Ballet across Borders

Career and Culture in the World of Dancers

Helena Wulff

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859739983
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This absorbing book is ballet's 'biography' -- a revealing examination of a closed world, its competition and camaraderie, sexual politics, intimacies, pressures and, not least of all, its magic. Ballet companies have endeavoured to hide what is going on backstage lest the reality of highly strung nerves, constant fatigue and pain from injuries tarnish the illusion of ethereal figures and seemingly weightless steps in polished performances. But the audience's perceptions of fairy-tale worlds onstage are far removed from the experiences of the dancers themselves. The author, who trained to be a dancer, has been given an entrée to this private world that few outsiders ever see.Books on ballet tend to focus on performance. In contrast, this book, which draws on extensive fieldwork with major companies such as London's Royal Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre in New York, the Royal Swedish Ballet and the Ballett Frankfurt, is about dancers - how their careers are made and unmade and what happens in dance companies offstage. Anyone interested in the culture of ballet or the theatre, as well as students of anthropology, dance, performance and cultural studies, will want to read what really goes on when the curtain comes down.

1
Prologue: A Return to the Ballet World

When I was two years old my parents noticed, they used to tell me, that I would dance when I heard music. They then took me to a local ballet school for toddlers, and this was the beginning of fifteen years of intensive practice in classical ballet for me. At the age of seventeen I had to stop because of a back injury. But my body still remembers what it feels like to dance.¹ Learning to dance and dancing are muscular experiences that never go away completely. The feeling is activated, for instance, when I hear music to which I used to dance.

Growing Up in the Ballet World: A Memoir

One Christmas, when I had danced for a few years, my parents took me and my younger brother to see the German children’s ballet Little Petter’s Journey to the Moon at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm. It became our Christmas treat for a number of years, so it is likely that different performances melt together in my recollection. But I remember clearly that on one occasion, when The Man in the Moon’ entered to a huge thunderclap, my brother became so scared that he had to be taken out by our mother. I was never scared. On the contrary, I was absorbed by the allure of the stage. One year, when we were seated close to the stage, I even had a momentous experience of ballet art, the first and formative one that I believe imprinted a passion for ballet in me. On stage the light was turned down and a black starry sky appeared. Girls dressed in glittering white tutus made their way with the soft music on a low ramp. The girls sat down, each one with her legs gracefully to one side.

I was spellbound. I had never seen anything so beautiful. There is a notion of ballet revelations in the ballet world, a state of mind that can be likened to a religious experience, a conversion. These exceptional experiences of ballet art usually happen to children, but they may strike later in life as well, producing a feeling of such force that it is never forgotten. It can be suppressed over the course of many years, yet it is still there. It seems to arise with some preparation, be it through cultural capital and/or experience of dancing, not during a first visit to a ballet performance. Many dancers, choreographers, critics, ballet fans and ballet sponsors remember one particular moment of ballet splendour that mesmerized them irrevocably. A ballet revelation can be the impetus to pursue a career as a dancer or the beginning of balletomania; but it can make an imprint on any theatre-goer.

A male principal with the Royal Swedish Ballet told me how he as a ballet student used to watch performances from the wings at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm. The Taming of The Shrew made a particularly strong impression on him: Then I felt – this I want to do! From then on dancing became a job, not only a hobby.’ As he was standing in the wings that night, he had realized, quite unexpectedly ‘how the steps you learn in the studio can be used’. The world of ballet art opened up to him, full of unexplored treasures, and he was overwhelmed by ‘a feeling you can never get again’. It all resembles how Agnes de Mille as a fourteen-year-old ballet student in the 1920s saw Anna Pavlova dance and recalls how she ¢sat with blood beating in my throat’, struck by a sudden certainty that this was going to be ‘her life’s work’ (Gherman 1994: 27). And the ballet sponsor and writer Lincoln Kirstein (1994) was as a child prohibited by his mother from seeing the Ballets Russes in 1916, on the grounds that he might fall apart as he had done at a performance of La Bohème, believing that Mimí was really dying on stage. Later, ballet did become ‘a luminous magnet’ (ibid.: 214) for Kirstein.

As I grew physically from a child to an adolescent, my body was being disciplined – sometimes with aching muscles – by and into the steps of classical ballet, and so was my world-view. I was living in the intensity and discipline of ballet dancing that separates dancing adolescents from non-dancing peers (cf. Sutherland 1976). I was attending a ballet school in Stockholm. My teachers, a Latvian couple, used to be a ballet director and a principal dancer. They had fled in a small fishing boat to Sweden during the Second World War, bringing with them their ballet scores amongst a very few belongings. From these ballet scores they were able to mount original Russian classical ballets (Ralf 1979). They taught us their Russian training, the Vaganova school.

One variation of steps that has stuck in my mind (and body), probably because I realized the historical significance already at the time, was that they instructed us in ‘how to do révérance to the Tsar’, i.e. thanking the audience for their applause with a specially deep curtsy, turning towards the box where the Tsar used to be seated in their theatre.

With the ballet lessons came a decorum of politeness, a chivalry in the studio as well as outside it that echoed courtly manners all the way back to the fourteenth century, when ballet was first practised in Italy, descending through King Louis XIV of France, and (for us, then) especially through the court of the Russian tsars. According to this decorum, men were supposed to be polite to women when it came to ways of greeting, passing through doors, and so on and younger people to older people. Generally people of lesser status showed respect (at least interactionally) to people of higher status, i.e. of greater fame.

In the dressing-rooms we ballet students discussed dance wear, dance shoes and hairstyles for dancers. We were learning an adorned femininity, which is a characteristic of costuming in classical ballets. Importantly, it also becomes a way to dress outside the theatre and studio for ballet dancers when they wear their ‘street’ or ‘private’ clothing and ‘street’ or ‘private’ hairstyles.

Wearing my hair gathered in a small bun at the back and a light blue leotard, I did the barre exercises standing in the middle of a long line of girls. Our ballet mistress was determined. She wanted perfection. Her dark hair was cut short, and she usually wore a simple dress and red ballet shoes with low heels in order to be able to ‘mark’ the steps for us. Sometimes she used the best girls to fill in where, because of her age (she was in her fifties), she was too stiff to move. She gave corrections verbally or came up to the girl who had missed the step, and moved her leg or arm the way it was supposed to go. Getting warm and beginning to sweat, we continued doing short variations, such as pirouettes (turns) and jetés (jumps) in two groups on the floors. Now we danced to Chopin waltzes and pieces by Ravel from the black grand piano. We were anticipating the day when we would be old enough to start dancing on pointe.

Our ballet mistress had complete authority. We never questioned anything; but I recollect wondering in private about the background and the context of the steps. As I gradually learnt French in school, I took a secret delight in making connections between the ballet terms and what they illustrated. That the pαs de chat, for instance, is a step that imitates the soft leap of a cat, and a glissade is a sliding step.

One year we were preparing for a recital, the section with the snowflakes in The Nutcracker. Our ballet mistress was not pleased with our dancing. She showed us a particular variation again. It still did not work. By then she was getting irritated; and when it did not really improve the third time either, she lost her temper. It must have been a forceful fit, since it has stayed in my memory for so many years. I was not only scared and disciplined by it, but also impressed.

Later, as an adolescent, I got a black leotard, like the other girls in my class. We were also sporting skin-coloured tights and the necessary light blue, home-knitted legwarmers. Now we were doing more advanced exercises, and one of them was to start the momentous pointe dancing. My first pair of pointe shoes were pink satin. It was important to put rosin on the soles of them in order not to slip. We took turns pawing in the rosin box that was placed close to the entrance of the studio. The rosin soon sent out its dry smell, which still fills me with a familiar excitement whenever I get close to it. For dancing on pointe was such a thrill: we were learning to reach into a new, aerial dimension. Clearly, it would take a lot of practice to dance effortlessly on pointe for longer stretches of time. At first it hurt; yet to break through the law of gravitation with the music released a special feeling of delicate euphoria that I have never experienced in any other way since then. Now I think of this exceptional state in terms of Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) concept of flow, an optimal experience where action and consciousness meet.

But I did not only dance myself, I was also taken to the Opera House in Stockholm to watch performances. I saw Swan Lake and The Nutcracker a number of times, and I acquired a ballet literacy, a habit of ‘reading’ balletic form and movement. A turning-point occurred, I think, when I was nine years old and my father took me to see The Moon Reindeer by Birgit Cullberg. In the intermission my father and I talked about the ballet and I expressed an objection: ‘It’s a pity that they don’t have horns on their heads, since they are meant to be reindeer.’ My father then turned to me, exclaiming: ‘That’s the whole point with ballet! They dance the horns!’

My parents recognized that ‘ballet is Helena’s interest’. When Rudolf Nureyev came with Margot Fonteyn to do Giselle, my parents realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event and bought a ticket for me. Nureyev and Fonteyn were of course preceded by their transnational reputation as well as by advance promotion for this particular visit. I remember Fonteyn as a fragile and adorable Giselle; but it was Nureyev’s Prince Albrecht that made the lasting impression on me. He jumped very high; his technique was impeccable. What really got to me, however, a fourteen-year-old girl on the verge of womanhood, was his overwhelming stage personality. The audience was exalted, unusually loud for a Stockholm audience, and demanded no less than sixteen curtain calls.

A few years later I stopped dancing. It was not until then, when I was unable to dance, that I really understood how much dancing had been a way to breathe for me, and to express myself. Now I did not want to be reminded of ballet; I blocked it out, stopped going to performances, even avoided ballet and dance on television. I buried my love for ballet, and went on to university to train as an anthropologist. I became fascinated by anthropology: here I could explore my interest in people theoretically. Through fieldwork and writing, I saw a potential for personal and intellectual development that satisfied me deeply. I became particularly interested in youth culture and ethnicity (see mostly Wulff 1988; Amit-Talai and Wulff 1995), and later in transnationality (Wulff 1992). With time I discovered aesthetic anthropology, performance studies and the anthropology of dance. There were discussions on occupational cultures. I had started teaching, and enjoyed it, but felt after some time that I needed recharging. I wanted to move ahead anthropologically by way of research. For a while I was thinking of studying writers, perhaps ethnic novelists, but realized that it does not make much anthropological sense to do participant observation with people while they are writing. Then, it dawned on me that I could study another kind of artists – dancers! Their work practices lend themselves very well to observation. And I thought that my previous experience of dancing would make up for the fact that I could not participate in the dancing any more.

As early as 1961, long before reflexivity became a staple concept in anthropology, C. Wright Mills (1961) wrote that scholarly thinkers do not separate their work from their lives but let them spark each other. Most people have to separate their work from their lives, since their work is shallow; intellectuals, on the other hand, can make use of their life experiences in their work.

Doing a study on the ballet world has reminded me of familiar and forgotten sides of my personal ‘self’. In a sense, I started out as an ‘other’, but have become able to reformulate a part of my personal as well as professional ‘self’ through this fieldwork; clearly the two inform each other.

There are basically two advantages in having some dancing experience when doing a study on dancers. First, a dancing career is a hard one. Moments of triumph, such as ovations and applause, are very short. But since I used to dance, I know something about the pain – and the passion – of dancing that won me the respect and trust of the dancers. Having grown up in the ballet world I possess the kind of social capital that structures the idiom in the theatre, both frontstage and backstage.

Discussing the problem of transferring the mental models of informants to anthropological text, Maurice Bloch (1992: 130) argues for connectionism, the notion that knowing everyday practical skills, and making sense of the world, form networks of mental models that can be connected to each other in complex systems. Being partly linguistic, these models also combine ‘visual imagery, other sensory cognition, the cognitive aspects of learned practices, evaluations, memories of sensations, and memories of typical examples’. They are the outcome of activity that is learnt during socialization, managed and remembered not only through language but in fact primarily through ‘experience, practice, sights, and sensations’. This, Bloch states, is also how the anthropologist should learn a culture he or she is studying in order to grasp its mental models and translate them into text.

Just like me, Cynthia Novack (1993: 36) practised ballet for fifteen years. She said that this ‘kinesthetic reference’ stayed with her afterwards. And even if dance may evoke ‘kinesthetic identification’ in any viewer, for those who start to dance when they are children and dance for many years this becomes a formative experience. Dance is for ever inscribed in their bodies. I was unable to practise ballet the way the people I was studying were doing it, but since I too grew up taking ballet classes – with some of my informants – we have a shared past. There was so much I recognized in what they did and in the ambience in the ballet world. Bloch’s discussion could also be framed in terms of the notion of the body and linked to ballet as a non-verbal art form. Many dancers are not very verbal people: they are trained to express themselves through their bodies, they have an extreme body-consciousness. They communicate through their bodies even when they are not dancing. In general, dancers move their bodies more when they engage in a conversation than non-dancers, getting up from a chair, for example, in order to emphasize a point through gesturing with arms and legs.

As Kirin Narayan (1993: 678) points out, ‘preexisting experience’ of societies we study is restructured analytically mainly by ‘locating vivid particulars within larger cultural patterns, sociological relations, and historical shifts’. Returning to a setting as an ex-native or a native fieldworker of some kind, does not mean, however, that everything is known in advance. Reconsidering her two field studies in Jordan, on Circassians and the Wadi, Seteney Shami (1988: 137) realized that she ‘knew’ those parts of her country in different ways. On both her field entrances she had identified familiar ‘ideas, values, and patterns’. Yet she went on to discover many new ones.

There were aspects of the ballet world that I had been ignorant of when I was still dancing. This can be explained partly by the fact that I never was a professional dancer, and that I was quite young when I left. It had not occurred to me, for instance, that most dancers have rather low salaries, nor had I completely grasped the excitement and unpredictability of the creation of ballet art on stage. When I was dancing, I did have a vague feeling that I was doing something that was different, something that not many people were doing or found interesting. I was aware of connections both to contemporary and historical court life as well as to an old-fashioned notion of dancing as an indecent activity. But I did not see how impenetrable the ballet world appears to many people.

When I started talking about my plans to do a study on ballet dancers, and later when I was still doing fieldwork, I got a number of reactions that I had not expected. A middle-aged American male anthropologist was unable to relate to my topic of research, so he got out of the situation through a joke: ‘Do you want help with observations?’ (The dancers were all assumed to be women.) A middle-aged male European anthropologist warned me: They’re gay, you know that, don’t you?’ (Now the dancers were all men.) Both these comments offended me. The first one, because I found it sexist; the second, because even though there is a certain truth in the fact that there is male homosexuality in the ballet world, it is not the entire truth (in some companies, in fact, it is hardly true at all). Neither is it something that ballet people (including me in this instance) care to hear as a first, characterizing comment about bal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Prologue: A Return to the Ballet World
• 2 The Transnational Context
• 3 Work as Vocation
• 4 Classical Ballet Culture
• 5 Producing Performance
• 6 Moving and Mixing
• Bibliography
• Index