American childhood across borders of gender, class, race, and sexuality. A social history, Ballet Class takes a new approach to ballet and helps ground an art form often perceived to be elite in the experiences of everyday people who spent time in barre-lined studios. Drawing on materials including children’s books, memoirs by professional dancers and choreographers, pedagogy manuals, dance periodicals, archival collections, and oral histories, this pathbreaking study provides a national perspective on the history and significance of recreational ballet class in the United States and its influence on many facets of children’s lives, including gender norms, consumerism, body image, children’s literature, extracurricular activities, and popular culture.
At its debut in 1866, La Source already had it all: dagger-wielding Muslims dominating veiled women, a magic flower in a green ecology, and a full-blown environmental crisis at the end. When the Paris Opera ballet restaged this Orientalist and colonial drama in 2011, and again in 2014, the contemporary context of homegrown jihad, climate politics, and a law banning the dissimulation of the face in public spaces, kept it relevant. At four historic performances, over 150 years, this book explores the resonance of La Source ’s double narrative in its contemporary contexts: the biopolitics of bodily hybridity and regeneration and the cosmopolitics of the exploitation of human and natural resources.
This article examines the phenomenon of “enlightened balletomanes” within the Russian ballet critique (XIX century), as well as peculiarities and key trends of their critique activity. Ballet critique, similar to the contemporary to it theatrical critique, recruited into its authors educated and literary gifted ballet enthusiasts. Observing ballet on the regular basis, the theatre habitues were turning into its connoisseurs; they payed detailed attention to dance technique and content of performances, its weak and strong sides, were able to describe a stage movement and a dance, as well as formulate their perceptions and assessments. Such experts, who also wielded a skillful pen, were called the “enlightenment balletomanes” in analogy with “enlightened theatregoers”. Some of them used to be actors, journalist or dramaturgists, some even military officers or government officials, but being in a constant connection with the ballet theatre, they intergrew the profession of ballet peer reviewers and observers, contributing to the establishment of the professional ballet critique of its time.
Born two hundred years ago in Marseilles, Marius Petipa spent more than sixty years in Imperial Russia as a ballet master, serving directly under the eye of the Emperor. He became the greatest choreographer of the nineteenth century, creating a quantity of work, some of which—such as Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty— has survived to attract audiences all round the world. In Russia, he was revered, even if by the end of his life he had become outmoded and new ideas were circulating, culminating in the experiments of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. Yet even the rebels recognized his genius and their indebtedness to him. He had a lasting and profound effect, both in the Soviet Union, where ballet became an emblem of cultural prestige, and in the West, where his spiritual descendants, Diaghilev included, promulgated and extended his work. Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master is a survey of his life and work, before and after his arrival in St Petersburg. It is a cultural biography placing Petipa in his context. It describes the people and events around him; it traces the evolution of the aesthetics of ballet; it analyses the influences that made Petipa unique; and it examines the ways that he, in turn, influenced the course of modern ballet.
This book takes its point of departure from the overwhelming interest in theories of the body and performativity in sociology and cultural studies in recent years. It explores a variety of ways of looking at dance as a social and artistic (bodily) practice as a means of generating insights into the politics of identity and difference as they are situated and traced through representations of the body and bodily practices. These issues are addressed through a series of case studies.
This paper examines the mobile and embodied geographies of four abled-bodied dancers following their artistic encounters with disability in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Uniquely, I work with the dancing body to examine the differentiated experiences of mobility, and to uncover the performative role of the able body in unravelling assumptions around the skills and artistry of disability dance. Empirical research developed in response to a choreographic dialogue held between the dance company BalletBoyz, and the disabled dancers of Ethiopia’s Adugna Potentials. Post-artistic exchange interviews and performance-based observations with the BalletBoyz are mobilised here to advance geographical knowledge about the embodied, performative and practiced dimensions of micro-bodily mobility. Equally, I assert the creative potential of the dancing body to probe the social construction of imperfect mobility by exceeding an ablest mobile experience, and inverting expectations around bodily disability.
Jennifer Fisher provides a history of the "making it macho" strategy for men often employed in the dance world, which has been a response to the prejudices against ballet men throughout the 20th century and beyond. By looking at various rhetorical strategies in dance biography (Shawn, Nureyev, Bruhn), movies (Shall We Dance? The Turning Point), and television (So You Think You Can Dance), it foregrounds the frequency and futility of binary thinking in relation to masculinity as well as femininity when it comes to ballet performance. It references analysis of modern masculinity by Michael Kimmel and George Mosse, as well as dance analysis by Julia Foulkes and Ramsay Burt. It is suggested that, given the challenges for men in the feminized world of ballet, they trade the "macho" moniker for that of "maverick."
Chinese dance is a riot of identities – court, folk, ethnic and dynastic. It has a glorious history and is a topic on its own. It draws inspiration from martial arts and “the art of sex” as the quintessential man of letters and leisure Li Yu wrote: “When people teach girls to sing and dance, they do not really teach them how to sing and dance but how to be sensual. If you want her body to be so, then you must have her dance.” Several legendary sensual dancers rose to be Senior Consorts and Empresses during the Han (206 bc–ad 220) and Tang (618–960) dynasties. Yang Yuhuan, the most beautiful woman in Chinese history, was a sensual dancer. She captivated the Tang emperor Xianzong (685–762), became his favourite consort and came to shape Chinese history. The splendid history of court dance, like Chinese dance itself, waits to be researched. Chinese dance absorbed its properties and values from many cultures, especially Central Asia, during the Han and Tang dynasties. This pattern of assimilation continued as the Mongols conquered China in 1279 and the Manchus in 1644. It developed rapidly after the Opium War (1839–42)when China began to have direct intercourse with the world beyond greater Asia. This exposure not only dramatically changed China's history but also the very fibre of Chinese culture. Dance in the form of ballet is a great example of such cultural change.
On any given morning of the year, if you were to ask a ballet dancer, “What are you going to do today?” the answer most probably would be, “First, I'll take class.” “Taking class” means the daily regimen of formalised exercises to refine, strengthen, maintain, and prepare the dancer's body for performance. This is the leçon or lesson – a process based on a codified, although ever-evolving, academic theatrical dance technique, done under the supervision of a ballet instructor. This chapter will discuss early ballet technique and training, with particular focus on developments in the eighteenth century, when the codification, the instruction, the academies and the performing companies – the professionalisation of ballet – became well established, setting the tone for decades to come and influencing the art into our own day. At the outset, it is important to acknowledge that the historical traces of the development of ballet technique and training, as well as of ballet repertoire, are relatively rare. Unlike its sister arts, music and drama, ballet did not develop a comprehensive and universally accepted way to leave written or notated records capable of reflecting the complexities of its technique and choreographies, although in the early eighteenth century there was one valiant attempt at notation. Prior to the early nineteenth century, there were no detailed accounts of systematised training practices for professional dancers, although there are many tangential sources about training exercises from earlier periods and many later sources for corroborative material.
Ask any young woman on her way to a performance of Giselle or Sleeping Beauty what most clearly symbolises ballet and she will probably answer – the skirt and the pointe shoe. She will not quote sentences from the story and may recall only a few names of the characters. But after the performance she will remember the ballet costume of the female dancer. If she ever had ballet lessons she will reminisce about her first pointe shoes; she might still have them in the attic. Why this cult of the costume? Has ballet no message? Is it merely a flighty art form of beautiful lines, of flowing skirts and satin shoes? The history of these two items of dress tell us exactly the opposite. The skirt and the point shoe represented a complete change in the nature of the ballet as an art form. They have not always been there. When they were introduced in the 1830s, roughly 180 years ago, they initiated a revolution in artistic values and a fundamental shift in the attitude towards women in public life. How and why the tutu and the slipper achieved this pride of place in ballet will be explained in what follows. Less clear is why much ballet today still uses a dress code frozen in time.
In New York, on 2nd November, 1943 Alicia Alonso, a Cuban ballerina, danced the title role of Giselle replacing a sick Alicia Markova in a performance of Ballet Theatre. In 1943, a Cuban ballet dancer was a rarity, even more if she starred in a work considered the epitome of the European Romantic tradition. Though Cuba was immensely popular in the United States in the 1940s, it was by no means associated with ballet. Since the early 1920s, Hollywood and Broadway had made Americans familiar with images of Cuba as an exotic destination offering exuberant women, hot rhythms, beaches, casinos and endless nights of romance and alcohol. I'll See You in Cuba (1920), The Cuban Love Song (1931), Girl from Havana (1940) and Week-End in Havana (1941) were among the era's numerous films and musicals with Cuba as their subject or background. Cuban songs topped American charts while rumbas, congas, cha-cha-chas and mambos took centre stage in dance halls from New York to Los Angeles. Rising to fame as a ballet dancer and becoming one of the most celebrated Giselles of the twentieth century, Alonso undermined Americans’ stereotypical images of Cuba and Cubans. She also challenged the assumption that ballet belonged to Europeans. Asked about the reactions that her nationality elicited at the beginning of her career, she said: “A lot of people were astonished. I danced the more classical works, like Giselle and Swan Lake. In my first visits to England and France, the audience could not believe that a Latina represented classicism. In England, a critic even asked me how I had the courage to dance Giselle. Regardless of their disbelief, I achieved success”.
Revolutionary festivities and cultural disruption During the French Revolution of 1789 a deep change in the representation of social communication and interaction took place. The spectrum of the new sociability reached from refashioning the national costume that replaced the old dress codes of the guild and social hierarchies to the republican, informal way of addressing each other, from imitating Roman slave haircuts to rituals of fraternisation, from frugal banquets in the open to name-giving ceremonies of newborn babies (Brutus was one of the preferred choices), from the revolutionary catechism that spread ancient Roman models of virtue to the introduction of a new, republican calendar. All these measures were intended to mark a break not only with the Ancien Régime before 1789 but with history as it had been known. The French Revolution understood itself as a “regeneration”, a return to a social order that was close to nature. A stable political order was the goal and certainly not a permanent revolution. But the Revolution, particularly after the execution of the king, had become a threatening crisis. To the horror of many politicians, post-revolutionary France proved extremely mobile and unsettled. The movement cultures and body performances of this time can be seen as an attempt to contain the “too much” of social movement by controlling the individual body within the mass. Hence the painter David and the choreographer Gardel saw themselves confronted with the problem of convincing passionate crowds to move within ordered forms, to make a moving, yet manageable, organised, yet innocuous, collective body out of an unruly mass that threatened to explode at any moment.
The Nutcracker is the most popular ballet in the world, adopted and adapted by hundreds of communities across the United States and Canada every Christmas season. In this entertainingly informative book, Jennifer Fisher offers new insights into the Nutcracker phenomenon, examining it as a dance scholar and critic, a former participant, an observer of popular culture, and an interviewer of those who dance, present, and watch the beloved ballet. Fisher traces The Nutcracker's history from its St. Petersburg premiere in 1892 through its emigration to North America in the mid-twentieth century to the many productions of recent years. She notes that after it was choreographed by another Russian immigrant to the New World, George Balanchine, the ballet began to thrive and variegate: Hawaiians added hula, Canadians added hockey, Mark Morris set it in the swinging sixties, and Donald Byrd placed it in Harlem. The dance world underestimates The Nutcracker at its peril, Fisher suggests, because the ballet is one of its most powerfully resonant traditions. After starting life as a Russian ballet based on a German tale about a little girl's imagination, The Nutcracker has become a way for Americans to tell a story about their communal values and themselves.
In this rich interdisciplinary study Tim Scholl provides a provocative and timely re-evaluation of the development of ballet from the 1880s to the middle of the twentieth century. In the light of a thoughtful re-appraisal of dance classicism he locates the roots of modern ballet in the works of Marius Petipa, rather than in the much-celebrated choreographic experiements of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Not only is this the first book to present nineteenth- and twentieth-century ballet as a continuous rather than broken tradition, From Petipa to Balanchine places works such as Sleeping Beauty, Les Sylphides, Apollo and Jewells in their proper cultural and artistic context. The only English-language study to be based on the original Russian soures, this book will be essential reading for all dance scholars. Written in an engaging and elegant style it will also appeal to anyone interested in the history of ballet generally.
Dancing Genius is the first book-length critical study on Vaslav Nijinsky as a star dancer of the Ballets Russes company. Through looking into definitions of virtuosity, stardom and genius, Hanna Järvinen contrasts contemporary materials from Russia, France, England and the United States with later, hegemonic interpretations. Nijinsky emerges as a celebrity figure whose dancing was attributed with genius in order to raise the prestige of the art form, but a figure also attributed with 'racial' characteristics in a thoroughly Orientalist manner. Tracing the historical figure in contemporary documents and later reminiscences, the book opens up questions about authorship in dance, about critical evaluation of performance practice, and the manner in which past events are turned into history. http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/Dancing-Genius/?K=9781137407726
Ballet faced formidable obstacles in establishing itself as a “home-grown” transplant at mid-century. Scholars have emphasized choreographic efforts to cultivate a nationally identifiable style during the period, focusing primarily on the emergence of Balanchine and neo-classicism. Yet the role of dancers in the Americanization of ballet largely has not been probed. This article examines the part that Maria Tallchief, daughter of a “full-blooded” Osage Indian father and Scotch-Irish mother, and the first American ballerina to reach prima status, played in changing public perceptions of ballet in the mid-twentieth century. Between 1952 and 1954, national magazines such as Dance magazine, Holiday, and Newsweek featured images of Tallchief on their covers, lending visual credibility to claims that ballet, which many at the time considered a “foreign” dance form, had come of age in the U.S. I argue that iconographic portrayals of Tallchief's face, legs, and feet, which illustrated the dancer's physical assimilation of Balanchine's approach to dance technique, along with narratives of her personal story, advanced an account of ballet's Americanization that placed the dancer, as much as if not more than Balanchine, at center stage. I then illuminate how Tallchief's exemplification of self-discipline and initiative bolstered nostalgic arguments about the successful “citizenship” of white ethnic immigrants, while also promoting arguments about the viability of Indian assimilation during the tribal termination era. When seen in the contemporaneous contexts of ballet's Americanization and societal debates over Native American citizenship, Tallchief's story is seen to complicate the meanings of “assimilation” and “citizenship” in postwar America.
In this paper I am particularly interested in unpacking the notion that dancers with a visible disability are both marginalised and hyper-visible. I refer to selected dance examples available on YouTube and consider these in relation to Whatley’s (2007) presumption of difference indicators in support of my aim to expand research into the area of dance and disability. Viewing these dance examples provided a ‘bouncing off’ point from which to unpack how these performances are perceived and made meaningful by their audiences. Drawing from discussion tasks set at several different conferences in response to viewing these dance examples, I share initial findings and consider issues that arose in embracing difference, tensions and complexities.
More than any other era in the history of ballet, the nineteenth century belongs to the ballerina. She haunts its lithographs and paintings, an ethereal creature touched with the charm of another age. Yet even when she turned into the fast, leggy ballerina of modern times, her ideology survived. If today the art of ballet celebrates the danseur nearly as often as the danseuse , it has yet to rid it aesthetic of yesterday's cult of the eternal feminine. Like her nineteenth-century forbear, today's ballerina, an icon of teen youth, athleticism, and anorexic vulnerability, incarnates a feminine ideal defined overwhelmingly by men.