Dance, Professional Practice, and the Workplace

Challenges and Opportunities for Dance Professionals, Students, and Educators

Angela Pickard, Doug Risner, Angela Pickard, Doug Risner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367421373
• eBook ISBN: 9781000030419
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published as a special issue of Research in Dance Education, now with an added chapter, this text acknowledges and celebrates the increasingly diverse careers and employment networks in which dance professionals and dance educators are engaged.

Addressing issues and developments relating to the workplace of dance, the text explores what it means to transcend the boundary between dance as passion, and dance as employment. Chapters explore challenges of professional practice including limitations on access, precarity, bodily risk, gender inequality, and sexual harassment, and challenge the status quo to offer readers new ways of thinking about dance, and how this might translate into professional practice and work. Ultimately celebrating the passion which motivates dancers to embark on a professional career, and highlighting the elation and joy which such employment can bring, this volume encourages dance professionals, students, and educators to imagine things differently and develop teaching approaches, curricula, work places, and communities which capitalise on the diversity and dedication of individuals in the field.

This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, professionals in the field of Dance, Dance Education, Choreography and related art forms, Curriculum studies and Sociology of Education.

1
Embodying Precarity, Pain and Perfection

Young Dancers’ Commitment to the Ballet Body as Aesthetic Project

Angela Pickard

Body as Aesthetic Project

Ballet is a cultural activity inhabited, promoted and valued by the powerful social group and socioeconomic context. Buying the experience or aesthetic of ballet as a consumer, participant or audience enables access to a social and cultural world with institutional structures such as ballet classes, dance schools, companies, performances and ideological beliefs about art, dance and the body (Novack, 1993; Pickard, 2012, 2013, 2015). Chris Hand (2011) argues that arts audiences behave like consumers and that there is a level of loyalty to an art form and ‘brand.’ There are expectations of what is to be received in terms of that aesthetic experience as movement vocabulary, line, form and architecture, symmetry, body shape and size of the dancers, gender roles and hierarchies presented on stage as corp, soloist or principal. The audience or spectators of ballet perpetuate notions of how ballet bodies are represented in the social world. Classical ballet has historical and contemporary connections to the European courts and the high bourgeoisie strata in Western society (Wolff, 2003), and it is a distinctive and exclusive world of ‘high culture’ with an aesthetic and etiquette or ‘decorum of politeness’ (Wulff, 2001: 3). To be immersed in a cultural world that is produced and adorned through theatre, costume, make-up, ballet shoes, tours, marketing, idealisation, perfectionism and fantasy is seductive.

Pierre Bourdieu (1990) used the metaphor of game playing to describe a social arena or world as a way of understanding the ideologies, systems and structures for a player to successfully engage and be able to embody the ‘rules of the game’ or compete for power. In his theory of agency as active interpretation and decision-making in social action, Bourdieu formulated his concept of habitus. Habitus are viewed as ‘the non-discursive aspects of culture that bind people into groups, including unspoken habits and patterns of behaviour as well as styles and skills in body techniques.… There are systems of habits and dispositions that become inculcated in the body in everyday life’ (Pickard, 2015: 24). Bourdieu ‘acknowledged that structures and rules exist, but that they are often subverted, negotiated or broken as interests and desires come into play’ (Pickard, 2015: 22). Bourdieu argued that ‘individuals make choices, so long as we do not forget that they do not choose the principles of these choices’ (Bourdieu in Wacquant, 1989: 45). There are limits or constraints to choices.

Bourdieu linked agency (practice) with structure (via capital and field). Practice refers to the practice or many practices or the experience of practice. Practice (capital) are the resources activated by the social, structured conditions and history (field) which they belong to. The ‘invisible hand’ of the field determines which capital is valued and increased, decreased and exchanged. Players have a stake in the game; they chase goals and adhere to norms that are deemed to matter and have meaning. Investment in playing the game mould the habitus which in turn shapes the actions of the actors that reproduce the field. Belief in the logic of the game develops habitus; the values and spoken and unspoken assumptions that are taken for granted and unconscious. These becomes self-evident universals that inform an agent’s actions and thoughts within a field—the silent experience of the world—described by Bourdieu as doxa. The way the habitus shapes perceptions, motivations and action will involve the player further to commit and the ‘social game’ is inscribed in individuals:

Social reality exists.… twice, in things and minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside social agents. And when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like ‘a fish in water’: it does not feel the weight of the water and it takes the world about itself for granted.

(Bourdieu in Wacquant, 1993: 133)

Habitus is both the medium and an outcome of social practice. It is not just a state of mind but a bodily state of being as embodied action, memories and history. The habitus is reproductive and productive, so the rules are learnt through explicit teaching as well as practice.

To be viewed and accepted as a ballet dancer in ballet culture, there must be demonstration in the shape and size of the material body, as well as through the movement vocabulary. The articulation and expression of ballet movement conveys ‘the seduction of the stylisation of the ballet aesthetic of beauty and perfection within a physical, theatrical and social performance’ (Pickard, 2015: 6). It takes much training, commitment and practice for a corporeal body to be constructed to represent the ideals of preciseness and perfection:

disciplining muscles, bones, tendons and joints to push upwards and outwards from the ground. The ballet body never represents itself but is always seeking perfection outside itself. In the process of training a ballet body, any signifying connections to humanness are magically sidestepped. The physical, linear, proportioned form of the dancer’s body evokes the concept of perfection.

(Claid, 2006: 20)

Particular bodily appearance teamed with technical ability and stylistic expression translate as high currency, exchange value or social, physical, cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1990) in ballet culture. Such currency is motivating as aspirational and many young dancers commit their bodies as an aesthetic project, lured by the possibility and pleasure attached to becoming a professional performing ballet dancer. It is the interaction of Bourdieu’s three concepts of field, habitus and capital that produces the logic of practice (Bourdieu, 1990).

The lived experience of a ballet dancer in training or in work as a professional performing ballet dancer is uncertain, unstable and precarious. To access training in an elite ballet school, the dancer must be successful through an audition process. Once a place has been gained to train at a ballet school, the young dancer must be prepared to commit and potentially sacrifice other areas of their lives—for example, friendships and a range of other interests to commit and pursue ballet. There is pain, discomfort and scrutiny involved in repetitive ballet training. Life as a professional ballet dancer is demanding and dominated with thoughts and actions around the physical body in classes, rehearsals and performances. There is risk of injury, not being able to dance or perform and therefore, possibly, not being paid. Personal risk to the dancer’s physical body, health and mental well-being through engagement with the logic of practice (Bourdieu, 1990) through training regimes, regular critique and demanding performance schedules in ballet are normalised. Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan (2010) gave an insight into the social world of ballet in terms of body control, discipline, ‘tyrannical teaching methods, humiliation and bullying, ambition, self-abuse, eating disorders and other weight and body distortions and pathologies, narcissism, individual and group pressures, intra-company rivalry and intense competitiveness, hierarchically based identities and statuses, emaciation and isolation’ (McEwen and Young, 2011). Precarity in ballet relates to dancer dependency of needs across institutional and bodily contexts: body, labour and politics.

Connections between dance and athlete development made by McEwen and Young (2011) suggest ballet is a ‘risk’ culture, where dancers ‘make sacrifices, strive for distinction, accept risks and refuse limits—practices that initially facilitate success but ultimately compromise health.’ The process of incorporation of the social world into a dancer’s body relies on regular engagement and practice. Often commitment begins early at a young age, perhaps before a young child can understand the consequences of such a commitment. Often, this is through a local dance class provided by a private ballet school and a structured class, syllabus and grading system. Such a system provides regular opportunities for positive reinforcement through examinations and the reward in achievement, grades, certificates and a perhaps different coloured leotard. The social world of ballet shapes the ballet dancer’s body: ‘the body is in the social world but the social world is in the body’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 190).

Early entry into an activity is significant because:

the earlier a player enters the game and the less he is aware of the associated learning.… the greater his ignorance of all that is tacitly granted through investment in the field.… and is his unawareness of the unthought presuppositions that the game produces, and endlessly reproduces, thereby reproducing the conditions of its own perpetuation.

(Bourdieu, 1990: 67)

Dancers from a young age often experience an array of emotions such as success, ambition, self-punishment, regret and jealousy (Buckroyd, 2000) in ballet training as they are becoming familiar with the norms and codes of behaviour that the social world expects. As a social world becomes familiar, that social world tends to be taken for granted and behaviour normalized—that is, unless an epiphany such as an injury forces thinking (Wainwright and Turner, 2006; Wainwright, Williams and Turner, 2005). As stated previously, embodying the disciplines of ballet, structuring the body and ‘ballet body belief’ (Pickard, 2013) involves regular practice or a logic of practice (Bourdieu, 1990). This practice involves pushing the boundaries of the body in striving for perfection; it is therefore painful and precarious.

Ballet schooling involves immersion in regular practice to structure the material body in terms of the aesthetic of size and shape, but also in terms of aesthetic expression. The ballet dancer’s habitus, and belief in the ballet game is significant for commitment. The way a dancer looks, behaves and expresses oneself is representation and a perpetuation of the culture and identity.

The ballet body is both the process and product in the form of the ballet body in construction and the ballet body in performance. The body is both the subject and object of ballet and the ballet dancer is an embodiment of an object of and creator of desire: the ballet aesthetic of beauty and perfection.

(Pickard, 2015

The body is a site of production and reproduction of particular cultural norms (Bordo, 2003; Butler, 1993; Connell, 2005; Jagger, 2008) and ‘specific social worlds, invest, shape and deploy human bodies’ (Wacquant, 1995: 65).

Many young ballet dancers will have been successful at an audition to enter an elite residential or non-residential ballet school. By gaining access to an exclusive, elite ballet school, the young dancer is deemed to be able, unique and someone that has been specially selected. This study focused on 13–16 year-old dancers, where most were in a period of adolescence. This period of development brings physical and psychological changes. The age of onset, length and pace of the adolescent growth spurt are all highly individual. The growth spurt usually takes place at ages 11 to 14 (sometimes earlier for girls and later for boys) and can last 18 to 24 months. While some youngsters grow slowly and may notice no dramatic changes, others can grow as much as one centimetre or more in a month.

During an adolescent growth spurt, physiological changes include increased height, increased body mass, increased arm and leg length, and changing proportion of limb to torso length occur. As the nervous system struggles to keep up with these muscular and skeletal changes, the dancer can experience fluctuations in coordination and balance. The long bones of the arms and legs grow prior to the trunk, challenging the stable torso required in dance classes. This growth can also be asymmetrical, with one arm growing more rapidly than the other. Since the muscles often do not lengthen as fast as the bones, strength and flexibility can decrease. Growth plates at the ends of bones can be vulnerable to injury, particularly in areas such as the knees where strong tendons attach.

(Daniels et al., 2000)

Changes in body shape and size can challenge a dancer’s self-image. Furthermore, there are hormone fluctuations and if there is a perceived decrease in ability and lack of confidence, then this may impact on a previous taken-for-granted ability to perform and this can be emotionally challenging. This period of adolescence is significant and brings another layer of precarity to a young ballet dancer. The young dancer will engage in years of training but will not necessarily become a professional ballet dancer.

Methods

Ten young ballet dancers, five girls and five boys, all of whom want to have a future career as professional and performing ballet dancers, were interviewed. The young dancers were all successful at an audition for a place at an elite ballet school between 10 and 11 years and have been engaged in regular non-residential training. The dancers were invited to be part of the study through an information letter that was sent to all the dancers aged between 13–16 years studying ballet at the non-residentia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Embodying Precarity, Pain and Perfection: Young Dancers’ Commitment to the Ballet Body as Aesthetic Project
• 2 Gaga as Embodied Research
• 3 Creative and Embodied Methods to Teach Reflections and Support Students’ Learning
• 4 Rebalancing Dance Curricula Through Repurposing Black Dance Aesthetics
• 5 WhoLoDancE: Digital Tools and the Dance Learning Environment
• 6 A Delicate Balance: How Postsecondary Education Dance Faculty in the United States Perceive Themselves Negotiating Responsibilities Expected for Tenure
• 7 Body Trouble: Sexual Harassment and Worker Abuse in Musical Theater Dance Employment
• Notes on Contributors
• Index