(Re:) Claiming Ballet

Adesola Akinleye

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781789383614
• eBook ISBN: 9781789383638
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: American Drama

The collection of essays demonstrates that ballet is not a single White Western dance form but has been shaped by a range of other cultures. In so doing, the authors open a conversation and contribute to the discourse beyond the vantage point of mainstream to look at such issues as homosexuality and race. And to demonstrate that ballet's denial of the first and exclusion of the second needs rethinking.

This is an important contribution to dance scholarship.  The contributors include professional ballet dancers and teachers, choreographers, and dance scholars in the UK, Europe and the USA to give a three dimensional overview of the field of ballet beyond the traditional mainstream.

It sets out to acknowledge the alternative and parallel influences that have shaped the culture of ballet and demonstrates they are alive, kicking and have a rich history. Ballet is complex and encompasses individuals and communities, often invisiblized, but who have contributed to the diaspora of ballet in the twenty-first century. It will initiate conversations and contribute to discourses about the panorama of ballet beyond the narrow vantage point of the mainstream – White, patriarchal, Eurocentric, heterosexual constructs of gender, race and class.

This book is certain to be a much-valued resource within the field of ballet studies, as well as an important contribution to dance scholarship more broadly.  It has an original focus and brings together issues more commonly addressed only in journals, where issues of race are frequently discussed.

The primary market will be academic.  It will appeal to academics, researchers, scholars and students working and studying in dance, theatre and performance arts and cultural studies.  It will also be of interest to dance professionals and practitioners.

Academics and students interested in the intersection of gender, race and dance may also find it interesting.

Part One

Histories

Chapters in this section interrupt the grand narrative of a monocultural ballet institution. They address the macro, reviving and discussing alternative and parallel histories to a single, exclusive account.

1

Ballet, from property to art

Adesola Akinleye

Introduction

In this chapter, I reflect on ballet using the two lenses of property (ballet-as-property) and inheritance (the Manor House of Ballet). This is an attempt to contextualize and separate the artform itself from legacies of Western imperialism in the twenty-first century. I do this to set the stage for why ballet has a broader (if invisiblized) church than the narrow population of the exclusively White, heteronormative, propertied class. Ballet is a mode of physical expression, a creative artform loved by many artists from across social stratifications who are dedicated to the form but are perceived as unentitled to claim it as an inheritance or artistic identity. Using the lenses of property and heritage helps to un-weave the artform from the operation of colonialism that has commandeered ballet into being a cultural club (in the sense of both an exclusive group and a violent weapon). Becoming popular in the 1600s as Europe’s colonial expansionism began, ballet historically has been shrouded in political manipulation.¹ As the postcolonial global community unravels the historical, artistic and cultural damage of colonialism, it is clear that the imperialist usurping of ballet for agendas of hierarchy and oppression (if left unchecked in the twenty-first century) is detrimental to the growth and existence of the artform itself.

Protectionism

As a result of many different colonial events globally within dance, we have a history of dances being lost through banning of the form, or the music to which it is danced, or the artists involved in the dance being persecuted (Jonas 1992). During Medieval times, the European aristocracy controlled the working classes through legislation of their bodies – particularly how and when they could dance and worship (Ehrenreich 2007). This authoritarian, violent imposition of such regulation of the body was positioned as defending Europe’s society and decency (Foucault et al. 2003). After long voyages and imposed self-deprivation, European missionaries arrived on shores beyond Europe to continue the control of people through banning their bodily expressions and dances. Organizations such as the London Missionary Society opposed people dancing on moral grounds. Condemnation of dance and other cultural/aesthetic practices was part of a missionary incentive to empire building and at the same time part of the defence of their assumed genealogical right to object:

The apostate chieftain, who had been one of the principal instigators of the late war, and was the leader of those who renouncing all regard to religion, law and good order, had revived the games, dances and wickedness of heathenism.

(Ellis 1844: 337)

Globally, dances have been preserved at the risk of punishment, imprisonment (Jonas 1992) or even death. For example, rumors of the Ghost Dance being danced led to the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890 (McGaa and Eagle Man 2009). Some dances have been lost altogether or practiced in secret from generation to generation, such as Kumu Hula (master teachers) protecting hula from 1820 (Trask 1993). As a result, it is no surprise that the colonial powers who had inflicted these injuries on dance also identified particular dances that they wished to protect and preserve. The act of protecting a dance form becomes as much a part of domination as the act of banning another dance form – a colonial act of claiming cultural authority and demanding the right to design aesthetic identity. It is not a surprise, then, that in the colonial projects of Europe from the 1600s, the very dance form that began to be popular across Europe was adopted by Western imperialists as a dance form to protect. It could be suggested that those who protected and preserved ballet sheltered it from the victimization they inflicted on other dance forms, defending ballet as a property of their privilege and power. Therefore, ballet has been a protected dance form in Western culture as much as an act of political prowess as for its artistic expertise.

In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, protectionism has continued in the form of funding earmarked for (specific) ballet companies. Funding access allows for a variety of methods of protection, such as archiving materials pertaining to the development and performance of mainstream ballets and the artists who perform in them, and the formal documentation and archiving of ongoing artistic endeavors in the creation and re-staging of ballets: creating and recreating a history for the form. It also allows for advertising and promotion, leading to most ballet images coming from or conforming to the limited perspectives of a few major, funded ballet companies (despite ballet being engaged with by people across a range of unfunded projects and grassroots communities, who rarely see themselves in these images of ballet). From a social and cultural perspective, the notion of the ballerina is reaffirmed through children’s stories, fashion and popular media that seek to circularly affirm their authority by mirroring the aesthetic of the companies who have the credibility of being funded. As an example, the Arts Council England (ACE) has a specific funding strand for opera and ballet companies (four opera and three ballet companies). In its analysis report (Arts Council England 2016: 1), ACE suggests that, ‘Opera and ballet are important and popular artforms in England. They are rooted in our shared European cultural history and make a unique contribution to contemporary culture.’ Coming from a working-class background, I suggest there is a larger discussion to be had to unpack to whom the ‘our’ of ‘our shared European cultural history’ refers. However, as a result of their ‘contribution to contemporary culture’, these ballet companies receive a significant proportion of public money allocated for dance. The ACE analysis reported that in 2012 these seven opera/ballet companies together received 22 percent of National Portfolio funding. The justification for funding of these companies is not compared with how other artforms are funded in England; instead, ballet companies are compared with other ballet companies in other parts of the world, thereby taking their funding out of the context of how other English dance is funded and into the context of how ballet is preserved in other places: ‘They [seven companies] are generally less reliant on public funding as a proportion of turnover than their European counterparts’ (Arts Council England 2016: 2).

It is clear that this funding pattern is not just an anomaly of England but is present across the European colonization footprint (including the United States and Australia). The cultural contribution referred to in this ACE report is given resonance when considered in terms of the Western colonizing project targeting dance as a mode of physical expression of identity. This was done through the banning of dances (as discussed above), but also through imposing dance as a mode of controlling the bodies and desirable aesthetic of people in a kind of racialized body politic (Thompson 2014). Ballet as an artform was usurped and used as part of the propaganda of colonization. Today it has not thrown off this role, as funding pedestals mainstream ballet into a position of isolation and privilege. In popular Euro-American culture today, ballet manifests images of people who work with passion and are experts, part of a privileged White, propertied class² telling heteronormative stories of love and procreation, where girls are delicate and men lift them up, preserving and protecting Western social worth and linking it to morality (Foucault et al. 2003). I suggest that the political manipulation of ballet detracts from the vitality any artform needs in order to continue to grow.

Exclusion

The first lens I am using here looks at ballet as being treated as property (rather than an artform). This responds to Dr Cheryl Harris’s exploration of property as the expectation of rights to enjoy and use at the exclusion of others (Harris 1993). I consider whether ballet could have been hijacked, turning it into imperialist property that attempts to limit access to the form itself. In her seminal paper, ‘Whiteness as Property’ (1993), Harris constructs the framework for comprehending how law³ has protected privilege as an expectation of being identified as a ‘White person’ (or a ‘cis-straight’ person). Her work leads me to consider how in terms of dance, ‘law’ could be replaced with ‘funding’. I am struck by how funding has protected privilege as an expectation of being identified as being a part of mainstream ballet.

Harris begins by tracing the legal and political reasoning from which the notion of ‘Whiteness’ and ‘race’ emerge. Within and beyond her work, it is noted that race is a shifting and intangible division that draws heavily on the visual color of skin and is used to refine distribution of power (West 1999). Harris discusses how stratifications of race were useful in the economic development of transatlantic slavery. Both White and Black categories of race are complex: while not based on any biological differentiation but rather socially constructed identities that differ geographically and across their short history, they are shaped by commercial and political manipulation (Bernasconi 2001; Hyatt et al. 1995). To demonstrate how Whiteness is socially constructed to afford the property of privilege, Harris gives the personal example of her grandmother, a light-skinned African American woman who, bringing up her children alone, was obliged to ‘pass’ for White in order to apply for and take up a job in a department store. This daily act of forced self-denial took a mental and physical toll but was also a real danger as passing is understood as a kind of theft – the taking of privilege that does not belong to you; in this case, the property of Whiteness is the privilege to determine who can be excluded from entering a department store. To be a part of Whiteness includes an expectation of privileges of access and entry, such as to work anywhere, access to funding and even access to migration. This expectation is then protected through the interpretation of Euro/American laws⁴ and, more recently, in constructs for immigrant rights (Haney-Lopez 2006). Under different lines of demarcation, the binary identities of male/female have also historically forced passing as an opposition to the binary of Western gender. Punishment has been meted out to those ‘caught’ presenting as a gender other than the one assigned to them by society at birth (Craft & Craft 1999; de Gabriel et al. 2018). It is clear that passing is only perceived as legally and socially punishable if the identity one is ‘concealing’ and the identity one is presenting have unequal status. In the case of Whiteness, Harris’s work notes that this privilege is therefore protected as a property of Whiteness, thus limiting who can be identified as White becomes a vested interest.⁵ In the case of gender and gender fluidity, passing acts to underline the socially constructed nature of gender. The act of passing therefore threatens those who gain from establishing a hierarchy of difference to determine rights of entry between peoples based on bodily attributes such as sexual organs or skin color (Case et al. 1995; Gould 1996; Hall 2005).

This vested interest in who can claim the right of entry is also evident in how ballet is protected. The right to exclude others ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Half Title
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Introduction: Regarding claiming ballet/reclaiming ballet
• Part One Histories
• Part Two KnowledgeS
• Part Three Resiliences
• Part Four Consciousnesses
• Notes on contributors
• Index