Linköping University – Department of Culture and Society (IKOS) Master´s Thesis, 30 Credits – MA in Ethnic and Migration Studies (EMS)

ISRN: LiU-IKOS/EMS-A--21/09--SE

Performing Whiteness: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Racism in .

María Angélica Rodríguez D.

Supervisor: Stefan Jonsson. Abstract

This thesis is a study of race and ethnicity in culture and the arts. It discusses whiteness and racism in ballet and addresses a gap in the literature for both disciplines Ballet and Race and Ethnic Studies. Even if ballet is a privileged art form that for centuries has served statecraft, survived revolutions, and political instability the problem of race in ballet is jeopardizing its validity and acceptance in the contemporary world. I ask if racism in ballet is more than behaviors, if it designates ideology, or if it is a matter of visuality and aesthetics. I do this to provide insight into how race is projected in and through the art form in question. The need to transcend the scope of a single discipline brought me to adopt interdisciplinary research to analyze ballet right at the intersection with crossing perspectives linked to the body, aesthetics, performance, privilege, race, and gender. The thesis shows that ballet gives material expression to whiteness as ideology and is compliant with an exclusive approach to an idea of the body and beauty that presupposes racist attitudes and behaviors. At the institutional level, the experience of ballet is whiteness -unnamed, unmarked, universal. But for those bodies outside the constructs of whiteness the experience is marked by racism and objective barriers. The study informs that an exclusive discourse of the body, often disguised as aesthetic discourse, translates into limited access to ballet education, body shaming, harassment, and fewer job opportunities. However, ballet is an art form, it is more than whiteness or racism. It creates beauty in the body of the dancer which is both instrument and object of art. Ballet dancers invest their lives learning and performing an art form that some other people cherish, but how come a space of whiteness and racism is perceived as beautiful? The thesis elucidates the importance of this reflection also.

Key Words: Ballet, Race, Whiteness, Racism, Ideology, Aesthetics. To my mother, who took me to ballet,

my two children Amalia and Felipe.

And to Isabel and Julian.

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to Stefan Jonsson, my thesis supervisor, for his orientation, support, and critical discussion that allowed me to make good use of the work done. He inspired me to think and write about ballet in a way that I could only imagine but could not materialize before.

Always in my heart all my ballet teachers, but specially † Ana Consuelo Gómez, and Jaime Díaz, the first to show me the meaning of discipline and passion for .

Thanks to Marta Pardo for allowing me to join her Rhythmic Gymnastics training sessions, which have kept me active during this pandemic.

Especial thanks to the women of my family, my beautiful grandmother who moved with me to Sweden for the first months, and my kids to whom I have seen grow from the experience abroad.

Thanks to the friends that supported me from the distance and the new friendships that were forged.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 1.1 Aims, Purpose, and Research Questions ...... 1 1.2 Limitations to the Research ...... 3 1.3 Method and Methodology ...... 4 1.4 Thesis Outline...... 6 2. BACKGROUND: A HISTORICAL REVIEW ON BALLET ...... 7 2.1 Seventeenth Century Court Ballet ...... 7 2.1.1 Ballet After the French Revolution...... 9 2.2 Nineteenth Century ...... 10 2.3 Twentieth Century Ballet Ruses and ...... 12 2.4 Ballet in the Twenty-first Century ...... 17 3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND ANALYTICAL APPROACH ...... 18 3.1 Ballet as an Ethnic Dance Form ...... 18 3.2 Conceptualizations of Race and Critical Whiteness Studies ...... 20 3.2.1 Race, Racialization, and Racial Formations ...... 20 3.2.2 Critical Whiteness Studies ...... 21 3.3 Foucault and Ballet Studies ...... 23 3.3.1 Foucault Docile Bodies and Critical Pedagogy in Ballet ...... 23 3.3.2 Studies About Whiteness and Racism in Ballet...... 25 4. PERFORMING WHITENESS: IDEOLOGY AND DISCIPLINE ...... 27 4.1 Ideology, Whiteness, and Aesthetics...... 29 4.2 White Docile Ballet Bodies ...... 33 4.3 Whiteness: Institutional Orientation and the Practice of Ballet ...... 36 5. BALLET AND RACE CONTROVERSIES ...... 40 5.1 The Experience of Blackness in Ballet ...... 43 5.2 Systemic Racism and Structural Barriers in Ballet ...... 45 5.3 Racism, Breaking Patterns...... 47 5.4 Ballet Aesthetics: Racialized Perceptions of Beauty ...... 50 6. CONCLUSION ...... 53 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 58

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Aims, Purpose, and Research Questions

Denunciations about racism in ballet and conversations about black dancers onstage have sparked my interest in writing about the discipline I have spent a lifetime, but this time from a race and ethnic perspective. The experience of not being white in a white world relates to political, social, and cultural history; for the black dancer, the experience is overdetermined from the outside by the appearance; One more time, “the black skin onto which white fantasies and fears are projected” (Macey, 1999). In ballet, the narrative of the color barrier relates to the idea that darker complexions “break the line” of the or the thought that black dancers distract from the uniformity essential to the aesthetics of classical works.

If I interpret ballet´s racial attitudes in terms of our own generation´s understandings of biological , it is likely to condemn as racist. It could also be a way to distort the discipline by a desire to support contemporary struggles and demands. For the critics, ballet is an enclave of whiteness and privilege. Indeed, a lack of recognition of the elements saturated with racial connotations is recurrent and is part of the passivity to move forward. Ballet is a structured art form, one of the oldest and technically richest forms of movement and expression. More than exclusionary practices or the reflection of some historical antipathy to color or class, it is in the craft of the beautiful it makes the body an object of art. However, it is part of a comprehensively racialized social structure in which, among other things, what is worthy of cultural display is defined by power.

In his essay Racism and Culture, Frantz Fanon (1967, 32) writes, "If culture is the combination of motor and mental behavior patterns arising from the encounter of man with nature and with his fellow-man, it can be said that racism is indeed a cultural element. There are thus cultures with racism and cultures without racism.” I am inclined to think that ballet

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comes from a culture with racism and that racism in ballet renews, adapt, and changes undergoing the fate of the cultural whole that informed it.

What follows is a review of the struggle to reconcile culture and tradition with the contemporary world demands, particularly the race problem and racism in ballet. My interest draws on how dominant structures play a dual-edge dynamic that grants the institution of ballet a privileged position that serves to reify a white space, and at the same time, compromises the validity and acceptance of ballet. The tension between protecting the tradition and modifying old ideas and practices is ongoing in classical ballet. But there is a particular resistance in giving up aesthetic requirements of skin color.

The necessity to reaffirm the whiteness of the space tells us more of what seems to be in place: a white institution struggling and holding onto something (whiteness) that the presence of black dancers and dancers of other ethnicities shows has already gone. Given the time, this work does not pretend to address the full complexity of this issue. I have focused instead on suggesting an interpretation of ballet evolution and its aesthetical content. From different perspectives, I analyze how race and racism articulate various forms of action that result in the exclusion or mistreatment of dancers given their skin tone.

Having danced all my life, I have grown gradually curious to analyze the discipline that sculpted my body and remodeled my anatomy to the point of deforming or breaking my bones with stress fractures. It all happened while trying to fulfill the requirements of an art form in which there is no place for the wrong body type, height, or skin color. About my experience with ballet: I started ballet education in Colombia, a country where ballet is alien to its culture and where the link with Europe is that of Coloniality. I also trained and danced ballet in Cuba, France, and the United States. In each country, the learning process was the same, highly conservative, and hierarchical. I have practiced for years the movements and steps of a discipline in which the body is both the instrument and the object of art; I grew up in the ballet classroom, with the ballet teacher gazing, disciplining through the daily ballet class, and long hours of rehearsals. Ballet requires discipline and determination. To learn the

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steps, I had to follow orders, imitate, and obey. I grew up dancing ballet: performing whiteness.

I write this thesis to answer questions I found I could not answer from the vantage point of dance alone. At first sight, there seems not to exist any race prejudice in ballet. The monochrome spaces flatten the complexity of what is going on. There is beauty, but the scene mirrors the map of exclusion that racism attempts to draw. Ballet, in this sense, is like a theatrical representation of a visual regime of power in which whiteness is the absent center against which Others appear as deviants or point of deviation. In ballet, skin color is the external and visible sign of difference. It is used for the systematic exclusion of bodies outside the constructs of whiteness. With this research, I try to cover the underlying problematics of this.

How to understand racism in ballet? Is it a behavior that includes regular practices of not accepting or hiring black dancers in ballet institutions, requiring dancers to white-up with cosmetics to be onstage, or ruling out dancers from productions because their skin color is not aesthetically acceptable? Or, is racism designating ideology? In affirmation or denial, how does ballet reproduce racism? Is it just a matter of visuality? These are the questions that I will explore in the following pages, but their broad scope encompasses a few limitations.

1.2 Limitations to the Research

The sensitive nature of this kind of work reduces the number of texts available to cover the subject. Few writers, journalists, dance critics, or social commentators write about racism in ballet. There is a gap, and my intent is to analyze race and racism and understand how they appear and operate in classical ballet. However, race and ballet studies rarely meet. The gap in the literature that combines race and ethnic studies with ballet makes it harder to analyze and write about the topic in a way that is not insubstantial and can make a meaningful contribution to both fields. Knowing the limitations, I hope to contribute by reflecting on race and ethnicity in the arts and culture and by situating denunciations of racism in terms of

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ideology and structural racism. It is worth mentioning that I have my own biases and resistance to ballet formal beauty and discipline. I do not claim to speak for all classical dancers nor intend to collapse into my subjectivity. I write from the place of a lived embodied experience, of my experience as a and someone who has taught ballet.

Moreover, ballet is recorded fundamentally in the body or the physical memory of the muscles and the bones. We learn by imitation, and some information is unlikely to be found in books or even filmed material. And that constitutes a limitation to research. Furthermore, experts in the dance notation system are rare, and such works will provide limited analysis of race. “Dance today has shrunk into a recondite world of hyper-specialists and balletomanes, insiders who talk to each other (often impenetrable laden prose) and ignore the public” (Homans, 2010: 625).

Furthermore, the ethnic roots of ballet are often lost in its understanding. First, the categorization of ballet as superior is inconsistent with it being ethnic; Second, ballet is projected as a universal dance form with a technique of its own that stands on top of dance hierarchies. In the contemporary world, universality is enforced through degree requirements in the higher education dance programs where ballet and modern dance dominate the curriculum structure. Hence, there is a reluctance to categorize ballet as ethnic precisely because its status as a superior dance form is consistent with not being ethnic. To make it clear, ballet as an ethnic dance form constitutes a basis in my understanding for this research.

1.3 Method and Methodology

Being anchored in a phenomenological and aesthetical analysis of ballet, this research is not connected to a particular period or chronological exposition of events. However, it proceeds in chronological order to analyze ballet. The aim is to interpret ballet evolution through its most distinctive forms and from different disciplines examine race, whiteness, and racism, right at the intersection of crossing perspectives linked to the body, aesthetics, performance, privilege, and gender. I am aware that class is another important mode of analysis, it is taken

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under consideration, but I am not able to cover it because it is outside the limit and structure of this thesis. Also, the need to transcend the scope of a single discipline brought me to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, so this research interacts with academic works on performing arts, humanities, and dance education, in different ways.

Likewise, one aspect of this research connects to research in the performing arts. This means that as an additional source, I draw on my experience as a dancer and as a ballet teacher to offer my study an additional layer of embodied phenomenological knowledge of ballet and race in ballet. This is a unique feature of my method and I believe takes us deeper into an understanding of the research topic. My insider perspective is meant to contribute to the scholarly conversation.

Concerning the literature review, I proceed with an integrative approach to assess and combine perspectives and insights while drawing on primary sources such as books, academic journals, newspapers, and ballet performances. The point of departure is a review of ballet history beginning from the seventeenth century using the lenses of race and ethnicity. My reading of ballet history then expands to critical ballet pedagogy, Foucault's theory of power, Critical Whiteness studies, Althusser, and Fanon. I use interdisciplinary research as a complement of qualitative research engaging with the written and visual analysis of ballet content.

Put differently, the research that follows conforms fairly well to what we call interdisciplinary research:

A mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice (National Science Foundation 2005, 2).

It is hard to answer the different research questions from ballet alone. The complexity of the topic is what ultimately has led me towards an interdisciplinary perspective. I have followed CohenMiller & Pate (2019) model for developing Interdisciplinary research. There was a

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significant number of texts to sort through regarding the different perspectives and disciplines included in this research, and I have used multiple venues to locate relevant material. These include scholarly articles and books, online searches, reviewing references from other works, and reviewing ballet performances. In the beginning, there was a considerable number of materials. Then I went to a smaller set and finally stick to those with an explicit theoretical underpinning, and from them, I built my thesis.

1.4 Thesis Outline

The thesis is organized into six chapters. After this introduction, I present a historical review on ballet with particular attention to the elements that give insight into race and racism. The third chapter provides the theoretical framework and the literature review on ballet and the humanities, including works of Foucault, critical race studies, and ballet pedagogy that were essential to prepare the combined analysis of this thesis. My focus is racism, but in order to discuss racism, I need to discuss whiteness. Hence, I develop my findings in two chapters considering that the institutional experience of ballet is whiteness and the experience of the black dancing body is racism. In this way, chapter four reflects on ideology, discipline, and the construction of whiteness, while chapter five delves into the outcomes of whiteness for those bodies who do not seem to belong there, meaning the internalization of the white gaze and the controversies of racist practices surrounding the ballet experience. Chapter six is the conclusion of this research.

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2. BACKGROUND: A HISTORICAL REVIEW ON BALLET

2.1 Seventeenth Century Court Ballet

Ballet is a theatrical form that fuses poetry, music, and dance, in a tradition, technic, and aesthetic of its own. Historically, ballet has played a central role in the expression of cultural pre-eminence. It first appeared in Europe´s courts during the sixteenth century and evolved as a formal discipline that served in the projection of aristocratic identity. Ideas about dance in western culture came from classical antiquity, which provided a model for associating dance with cosmology. As if dance could be a revelation of the implicit order of the world. A symbolic testimony of perfection of the universe, like hidden beauty in dancing bodies. References for dance theory of the seventeenth century that shaped what we now know as classical ballet are, for example, in the writings of the ancient Greek Lucian (221):

Dance came into being contemporaneously with the primal origin of the universe, making her appearance together with love -the love that is age-old. In fact, the concord of the heavenly spheres, the interlacing of the errant planets with the fixed stars, their rhythmic agreement, and timed harmony are proof that dance was primordial.

“With the body itself operating as medium, nature and art were tangibly joined and thus encouraged efforts to reveal through dance the implicit order – or art- of the natural world” (Cohen, 2000: 86). The thought of dance as primordial joined theories of universal motion at the inception of ballet in the sixteenth century; And from these premises, by the mid- seventeenth century, on an artistic level, dance, architecture, and cosmic theory in and around the courts of Europe intertwined to create spectacles to magnify the royal body (Cohen, 2000; Strong, 1984; Homans, 2010). It was absolutist power translated into art. The dance evolved and organized around the axis of the monarch´s presence: All the poetic allegory from the traditional analogy between king and sun transformed into the material agency of the king. As Fontenelle´s (1657-1757) illustrations in Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, the

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king was like the great vortex of which the sun is like the master. A fiction within a fiction that had both an aesthetic and ideological power.

Ballet literature shows how classical dance serves political regimes. There are, for example, accounts of how Cardinal Richelieu used it for diplomatic purposes and how he persuaded people to admire some as they enhanced his concept of power (Chazin-Bennahum, 1988; Cohen, 2000; Homans, 2010). One of these was the Ballet de la Nuit (1653). A ballet where the King´s image intertwined with that of the sun, like Le Roi Soleil, Louis XIV of France. According to Kirstein Lincoln (1984), one of the founders of New York City Ballet, the ballet consisted of forty-three separate entrées representing the twelve hours of the night: the King of France cast himself as the rising sun appearing with Aurora and accompanied by allegorical representations of honor, grace, love, riches, victory, fame, and peace (Scholl, 1994: 21).

In the ballets where Louis XIV performed as the sun, the spectacle was his body, and everything centered around his presence, including the disposition of the stage (Cohen, 2000; Homans, 2010; Strong, 1984). In regards to Kantorowicz´s study of The King´s Two Bodies (1957), dance scholar Mark Franko has argued that “when dancing, Louis XIV stands for his real ability -his body natural- and for the mystical role he -his body politic. His body, and his role, constitute the two-body theory in theatrical practice” (Franko, 1988: 6).

Ballet became a central feature of court life because physical appearance was a sign of inherited nobility; the ballet became a way to look and act noble. When Louis XIV founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661, the purpose was to “restore the art of dancing to its perfection” (Archives Nationales 1988 in Homans, 2010: 38); And, like other French institutions, it intended to be an object of European emulation. However, scholar Jan Kott (1997) traces a relationship between ballet and the colonization of the body-as-subject by kings. In this view, ballet aimed "to appropriate grace and decorum in the service of a mystic of superiority that rationalized rulership by an aristocracy endowed with divine authority" (Fletcher, 1998: 34).

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Marked by privilege from the beginning, under Louis XIV, ballet status elevated: the discipline took another level with efforts to systematize and codify the steps according to a strict set of geometric principles governing movement. It is worth mentioning that in this period, the ballet was predominantly male, and female roles danced en travesti. But as rigorous training increased complexity in , aristocrats refrained and left it to professionals who were not aristocrats.

Compatible with its culture and values, European Monarchies started to hire masters who introduced the discipline in their countries. Ballet took ground, but it remained a foreign art until each country proved a way to make it their own. Thus, ballet masters diffused the knowledge with the steps codified in the French language, their classical dance technique remained, and each country introduced distinct national elements in style. “English ballet style is often described as restrained and classical, Danish style as humane; French dancers as elegant, Russians as soulful and Americans as straightforward and energetic” (Sulcas, 2003).

2.1.1 Ballet After the French Revolution.

In the eighteen century, precisely because ballet personified French aristocratic style, it became a target; “ballet was no longer a symbol of refinement and elegance; to the contrary, it had come to stand for decadence and decline” (Homans, 2010: 77). Ballet masters and dancers had only one way forward: reform and adjust to the changing context. The royal spectacle transformed into one that suspended the realities of the revolution for public enlightenment and amusement. In response to the socio-political demands, ballet abandoned repertoire that exalted the idea of a semi-divine race of monarchs and princes. Instead, as Judith Chazin-Bennahum (1988) notes in her book: Dance in the Shadow of the Guillotine, it focused on ballets based on classical mythology with an emphasis on human emotions, the revolutionary spirit, and the bourgeois drama. Notwithstanding the changing context, the quest for beauty and perfection in ballet continued.

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Regarding race, there are two ballets in the revolutionary period that are worth mentioning. First, La Liberté de Nègres ou Sélico (1793), a ballet that “professed the importance of freeing all enslaved peoples but specifically concerns for the blacks of the West Coast of Muslim Africa” (Chazin-Bennahum, 1988: 108). Second, La Fête Américaine (1794), where symbols of Us and the Other start to appear onstage with the use of coconut palms, garlands of the tri-colored ribbon, a representative of the American people carrying a balanced scale with two children, one black and one white, and the tree of liberty calling for no racial distinctions. (Chazin-Bennahum, 1988: 120). Such performances are the firsts invitations to question depictions of race and ethnicity that emerge from genetically determined physical differences and learned cultural patterns in Europe.

According to dance historians, perhaps there is no other time in history where the look and quality of ballet changed more dramatically than during and after the French Revolution. The ideology of political and social freedom invaded ballet aesthetics. The Romantic Ballet of the nineteenth century was shaped with “the significance of women as heroines, a new freer dance technique with more profound gestural movements, the melodrama with a villain of horrible dimensions in a story purporting to offer a moral message, the gigantic spectacle, and the importance of local color with regional dances emphasizing specific geographic regions” (Chazin-Bennahum, 1988: 173). Ballet discipline filled itself with arduous professional training, which from a ballerina perspective became the basis of unbounded freedom of movement.

2.2 Nineteenth Century Romantic Ballet

The Romantic Ballet comes from a generation of artists with a profound disenchantment of the post-revolutionary world. In criticism to rationalism, a society based on material wealth devoid of moral and spiritual content, Romantic Ballet was the aestheticized way to dwell into the depths of being, in the sense of loss, the intense feeling of yearning, the “if only” love… of the first modern ballets and that invented ballet as we know it today: a first act opening with a narrative sequence, followed by a white act or the ballet

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blanc with ballerinas dancing in an ethereal vision like spirits; and, a final act, a or an assortment of national or character dances (Homans, 2010; Scholl, 1974).

Romantic ballet “completely shifted the axis of the art -it was no longer about men and power and aristocratic manners; classical gods, heroic deeds; or even quaint village events and adventures. Instead, it was an art of women devoted to charting the misty inner worlds of dreams and the imagination” (Homans, 2010: 209). The romantic ballerina was airy, spiritual, ethereal, otherworldly, and depicted a feminine aesthetic that included an idealized facial composure. The ballerina who embodied Romanticism was Marie Taglioni. Her dance technique focused on lines and symmetry, simplicity, and perfection in an Ancient Greek manner.

She insisted on simple and lighter costumes and introduced the bell-shaped dress cut below the knees, with a wasp waist and puff sleeves, known today as the romantic . Her most significant contribution is the introduction of pointe work, a technical feat in ballet; With a strong-feet technique, Taglioni managed to convey a sense of lightness and ethereality. To rise on pointe gave a combination of woman´s power and beauty that privileged woman and relegated man to the role of ballerina porteur, her carrier or the one who takes her through the air from one point to another. In the nineteenth century, the ballerina became the undisputed protagonist of the art.

However, as women took the lead, “the dancing body in ballet became associated with femininity, sensuality, and decadence (Karthas, 2015: 159). With the rise of the bourgeoisie, ballet transformed into a private enterprise. In similarity to the current state, the ballet received support from the government but became increasingly dependent on private funding. Then, followed the commodification of dancers. An unmistakably aristocratic expression no longer seemed exclusive from the perspective of a privileged person. Ballet was in decline. The physical appearance of the ballerina became the center of the male gaze and desire. Ballet was like a market for girls, and being a ballerina became objectionable in some social circles.

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While in some countries, ballet lost momentum and support, in other countries, it remained untouched or elevated. In Denmark, where the political situation was stable, classical ballet found a safe haven in the Royal Danish Ballet. Under August Bournonville´s direction (1830- 1877), a Danish style of ballet evolved which included Nordic folk as a theme and set out a new athleticism without sacrificing the prized decorum, propriety, and softer movements of classical ballet. Ballet in Denmark remained untouched well into the twentieth century, while In Russia, they enlarged the romantic tradition and elevated ballet. It was Russia who brought Modern Ballet to life.

The School, founded in 1738, was the result of military-style training and the fusion of dance styles and techniques from the French, Danish, and Italian schools with refinement and elements of the Russian dance tradition. Russia exalted the aristocratic connotations and made ballet more imperial. La Bayadère, The Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, and , are Russian nineteenth-century ballet creations. These ballets are still the most danced of the classical repertory around the world. Denunciations of racism are related to their content which can be ethnically insensitive and exclusive because all include the white ballets that close the door to dark skin tones.

Ballet in Denmark and Russia proved that ballet could adopt the national identity and spirit of a country; And, this served to praise a universal nature in ballet. Most importantly, with Romanticism, the actual dancing became recognized: the steps, poses, and movements of ballet acquired a new intrinsic meaning, “the real, unique and eternal theme for ballet became the dance itself” (Gautier in Homans 2010: 209). Regarding race, there is no historical evidence of black ballet dancers in the previously reviewed periods. And, if ballet was made feminine during the nineteenth century, this amounted to white femininity.

2.3 Twentieth Century Ballet Ruses and Neoclassical ballet

Another turning point came at the beginning of the twentieth century when the world turned toward realism, natural science, and positivism. The Romantic Ballet emphasizing the

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fragile, ethereal, refined, and feminine could not keep up. Ballet came to be attacked for its conventionalism conservatism and lack of expression by dancers who created new ways of moving, such as Laban, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Fuller, and Duncan. The first quarter of the twentieth century was dominated by the ideas advocated by the Ballet Russes. A Russian that showed ballet to the world in an entirely new way. Ballet Russes reconciled French cultural tradition with national and modern tastes proving ballet´s potential as an art form with a dynamic and collaborative fusion that incorporates symphonic music, dance, and visual arts (Karthas, 2015; Scholl 1994). Ballet Russes focused on ensemble work or group action departing from the Romantic ballets that placed attention on one star or couple before a corps de ballet backdrop. They toured North America, South America, and Europe exporting and internationalizing their conception of dance.

Ballet Russes appealed to the European fascination of defining Others, they satisfied “Western European interest in expressionism, orientalism, symbolism primitivism and to a greater extent, exoticism” (Karthas, 2015: 78). Ballet Russes exploited the commodification of cultural, ethnic, and racial differences with ballets that fused western and eastern aesthetics by presenting Russian and Oriental-themed works like Firebird based on a Russian myth, or La Bayadère that includes exotic images of India. However, fears about degeneration and the cultural invasion of foreigners catalyzed efforts to assert the French identity of ballet. A topic that Ilyana Karthas (2015) develops in her book When Ballet Became French.

Moreover, ballets like Le Sacre du Printemps included in Ballet Russes repertoire changed the reception of ballet. Choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, music by Stravinsky, it was the antithesis of classical dance. It had nothing to do with aristocratic noble ideals or with academic ballet; on the contrary, it was the destruction of both. The story is about a pagan rite that culminates in the female sacrifice of a chosen girl forced to dance herself to death. A whole ballet tradition, music, choreography, and staging swept away. Instead of verticality, , and body lines, it is about shaking, trembling, and contracting the body. Critics considered Sacre evidence of the decline of Western thought and civilization, the birth of twentieth-century music and dance, and the prelude of World War I (Karthas 2015, Homans 2010, Scholl 1994). It was the beginning of Modern Dance.

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Ballet dancers in the twentieth century were actively performing and creating new works that sort of redefined ballet or made it neoclassical. Some companies increased touring projects, creating more opportunities for dancers to perform in various countries and diverse audiences. New ballet schools and companies, both national and private, emerged and increased in number during this century. The result was an increased promotion of ballet and less limited access to ballet education. However, the crossing dynamics of class, race, gender, and the body still defined, as today, the composition of the dancers in the different ballet institutions of each country. Concerning access to ballet education in terms of class, this may differ depending on the support given by the state for professional ballet education. National ballet schools in France, Russia, or Cuba, for instance, offer education sponsored by the State and argue that class is not decisive in access to ballet education. In these cases, physicality more than class defines access, but what ballet dancers embody is still an art form with the aristocratic element deep-rooted and ideas of the body and beauty that belong to the constructs of whiteness. The political regime and revolutionary aspirations in Soviet Russia or Castro´s Cuba did not strip away ballet from its whiteness. Ballet dancers perform whiteness, and dancing nineteenth-century classics histrionically or theatrically is closely linked to embodying elite white femininity, particularly for those ballet dancers performing the leading roles.

We have seen how Court Ballet served the state and translated absolutism into art. Likewise, in the twentieth century, the ballet was actively used but as a diplomatic tool. The USSR, for instance, used it as an artistic representation of reality with the task of ideological transformation of consciousness. Ezrahi (2012) in her book Swans of the Kremlin. Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia develop this topic. It is interesting to draw a parallel concerning the survival of ballet after the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. Even though the reasons differ, the fact is that a privileged art form remained with its tradition subtly modified after significant social changes. In France, it survived thanks to the belief that ballet could represent republicanism. And, in Soviet Russia, it was more of appropriating an imperial institution as a way of positioning the new power.

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In addition, every period and every country produce ballet dancers that serve as representatives of classical ballet in its strict technical sense and, more importantly, to the style which belongs to the nation. Ballet in the USSR, for instance, was made with deep ideological resonance and demanded socialist realism. The Soviets replaced the complex use of classical ballet that characterized Petipa’s and Fokine’s choreographies that elevated ballet in the nineteenth century for a new choreographic language that was reflected in the so-called dramballet. Galina Ulanova became the embodiment of Soviet ballet and the emotionally intense style that characterizes them. I am not able to go further into the subject but in Soviet Russia or Cuba, for instance, embodying ballet was congruent with the citizen obligation with socialism or revolution. Technically, behind Galina Ulanova and other famous Russian ballet dancers were the teachings of Agripina Vaganova, who systematized and codified ballet in the Fundamentals of Classical Ballet in collaboration with Lubov Block. The is one of the preferred methods for teaching ballet today.

The Soviet turn resulted in the creation of ballets like Romeo and Juliet. A beautiful ballet in the ballet sense and still part of today´s repertoire. However, dramballets were more focused on pantomime and this made Soviet ballet whittle away from classical ballet as performed by Russians in the previous centuries (Ezrahi, 2012; Homans, 2010). Before the Soviets, Russians successfully absorbed French and and managed to make it their own and raise it to imperial standards. But in the twentieth century, although Russian ballet kept flourishing, it was not in Russia, but outside its territory: in Britain and the United States. And thanks to the work of Russian migrants.

It was Russians who passed ballet into new bodies and minds. Not only the lessons with the Vaganova method but the entire orthodoxy of the Imperial Ballet. In the mid-twentieth century, Britain recognized ballet as national art, and the Royal Ballet became a world leader in dance. Margot Fonteyn became the image of the Royal Ballet and, together with her dance partner Rudolf Nureyev made ballet popular with ballets choreographed by Sir Frederik Ashton and Kenneth McMillan. These dancers and choreographers contributed to a ballet boom in Britain, but the same happened in different countries during this period. In general, there was a growing interest in the ballet discipline, and there were attempts to make it

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popular. In the U.S., Russian migrant George Balanchine created The School of American Ballet (1934), envisioned with a mixed student body (an idea did not succeed). And he was also a founding member of the American Ballet Theatre (1939) and New York City Ballet (1948).

The ballet boom also signified the creation of private ballet studios and institutions and produced different outcomes. On the one hand, private ballet studios provided more access to ballet education, especially concerning the studios that started to function in marginalized areas. But on the other hand, professional ballet education was still privileged and costly. In some countries, as the middle classes grew more affluent, girls flooded into dance schools, asserting a relationship between class and ballet education. However, access increased as well, thanks to scholarships provided by private institutions and from State support. In the U.S., for instance, scholarships were granted in growing numbers during the Cold War, and this increased access to professional ballet education and strengthen the position of ballet aesthetics in dance.

George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Antony Tudor were the ones who made classical ballet emblematic in the U.S. Balanchine institutionalized the standard look of the hyper- whitened, ethereally slim ballerina. But he also had a genuine interest in African American culture. Balanchine worked with Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham and “integrated Africanist principles of energy and performance motifs into his choreography for his almost totally white ensemble” (Gottschild, 2003: 140). In some duets, Balanchine used black-on- white aesthetics as in Agon, with Arthur Mitchel one of the few black dancers, at that time in the New York City Ballet, and white ballerina Diana Adams. Balanchine´s black-on-white aesthetic attempted to change the perspective of ballet, but structural conditions prevented this from happening. In 1969, Arthur Mitchell created Dance Theatre Harlem, the first African American ballet company: today a multi-ethnic company with its own ballet school.

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2.4 Ballet in the Twenty-first Century

Ballet has been changing in the past decades. The ballerina no longer reigns in the construction of new ballets and their meanings. New ballets include views of masculinity rather than femininity; also, there is a tendency towards equivalence in partnering, whether opposite-sex or same-sex. The new choreographies treat women with less sexism and less sublimity. She is not the center as before, but the implications of these changes are still emerging. The iconoclastic images keep losing admiration, and it seems ballet entered into a phase of slow decline. Artists and choreographers who made ballet vibrant in the twentieth century are dead or retired. Successors live in different times. Ballet is seen as a base of technique and a source of innovation; the art form is still leading but without a conventional framework. Ballet is refashioned, so various choreographers use classic foundations in favor of visions of their own.

Homans (2010) argues the tradition itself became clogged and exhausted. Ballet, layered in courtly conventions, represents order, hierarchy, tradition, high ideals, self-control, and proportion and grace stand for an inner truth and a state of being. The narrative no longer has salience. Elitism and skill are exclusionary and divisive. It looks like ballet is starting to die slowly. Old ballets are presented with new conventional choreography, but that is not making people admire ballet again. From aristocratic to bourgeoise and into a commercial affair, ballet has survived, but it still registers elements of the societies that nourished it, even if they collapsed, and this is considered problematic.

Ballet, always so particular, is still diffused as universal. On the one hand, we know ballet is an ethnic dance form; on the other hand, we know it is now becoming a platform in higher dance programs around the world, which are structured around ballet technique and modern dance technic, both European. Two contradictions emerge, the first between an ethnic dance form with a global kind of scope or universal range and the second between race and aesthetics. So, how come a thing which is very linked to whiteness and racism can still be perceived as universal and beautiful? To analyze these problems, we have to take a look at theoretical understandings of how race and whiteness operate in ballet.

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3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND ANALYTICAL APPROACH

The theoretical framework is organized into different sections based upon disciplinary perspectives: The first section presents a literature review on ballet as an ethnic dance form centered on the work of dance anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku. The second section includes a review of race theory and conceptualizations of race from sociologists and race theorist Omi and Winant and a review on Whiteness Critical Studies based on sociologist Ruth Frankenberg and cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed. The third section delves on Foucault´s docile bodies and literature that uses part of his genealogy of power to analyze ballet pedagogy. The final section expands into a revision of the literature discussing whiteness and racism in ballet by dance scholars, some of them former ballet dancers, writing mainly from the fields of Dance Studies and Dance Education.

3.1 Ballet as an Ethnic Dance Form

From the historical introduction to classical ballet included in the background section of this thesis, it is critical to turn attention to the ethnic element in ballet. To Joann Kealiinohomoku (1970: 39), “ethnic means a group which holds common genetic, linguistic and cultural ties, with special emphasis on cultural tradition. By definition, therefore, every dance form must be an ethnic form.” In her essay, An Anthropologist Look of Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance, Kealiinohomoku states ballet “is a product of the Western world and a dance form developed by Caucasians who speak Indo-European languages and who share a common European tradition” (Ibid: 40). She stripped away the universal element, something unusual in the field, which was considered groundbreaking. From her view, the idea is to acknowledge that the internationalization of ballet should not undermine its effectiveness as an ethnic form. Another issue Kealiinohomoku called into attention was that ballet for a long time has been diffused in a way that looks more like that of cultural imperialism.

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Accordingly, the universal claims of Western knowledge, colonial or postcolonial, suppress its various racialized Others into silence, and it did it as well in the realm of dance. In the making of Otherness, as Goldberg (2000) argues, ideas about persons, society, and politics become objectified and are then reified as universal objective truths; “Part, indeed, an idealized part, is substituted for the whole, and the specification of the Other, or Otherness itself is silently denied. Those thus rendered other are sacrificed to the idealization, excluded from the being of personhood, from social benefits, and from political (self-) representation” (Ibid: 156). In dance, classical ballet is the idealized dance form to which the dance of Others loses value. Mills (1997) writes about epistemological underpinnings that have contributed to shaping the current image of classical African dance as a bodily (somatic) experience compared to an aesthetic (artistic) endeavor through the application of the consistency theory of selective perception. In this way, ballet turned into art, the quintessential form of dance and the normative technique, while the dance of Others is considered inferior.

To think about ballet as ethnic is the basis of my research, but few authors take this approach. Dienes (1995) goes further and categorizes ballet as stage folklore:

Ballet is definitely and unquestionably a product of European culture, born from and fed by elements of European ethnicity, an art form that has assimilated a high number of movements and patterns from social and folk dances through “choreo-capillarity” and others through individual choreographic inventiveness. It rose to the highest peaks of European society and came down to the middle classes as a form of both professional stage art and amateur social pursuit. It has never been “readopted” into folklore in its original function, but has engendered what may be called stage folklore. (Dienes, 1995:177).

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3.2 Conceptualizations of Race and Critical Whiteness Studies

3.2.1 Race, Racialization, and Racial Formations

Conceptualizations of race in literature organize in two ways. First, race is a classification based on biological or physiognomic differences ranging from visual distinctions of skin color to genetic or genomic variations. Here, from the so-called corporeal and phenotypic markers, emerges a visual dimension of race with the potential to be translated into aesthetic categories. Even moral judgments in a culture highly tied to what is visible tend to be based on these markers. Second, race is understood as an ideological construct that masks a more fundamental material distinction of identity and reinforces social differences and notions of self-representation (Omi and Winant, 2015; Benedict, 2000; Goldberg, 1990). In this sense, to think of race as a construct is to situate the idea under historical conditions as an organizing principle to structure the world according to certain political interests. Hence, race is involved in the definition of rights and privileges, the distribution of resources; it is a template for subordination and oppression of different social groups. Omni and Winant (2015: 111) define race as “a concept, a representation or signification of identity that refers to different types of human bodies, to the perceived corporeal and phenotypic markers of difference and the meanings and social practices that are ascribed to these differences.”

While it is widely accepted in most scholarly fields that race is a social construction, assumptions of biological determinism are still present: as Fields (1990) notes, “we live in a world in which the nineteenth-century biological conception of race, although discredited scientifically, remains important to people and institutions and countries that act as if they believe, that the world population is divided into biologically distinguishable groups, i.e., races” (Miles, 2000: 138). In this way, race appears to identify the Other but not people of known European descent or visible European appearance, so there is the black ballet dancer and the ballet dancer. However, race is also a template for resistance to many forms of marginalization and domination. Dancers who are denouncing racism and challenging existing practices of exclusion and marginalization are using Black: the historical, political, and cultural category.

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To think critically on the idea of race helps to understand the implications of its attributed meaning through time and review notions of racialization to analyze racism in ballet. Racialization consists of selecting and of imparting social and symbolic meaning to perceived phenotypical differences. Through the process of racialization, people objects, and indeed ballet, come to be inscribed with ideas and meanings that move from race-thinking to race-making. But the ability to interpret racial meanings depends on preconceived notions of a racialized social structure that locates an individual or group “within a socially and historically demarcated set of demographic and cultural boundaries, state activities, life chances, and tropes of identity/difference/inequality (Omi & Winant, 2015: 125).

To better organize the understanding of the ideas of race, theorists bring attention to that which links signification and the structure: racial formation processes. Omi and Winant (2015: 109) define racial formation as “the socio-historical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed.” In other words, racial formation is the process of race-making and its after-effects throughout the social order. Some examples of racial formation process start from historical events like the European colonial expansion and African slavery. These events shaped the idea of race and structured the world; the experience resulted in ideas of superiority and derogative definitions of the Other. The impacts are still felt at economic and psychological levels and came to influence aesthetics. Ballet constitutes an example of this.

3.2.2 Critical Whiteness Studies

Critical Whiteness Studies aims to make whiteness visible and disrupt racism by problematizing whiteness. According to Ruth Frankenberg (1993: 1), whiteness is a set of linked dimensions: “First, whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege; Second, it is a standpoint, a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society. Third, whiteness refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.” It is possible to say that the ballet fits in the three aforementioned dimensions of whiteness. Ballet is a white institution, meaning it is an institutional space “shaped by the

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proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather, and cohere to form the edges of such spaces” (Ahmed, 2007: 157).

Critical Whiteness Studies focuses on the construction and maintenance of whiteness, to Frankenberg (2015: 454), "a construction that is, however, fundamentally asymmetrical, for the term whiteness signals the production and reproduction of dominance rather than subordination, normativity rather than marginality, and privilege rather than disadvantage." Whiteness is seen as a tool in dismantling the relationship between ballet and racism. Thus, it is fundamental to speak of whiteness in ballet and assign it a place in the relations of racism. As Dyer (1997: 1) remarks, “as long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they function as a human norm.” Ballet is considered high art and, despite its decline in different moments in history, it maintains a privileged position with whiteness as the platform of the experience.

Sarah Ahmed (2007) considers whiteness and its ongoing history as a category of experience, which orientates bodies and institutions in specific directions that shape what bodies can do. In her view, whiteness is a location that holds its place through habits and the repetition of acts; Whiteness is given as the background to experience. White bodies do not turn toward whiteness because it is all-around determining the experience of being in a white world. In the words of Ahmed (2007:157), “the effect of this ‘around whiteness’ is the institutionalization of a certain ‘likeness’, which makes non-white bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this space." In a sea of whiteness, some bodies move comfortably and with familiarity. Other bodies are marked, stopped, and become subject to racism. I use whiteness in Ahmed's terms to reflect on the institutional practices of classical ballet. I begin with the ballet institution and its discipline to bring what is behind the experience of the black dancing body in ballet.

However, authors alert there is a risk in making the invisible mark of privilege visible, as Sara Ahmed (2007: 149) notes: “any project that aims to dismantle or challenge the categories that are made invisible through privilege is bound to participate in the object of its critique.” Thus, it is vital to have a critical vigilance in mind when writing about whiteness,

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but the same caution is needed to write about ballet from the standpoint of critical race theory. Otherwise, strong accusations will further devalue an art form that, in the end, belongs to a particular group with its own culture and traditions.

3.3 Foucault and Ballet Studies

3.3.1 Foucault Docile Bodies and Critical Pedagogy in Ballet

Foucault´s genealogy of power in European history opens a door to situate the ballet discipline in the group of institutions that appeared in the seventeenth century at the deployment of biopower. Power, sometimes projected as coercion and others associated with freedom, is a concept already theoretically confusing that appears in different forms such as the ones identified by Foucault: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopower. These types of power overlap rather than replace each other. For the purpose of this research, I do not dwell on the dynamics of these forms of power and turn the attention towards the way power is applied to the body.

According to Foucault (1977), when the classics turned the body into an object and target of power, the fixation of having a hold of bodies extended to controlling the efficiency of movements; more than the intensification of subjection, it was about making the body more obedient, useful, and skillful. Different technologies were created and deployed to discipline the two registers of the body, the anatomical (natural body) and the political (intelligible body), in a way that secured the desired performance. Central to this process was the creation of disciplines and docile bodies.

Ballet, although not included in Foucault´s work, can be analyzed as a technology of power that determines “the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination” (Foucault, 1988: 18) as well as a technology of the self, which “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to

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transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Ibid).

From the theorization of disciplinary power and docile bodies, dance scholars show an interest in how bodies develop in relation to artistic technique and bio-political forces that constitute and regulate subjectivity. The next part is a literature review on the growing field of dance pedagogy. It focuses on studies that combine Foucault and ballet. It then expands to a literature review that discusses the topics of whiteness and racism in ballet.

Discipline, hierarchy, and ideal bodies belong to traditional ballet pedagogy, and so injury, abuse, and loss of the self in professional ballet training. Kleiner (2009: 236) argues, “ballet technique is learned only through highly self-conscious training, yet it requires a loss of self- consciousness when performed.” Reproducing the harshness of the discipline, including authoritarianism, seems to be part of the tradition and necessary to achieve results (Brandt, 2016). However, there is a growing interest in transforming practices and research pointing to a critical pedagogy in ballet, which includes somatic practices that encourage a connection between mind and body. The literature review shows proposals of concrete methods such as Awareness Through Movement (Demerson, 2020) or the application of Dewey´s reflective pedagogical principles to ballet (Weidmann, 2018).

Discipline establishes hierarchies, distributes individuals in space, and creates ranks for bodies categorized according to ballet aesthetics or the idealized body in ballet (Green, 1999, 2001; Kleiner, 2009). According to Green (2002: 100), “student dancer bodies are docile bodies created to produce efficiency, not only of movement but also, a normalization and standardization of behavior in dance classes.” Dryburgh and Fortin (2010) argue that surveillance is applied to ballet dancers to normalize their bodies into the ballet aesthetic but assert that this can either be a positive or negative force contributing to the oppression or the emancipation of the dancer.

Kleiner (2009) analyzes the setup of the ballet studio like a panopticon and points to the loss of self-consciousness that ranges from intentionally wearing a lot of black to prevent awareness about weight to dancing less self-consciously as the discipline is ingrained in the

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body. For Green (2001: 164), ballet “without a sense of ownership of the body, it often leads to unsafe pedagogical practice, injury, physical strain, pain, and general lack of confidence and wellbeing.” Marston (2018) argues that the ballerina engages in disciplinary monitoring of the self to achieve a societal ideal based upon the female body as spectacle. And to Mc Lean (2008: 16), the dancing body is never only the object of the gaze, but also a subject who participates and present chosen aspects of herself to that gaze, willingly and consciously. The literature reviewed shows that the relationship between power and docility emerging from Foucauldian perspectives in ballet is not linear or absolute.

3.3.2 Studies About Whiteness and Racism in Ballet.

Other studies focus on the perpetuation of Eurocentric dance hierarchies in higher education dance programs. McCarthy-Brown (2014) argues that higher dance education programs grounded on classical ballet and modern dance techniques in the U.S. reinforce classist and racist ideologies. Zhuwawo & Nkululeko (2020) use Foucault's theory of power to argue that ballet training enforces whiteness in dance training programs and subjugates the African Zimbabwean body into a white ideal body construction. Schupp (2020) examines dance competition culture through critical race theory and notes that ballet is the standard to evaluate and marginalize other dance styles. Finally, Carter (2018) writes about the cultural legacies of imperial whiteness that run through ballet in general. He uses The Dying Swan as a performance prism refracting the particularity of lived experiences of post-coloniality and relations to elite forms of white European civilization. To this author, ballet is the materialization of privileged forms of whiteness and the refraction of imperial domination.

For Atencio &Wright (2009: 43), the standardization of ballet and modern dance created conditions where "skinny disciplined bodies associated with middle-class whiteness became imbued with a higher institutional value.” Green (1999, 2001) argues that the effects and context of ideal bodies in dance cannot be generalized for women or limited to a dominant white, middle-class perspective. In her study, body issues appeared to be different for all women, regardless of race. Picart (2012) analyzes whiteness as status of property and the

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granting of intellectual property to the choreographic works of George Balanchine, who showcased a hyper-whitened ballet feminine aesthetic, and those of Martha Graham, who used exotic elements to mask the whiteness.

McCarthy-Brown's (2012) research focuses on African-American ballet dancers, constructs of double-consciousness, historical images of the black woman, and colorism. She notes that technical ability relegates to color casting and that hiring practices in mainstream American ballet companies show a preference for light-skinned ballet dancers. According to Brown (2018), ballet is diversifying but by expanding its definition of whiteness as opposed to embracing blackness. Her study reflects on the experience of institutional racism in the U.S and the outcomes of racialized funding coming from philanthropic organizations. Brown suggests that old stereotypes, aesthetics, and racial limits are reinforced instead of normalizing mixed-race companies.

Heinecken (2017) reports a failure to provide a systemic critique of the economic and institutional structures of the ballet world and how these may limit the opportunities for many aspiring dancers. This author questions the focus on success narratives of black dancers that reproduce a classist understanding of the world in which success or failure depends on the individual. Senaki (2018) writes about the experience of black women in ballet and the impact on emotional labor and aesthetic labor, conceptualized by the author as emosthetic labor.

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4. PERFORMING WHITENESS: IDEOLOGY AND DISCIPLINE

Ballet, stuck in the aristocratic principle that gave it a structural position of privilege and directed its strength, is a highly conservative art that resists change. Within more than four centuries, the discipline and its aesthetical connotations remain stable, more so in the body that receives the knowledge of how to dance ballet. Ballet does not speak about its whiteness; it lacks the awareness to see how it aesthetically reflects a construction in relation to the other; it does not associate tightness, self-control, self-consciousness with notions of racial thinking. Although, whiteness is the regime that has regulated and governed social and cultural life for centuries. Thus, it is valuable that the study of racism in classical ballet includes analyses from this perspective.

Nearly all ballet dancers in major ballet schools and companies are white subjects coming from middle and upper-middle-class backgrounds. Ballet does not perceive its raciality because race does not acknowledge its shaping of white identities or experiences. Members of the ballet community are generally not in the structural position to see the effects of racism or the role of race in shaping the discipline. Furthermore, ballet dancers learn to give up their bodily authority from an early age, so regardless of their race or ethnicity, they tend not to question artistic authority. If they do, they risk retaliation like verbal belittling or their permanence in a school or company. The hierarchy in ballet is highly respected, and the ballet dancer is there to be seen, not heard. Even if the ballet reflects a racist view of the world, dancers keep dancing given passion, carrier prospects, or job contracts.

Ballet reflects a construction of the world in the image of the dominant group who set a standard for aesthetics and humanity. Ballet is the dance of a group of people who, for historical reasons, were situated at the moment and under favorable conditions to develop dance as an art form, and they made it an object of emulation and positioned it as the highest referent in dance. Ballet covers an aesthetic function in dominant ideologies. In general, where ballet exists, be it Global North or Global South, it is about performing whiteness.

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When ballet shows whiteness explicitly, it does so as a scene or act included in the whole theatre work. The is an otherworldly vision in which white functions in the three ways identified by Richard Dyer (1997): first, white is a category of color like any other. Second, white is a category of skin color and functions as a movable criterion of inclusion ascribed to the whiteness of the skin. Third, white is a hue with symbolic connotations such as purity and ethereality. For the rest of a classical ballet performance, and ballet in general, whiteness appears as nothing in particular: it is unnamed and unmarked, an invisible asset invoking universality.

Habitual practice teaches the discipline which is integral to the professional ballet dancing identity. A ballet dancer grows under strict body surveillance and accepts disciplinary dietary and training practices as necessary parts of the profession. Ballet both disciplines the body and mind; it involves a demanding physical training routine centered in the ballet class, which includes work at the to build basic technique and a set of center work combinations increasing in complexity in a logically progressive manner. Learning ballet involves receiving physical knowledge, not readily translated into verbal terms, with a vital capacity to express and reformulate identities and meanings through the practiced movements. As Dyck and Archetti (2003) suggest, both sports and dance constitute embodied activities that give rise to various national, ethnic, class, gender, and personal identities, ranging from colonial compliance to nation-building.

This chapter reviews how whiteness in ballet is constructed and maintained and the outcomes of the cultural practice of whiteness. The analysis centers on whiteness as a background to the experience of ballet to give insight into the experience of racism reviewed in the next chapter. For this purpose, there is an emphasis on ballet as a discipline and the lived experience of learning ballet. The first part of the chapter analyzes ballet as an Ideological State Apparatus and as a discipline that could work as a Foucauldian "technology of the self." The second part reviews ballet discipline using Foucault's disciplinary power and the notion of docile bodies to achieve the normalization and standardization of a white bodily being as displayed in the aesthetics and performance of classical ballet. The last part is about

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the experience of whiteness at the institutional level with its complexities and contradictions and about how whiteness is related to racism in ballet.

4.1 Ideology, Whiteness, and Aesthetics

Ballet performs ideological and aesthetic functions to society, and it is vital to understand how ideology is projected in and through aesthetic value and not apart. Alderson (1997) explores this topic and reviews Giselle Act II arguing that ballet invokes the beautiful to make a tendentious position appear natural and inevitable; the ballet blanc, in particular, entered a discourse of the body to propagate socially charged imagery as a form of the beautiful. What is problematic about invoking beauty is that it veils perception. In defense of beauty, criticism against ballet, as Alderson (1997: 122) remarks, "often remains vulnerable to the most characteristic defense against such charges by the adherents of ballet: Yes, but it´s beautiful.” Ballet may be an enclave of whiteness, a discipline based on totalitarian teaching methods, and complacent with narcissism or anorexia nervosa, but it is beautiful.

The problem has to do with conceptions of beauty that support dominant discourses and fall into racial prejudice and dichotomies such as white is beautiful and black is ugly. "People have always said that you can't have one black swan on a stage full of white swans. Well, my answer to that is, 'Then get more black swans" (Cassidy, 1990). Ballet has issues accepting the black woman outside historical and contemporary stereotypes that forbid her to be the quintessential pure, elegant beauty. Some say ballet is too tradition-bound to let black dancers comfortably into their ranks; Like chess pieces, it would be strange to mix them (Slater, 1975).

The strange thing is all the whiteness, which as an ideology is akin to white supremacy. Ballet linked to whiteness elevates white bodies and despises the body of Others in complacency with racist behaviors. To support this idea, I use Althusser's (1971) and situate ballet institutions in the plurality of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), which have a double functioning predominantly by ideology and secondarily by the used methods of discipline.

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Like any other ISA, the ballet institution is secured by the ruling ideology and survived revolutions precisely because it provides a way to express and exercise hegemony. If each ISA is the realization of an ideology, ballet is an aesthetic realization of whiteness.

Ideologies are not born in the ISA. Althusser argues that ideologies come from the social classes, their conditions of existence, their practices, and their experience in the class struggle. To Althusser (1971: 256), “ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” Ideology is mainly an illusion that alludes to reality, but it has a material existence in the practices and the rituals defined by the ISA. Althusser´s theory applied to ballet transforms it into an Ideological Apparatus in which practices and rituals are in line with the aesthetical construction and reproduction of whiteness.

This aesthetic construction and reproduction of whiteness, as we have already seen in my historical section, looks different in different times and different traditions. The classical French ballet of the seventeenth century was about whiteness and universality, the body of the king, the court, and that kind of hierarchy. But later in the nineteenth century, for instance, is an ideology of white femininity, of the ballerina who has a particular body. So, from the ideology of the aristocracy to an ideology of elite white femininity and now redefining meanings in terms of masculinity, it is seen how ballet activates ideology differently throughout history.

But how does Althusser's theory also allow us to think of ballet in a way that challenges this ideology of whiteness? How can ballet make whiteness strange and make us look at it? Well, for Althusser (1963), there is a kind of art that makes explicit the latent internal imbalances of our real conditions of existence, a type of art that questions the illusions of consciousness and the constructs of our reality. Ballet helps us see ideology but on the other way around makes us blind to it. By making whiteness invisible, ballet projects uncriticized ideology and validates racial myths that somehow control classical aesthetics. The classical theatre to speak about ballet is closely related to the ideological nature from which its practices and

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rituals are derived. In this way, the belief that ballet really needs white visual unity and a stage full of white dancers continues to lure audiences into the comfort of their whiteness.

A ballet that goes beyond the illusion will put more than one black ballerina in the corps de ballet of a ballet blanc. It will break and displace whiteness and make visible a true dynamic that is constituted precisely by the absence of a relationship with blackness and enforced by rigorously excluding black bodies from the stage. What could make us see ideology in ballet is the introduction of dissonance and images that break the familiarity and likeness of the white space. A performance in which black and brown ballerinas enlists with white ballerinas in a ballet blanc would be the rupture and the beginning of another consciousness. I would show what some ballet audiences are asking for: the full spectrum of humanity on stage.

All ideology, as well, hail or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects. According to Althusser (1971: 269), “The individual is interpellated as (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection.” The ballerina accepts her subjection (freely), and it is in the mechanism of the ballet discipline that the effect of ideology is internalized and reproduced. The ballet discipline and its permanent surveillance produce an internalization of the white gaze that, in this case, ensures mastery of the ballet technique. Thus, disciplinary power in the case of ballet creates beauty. As Foucault (1977: 219) argues:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.

The body of a well-trained ballet dancer is malleable, manageable, efficient, and self- disciplined; However, at some point in the embodiment of the discipline, the ownership of the body is lost. Surprisingly, from systematic exposure to high levels of discipline and self- discipline, temporal moments of transcendence and self-knowledge appear. Ballet, in Foucauldian terms, works as well as a technology of the self. And when you reach a level

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where ballet is performed automatically and unthinkingly, with extreme precision and skill, and with moments of transcendence or flow, the dancing experience reaches another level. The tension between the dancer and the unattainable aesthetic ideals or the authoritarian teaching methods dissipates. Discipline enhances performance and creates the acclaimed beauty that ballet professes for both audiences and dancers.

Knowing that discipline can take positive or negative forces that move beyond the initial oppression and emancipation of the dancer and those idealized states of happiness and perfection is to know that even self-disciplinary processes can lead to self-destruction. What happens after the internalization of the ballet discipline? From a personal experience, I do not remember when the ballet discipline took hold in my mind. It is supposed to start when they hail “ballerina” or better when they say: “you have the right body, the perfect instrument”; Or, maybe when they told me: “you are a talented dancer!”. In any way, I was subject of ballet, material to use and exploit. Discipline meant spending most of my life training ballet, missing family and friend reunions. When not dancing, it was like living in permanent pressure and pain, measuring my body, restricting food intake, and rendering the ballet aesthetics in my body.

I will not dwell on personal details, but ballet environments are compatible with narcissistic, anorectic, self-destructive pathological behaviors, normalized in the quest for beauty and an obsession with perfection emerging from a symbolic system product of the imaginary of whiteness. The line between self-regulation and auto-destruction in ballet is blurry. The tension fades as you get compliments and see results, so you get lost in the dance, one more time, again and again. Dancing ballet feels like shedding life, or as others say: life evaporating. The discipline permeated my thoughts and my body, the flesh and muscles over bone. From my standpoint, it was like being colonized by ballet. I learned to perform whiteness, such a painful bodily privilege, where you seek power by embodying a cultural given image at the cost of disembodying yourself.

All the beauty in ballet is backed by authoritarian teaching methods, in a logic of subjection where ballet dancers end up lost in the ballet or lost in themselves. Some dance scholars and

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members of the ballet community say it is not the art of ballet that is at fault as much as an outdated modality of teaching and working that places too much emphasis on an unattainable body type or image. In any case, discipline and the control of the body, within the frame of a dominant culture, turned into proof of superiority, so western ballet and modern dance became the norm. Other dances are considered inferior and are even assigned demeaning connotations.

4.2 White Docile Ballet Bodies

The spectacle of ballet in the courts of Europe differed in meaning from that of ballet as a discipline. According to Fletcher (1998: 34), "ballet pedagogy set in motion by Louis XIV developed in a cultural climate that deliberately sought to colonize the body and enlist it in a form of socio-economic servitude." Although not acknowledged in the reviewed literature, ballet schools in Europe emerged during the deployment of Biopolitics and the organization of power over life. They appeared when an explosion of diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of the bodies and the control of populations took place, as described by Foucault (1977). By situating ballet discipline in such a historical moment, it is inevitable to assign to it elements of racial supremacy and ideologies complacent with racism.

From the aristocratic standpoint, body mechanics were associated with the divinity assigned to the royal blood. The body was thought of as crafted by God. What the body could be and do was relevant to visions linking body and cosmos. According to dance historian Sarah Cohen (2000), physical display, grace, and charm, for example, were thought of as “little rays” of divinity. Ballet was part of European nobility; it emerged as a social dance and grew as a spectacle to praise the royal body. When ballet emerged as a discipline, the absolutist and aristocratic elements remained through the imposition of them as external models of the idea of the ideal body that served to standardize and normalize aesthetics and behavior. Dancers who did not belong to aristocracy internalized the norms and codes of Court Ballet

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as unconscious habits, becoming self-regulated docile bodies, and on and on the knowledge passed to each future generation.

According to Foucault (1977), the docile body is the one that obeys, responds, becomes skillful, and is improved; It may be manipulated, shaped, trained, subjected, and used. Disciplines produce docile bodies or a relation docility-utility through distinct methods such as “uninterrupted surveillance, constant coercion, supervision of processes of the activity rather than the results” (Ibid,149). Based on a Foucauldian analysis of ballet, it is vital to understand the link between discipline and increasing white dominance regarding aesthetics and art. Foucault (Ibid, 150) argues: “if economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labor, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination.” The disciplining of bodies in ballet produces both docile bodies and bodies that fulfill the white aesthetic imaginary. In this view, one more time, it is seen how ballet discipline presupposes the construction and maintenance of whiteness.

Discipline also establishes ranks and hierarchies. It allows both the “characterization of the individual as individual and the ordering of a given multiplicity” (Ibid: 162). Formally disciplining bodies in ballet can result in “the proselytizing of particular schemes of preference, valuation, and meaning” (Dyck and Archetti, 2003: 9). In the ballet community, discourses that marginalize ethnic, indigenous, and urban dances often invoke the discipline attached to ballet. Other dances become a target because they lack the technical and disciplinary aspects required for high-level dance. The exercise of power takes place by creating imaginary standards that have real consequences in the dance world. Different dance scholars describe how dancers´ bodies are ranked and categorized according to aesthetics, according to the idealized body (Green, 1999, 2001; Kleiner, 2009; Dryburgh & Fortin, 2010). The bodies positioned on top of the hierarchy serve for lateral surveillance and as referents of comparison between dancers.

Anatomical criteria usually designate inclusion and exclusion at a given historical moment. Black bodies, for more than three centuries of ballet education, were excluded. It is only in

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the twentieth century were accounts of black ballet dancers start to appear. Throughout ballet history, aesthetic ideals and anatomical requirements associated with whiteness resulted in individuals and collectivities considered ill-suited for classical ballet technic. Each ballet school or company defines the standards of body type, weight, and skin tone, and the composition of a corps de ballet informs the orientation of a ballet institution. Some are more prone to whiteness than others.

Although pale flesh is preferred, many white dancers are excluded from ballet simply for not having the right body to perform ballet. Still, it is visible in ballet classrooms that white dancers are the majority, which indicates that ballet is available to some bodies but not others. However, the whiteness of the institution is so that “even bodies that might not appear white still have to inhabit whiteness if they are to get ‘in’ (Ahmed, 2007: 158). So, bodies well- trained in ballet technique sometimes pass as white when they are not. Usually at the intersection with class.

If ballet productions are a spectacle of whiteness, ballet discipline is behind integrating and ensuring what becomes a formula of cultural domination. The difficulty to see this is that the body discourse in ballet often disguises as aesthetic discourse. The extreme bodily refinement and part of making white bodies the paradigm of beauty is the discipline by which it is built. In ballet, the power of whiteness relies upon the disciplining of the body in moulding and sculpting bodies. The difficulty in accepting darker skin tones has to do with dominant perspectives that make the world more complex and do not permit opposites to exist together in one. Dichotomic characterizations result in extreme definitions of the self and the other, in notions that identify white with pure and beautiful and black with evil and ugly.

Bodies disciplined through ballet, as Carter (2018) notes belong to bodies built with biopolitical orientations that treated all life as a political and economic resource and measured its usefulness on a hierarchical scale; “ballet traveled from Europe around the world in tracks laid down by invasion and conquest” (Ibid: 112). Not every ballet director engages actively in dichotomies of the self and the other, but position determines the maps people create in their minds. Bodies that are anatomically suitable for ballet could be highly valued regardless

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of race and ethnicity. Different mainstream ballet schools and companies accept black ballet dancers and say they hope for more, that they judge dancers on artistic merit. However, there are not enough black ballet dancers in major ballet schools or companies, and according to critics, ballet does the worst kind of tokenism (Cassidy, 1990; Howard, 2021a).

Some ballet companies hire dancers with darker complexions to provide an illusion of diversity and mask the pervasive whiteness, which is highly problematic. Concerning this phenomenon, Ahmed (2007: 164) argues, “it is the very use of black bodies as signs of diversity that confirms such whiteness, premised on a conversion of having to be: as if by having us, the organization can be diverse.”

4.3 Whiteness: Institutional Orientation and the Practice of Ballet

It is fundamental to speak of whiteness in ballet and assign it a place in the relations of racism; following Sara Ahmed's (2007) phenomenology of whiteness, the focus of this section is on the institutional habits and practices of ballet to bring what is behind, what does not get seen as the background to experience. In performance theory, a successful performance makes invisible and indivisible the separate elements that constitute a production. Snyder and Young (2020) found that some theatre performances mask what emerged from their project as the “four I’s of oppression: ideological, interpersonal, institutional, and internalized” (Ibid 16). In a similar line of thought, Alexander (2014: 549) argues, "when performance is successful, social powers manifest themselves not as external or hegemonic forces that facilitate or oppose the unfolding performance but merely as sign-vehicles, as means of representation, as conveyors of the intended meaning.”

In ballet, the performance hides the disciplinary power of which it is a product. Kleiner (2009) notes, ballet performance masks the pedagogical techniques, hierarchies of ability, rigorous training, and class differences in taste. The whiteness is evident in the ballet blanc, but what is hidden to audiences as if it has nothing to do with the whiteness of the space is that “pale-skinned people have dominated both onstage and backstage throughout

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its history as a profession from the seventeenth century to the present” (Fisher, 2016: 585) As whiteness theorist Ruth Frankenberg (1993: 235) argues, “whiteness, as a set of normative cultural practices, is visible most clearly to those it excludes and those to whom it does violence. Those who are securely housed within its borders usually do not examine it”. In general, there is a lack of critical self-reflexivity regarding how dancers have positioned themselves as white dancers or how the ideology of whiteness positioned them as race-free.

Whiteness is the background to the ballet experience. Ideology is in the mode of representation of an aesthetic construction of beauty, in white ways of seeing beauty and reproducing whiteness. The ballerina, particularly the Romantic ballerina, displayed somewhat elevated as an image of elite white femininity performs fragility, a luxury of whiteness. She gives material expression to the thought that echoes white humankind higher and purer, at the top of creation linked via the angels to God. Regarding fragility, Carter (2018: 126) notes, “displays of delicacy, weakness, and helplessness may index domination, pointing to the disavowed exercise of power by the performance of its absence.” The ballerina performs a delicate fragility, the ability to be everything and nothing, present in flesh and bones and yet absent in her ethereal role, both alive and dead.

Whiteness, as usual, operates as a site of invisibility. Violence is often taking place elsewhere and comes from a strange black animal creature. In the performance of whiteness, what is marked as absent is vital because there lies the construction of whiteness in relation to the Other. To Dyer (1997: 75), many usages of the term white suggest a quality as an absence: “Cleanness is the absence of dirt, spirituality the absence of flesh, virtue the absence of sin, chastity the absence of sex and so on.” What strikes more about whiteness as the absence is disembodiment and what is absent as material reality:

Symbolically, white embodiment is paradoxically a form of disembodiment. Whiteness is beauty transcendent, pure, clean, untainted, brilliance, genius, above and beyond the dirt and filth of the earth. Whiteness is associated with forms of angelic embodiment typically represented in iconographic depictions as luminescent “bodies” descending from the heavens (Yancy, 2005: 374-375).

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In the dance community, things like “dancers are the athletes of God” have salience. Ballet is the embodiment of dominant discourses and gives aesthetic expression to the paradoxes that gave representational power to whiteness. Akin to Cartesian thought of body mechanics and ingrained in a culture that separates the mind from the body, it materializes representations of racial superiority. Indeed, the verticality of ballet relies on ideas of superiority, and for scholars suggests a relationship with divinity and moral uprightness that moves away from animal nature. Ballet produces an ethereal, translucent, and incorporeal image that captures immateriality and spirit. Even if ballet is the control over the body for aesthetical purposes, it is congruent with claims of racial superiority that reside "in that which cannot be seen, the spirit, manifest only in its control over the body and its enterprising exercise in the world" (Dyer, 1977: 44).

“Ballet’s technical emphasis on clarity, lightness, and control memorialized the cultivated habitus of aristocrats maneuvering under the watchful eye of an absolutist ruler” (Carter, 2018: 112). Most ballet schools and ballet companies resonate with the absolutist environment of the aristocratic past. They resonate, as mentioned before, with the aesthetical ideals of the dominant discourse of the order of things. However, what makes things more problematic is a heightened emphasis on the physical and the visible with the body-as-an- object of art, inextricably linked to the institutional pressures of the profession. All careers are subject to the possibility of encountering abusive managers or those who make biased hiring decisions, but as the site and tool of labour is the dancer´s body, skin tone, weight, and shape are relevant features along with skill. The racist ways ballet institutions are aware of the black dancing body are part of a larger historical imaginary, an inherited background that positions black bodies outside the normalized constructs of whiteness.

Using Althusser´s theory, we have seen that ballet as an ideological apparatus has a double functioning predominantly by ideology and secondarily by the used methods of discipline. In this view, one of the functions of performance, theatre, and fundamentally art is to show ideology and the imaginary relations that configure it. Even if our daily life is surrounded by ideology, we do not see it or can make a clear distinction between ideology and reality. However, there is a particular form of theatre and art that makes us aware that we are

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ideologically constructed. The problem is that ballet is the kind of art that strengthens ideology, for instance, the naturalness of whiteness. The whole apparatus is built on this ideology of whiteness. That is how the experience of dancers, choreographers, and the is lived.

My experience as a ballerina is closer to that of the person familiar with the white space, which sees itself as universal or neutral. My body passed the requirements for a professional career in ballet, but my citizenship implied other limitations. I had to leave my country at a young age to continue my ballet education, and with all the good and the bad, I started the migrant experience early in life. The boundaries that I literally and figuratively crossed and re-crossed are the ones that define my story as a dancer, but they are not part of this thesis. The following chapter looks at the other side of the coin. It discusses ballet and racism because the ideology of whiteness is experienced as racism for those bodies who do not seem to belong there.

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5. BALLET AND RACE CONTROVERSIES

After joining Staatsballett Berlin in 2018, Chloé Lopes Gomes was told: “You're not in line, and that's all we see because you're Black", she was required to wear white makeup to blend in (Lopes Gomes & Capelle, 2020). In 2012, Carlos Acosta (Royal Ballet) said: “still there is this mentality, especially with directors, that a black ballerina in the middle of a flock of white swan would somehow alter the harmony" (Goldhill and Marsh, 2012). In 2015, Benjamin Millipied (former director at the Paris Opera) denounced “insidious racism” in the company and said he was told: “one does not put a person of colour in the corps de ballet because they would be a distraction” (BBC, 2020a). Well, they would actually break the ideology of whiteness because they would indeed show racism.

Public attention is focused on racism while whiteness remains invisible. In this chapter, I make a theoretical turn to discuss ballet and racism because for the black ballet dancer and some outside the constructs of whiteness, ballet comes as a space that exudes racism and objective barriers. Most public complaints have been about systemic problems, but a handful of dancers are starting to openly denounce racism (Rose, 2021; Stahl, 2020; Fisher, 2020). For the black ballet dancer, the experience is overdetermined from the outside by the color of the skin. But I am unable to cover the experience of racism fully. Instead, I focus on Fanon´s thought of being-for-others and structural barriers in ballet.

Some bodies are victims of a visible appearance for which they are not responsible because the dominant ideas of the black body belong to the historical racial constructs of the white gaze. Understanding ballet as ideological apparatus makes it easier to see how the aesthetic ideals and definitions of beauty in classical ballet became racially signified. Throughout history, various metaphors and analogies have been used to impose negative distinctions on the black body; Whiteness all around determines the lived experience of those who stand out as points of deviation. Prejudices activate when people are stopped or blocked from participating in a white world where differences are kept in oppressive terms and where superiority depends on making others inferior.

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Fanon (1952: 68) writes: "Inferiorization is the native correlative to the European´s feeling of superiority...: It is the racist who creates the inferiorized." In his view, in all colonized people a complex of inferiority took root, so more than two-thirds of the world population were made to feel inferior. Assumptions of biological determinism and stereotypes in some instances solidified into established stances. The so-called historical-racial schema is related to the fabrication and reproduction of such thoughts. And, to some extent, the understanding of human difference, culturally endorsed with analogies and metaphors, influenced aesthetics and the perception of beauty.

In the name of tradition, the historical past, and blood ties, the racial Other have been segregated, exterminated, and told: “you will never belong here.” Ballet is an art form that holds tight to tradition and is highly conservative in defining who belongs. Strong Roy (1984), in his analysis of renaissance festivals during 1450 and 1650, shows how normal it was at that time to express political thoughts and realities using spectacles such as the ballet. In the seventeenth century, when ballet emerged, from the standpoint of aristocratic culture, the idea was that “monarchs and princes belong to a semi-divine race apart from the rest of ordinary mortals” (Ibid: 53). Court Ballet represented a view that magnified the royal body and the monarchy, understood as blood with divine origin.

The nobility was seen as a special race with its own bloodline. Purity, clarity, and cleanness were not metaphorical but physical properties, genealogically transmitted (Greenwood, 1984). Indeed, noble privilege and the superior status of nobility were based on the material quality of their blood. The social hierarchy based on this purity of blood defined the principles of inclusion/exclusion and also served the legitimation of inequality. Insofar as classical ballet served European monarchies to magnify the royal body, the ballet at the beginning was a theatrical representation of a particular idea of race.

However, a common bias is to think art is above racial politics. There is a reluctance to acknowledge how ideas of race influence aesthetics and the potential of this turning into racist practices. Ballet is art. It is what it is, and what is inherent in a particular art form cannot be changed as it happens with Mexican art, Hindu art, or Chinese art. Ballet adherents are

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unwilling to view ballet as an ideological apparatus or engage in analysis of race. It is assumed that not wanting to see black bodies performing white ballets is similar to Japanese not wanting to see blond Geishas or Hawaiians preferring dark hair performers. Nevertheless, in classical ballet is common to see white dancers in ethnic or character parts.

Exclusions turn out to be the way they are in ballet because they reflect the language, genetic features, and cultural traditions of a particular group of people. Hence, ballet portrays European notions of the world that represent what was considered essential and characteristic. It emerged from European traditions and values, evolved in time, and part of the legacy includes the nineteenth-century visions of ethereal beauty and stereotypes preserved as theater relics. Ballet is just another aesthetical expression of ways of looking at and valuing the patterns existing within western European societies and creates bodies appraised for the beauty of their movements. In ballet, the body is the object of art. And, the artful body is achieved through the disciplining methods imparted by an ideological apparatus created from a position of dominance. Art is art, but in this case, artworks are consistent with a particular (racist) view of the world.

The problem is that answers to the question of why there are so few black dancers in classic ballet companies are still today founded in color prejudice. Consider an article published in the New York Times in 1975: “black peoples feet are too big or too flat for the classic line required in ballet; black dancers tend to rely on instinct rather than in technique of classical ballet; a black skin would destroy the illusion of symmetry of the corps de ballet; black dancers would hardly be capable of identifying with and art than began in the 16th century in European courts” (Slater, 1975). These assertions are wrong, and it is a shame that attacks on corporeality continue in ballet and society.

Thus, if images or art respond to culturally specific perceptions of beauty, how the embodied experience of ballet becomes an embodied experience of racism, and what are the outcomes? It is too easy to point to racism as a prohibition of darker skin tones. For this reason, I dwell on the experience of racism that is more than some historical antipathy to color or class. The first part of this chapter discusses how racism impacts the psychic structure of people and

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analyzes the experience of blackness in ballet from Fanon´s perspective. The second part is about systemic racism, common myths, and structural barriers in the ballet institution. The third part is about stereotyping and insensitive racial depictions of the other and reflects on efforts to break patterns of exclusion and racism. The last part is a discussion on racialized perceptions of beauty.

5.1 The Experience of Blackness in Ballet

Different authors write about the desire to be white, of females dreaming of whitening, and all those bodies aspiring to be white to gain admittance in a world where the only way to be worthy is white. The lived experience of the black body and those who are outside the constructs of whiteness is, for Fanon (1952), the internalization of color prejudice and the internalization of the white gaze. Through this internalization, people embark on a vicious cycle trying to enter the white world, but society creates difficulties because of the color of the skin. Thus, despite achievements and assimilation, the outward appearance makes people incapable of scaping race. In this way, the black ballet dancer is no just a ballet dancer.

The impression of being colored is a product of living in a white world. The experience of the black body is being for others and suffering alienation by the color of the skin. However, the source of the problem is not the individual but the social structure, a racist structure, where the historical and economic realities separate territorially, economically, and politically entire populations to maintain the maximum amount of privilege. Warren (2003: 47) argues, “the presence of the body of color and the fact that it cannot achieve absence is exactly what maintains white privilege.” Cultural and discursive practices make blackness visible because the dominant white view is the one (invisible) that has set the idea of the racial other. Thus, existence passes in relation to that view.

Fanon gives insight into the psychological elements that mark the lived experience of blackness and the feeling of inferiority. This feeling, not entirely personal but environmental, is a product of the historical and economic forces within a society where a group of people

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strengths itself by creating inferiority. Myths of black people are part of the collective conscious and are pervasive in ballet. The world signals to be white: “one is white, so one is rich, so one is handsome, so one is intelligent" (Fanon, 1952: 40), so one is beautiful, so one engages in the wrong struggle to secure what is forbidden because no matter how much is assimilated, the outward appearance defines the whole. Assimilation is not superficial and brings no solution to the problem, which is still determined by the outward appearance. The solution, from different perspectives, implies restructuring the world, but how can the ballet dancers choose action concerning the social structure? How to teach ballet dancers to stop being slaves of the archetypes?

Ballet aesthetics are hard to challenge. Changes in ballet are subtle and come at a slow pace. A black dancer using a white tutu could be an image of colonial appropriation of the black body. However, it could also strip away colonialist associations of vulnerability and fragile white femininity in ways that challenge normative categorizations and images of beauty. The creation of new images in which black and brown bodies belong to the aesthetics of ballet is a way to challenge perceptions associated with racism. A group of black ballerinas in a white corps the ballet is an image of them appropriating a world and a culture that historically closed the door to them. However, how long will take classical ballet to do this? The acceptance of black dancers in ballet depends on restructuring the existing framework used to construct meaning and assign meaning to the reality in which we exist.

High fashion and ballet, for instance, are two fields focused on aesthetic labor, body performance, and embodiment. Both privilege white bodies, but the fashion industry shows more efforts towards a representation of blackness as alluring and integrated into dominant white discourses of femininity. However, there is a lack of significant structural changes in the aesthetic logic (Summers, 2017), so in this respect, it fails in the same way as ballet. In fashion, image activism requires more black bodies in line with fashion norms on the runway and magazines; in ballet, it requires anatomically apt black bodies disciplined in ballet tradition, technique, and style. But there are systemic issues and racist attitudes that prevent inclusion and diversity in ballet education and the professions. I discuss this in the next section of this chapter.

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Furthermore, it is true that regardless of color, every ballerina goes through the same training process. The methods for disciplining bodies are the same for all; they are not exclusive to discipline bodies of color outside the normalized constructs of whiteness. In that sense, there is no intentional racism in disciplining ballet dancers. However, the experience of whiteness is not the same as the experience of blackness: “The black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (Fanon, 1952: 99). In a double system of reference, as Fanon shows, the experience is determined by having to be black and being black in relation to the white other. There is a different impact because being for the other is having to be inferior. A feeling of inferiority is produced by the white Other, who is in a real or imagined position of authority.

In a white space like ballet, bodies hardly dance in equal terms. Bodies are ranked, and some encounter difficulties for the color of the skin. Living in constant fear of rejection is stressful. “To be the other is to always feel in an uncomfortable position, to be on one´s guard, to be prepared to be rejected” (Fanon, 1952: 57). Structural racism produces both economic and psychological harm. In ballet, rejection and discrimination based on skin tone add to the demands of weight, technique, ability, an appearance that all women in ballet face (Senaki, 2018). However, ballet dancers perform aesthetic and emotional labor, so injuries and pain, emotional or physical, are hidden to create an illusion of elegance, grace, and beauty. Racism is swallowed by the dancer while he or she performs whiteness.

5.2 Systemic Racism and Structural Barriers in Ballet

I have already discussed how the ballet institution, orientated around whiteness, uses the anatomical criteria to differentiate within, even among those whose racial identity is not in question. The ballet body types relate to the difference in classical ballets. Wulff (2008, 527) notes the soubrette, a small woman characterized by quick movements. The , an attractive male dancer with an elegant expression, usually the prince who dances with the "lyrical" ethereal ballerina, a pretty and slim woman who knows to convey poetry. Finally,

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there are the demi-character dancers, histrionic with strong-colorful stage personalities. Such descriptions serve to picture the differences in ballet bodies; but say nothing about the requirements of a slim frame, the borderline anorexic thinness, arched feet, long and flexible limbs, or the rejection of darker complexions.

The idea that some people do not choose ballet because of taste and class preferences is also common. Sometimes this is taken as an answer to the lack of diversity in ballet. The myth is black dancers do not choose ballet. However, in all its whiteness, the one not choosing black dancing bodies is ballet, and there is no acknowledgment of this rejection (Brown, 2018). Systemic racism defines the production of ballet dancers. The rhetoric says the problem is access or that it is hard to find black ballet dancers. Dance critics, for instance, say that ballet directors and choreographers do not intend to choose black ballet dancers who are not up to the company's standard: "the issue is one of line and style. The physique and technique have to fit, not the skin tone" (Jennings, 2012). Company directors say, as well, they hope black dancers will come up through the official ballet schools (Cassidy, 1990).

Regarding comments of line and style, these belong to particular images of whiteness in ballet. Ballet blanc scenes –in La Sylphide, Giselle, Swan Lake, or La Bayadère are important showcases of beauty in ballet: they are part of the aesthetic experience. All ballerinas on stage, wearing white dresses or tutus, are placed there to show unity, an identical nature. They are trained and expected to move as one and look like one. There is no place for the wrong body type, height, or skin tone. Ballet dancers need to fit into the mold. Skin colour is never left aside or ignored. Racism, in this sense, is enforced through the aesthetic discourse. The color composition of the scene in a blanc ballet is precisely white. It is an aesthetic choice, white ballerinas included. Intentional or unintentional, for darker skin tones the pressure to look white is worst (Waxman, 2018).

Regarding style, in colloquial terms, if ballet is the food, style is the different preparations. There is a national element in each style, and each culture makes its way into performing ballet´s codified technique. It looks like extra technical support for a new member of a ballet company is also a privilege. If the dancer cannot get into the official ballet school of a ballet

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company, he or she is bound to fail for not knowing the style. Moreover, as Brown (2018) argues, color casting and objective barriers exist, as well, in black ballet companies like Dance Theatre Harlem. Hence, the amount of racism in a ballet institution is not necessarily dependent on how much whiteness configures the space.

Today, there are more training venues, but black ballet dancers have more limited opportunities for professional employment. Ballet always looks for people with anatomies and physical aptitudes that promise the desired results with training. But usually, there are just one or two black dancers in major ballet schools or companies, in case there are. In the U.S., outreach programs have been launched to recruit dancers from diverse groups (Claytor, 2017; Kourlas 2007). But scholarships are bound to promote a particular aesthetic and body. In the end, this only serves to promote classical ballet in the strict sense. Other critics say that in the U.S, ballet is brown-bagging inclusion. From that view, those whose skin colour can be covered with cosmetics or bleached by the lights are the ones who pass (Howard, 2017a).

Regarding the preference for light-brown dancers, most success stories are about them. Also, the coverage of their stories sometimes makes the representation of black ballet dancers appear as tokenism. Scholars report preferential treatment to those non-white dancers who most closely approximate whiteness which is evident in the marked placement in photographs, prominent roles, scholarships, and affirmation (Gottschild, 2003; McCarthy- Brown, 2012; Howard, 2017a). In reality, the marginalization of darker-skinned women both in and out of the dance world continues.

5.3 Racism, Breaking Patterns.

For many years, blackface make-up has been used in Petruska and La Bayadère, highly controversial ballets for both the stereotyping of the characters and the use of blackface (Fisher 2020). The Moor in Petrushka is a grotesque characterization of the Other. Performed in blackface, he is “lazy, stupid and prone to violence, praying to a coconut” (Winship 2019). And, La Bayadère, full of exotic images from India, shows a happy group of slaves

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performing La danse des négrillons. Blackface, although abandoned by most ballet companies, is still used by the Bolshoi and Mariinsky ballets in Russia. In response to a photo of Bolshoi dancers using blackface (Copeland, 2019), Russian ballerina Svetlana Zakharova said: "There is nothing strange here, it's absolutely normal for us... this is art." (BBC, 2019). It is seen as part of a theatrical tradition. Vladimir Urin, the Bolshoi’s general director, said in a statement that the Bolshoi will not comment on the absurd allegation of racism (Marshal, 2019).

There is an evident lack of will to discuss race matters and the content of artistic productions that use exaggerations and unflattering portrayals of the Other to make clear and sharp distinctions between Us and Them. Some institutions argue that such practices are necessary given the lack of black dancers. In the Paris Opera, 400 staff members (from approximately 1200) signed a manifesto calling for an end to "the silence that surrounds racism and included the elimination of blackface, brownface, and yellowface from the repertoire" (Capelle, 2021; BBC 2020a). But racial insensitivity is socially inherited and reproduced because the structure remains the same.

The Nutcracker is another ballet where costuming and sometimes choreography can be insensitive to race and ethnicity. In this ballet, Asians in the Chinese dance appear happily bowing and jumping with index fingers pointing to the air and often dressed in yellow. The Arabian dance, for its part, displays another culturally inaccurate image in which a female hypermobile dancer performs the role of an exotic seductress, sometimes dancing alone others lifted to and from one male partner to another. Senaki (2018) found that this role is a normative experience for black ballet dancers in the U.S. Other examples of racial thinking in ballet are seen in the Gypsy camp in Don Quixote or in the “clichés of orientalist exotica – sparkling jewels, bra tops and acres of midriff” in Le Corsaire (Winship, 2020).

Today, some Nutcracker productions are shifting the narrative, but there is more continuity than change. or Petters och Lottas Jul from the Kungliga Operan is an example of an adaptation of ballet repertoire. The Swedish version of the Nutcracker overlaps the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman´s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King with Elsa

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Beskow´s Petters och Lottas Jul (Peter and Lottas Christmas). Instead of a wooden nutcracker Lotta (Clara), for example, gets a Yule Goat (Christmas Goat) that crack nuts. Choreographed by Pär Isberb, the Swedish Nutcracker keeps the whiteness of ballet, including the absence of black dancing bodies. But it softens the aristocratic formality and does not reproduce the common stereotypes of the second act. In the Arabian dance, for example, three sleep-walking aunties drift through the stage.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, a critical ballet would include black ballerinas in the corps de ballet. Not just one black ballerina as or as it is today. A group of black ballet dancers in a ballet blanc will show whiteness and break ideology. That is a way of breaking the command of whiteness to insert blackness into a white space. The critical effect would be the disruption of consciousness by incorporating black dancers in the performance itself. Black ballet companies already show black ballet dancers performing classical works. Dance Theatre Harlem, for instance, has a Creole Giselle, and some contemporary dance works make allusions to a critic on ballet and society using black bodies in white tutus. What about other major classical ballet companies? Could breaking whiteness stop being ballet or ruin the aesthetic experience?

Change is needed, as some say, to save ballet from itself. Some are challenging traditions by changing pedagogical practices, adapting repertoires, and a current initiative challenges the traditional pink uniform meant to match white skin. After some online petitions, there are new shades of pointe shoes and . It does not end racism but is significant for black and brown ballet dancers who struggle for ways to assert that various skin tones belong to ballet. It may seem unimportant, but the victory over the demand for darker shades of pointe shoes and tights is a step toward inclusion. The uniform is part of the tradition. Traditions are fundamental in society as well as in ballet. They prescribe rituals, protocols, and codes of conduct with elements that induce acceptance and compliance in order to keep everyone in place and the order of things. But, for a long time, traditions have been promoting exclusions based on race, ethnicity, or gender. In the next section, as a conclusion to this chapter, I discuss racialized perceptions of beauty.

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5.4 Ballet Aesthetics: Racialized Perceptions of Beauty

Different and conflicting perceptions of beauty revolve around two ideas. On the one hand, the judgment of something as beautiful is independent of what is known and valued; On the other hand, the pleasure required for the perception that something is beautiful is affected by beliefs or values (Eaton, 2000). In philosophical discussions about the perception of beauty, “pure” and valueless instances of beauty like a sunset are considered rare. Belief and moral values often come into play in definitions of beauty. Regarding the topic of this thesis, the main concern is with racialized conceptions of beauty in defining beauty in terms of the physical features that white people are likely to have. Racial thinking is so pervasive that ballet became racially coded.

Beauty is made conscious by the process of perception and relates to internal and external factors that go beyond simply seeing, hearing, and sensing. In general, everything passes in the context of our own life. Position is central to the process of creating knowledge and consequently the construction of reality. Where we are determines who we are and the images and maps we construct in our minds. Position, the system, and the structure of the world define our possibilities, in which directions we move, and what we create. Perspective is always in the eye of the beholder. In this view, artistic creations depend on the position of the artist. Some art products question depictions of the world in terms of black and white, Us and Them, beautiful or ugly, and allow reevaluations of existing beliefs and values. But others, reinforce differences and inequalities.

Ballet emerged from a position of dominance. The white aristocratic element is indeed deep- rooted. It never disappeared from the muscular memory that passes from dancer to dancer. Verticality was part of the deportment required of Renaissance courtiers “it is based on political hierarchies and moral traditions that equate beauty of outward or physical form with both nobility and inner goodness” (Banes 2000: 269). Verticality, grace in gesture and

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movement, turnout, arched feet, the balance of shape, and line of the elongated human body, still serve as definitions of beauty in ballet.

These fundamentals of ballet could also mark a difference between conceptions of Us and Them. What about the insistence on verticality in opposition to the lean forward torsos and deep knee bends of African dance (and African slaves) or the turnout in contrast to the inward turning of the feet in Asian dance? It is difficult to say whether these things were observable to ballet masters in race and period. It could be both a product of culture and dance in itself or an example of race-thinking applied to body movement and body language. “Phenotype and performativity should match up. Indeed, we become disoriented and anxious when they do not. The whole gamut of racial stereotypes testifies to the way a racialized social structure shapes racial experience and socializes racial meanings” (Omi and Winant, 2015: 141).

Gottschild (2003: 103) sees ballet as the “last bastion of white dance primacy” she says: “In the twenty-first century there will be a central role for black and brown bodies in ballet: Classical forms either accommodate or perish.” Some scholars suggest black ballet dancers do not mark a radical disruption to the ballet aesthetic, which is the main problem. But colorblind society is more problematic. Heinecken (2017) argues, the shape and body proportions of black bodies joining ballet at a professional level, in the end, enable them to embody classical ballet. In this sense, their supposed limits and limitations are a tale. Those bodies challenge color prejudice and the idea that only white bodies fall within ballet constructs. Copeland (ABT African America Principal ballet dancer), says “In nearly every way, my body was molded for dance. I was born this way” (Ibid, 616). Her struggle is precisely a differential treatment because of the color of the skin.

The stop sign is the skin tone, which appears before discerning the rest of the body features. The outward appearance, again limiting and denying access. There are success stories, but racism is present and impacts the experience of the black body (Patton, 2011; Slater, 1974, Fisher, 2020; Senaki, 2018). Racialized beauty is pervasive in ballet. Even if ballet took ground in different countries, it preserves ideas of beauty that belong to its root culture.

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Many turn their nose up in disdain at the ballet or at people who dance ballet. The agency of ballet dancers is not recognized and sometimes devalued. Dancing ballet is not about claiming membership to a European aristocratic past or an experience of overwhelming femininity. It is a harsh discipline. In my experience, the pain of it was numbed by the pleasure of dancing ballet. With all the good and the bad, I developed a strong relationship to ballet and its beauty. I guess my experience fall into a model in which “beauty is cast in terms of the dangerous pleasure it gives, the way it pushes one to the edge, the way it allows us to safely taste the forbidden and evil under the guise of beauty” (Zeglin, 2000: 8). I have dance ballet through all my life, and I like it. Dancers are passionate about dancing, invest so much energy and time performing beauty, but how do we deal with that, while we know it is racist. How can something like that still be beautiful? I hope I have elucidated the importance of reflecting on that question also.

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6. CONCLUSION

From a historical analysis of ballet, this research provided an interdisciplinary understanding of whiteness and race in dance and the arts. Even though race and ethnic studies rarely meet with ballet, the combination of disciplines provided the necessary information to answer the research questions. I tried to cover from different perspectives related to the body, aesthetics, performance, privilege, and gender a sensitive topic: racism, which is growing in visibility in ballet. My initial interest was on how the dominant structures, which grant ballet institutions a privileged position, compromise the validity and acceptance of ballet in the contemporary world.

The purpose of the research was to discuss race and ethnicity in the arts and culture. The research questions revolved around how to understand racism in ballet when racist behaviors and practices are considered unintentional and part of the visual aesthetics or theatrical tradition. Is racism in ballet designating ideology, behavior, or is it just a matter of visuality? The answer to these questions and the construction of an understanding of racism in ballet involved the combination of different disciplines, theories, and perspectives. The concluding remarks are the following:

To start, I return to the idea of ballet as an ethnic dance form with a rich cultural and aesthetic tradition that belongs to European culture and started as a nobility thing. Ballet dancers from different races and ethnicities embody this particular art form. But, although ballet has a global scope, it is not universal. The body in ballet is the object of art, and as an object of art, it is always material, particular, and concrete. In its concreteness, it belongs to specific notions of beauty inserted in constructions of whiteness. In a sort of cultural imperialism, ballet reached every continent. This problem is now visible in higher dance programs in non- European countries that require rigorous study of traditional western dance forms. Curriculums are organized around monocultural aesthetics and structured around ballet and

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modern dance, which belong to western dance forms (McCarthy-Brown, 2014; Zhuwawo & Nkululeko, 2020).

Ballet also gives material expression to whiteness as an ideology. Whiteness as the background of the ballet institution shapes ideas of beauty and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion assigning privilege to certain bodies. In such a way, it is compliant with an exclusive approach to notions of beauty and presupposes racist attitudes and racist behaviors of various kinds. Ballet discipline, for its part, fulfills a vital function. It establishes habits and routines that inform and determine what the body can do and is the essence of the embodied experience of ballet. Discipline, in this research, was reviewed as a mechanism for increasing body aptitude in the Foucauldian sense and creating docile bodies. The ballet discipline is used to place ballet on top of other dance forms considered instinctive, reduced as inferior, and outside the parameters of a logical progression of movement.

Likewise, using Althusser, it was possible to situate ballet as an ideological apparatus and say that classical ballet shows ideology in a way that makes us blind to it or in a way that reinforces whiteness. The study of whiteness gave insight into the experience of ballet at the institutional level and the kind of discipline it imparts situated as well in the frame of biopolitics. The whiteness of the space shows exclusion, but in defense of classical ballet, the narrative is that racism is a matter of aesthetics. The visual effect of some artistic creations is meant to be white, so the mentality is that black ballet dancers break the illusion, specifically, the line of the corps de ballet, or the harmony envisioned for classical works.

By satisfying white aesthetics, ballet represents ideas of race. In Court Ballet, it was about the royal body, which was seen as divine with its own bloodline. When the most notorious aristocratic elements had to be taken away, ballet focused instead on the female body and femininity. The ballet blanc, in particular, entered a discourse of the body to propagate socially charged imagery of elite white femininity and quintessential elegant beauty. How ballet institutions engage in racist practices is part of a larger historical imaginary that positions black bodies and others outside the normalized constructs of whiteness.

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The experience of whiteness at an institutional level is fundamental in understanding racism as behavior in ballet. Racist behaviors and practices translate into limited access to ballet education, body shaming, harassment, and lower job opportunities. According to ballet critics, ballet does the worst kind of tokenism. Companies usually hire just one or two black dancers to appear diverse; And, more than the low number of black dancers in major ballet companies, the problem is how they occupy the space. Racism is latent, and when there is no respect or sensitivity to interact with people, approaches to diversification are jeopardized.

On the other side of the fence, the experience of whiteness is lived as racism. Performing ballet for black dancers and some outside the constructs of whiteness is different. From Fanon´s thought, the experience of blackness is determined by being seen in a certain way and by the shame or inferiority complex this induces. It turns out this way because of a historical racial creation that belongs to the white Other “that make him the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible” (Macey, 1999). In this sense, the wound of colonialism produced both economic and psychological harm. The lived experience becomes the internalization of the white gaze and a feeling of being ashamed for a host of stereotypes that destroy the corporeal schema. Racism interpellates subjects, and that presupposes the constitution of an ideology.

Racism in ballet dancers can impact physical performance. It adds to the pressure of body weight, shape, and other physical requirements. Because ballet consists of carrying aesthetic labor and emotional labor it is lived differently from whiteness or blackness. Often, the presence of the black ballet dancer is a statement of silent resistance to a system of whiteness. However, what once was acceptable no longer holds, and dancers are becoming vocal making public denunciations about racism.

In some instances, there is a lack of recognition of the elements in ballet saturated with racial connotations. Concerning the use of blackface and the race and ethnic insensible material of classical ballet, some members of the ballet community argue that it is part of the theatrical tradition and necessary due to the lack of black dancers. Others are refusing the use of blackface, adapting what is considered offensive repertory, or accepting ballerinas on stage

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with pointe shoes and tights that match their skin tones instead of the traditional ballet pink (pale nude). However, there is still much to be done because racist attitudes and behaviors in ballet, as seen in this research, point to ideology and structural racism.

According to Balibar (1990: 292), "racism in theory necessarily involves an aspect of sublimation, an aesthetic idealization of the species: this is why the sublimation must be achieved by the description and valorization of a certain type of man, who exhibits the human ideal in both body and mind." And, we have seen how ballet is the materialization of this. The problem is to find a way to approach classical ballet from a critical perspective without resorting to another technique or dance form, to kind of change tradition from the inside. The solution is not to take away the ballet blanc but to restructure works inextricably linked to racism and challenge the mindset that enjoys this kind of art.

Returning to Althusser, his theory provides insight to solve problems like this. In his view, specific works of art, in specific circumstances, can break ideology. If only momentarily, a ballet showing this ideology of whiteness can create a spectacle that causes estrangement to show “the real” out of ideology or the illusions of consciousness: “A double installation, whereby the spectator is brought on scene in order for the scene to intrude into the consciousness of the spectator and produce aftereffects in her life” (Balibar, 2015: 9). This is a topic to explore in future research. Other fruitful topics for future research include crossing perspectives on class, dance, race, and ethnicity and how class recognition and misrecognition maybe subtle and unconscious as race. The analysis of my thesis can go further into social class which I am aware of but not addressing directly. Another topic emerges from the experience of the ballet dancer and the way ballet conveys also a structure of feeling. What ballet as a cultural art form does to the dancer and the audience, or the relation between culture and mood or feeling is a topic to explore in future research.

Even if the object of this thesis is whiteness or racism, I am aware that ballet is more than that. It provides an aesthetical experience. It is about beauty and there is something deeper for people who enjoy ballet that makes them see it as something beautiful. But how is it that ballet dancers and adherents cherish and enjoy a space of whiteness, and the racism in that

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space, as something beautiful? I hope I have elucidated that what is behind is ideology. And the illusion it brings as ballet dancers are performing whiteness is what we need to break to make ballet more inclusive and less racist.

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