BETWEEN MOVING BODIES: POWER, THE SENSES AND CRAFTING THE GIFTED BODY
By
LAUREN ELIZABETH NORTON
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of Archaeology and Anthropology College of Arts and Social Sciences
THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
June 2019
© Copyright by Lauren Elizabeth Norton 2019
All Rights Reserved Declaration
I, Lauren Elizabeth Norton, declare that this thesis, submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. This thesis has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institutions.
This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program
Scholarship.
i Between Moving Bodies
For Beryl, with love
ii Acknowledgements
It is perhaps fitting that the completion of this thesis, which examines the powerful operations of generosity between bodies and their results, has depended entirely on the openness of others and their willingness to give of themselves towards me. Because of this I owe a debt to many people – more than I can thank here. Yet in true Maussian style it is the obligation I have felt to give back that has spurred me on to finish this thesis. Born of and borne by their generosity, I hope its completion allows me to, in part, return the gifts of their instruction, support, love, patience and encouragement. In the hope of giving back, of demonstrating my worthiness of their gifts, and continuing the cycle of exchange, I give to them this thesis – giving a part of myself and returning a part of them.
My first thanks go to the staff and students at Canada’s National Ballet School who generously opened their world to me and whose experiences provide colour to the pages you are about to read. Thank you for sharing with me your thoughts, feelings, passions, fears, joys, successes and frustrations as you navigated the intricacies of life at the school and the training process. To Mavis Staines, thank you for seeing the value of my project, for taking a chance on me and for allowing me the opportunity to briefly join the NBS family.
To my supervisor Prof. Simone Dennis at ANU, I am enormously grateful for the guidance, support and inspiration you have given me throughout this process. Thank you for challenging me to push further, for your questions and suggestions, and for your belief in this research and in my ability to execute it.
iii Between Moving Bodies
Thank you to my friends Kathy, Bel, Allison, Kate and Briony for the shared cups of tea, glasses of wine, laughter and your heartfelt words of advice and encouragement – whether near or far I cherish your friendship.
I am so very grateful for the love and support of my family. In particular, to my mother Susan and father Bruce, thank you for your unwavering encouragement and for making it possible for me to pursue my dreams. This thesis and PhD would not have been possible without your support. To my sister Madeleine, thank you for always cheering me on and for the quick visits, warm hugs, shared laughs and words of advice. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my grandmother Beryl, who died while I was away on fieldwork and to whom this thesis is dedicated. Her commitment to lifelong learning, asking questions and doing things for herself continues to inspire me and I know how proud she would be that I have completed this.
Finally, to my husband Shawn, whose continual love and support has enabled me to celebrate the highs and survive the lows of this process. I am profoundly grateful for your willingness to enter the worlds of anthropology and ballet, for your patient listening to and kind reflections on my thoughts and ideas, and for your gentle and constant encouragement.
iv Abstract
This thesis examines the creation of gifted bodies, their sensory experiences and operations of institutional power. Drawing on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a professional classical ballet school in Toronto, Canada, I examine how the students relate to the training processes they must undergo in order to become gifted, where powerful exchange relations between student, teacher and school facilitate the creation of body, identity and institution.
I begin by suggesting that the institutional training of gifted bodies may be easily pursued through Marcel Mauss’ (1954) theory of gift exchange, where gifts of skill, technique and training are exchanged between teachers and students during daily interactions within the ballet school. Over the years of training, these regularised gift exchanges result in the gifted body – the core valuable of the institution. However, these are corporeal gifts belonging to and residing within bodies, of ways of moving and feeling, which cycle between bodies – something Mauss’ thesis does not permit access to. In recognising this, throughout this thesis
I follow and extend Rosalyn Diprose’s (2002) insight into the possibilities of corporeal generosity and an openness between bodies to bring Mauss’ thesis into the realm of the corporeal and sensory.
Addressing existing literatures of giftedness and ballet, I discuss how gifted bodies and their relations have traditionally been analysed visually, where the performing body has been read for what it may reveal about giftedness, gender, culture and society. As I will show, this has often obscured the emic experiences of those engaged in such processes as well as the relations of power that operate to shape and array bodies within the institution. While the
v Between Moving Bodies results of these powerful relations are sometimes made visible on the body – where muscles become strengthened, stretched and sculpted – I argue that the creation of the gifted body is not pursued by the institution or experienced by the individuals in this way. Instead, this is a process felt by bodies at the level of sensibility.
To access these felt experiences, both haptic and affective, I apply a sensory analysis privileging touch, which I argue is the way in which gifts for ballet are transmitted, received and experienced by the body and through which giftedness is accrued. To do so, I expand a definition of touch beyond physical contact to also encompass feeling between and within bodies from which movement cannot be undone. Utilising touch in such a way allows an examination of the intercorporeal relations between teacher and student in the ballet studio and the way such relations involve the exchange of multisensory gifts. This approach provides a different avenue through which to understand the powerful operations at work on and between bodies in the context of the institution, where it becomes apparent that the gifting relations that work to shape bodies and the hierarchies these encounters perpetuate, enable the creation of bodies, identities and the institution itself.
Yet these are operations that determine which bodies become gifted and which do not. As such, the pain experiences of students provide an apt illustration of the interface between bodies and institutions, indicating not only success or failure or the body’s physical transformation but also the regularised injustices which make the gifted body, identities and the institution possible. To conclude I expand this discussion beyond the realm of classical ballet to suggest that a similar approach may be applied to other forms of institutional life where other kinds of gifted bodies are also the core valuable.
vi Table of Contents
Declaration i
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract v
Preface 1
A return to ballet 1
Anthropology offers answers and questions 3
A problem with perspective 5
Limitations and challenges 8
Introduction 13
Thesis questions, aims and argument 13
My gifted bodies 16
My approach to giftedness 19
Limitations to generosity 22
A sensory approach 25
A touching analysis 29
Powerful touches 33
A painful process 36
My research contribution 41
Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet 43
Mauss goes to the ballet 44
Phase one: looking for evidence 47
vii Between Moving Bodies
Phase two: getting a better sense of ‘things’ 55
Ongoing evaluation 59
Fieldsite selection 65
Fieldwork methods: observation 66
Participants 69
Interviews and group discussions 69
Data analysis 71
Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies 73
Ballet in anthropology: a brief history 74
The look of the ballet body 76
Parallels to understanding giftedness 81
Bringing the body into focus 84
Training the gifted body 90
The way forward 98
Chapter 3: A touching analysis 100
A sense of ballet 101
Anthropology of touch: a brief history 105
Teaching with touch 108
What is touched touches back 113
Touch facilitates becoming gifted 115
The gift of time 120
Multisensory, multibodied training 123
Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet 125
The exchange of balletic gifts 126
viii Tasteful bodies 127
Moving bodies 132
Seeing bodies 135
Seeing myself versus being myself 140
Misplaced mistrust 147
Hearing bodies 150
Feeling the sound of music 154
Considering reciprocity 160
Chapter 5: Powerful gifting 162
Bodies of the past 167
Obligation and identity 169
Not all bodies are the same 171
Bodies are also institution making 173
The problematic gift of identity 176
In a state of potential becoming 181
Institutionalised injustice 182
Looks can be deceiving 189
(In)formative touches 192
(In)appropriate-looking relations 195
Beyond touching 200
Chapter 6: Bodies in pain 202
The look of pain 204
The power of pain 212
The problem of pain 220
Shaping meaning and feeling 224
ix Between Moving Bodies
The pains of bodies past 228
Making and differentiating bodies 233
Hierarchies made and re-made 239
The feeling of pain 242
Productive pain 247
Chapter 7: Conclusions 250
Future gifts 254
Beyond ballet bodies 257
Chapter summary 260
Glossary 268
References 273
x Preface
Preface
A return to ballet
When anthropologist Helena Wulff (1998a) described her seminal work, Ballet Across
Borders, as a way to return to the ballet world, her words struck a chord with me. Through this anthropological study I too returned to the ballet world, one I first entered more than two- and-a-half decades ago. But this research also enabled me to make a return to ballet, to in some small way give back to a world that has given me so much.
When I studied ballet as a student, I enjoyed the demanding training process where hard work and application bore physical results and I placed a high value on having the freedom and opportunity to express myself through dance. After an acute injury, I transitioned to teaching, where over the next decade I gained two internationally recognised teaching qualifications, prepared students for exams, competitions and performances, worked as a guest tutor and choreographer, and sat on an advisory panel for ballet teachers. This shift in focus, from student to teacher, opened up new, previously unimagined, ways of looking at and exploring dance. Working with others’ bodies, as opposed to my own, enabled a certain clarity to better understand technical efficiency – an awareness I wish I had had as a dancer. This new insight was coupled with a deeper understanding of the differences between bodies; and one of my favourite elements of teaching became working out how best to connect with a student to ensure I was providing them with the optimal opportunity to learn – be it verbal description, visual demonstration or physical correction.
1 Between Moving Bodies
Years later, I found once again that another career path and shift in focus paved the way for a different engagement with my experience of ballet. Anthropology enabled me to explore and think about ballet from a different perspective, providing me with an avenue through which to reflect on my own experiences and situate them within a broader historical, social and cultural context. In this way, considering others’ experiences of the ballet world has allowed me to revisit and make sense of my own.
Ballet, for me, was so much more than just a physical practice or avenue for artistic expression. It was a practice through which I discovered and worked on myself as a person. I learnt about the difference between physical and mental limits and what my mind and body were capable of achieving in the face of adversities such as exhaustion, illness or injury. The act of dancing and the coordination of movement to music gave me an outlet to express feelings and emotions in a safe environment surrounded by like-minded individuals – my
‘ballet family’. Ballet gave me the satisfaction of controlling my body down to the smallest of movements, as well as the exhilaration of letting my body go and allowing the movement to take over and in a way, control me. Because of this, I understand ballet to be an activity that depends on total sensory emersion.
Training refined my visual sensibilities of perception and attention to detail as I analysed my body in the mirror as well as the bodies of those around me. My imagination was broadened as I continued to visualise how my body was moving while away from the mirror and how it might look to others. Ballet further developed my kinaesthetic awareness – the awareness of my body as it moved through space – as well as the ability to ‘listen’ to my body and understand what my body was telling me through the multitude of physical sensations I experienced. This tactile feedback I received from my body was crucial to the successful
2 Preface execution of movement. It would tell me if I was on balance or where my centre of gravity needed to be adjusted. It would tell me if my shoulders and pelvis were aligned, in order to display the correct line for a certain movement. It would tell me if the correct muscles in my legs were being used, in order to make my allégro more powerful and dynamic. Also, the physical feedback from teachers, who would support the weight of my leg while I was trying to activate the desired muscles, or touch my shoulders to draw my attention to the tension I was carrying, was invaluable in understanding what my body was currently doing and what else it was capable of. Equally important was my ability to not only listen to the music and the sounds my body made as I danced, but to ‘feel’ the music through my body. In this way, my body would reflect the rhythmical nuances of a melody with the timing and dynamic of my movement. A teacher once told me to work my body like a musician playing an instrument and that heightened awareness of how each of my muscles was able to express the complexity of music has stayed with me ever since. These balletic gifts and my multisensory experience of them were therefore instrumental in how I learned, refined, executed and later taught movement. That experience has remained part of the person I am today and continues to shape my interaction with ballet more than a decade after my last ballet class.
Anthropology offers answers and questions
Wulff describes how, despite no longer dancing, her “body still remembers what it feels like to dance” (1998a:1). In a similar vein, anthropologist Cynthia Novack (1993:36) spoke of a
“kinaesthetic reference” that stayed with her long after her days of taking ballet classes were over. Their words resonate with me. The embodied memory and feeling in the very fibres of my muscles has often caused me anguish since I stopped dancing. Now, my body can no
3 Between Moving Bodies longer move the way it used to, yet when I hear certain types of music, I can feel my body wanting to respond to it; that past experience is still very much a part of me, a shade that resides under the surface of my skin. However, by situating this bodily experience within a
Bourdieusian theoretical framework of habitus and body hexis, I reconsidered my experience of this historically situated bodily and sensory response to music – from one of frustration and upset, to one of fascination and interest – how does that movement, that physical response, become embodied? How is that ballet body created?
In looking to answer those questions, I turned to discussions in much of the literature about the body/mind dichotomy in ballet. Anthropologists Anna Aalten (2005) and Maartje
Hoogsteyns (2013), among others, discuss the duality of working the physical body in an attempt to reach the imagined ideal body. As a dancer, I was taught to understand that there was always an element of technique to develop, that my body and what it could do could always be challenged, improved on and extended. This at times motivated me to continue to push myself beyond my physical, mental and emotional limits, yet was at other times debilitating: no matter what I did, my body would never be or do all that I wanted it to do.
Later, when injury prevented my continuing to dance, I was forced to accept that my mind could not always control my body. However, through a consideration of Michel Foucault’s
(1988) technology of self and Marcel Mauss’ (1973) techniques du corps I am able to understand this problematic experience as part of a broader context in which the intertwined relations between my physical and imaginary, present and future bodies were necessary for both the creation of my ballet body and my identity as a dancer.
Aalten refers to such experience as the “occupational culture of the ballet”, where “belief in the malleability of the body creates a world where a dancer’s body is always under
4 Preface construction” (2005:67). In this way, my seemingly contradictory responses in trying to reconcile the imagined ideal body with my own physical body as well as the control (or lack thereof) of my mind over my body, although something I did not recognise at the time, were vital elements in my development as a dancer and gaining membership to the ballet world.
But I was prompted to ask: how does this actually occur? I surmised that an examination of the ballet training process, then, ought to be key to answering this question, however such an examination seemed to be, for the most part, missing from the anthropological literature.
A problem with perspective
With much scholarly focus on what the performance of ballet represents and looks like on stage to outsiders, while obviously the final product of ballet production, behind-the-scenes discussion of what it takes to get the dancers to that professional level is rare to find in the literature. Given that most of a dancer’s dancing life is spent training in the studio and, in contrast, only a small portion of that time performing, such a performative focus in the literature is puzzling. How can only looking at what the performance of ballet represents to an outsider adequately represent what constitutes the complex world of ballet?
Historically, much of the literature seeks to understand and explain what ballet is and what it symbolises within Western culture and society, through the visual analysis and objectification of movement, bodies and performance. This overwhelmingly visual focus on performance has left little room for the exploration of how ballet is experienced by the dancer or what is involved in the creation of a ballet dancer. The voices of the dancers themselves are often missing from this dialogue, despite evidence that the way dancing feels to the dancer is
5 Between Moving Bodies distinct from what it looks like to an outsider (see Daly 1987; Jackson 2005; Wulff 1998a,
1998b). This lack of emic perspective has sought to be addressed in recent years and Wulff’s work with professional ballet dancers (later built on by Aalten using contemporary body theory to re-situate the physical body, missing from Wulff’s work, within ballet scholarship) can be seen as trailblazing in this regard. Making room for the physical body in ballet scholarship has been an important step in encouraging analysis to move away from seeking to understand what ballet is or what the performance of it represents, towards a more holistic exploration of the experience of dancers and complexities of the form. However, these emic perspectives are derived primarily from professional dancers, rather than students, and while providing insight into the ongoing occupational construction of a ballet body, do not provide clear insight into how that process is seeded, negotiated or experienced by individuals.
I have found only three scholars who have turned their attention towards the training of ballet; their ethnographic descriptions of the training process and the students’ perspectives are insightful. In addition to Wulff’s occupational work, as mentioned earlier, dance scholars
Jill Green (2002) and Angela Pickard (2012, 2013, 2015) have applied Foucauldian and
Bourdieusian analyses respectively to the institutionalised training of dance. In particular, their work highlights the operations of power which serve to control and train students within training institutions and how the students experience such processes. Despite gaining new insight into how a ballet dancer may be crafted, their theories only in part reflect my own experiences. As mentioned above, my experience of ballet was one of total sensory emersion, where every sight, sound, smell, feeling and even taste, yielded information to my dancing body. However, the available literature reduces the involvement of the senses in ballet to a purely visual focus, where the look of the balletic body appears to be the main aim of
6 Preface training. This restrained sense register, I feel, siloes ballet into something that can only be understood and experienced through our eyes rather than our bodies. Even when experiences of pain and pleasure are discussed, these are analysed with reference to how they are shaped by the pursuit of a visual bodily ideal (see Aalten 2005, 2007; Alexias and Dimitropoulou
2011; Anderson and Hanrahan 2008; Hamilton et al. 1989; Pickard 2015; Wainwright and
Turner 2004; Wulff 1998a, 2006, 2008). Such analysis backs ballet into a sensory corner, with no room for other experiences of ballet and indeed no acknowledgement that ballet can be experienced in any other way. In regarding ballet bodies purely as objects to be visually consumed by an audience or shaped to meet an aesthetic ideal, current work largely ignores the fact that the people performing are living, breathing, feeling bodies.
Some scholars, despite on occasion taking a sensory approach to other forms of dance, have nonetheless maintained that vision is the primary and most important sense for a ballet dancer
(see Aalten 2004; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011; Cohen Bull 1997; Green 2002; Grau
2005; Hall 1977; Legrand and Ravn 2009; Pickard 2012, 2013, 2015; Salosaari 2001; Wulff
1998a). While I do not dispute that ballet is indeed a highly visual art form and a practice heavily reliant on both the sight of the dancer and the audience, I do not believe vision is more important than other sensory experiences while dancing nor is my own experience of ballet or my body solely defined by my sense of sight. In fact, one of the world’s leading ballet companies, the Royal Ballet in London, England, has run ballet classes for the blind and visually impaired for more than 25 years in an attempt to debunk the “myth that ballet is a sole visual art form” (Bartley 2016). In this way, I liken the literature on ballet to an iceberg where the majority of attention has been paid to the most obvious and visible part of ballet
(performing bodies), while the depth of ballet experience lies hidden under the surface,
7 Between Moving Bodies invisible to the observer. It is this invisible experience I have sought to access in my research and thesis, which has necessitated the application of a sensory analytic other than vision.
For all the above reasons, I have explored how anthropological theories and in particular an anthropology of the senses can be applied towards an examination of the institutional training of gifted ballet bodies, how those processes are experienced by the students, and how they work to shape those gifted bodies. In so doing, my thesis moves beyond the world of ballet to consider institutional power and how bodies relate to its operations.
Limitations and challenges
I acknowledge that this project has been for me of both personal and professional significance and has enabled me to reconnect with my past experience in the ballet world and, as a result, has enabled me to reshape my own identity. However, while my previous experience and bodily knowledge of ballet has steered me to conduct this research and given me a certain perspective through which to analyse the ballet world, I do not consider this to mean that I am better placed than others to conduct this research, nor that my experience will be equal to that of others’. In fact, whilst my past experience gave me a certain type of understanding of ballet, a return to ballet as an anthropologist exposed my lack of understanding in other areas, which in turn provided the motivation for my further enquiry. In this way, my work is evidence of Max Weber’s (2012) interpretive framework, where experience doesn’t necessarily equate to understanding. Because of this, I consider myself to be both an insider and outsider ethnographer – perhaps even an “ex-native” like Wulff (1998a:6). This
8 Preface somewhat dichotomous position posed some challenges to my research, particularly as to how I might best give voice to the experience of others.
The very act of writing this thesis has been problematic. How could I turn others’ sensory experiences into text? How could I put into words the bodily experiences of individuals that they had already translated into language? As Michel Serres (2008) shows, it is almost impossible to translate the senses and our experience of them into language. That the act of turning experience into words “anaesthetizes all five senses” (Serres 2008:89) at once separating experience from the body where words become not representations of experience but only of language: “I cannot tell or write of touch, nor of any other sense” (ibid., 58). That words do not equal experience poses a challenge for this thesis which seeks to communicate, through writing, the sensory and bodily experiences of gifted individuals as they work with, on and through their bodies. This challenge is compounded by the well-documented questioning within anthropology of how accurately others’ experiences may be represented through text (see Abu-Lughod 1991; Clifford and Marcus 1986).
In acknowledging this, it is necessary for me to state that I do not consider my words to be equal to that of my participants’ sensory experiences – they are poor translations. However, as language becomes meaningful once it is understood within its sensory context (Okely
1994:46), where possible I use the words that my participants chose to express their experiences. This process of what I might call disembodied translation also proved difficult and unsatisfactory for my participants, as they often struggled to turn their sensory perceptions into language. How does one articulate how movement feels when it just feels
‘good’?
9 Between Moving Bodies
My challenge, then, was to find different ways to talk about the body and the sensoria that highlight this problem and complexity, as well as to deal with the contradictions that this task created.
In so doing, and following Serres, I do not suggest that sensory and bodily experiences can be explained in a neat linear fashion. As our senses are inextricably linked to each other, blended under, in and on the skin, knotted together, as Serres suggests, in a tapestry of tangled threads, it would be fruitless to try to further abstract the experiences of individuals beyond that of translating them into words. Instead, I have attempted to keep the senses and the body together as much as possible, to show how these concepts are linked together, to highlight the complex relationality of the senses, as well as the fact that it is through our senses that we take information into our bodies. We hear music, we taste food, we smell fragrance, we feel touch – even the act of speaking aloud requires a sensory “feedback loop which guarantees the audibility of our own voice” (Serres 2008:110). I do, however, focus on and use an exploration of an anthropology of touch as a ‘way in’ to explore these multisensory experiences. This is one of those contradictions that highlights the messiness of writing about the senses: where I must single out one of them in order to write about how they are inseparable.
Much has been written, from as far back as the Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher
Democritus, that considers touch to be the sense through which we ‘make sense’ of all our sensory perception (see English 1915; Derrida 2005). While this perhaps offers justification for my approach, my exploration considers touch experiences to be much broader phenomena than simply those elicited by physical contact. Instead, I also investigate the often invisible and subtle political and social touch experiences within the institutional context. In offering
10 Preface this broadened definition of touch, I am able to best articulate the complex sensory experiences of gifted individuals as they work within and are shaped by not only physical practice but also institutional processes, thereby allowing my work to contribute to an understanding of the creation of bodies. While singling out any one of the senses would allow me to offer insight into institutional worlds, an analysis of touch allows me to access the powerful processes at play within the institutional setting experienced by and which facilitate the gifted body.
Serres, among others, maintains it is through our senses that we gain knowledge about ourselves and the world around us (see also Classen 1997, 1999; Csordas 1990; Desjarlais and Throop 2011) – that sense leads to sense – and that our bodies and selves are created through this process that is forever in flux, in motion (see Diprose 2002; Manning 2006,
2014). A consideration of bodies in motion through a touching analysis, allows me to explore not only the way physical training processes shape the body but also how the reciprocal exchange of knowledge and flow of power enables the accumulation of knowledge and ongoing creation of bodies.
This temporality, the idea of bodies being created in ongoing movement and therefore arguably never reaching a finished or complete state, is also another contradiction in this thesis. Asking how a gifted body becomes seems to necessitate that a gifted body is an end state and something static. But if bodies are continually in formation, engaging in relations with themselves and others that enable a movement towards an unattainable end goal, then the idea of a static and achievable finished body is problematic. That the body is never truly complete and instead is always in formation aligns not only with my own experiences, as mentioned earlier, but also with those of my participants. As such, I do not seek to define a
11 Between Moving Bodies finished gifted body, beyond identifying the characteristics it must possess in order to be considered gifted at certain points in time and thus able to continue in its creation. Instead, I ask how it becomes and suggest that the giftedness a body acquires is to be found in the processes of becoming and the relational web of experience between the senses, the body, the self and others that those processes depend on.
My examination of the gifted body is situated within and between bodies, and my thesis explores the role of the senses in the production of knowledge and formation of gifted bodies and the individuals’ experiences of these powerful formative processes – for one cannot be understood without examining the other. This necessitates a move away from thinking about bodies or power in a strictly Foucauldian or Bourdieusian sense, to one which privileges the complexity of sensory perception and intercorporeal exchanges. Such an approach also requires an extension of Maussian concepts of giftedness and exchange to bring the corporeal to the fore. While this thesis grapples with the elastic concepts of the body, the self, senses and power, these concepts do not stand alone and, just like our sensory complex, all work together, interlaced and interwoven, coexisting in inseparable relations with one another.
Moving towards an understanding of the sensory and institutionalised formation of bodies allows for an understanding of the way all experience is underpinned by the social and the shared: that it is through an openness to exchange relationships with others that gifted bodies are formed and made sense of, that is, between moving bodies.
12 Introduction
Introduction
Thesis questions, aims and argument
My thesis poses three central questions. First, what is a gifted body? Second, how does it become? And third, how does the gifted body experience its own becoming?
Building on Marcel Mauss’ (1954) theory of gift exchange and bringing it into the world of the corporeal, I consider a gifted body to be reciprocal, one that is able to receive, process, give back and pass on gifts (whether thing, knowledge or skill) in exchanges with other bodies. My analyses work to show how the gifted body is crafted through these intercorporeal relations – the ongoing and formalised exchanges with expert others – as the value and prestige of being and becoming gifted is accrued within the physical body. As the results of these powerful processes and exchanges come to reside in, as well as shape the body, the experiences of the body as it becomes gifted are also embodied, registered through the sensoria and, in particular, the body’s ability to feel.
To access such intercorporeal experiences, I have sought an approach that goes beyond the existing visual and performative analyses of gifted bodies. Visual analysis may allow consideration of what a gifted body looks like and what outwardly visible gifts it must possess in order to become gifted, such as body shape, gender or skin colour. For example, female ballet dancers have been described as predominantly white and thin (see Daly
1987:14). Yet I suggest that evaluating bodies in such a way elides how a gifted body becomes and what its own experiences of becoming are. While I do not dismiss the role of vision or the information that can be gained from looking at bodies, I instead offer an
13 Between Moving Bodies alternative sensory tool through which to analyse the gifted body – touch. Different tools, I argue, allow for different understandings and possibilities for giftedness – for powerful processes of becoming are not always visible although their results may be. By privileging touch, which I argue is the primary mode through which becoming a gifted body is both affected and experienced, I offer an alternate entry point through which to explore the gifted body.
In so doing, I build on an anthropological understanding of the sensory and political nature of touch to show how the process of becoming gifted depends on bodies willingly engaging other bodies. This is an ongoing process where negotiated multisensory relations are mediated and made possible between bodies by their capacity to feel. In order to become gifted, I argue that bodies must hold themselves open to others during relations in which gifts of skill and knowledge are exchanged between and giftedness is accrued in bodies over time.
However, these relations are hierarchical – comprised of expert and novice bodies – and bodies possess differing gifts and potential for giftedness. As such, not only do these relations craft gifted bodies but they also determine which are insufficiently gifted.
This is a process in which identity, difference, belonging and exclusion are continually
(re)defined by how bodies respond to the gifts of others – how they succeed or fail to meet the obligation to receive and repay, that such exchanges entail. In other words, the touching relations in which bodies must willingly engage to become gifted may also determine their failure to become so. Where gift exchanges and giftedness are predicated on body-to-body generosity, such a process therefore also harbours the potential for injustice – injustice that operates on and through bodies but is not always visible.
14 Introduction
Considering these sensory and political relations through touch and the body’s ability to feel, allows me to reconsider the senses in my examination of both giftedness and institutional power. I challenge the common etic visual analyses of the gifted body and the Foucauldian notion that institutions chiefly control and shape bodies through surveillance, to instead consider the role of sensory and corporeal experience in the institutional production of bodies and accrual of giftedness. I thereby advocate that attention be paid to the powerful operations at work in the spaces within and between bodies and institutions – operations of power that I will show are not always as they appear. I build these ideas to culminate in a discussion of pain – an experience unable to be separated from touch – as it offers a visceral point of contact between bodies and institutions and ties together each of my thesis’ central themes: giftedness, sensory perception, temporality, movement, power and the social formation of identity, difference, belonging and bodies.
While my thesis may appear to be a Maussian analysis of gift exchange applied to bodies, my approach deviates from his work in two distinct ways. First, through my application of sensory tools (and in particular touch as an analytic) and second, through my discussion of pain – neither of which are themes examined by Mauss. As such, my thesis is intended to build on and extend our understanding of The Gift (1954) as it relates to bodies and offer a contribution to the anthropological literature on giftedness, body production and institutional power. Namely, that gifted bodies are reciprocal, crafted through ongoing senso-historical and intercorporeal relations both activated and experienced through the body-in-becoming by touch, where the institutional embodiment of giftedness is experienced by and results in the gifted body.
15 Between Moving Bodies
My gifted bodies
To execute such an approach, I consider the foundational element of the professional ballet school in which I undertook 11-months’ ethnographic fieldwork: the gifted ballet body.
In Chapter 1, I discuss how bodies are selected for admission to the ballet school on the basis of a particular aptitude for ballet dancing: a property referred to emically as ‘a gift’. A gift for ballet is not equally given to bodies: bodies come in all shapes and sizes with ranging degrees of strength, flexibility, coordination, musicality, artistry, passion and tenacity. Balletic gifts present as various combinations of raw potential that can be developed in and through formalised exchanges with expert others – namely training under the instruction of ballet teachers who have successfully developed their own gifts in their own previous, generational exchange relations. However, some bodies are more possessed of and accumulate greater value – of increasing giftedness – than others. Some will complete their training at the school and graduate, others will not; some will win places at top companies around the world, others will not; some will go on to have celebrated careers within the dance world and beyond, others will not.
The audition process for selecting students for entry into the school involves searching for the traces and evidences of giftedness and continues after a student’s enrolment, according to their capacity to respond to training. While we might suppose that these gifts are visible and measurable, such as great technique, body shape, flexibility and strength, not all are thus and indeed the key attribute that identifies the potential for giftedness is often invisible and harder to define – what teachers often referred to as the “microchip”. Bodies identified to be in possession of such a gift are willing and able to participate in and make sense of the training process – to receive gifts of instruction, interpret and apply them, and, eventually, give them
16 Introduction back. It is only those bodies able to do so that are considered worthy of being crafted into gifted shape.
As the school’s selection process shows, a body’s capacity to receive and repay is something not easily assessed by simply looking at auditioning bodies. Instead, such evaluation is only made possible during an extended period of daily body-to-body interaction between teachers and potential students. As such, the process to determine which bodies to take into the school is conducted in two parts – the audition class and the month-long summer school. It is these possessions and processes that the institution relies on to determine and sort those bodies recognised as producing giftedness and those insufficiently gifted. The latter can only benefit from the generosity of others but cannot produce anything of equal or greater value in return; the former are bodies worthy of gifts (of skill, of instruction, of knowledge) and are thus bodies deserving of training.
Prestige is laid upon novice ballet bodies as they are granted entrance into the school on the basis of their giftedness and is accrued as they are re-accepted and invited to return after each year’s evaluation period – their place never guaranteed. This is a prestige felt by selected students, as one told me:
There’s so many kids that audition to come for summer school, and then there’s so many kids in summer school that audition for the year, and out of those people we’re the ones that got in. Just, like, that’s amazing.
Formalised, parcelled-out gifts of skill, knowledge and training are bestowed on the novice ballet bodies by their teachers and the institution over the course of years of training. Upon receiving such gifts the students demonstrate their worth and developing giftedness by making return presentations of skilled rendition, demonstrating that they have received,
17 Between Moving Bodies understood and acted on the gifts given to them through their increasingly honed techniques du corps (see Mauss 1973). These small exchanges, involving the detailed development of particular muscles, movements, techniques and specific corporeal capacities (of fingers, toes, thighs, bellies, necks etc.), build over the years of training to the ultimate exchange, as the dancer graduates with and ‘receives’ from the school a fully competent ballet body. In turn, the institution and its teachers acquire the generational prestige which the dancer’s now fully gifted body will bring as they join an internationally recognised dance company – the core mission of the school I visited and all professional ballet schools around the world.
Training therein might be usefully conceptualised in the terms of a series of intercorporeal gift exchanges that manifest, ultimately, in the gifted body – a body that is the result of formalised and regularised exchanges with other bodies and in which a gift for ballet is realised. If the dancer fails to return these small and regularised institutional prestations by demonstrating an increasingly skilled body, one which in future will be capable of returning the gifts of their instruction, in and through manifestation of the techniques du corps of which they were previously not possessed, the teacher’s desire to give gradually diminishes and is eventually terminated. This withdrawal of generosity results in the student’s temporary or permanent dismissal from the school when they are not re-accepted for the following year, their gift insufficient to maintain the exchange relations of instruction and demonstration.
Such dismissal will arise irrespective of how much financial or any other capital the student might access to give.
18 Introduction
My approach to giftedness
These Maussian concepts of gift exchange and techniques du corps might be applied to all manner of exchange relations to illuminate the core valuables and exchanges at play in nontraditional contexts well beyond the traditional societies to which Mauss conducted and applied his work. They might also equally be applied to situations in which the body itself is the main commodity, such as elite sports academies (the athletic body), the armed forces (the military body), or correctional facilities (the reformed body), among others. In the world of professional ballet training, the body is the core valuable and is at the heart of exchange relations of skill and prestige. Equally, the notion of giving and receiving the gifted body is at the heart of the socio-corporeal world of the ballet training institution.
Indeed, much of Mauss’ thesis resonates with my own research in the ballet school. Mauss
(1954) initiated the notion that giving, rather than commodity transaction, establishes communal relations and the social identities of the parties within that community (such as teachers and students within the ‘ballet family’), distributing to each party the reciprocal relations of obligation. His is an argument about a gift-based social economy, an economy that might be hidden beneath the pretence of equal social contracts between individual agents.
As the gift circulates, it determines not only what might appear to be the preexisting identity of the individual, but equally the rank and situation of that individual relative to others, such as ballet teacher/student or, more broadly, employer/employee, parent/child, master/slave etc.
In so doing, it confers privilege on gift receivers and concurrently a stern moral obligation toward the giver – an obligation that cannot be repaid in terms any other than by the maintenance of a social bond (Mauss 1954:6). The especial power of the gift to do this, to make and maintain social bonds, arises from its spiritual status; the transfer of a possession –
19 Between Moving Bodies or in the case at hand, skill, knowledge, capacity – is a transfer of part of the personhood of the giver (ibid., 44-45).
As philosopher Rosalyn Diprose (2002) shows, this notion puts Mauss’ thesis beyond that of the social contract theorist, in the sense that while such theorists do assume that a part of one’s personal property is indeed exchanged through contract, Mauss assumes that the gift remains part of the personhood of the giver, “so that its circulation is one that seeks a return to the place of its birth” (Diprose 2002:6). Models of social economy, as proposed by social contract theorists, consider the exchange of commodity, where “objects of equivalent exchange value are reciprocally transacted” (Schrift 1997:2), to be separate from the self.
Therefore, the identity of both giver an recipient is claimed in advance of the contract and bonds between them are severed once the transaction is made.
In contrast, social exchange is not constituted by the exchange of commodity (whether thing, skill or knowledge) deemed separate from the self, but through the gift of part of oneself to another (Mauss 1954:10). Further, the respective identities of the giver and the recipient are not given in isolation prior to the giving of the gift. In other words, in models of social exchange, identity is not formed separately or prior to the exchange, but is constituted through the giving and receiving of the gift. That is, I give you a part of me and claim a part of you in return, thus we are made different from each other. Because the gift comprises and determines the social identity of each body interrelatedly, and with it a lasting social bond that obligates the recipient to the donor, the debtor in such exchanges is the recipient, rather than the giver – another contrast with the contract model of exchange (see Diprose 2002:6).
Such insights as Mauss’ would make compelling sense of the enclosed social world of the professional ballet school, even when we are dealing not with material commodities but with
20 Introduction corporeal exchanges (the importance and specificity of which I will discuss further momentarily and throughout this thesis). I might say that the exchange of balletic skills for the claim the school makes on crafting bodies desirable to the best dance companies, is surely a gift bestowed on the dancer that comes with part of the teaching self. This is writ large by the fact that these are bodies that bear the hallmarks of generational training, of skills (quite literally) handed body-to-body-to-body through the centuries. Tracing the pedagogical lineage of dancers is similar to following a family tree (Fournier 2018), where relations between teaching and student bodies travel back for generations (see Homans 2010). Gifted bodies, therefore, come replete with the physical characteristics of having been trained by one particular school and set of teachers, who give of their own embodied knowledges to the bodies they are crafting. In this way, corporeal transactions of balletic gifts give the identities of ballet students and teachers in their very exchange, and in so doing, the identity of the institution itself.
I might also say that it is because of this historic and “magical legacy” (Mauss 1954:43) that the novice ballet dancer, the recipient of the gift of training, feels the obligation to give back to their teachers; indeed, the structuring of school life insists they do, or they will fail to be invited to return for the next year of study. Certainly, the pursuit of Mauss’ notions as they stand, shifted into the terrain of the corporeal, would go a great distance to understanding the institutional ballet training world, the gifted body, the specific exchanges that yield the ballet dancers they turn out, and the reputations of the schools that are dependent on such excellent bodies.
21 Between Moving Bodies
Limitations of generosity
But there are certain elements of Mauss’ thesis that make it insufficient to answer my questions – of understanding not only what gifted bodies are, but how corporeal exchanges are made and experienced, and the relations of power that govern the balletic institutionalisation of gifted bodies. These limitations arise from a perceived aporia of the gift
(see Derrida 1992), whereby in suggesting that identities are given and bonds are established in the exchange, Mauss ignores that to give of oneself necessitates a presence of self before the exchange and that relations between bodies must have already been established for the exchange to occur – thus the gift and giving become impossible (see also Diprose 2002:4-8;
Schrift 1997:10).
As Jacques Derrida (1992) has argued, and contrary to the above discussion about social contract versus social exchange, Mauss’ work does actually consider the gift as a commodity separate from its giver. Derrida’s argument is based on the notion that at the heart of gift exchange there is a decision to act that is made reciprocal through an obligatory bond. Thus
Mauss’ thesis remains firmly within a logic of exchange and contract within which the gift and giving are impossible (Derrida 1992:24). Such an aporia is created because under the logic of contract and exchange, the gift is recognised precisely as a gift – it practically functions as a commodity – and, once recognised, the gift bestows a debt on the recipient that can simply be annulled through an appropriate, suitable form of return.
From the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what it is, in its phenomenon, its sense and its essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacrificial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of the debt. (Derrida 1992:23)
22 Introduction
In other words, as Diprose notes:
Derrida’s analysis suggests that it is precisely this economy of contract and exchange between self-present individuals that makes generosity impossible. The gift is only possible if it goes unrecognized, if it is not commoditized, if it is forgotten by the donor and the donee so that presence (the gift as (a) present and the presence of both the donor and donee) is deferred. (Diprose 2002:6)
As she suggests, this problematic of the gift might be inconsequential were it not for the issues it raises regarding Being. Diprose notes how the gift itself is tied “to the gift-event of
Being: Being itself gives itself in the present on the condition that it is not (a) present” (ibid.).
If identities are given in the exchange, in which the total dispersal of identity between bodies results in identity and difference as self and other (such as teacher and student), then giving also resists Being. This resistance happens because, regardless of any delay in counter-gift to allow for the forgetting of the obligation to return (as suggested by Mauss and extended by
Bourdieu 1997:232), as soon as those identities are claimed, a debt to the other has been incurred and the exchange once again falls into a parsimonious economic cycle of obligatory exchange (Diprose 2002:7). Derrida suggests, therefore, that the gift must instead be given before self-identity is recognised, which of course leads to its impossibility because Being is constituted by the exchange (Derrida 1992:24).
Diprose’s work extends an understanding of the gift by revealing that both Derrida and Mauss ignore the fact “that in claiming freedom and property as one’s own, something has already been taken from others” (Diprose 2002:8, emphasis added).
Emphasizing the way that the gift does its work only by being forgotten and then through the dispersal of presence overlooks how, in practice, the generosity and the gifts of some (property owners, men, wage earners, whites) tend to be recognized and remembered more often than the generosity and gifts of others (the landless, women, unemployed,
23 Between Moving Bodies
indigenous peoples, and immigrants). It is the systematic, asymmetrical forgetting of the gift, where only the generosity of the privileged is memorialized, that social inequities and injustice are based. (ibid.)
To address this, and to move past the question as to whether the gift is possible or not,
Diprose offers an examination of how such social injustice is made possible, an injustice she argues that both constitutes and perpetuates hierarchical exchange relations (ibid., 9). Such an examination leads her to suggest that for relations to have the potential to exceed a debtor/ debtee economy of exchange, and thus generosity to be at all possible, then the self must not be recognised as a finite subject able to claim determinate identity through exchange, but one continually in formation through the bodies of others. Equally, she argues that if the gift is to be forgotten so that it may operate unrecognised, this must mean that gifting operates between bodies outside consciousness, at the pre-reflective and sensory level (ibid.). She determines that:
Only in invisible silence does generosity do its work of personal and social formation, and then only by maintaining an openness to others that is its condition. Only on the condition that a sovereign subject is neither the agent nor product of generosity does it do its formative work. (ibid., 7-8)
Mauss’ work, which Diprose shows ignores the feeling and ever-in-formation body, does not provide for such an understanding.
However, unlike Diprose, my concern is not whether the gift or generosity is possible. While her work may easily lead to analyses of present repellent politics that assert their own superiority precisely on the silencing of the gifts of others they deem lesser (think current domestic and international political rhetoric and policy about migrants and border control,
LGBTQI+ rights, body autonomy, fertility and abortion, social welfare etc.), my focus is chiefly with the operation of sensibility and its relationship to the gift. It is Diprose’s
24 Introduction understanding of how parsimony may be overcome, that allows me to put aside the problematic of the gift and to extend Mauss’ thesis to the corporeal and sensory world of professional ballet training. I build on her suggestion that generosity is predicated on the ability and willingness of bodies to hold themselves open to others, as bodies engage in a sensory process of continual becoming, to argue that institutionalised gift relations operate precisely at this level of corporeality – both of feeling as a physicality and of feeling as an affectivity. Both depend on the openness of bodies involved in the giving and receiving of the gift, on relations that are equally carnal and affective, while the product of identity and difference that results from their interactions is a material yet ever-moving production – the gifted body.
A sensory approach
So how might I access these powerful exchange relations? First, let me return to those asymmetrical forgettings of generosity that Diprose describes form the very basis of social injustice. These depend on the unequal evaluation of different bodies – a necessarily powerful procedure. As I noted above, ballet bodies accrue value, belonging and identity, through accumulating the gifts that once belonged to other bodies, namely their teachers and theirs before them. However, as Diprose shows, this accrual of giftedness often comes at the expense of other bodies (ibid., 8). In the case of the professional ballet institution these non- dancing bodies are nowhere present in places meant only for gifted bodies. As I have described, the school relies on processes of audition and re-evaluation to determine those bodies which possess the required balletic gifts that can be exchanged during training and those that do not. Therefore a process of open discrimination operates through and impacts on
25 Between Moving Bodies bodies, arraying them accordingly, such that some bodies are considered worthy of gifts and accepted into the school or invited to continue their training, while others are not. Such an understanding, I argue, permits insight into giftedness as it is felt, affectively and corporeally by those bodies.
Accounting for this corporeal dimension of giftedness in my thesis permits insight into the relations of power and their experience as they are corporeally enacted in institutional settings. To do so, I extend and hone Diprose’s insights into the importance of attending to the corporeal experiences that register, harbour and facilitate the operations of power and the giving and receiving of gifts, by arguing that it is insufficient to simply attend to ‘the body’ or
‘corporeality’. Instead, particular sensory registers provide very different access points to the operations of power and the relations of gifting and giftedness, particularly when that giftedness is vested in the body itself.
In Chapter 2, I discuss how gifted and ballet bodies have been accessed in and through numerous analyses privileging vision. These analyses have either sought to identify bodily traits needed for success, such as flexibility, strength, proportions or even artistic skill, thought to be possible through viewing and measuring the body (see Chua 2014; Hamilton et al. 1992; Hutchinson et al. 2013; Koutedakis and Jamurtas 2004; Kushner et al. 1990;
Mišigoj-Duraković et al. 2001; Sanchez et al. 2013; Ureña 2004); or have cast bodies as the beautiful tabula rasa onto which broader values and attitudes are inscribed, such as gender relations, histories, and particular cultural milieu (see Alderson 1987; Banes 1998; Daly
1987, 1997; Foster 1996, 1997; Hanna 1988; McRobbie 1997; Novack 1993). Bodies have thus been considered passive and static, subject to external forces and able to be read for signs and symbols and what they might reveal about giftedness as well as social and cultural
26 Introduction contexts. Not only has this paradigmatic view continued to produce knowledge on the gifted body and the relations of (often gendered) power in which it is involved, it has equally obscured the far less (visually) obvious ways in which power operates on institutionalised bodies – and not only those in the ballet world.
In such analyses, the dancers’ voices and their experiences as they are shaped by such powerful discourses are not evident – a silencing that extends to the body itself. This bodily absence persists despite literature that recognises that the way dancing looks to an outsider is different to how it feels to dance (see Jackson 2005; Wulff 1998a:9, 1998b:107), and that simply looking at bodies would be an “odd and shallow” way in which to understand an embodied practice such as dance (see Wainwright et al. 2005:56). In addition, although there is literature that recognises that ballet becomes embodied through physical training (see Grau
2005; Green 2002; Morris 2003; Pickard 2012, 2013, 2015; Ureña 2004) and is learned between teaching and student bodies (see Pickard 2015; Wulff 1998a, 1998b, 2006, 2008), the overwhelming majority of research to date has focused on adult professionals. As such, I argue that visual analyses that privilege an audiential view of bodies have left the processes of becoming gifted, and the dancers’ emic and felt experiences of them, unexplored and inaccessible.
All this has important consequences. First, simply observing or reading the gifted body for symbols and signs, I suggest, might not be a robust way of gaining insight into broader cultural or social factors such as gender – factors commonly understood to be contextualised by time, place and experience (Daly 1992, 2000). Second, viewing the gifted body in such a way – as simply a vehicle for the communication of something broader – entirely misses the body’s experiences. How does a gifted body become as such? What are its own relations –
27 Between Moving Bodies with the institution, with teachers, with other dancers, with itself? To examine the experiential dimensions of giftedness and the processes involved in the institutional crafting of gifted bodies that have been hitherto left aside, and to move analysis beyond the dominant mode of reading and measuring the body for insights it might give into broader contexts, I instead ask how a gifted body becomes and how it experiences its own becoming. To answer these questions, I put aside the predominantly visual analyses of both gifted and ballet bodies that have been conducted to date. Instead, I employ an analysis that centres on the body and the primary sensory mode through which I argue giftedness is both accrued and experienced – touch.
I offer my touching analysis, centred on both the feeling of bodies and the fleshy relations between them, for a number of reasons. First, the way in which the institution itself assesses the suitability of auditioning bodies in two parts and conducts year-long re-evaluations of those selected points to the importance of felt body-to-body relations in the pursuit of giftedness. As described earlier, while some gifts are visible on bodies, others are only able to be evaluated between teacher and student through longer intercorporeal interactions during class, as students are given time to demonstrate their ability to receive and return gifts of instruction. Second, as Diprose has suggested, in order for the gift to go unnoticed then gift exchange must operate at the sensory level – an understanding Mauss overlooks in his analysis (see Diprose 2002). This too suggests a link between the senses, relations between bodies, and the accrual of giftedness. Third, despite the visual preoccupation of the ballet literature, there are findings that point to the fact that how bodies look may not be how they feel (see Jackson 2005; Wulff 1998a, 1998b), and that although dancers may work their bodies towards a visual or aesthetic ideal, their ability to do so is determined and made sense
28 Introduction of at the pre-reflective level (see Legrand and Ravn 2009). And finally, while ballet training has rarely been the subject of anthropological inquiry, it is recognised that ballet is taught relationally, between bodies (see Wulff 1998a, 2008).
While Mauss overlooks the role of the feeling, sensing body in his theory of gift exchange, by grounding my examination in the body and the sensory and felt relations between them, I can address this limitation as well as expand an anthropological understanding of both ballet and giftedness beyond what the look of performing bodies might show us. For when giftedness resides in the body itself, the processes and experiences of being and becoming are of course embodied (Crossley 2005:16).
A touching analysis
Anthropologists have a responsibility to hold their analytic tools to rigorous account and examine why they are using them and the kind of results they deliver. This is especially true of sensory approaches, where scholars have been urged to articulate both why and how their chosen analytic is appropriate (see Pink 2015), as well as those tools used to examine gifted bodies, where early feminist analyses of dance have been criticised as being too reductionist and unsuitable through which to attend to moving bodies (see Banes 1998, 1999; Daly 1992,
2000; Fisher 2007; Foster 1996, 1997; Grau 2005; McRobbie 1997). I argue that touch allows me to not only examine the corporeal specificities of giftedness and the embodied processes of becoming gifted, but to access and ground my examination of power in the feeling body.
I use touch to examine how gifted bodies are crafted within the context of the institution – in my case the ballet school. I do not want to read these bodies in a dominant visual mode for
29 Between Moving Bodies the hallmarks they bear of institutional power, since these would be hard to ‘see’ in any case – the gifted body is brought into the regime of the dance (by the student and by the institution) primarily through the medium of touch. It’s a cornerstone of dance instruction, and both corrective touches and a sense of touch are deployed to manoeuvre the flesh into balletic shape. Other senses are of course involved to craft and make sense of ballet bodies, such as the visual observation of bodies or the hearing of music or verbal feedback. However, I argue that it is touch – considered to be a proto-sense, the sense by which all other senses are made sense of (Bannon and Holt 2012:3; Chidester 2005:50; Gibson 1962:97; Lysemose 2014:352)
– that allows bodies to negotiate (and me to access) the powerful processes at play in the institutional crafting of giftedness. When other Western and non-Western modes of dance have been explored outside the hegemony of sight (see Albright 2013; Brandstetter 2013;
Cohen Bull 1997, 2001; Dalidowicz 2015; Grau 1993, 2005; Houston 2009; Manning 2006;
Novack 1990; Potter 2008; Zubarik 2013), the social nature of dance has been made accessible, as each form is found to be heavily reliant on the relationality of bodies, and body parts, in its production, performance and/or consumption. I argue that when applied to ballet, an analytic of touch also illuminates such powerful social relations.
My conceptualisation of touch, however, is broad and contains movement, from which touch cannot be undone as a property. As touch resides in the spaces between and within bodies, in
Chapters 3 and 4 I argue that this intercorporeal touch is experienced in different ways. First, as physical contact between bodies, such as a dance teacher manipulating a student’s arm.
Second, as a sense of motion and somatic awareness or feeling inside bodies, such as a dancer feeling their leg muscles activate as they launch themselves through the air in a leap. Third, as the awareness of bodies moving in-sync but external to one another in space, such as
30 Introduction bodies dancing in formation without coming into direct physical contact. And finally, the experience of bodies being activated by music or bodily sounds. Numerous scholars have called for these individual components to be considered types of touch (see Chidester 2005;
Classen 2005a, 2005b; Finnegan 2005; Manning 2006; Qureshi 2000), however, considering them as a complex of interwoven touch experience allows me to articulate their relationality and the gifted body’s experiences of them. Just as Michel Serres (2008) has done, I argue that the multisensory experiences of these touches are impossible to separate and that it would be unwise to try to undo them from one another.
These touching gift exchanges constitute embodied knowledge communicated between bodies through movement in the form of multisensory feedback, information and corrections.
For example, the touch of a hand to the body communicates adjustments to posture or alignment; the clicking of fingers or stomping of feet communicates correct timing; the demonstration of a step communicates desired movement dynamics, quality or use of space etc. While existing research suggests that touch is primarily used in ballet to facilitate a certain look through the body (see Wulff 1998a:66, 70), I show how touch first leads to the feel of bodies. Such an analysis provides insight into the kind of sensory gifts needed to attain giftedness in ballet, such as the ability to feel movement, music and emotion, the bodies of others, and even the aesthetic tastefulness of bodies. These gifts come to reside in the student’s body itself as touches, sounds and visual cues remind or alert them to what their body is doing, enabling them to better feel what is happening.
More importantly than the gifts themselves, however, are the relations that enable their exchange. I show that an analysis of touch reveals how such gifts cycle between teacher and student and are made sense of by both bodies’ capacity to feel. This is because touch is
31 Between Moving Bodies relational – what is touched also touches (Blake 2011; Brandstetter et al. 2013; Classen
2005a; Derrida 2005; Diprose 2002; Houston 2009; Lysemose 2014; Manning 2006) – and when bodies touch each other, they become engaged in an ongoing and negotiated exchange which results in their collective and continual creation (Diprose 2002; Lyon and Barbalet
1994; Manning 2006). For example, the touch of a hand to a student’s back not only enables the student to feel the correct placement and alignment in arabesque as the teacher’s hand guides adjustments, but also enables the teacher to feel and evaluate the student’s success or failure as they feel the student’s body move beneath their hand. The clapping sound a student’s thighs make during a cabriole, assists the teacher to gauge how much the student’s legs are rotated; and assists the student to learn to associate that sound with how their body feels while doing the movement and to make corrections accordingly. Equally, the look of a leg moving sharp and fast as a teacher demonstrates battements jeté, enables a student to equate the look of the movement with how it must feel in their own body when executing the step, and enables the teacher to assess which of the student’s muscles may not be activated when the student fails to execute the step with the correct dynamics.
In other words, the student’s willingness and ability to meet the obligation to receive and return gifts of instruction is communicated and assessed body-to-body at the sensory level. It is these intercorporeal exchanges and relations, the sensory and embodied exchange and production of knowledge, which allow for the creation of gifted bodies, as sense leads to sense leads to sense. This is because the identities of student and teacher (and thus difference from each other) are formed through the body of the other. However, this is an ongoing process where both bodies claim identity of student and teacher interchangeably. As the above examples show, the student learns through the teaching body (a body that became such
32 Introduction through its own exchange relations with previous teaching bodies) and the teacher also learns from the student. As a result, hierarchies between them are negotiated, as they both maintain a state of potential becoming through the other. The ambiguous nature of such relations goes a long way to understanding what Diprose means when she suggests a way to overcome the aporia of the gift – that the creation of bodies is predicated on each being held open to the other in ongoing exchanges that operate at the level of feeling.
Powerful touches
These sensory and sense producing exchanges with gifted others must have one of two outcomes: either the continued creation of the gifted body as it successfully proves its value in accruing the gifts of others by fulfilling its obligation to return, or the termination of the gifting process as the student is not selected to return the following year, having been determined not to be in possession of gifts adequate to sustain its progression, namely the ability to give back. While such relations may appear to be between equal bodies, where each informs the other as part of the process of sensory exchange, they are in fact unequal – the teacher is still the teacher, the student must do what they are told in order to progress, and bodies capable of balletic giftedness are distinguished from those that are not. As such, a touching examination of this temporal process of becoming, accounting for both feeling bodies, enables me to show how power is exercised through this process.
In Chapter 5, I use touch to ground my examination of power by examining the way in which institutions mould, manipulate and control bodies in an attempt to create a desired type of body – such as a ballet school working to produce a gifted ballet body. Taking a traditional
33 Between Moving Bodies definition of touch as physical contact, would allow me to consider the seemingly violent manipulation of ballet bodies as they are pushed, pulled or poked into balletic form, or in a more extreme context, the torture of prisoners or the caning of school children, as ways institutions physically shape the bodies within. However, institutions today touch bodies in subtle ways which are not so visible, as students learn and prisoners are reformed without the use of overt physical violence (Foucault 1977; Synnott 2005:42). Instead, and following
Foucault, bodies are shaped as they are coerced to willingly engage in powerful processes of becoming, where in the case at hand, they learn appropriate studio etiquette and how to behave in class, what food is appropriate to eat in order to fuel the body for optimal performance, or that certain pains are positive or negative indicators of progress. However, while Foucault considers such a process to be facilitated by the visual surveillance of bodies,
I argue that such body-to-body surveillance is operationalised at the sensory level, reliant on the body’s capacity to feel.
To illustrate how a touching analysis may provide insight into such powerful processes, I build on philosopher Erin Manning’s (2006) approach, as she parallels a Foucauldian understanding of power, knowledge and body production in her examination of touch. She considers touch to be enacted, diffuse and relational, in the same way that Foucault considers power to be so. Manning considers bodies to be collectively and continually created through touch – “I reach out to touch you in order to invent a relation that will, in turn, invent me” (Manning 2006:xv). In addition, an anthropology of touch shows that touch is a learned social practice that is “a fundamental medium for the expression, experience and contestation of social values and hierarchies” (Classen 2005a:1) – including those between bodies such as student/teacher as well as between bodies and institutions such as student/school. Coupled
34 Introduction with my examination of the role and importance of touch in the felt intercorporeal gift exchanges between teacher and student, touch then becomes fundamental to the political, negotiated and ongoing creation of gifted bodies.
As touch enables mediation of appropriate social relationships, it can be seen as relational and always involving a simultaneous action and reaction (Blake 2011:9; Brandstetter et al.
2013; Derrida 2005; Houston 2009; Lysemose 2014:347; Manning 2006). Touch is, therefore, a negotiated act and ethical discourse (Classen 2005a; Finnegan 2005; Manning 2006) as we learn to understand the appropriateness or not of types of touch depending on the specific group we are in. Such an understanding not only offers a contrast to debates within dance, and education more broadly, about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of touch between teacher and student in the classroom (see Bannon and Holt 2012; Brancatisano 2016; Dursun
2016; Green 2002; Marshall 2009; Outevsky 2013; Owen and Gillentine 2011; van Ulzen
2013), as well as the oft feminist critiques of ballet as mentioned earlier, but it also allows me to consider the negotiated nature of touch and its role in the institutionalised shaping of gifted bodies.
I suggest that looking at bodily relations may imply a certain hierarchy at work. For example, some bodies surveil others, such as teachers monitoring the progress of students, or have power over others, such as male dancers manipulating female dancers or teachers dominating students. However, this ignores the fact that everything that is touched, touches, that “for every eye or hand on skin, there is skin on hand or eye” (Diprose 2002:116). Instead, when the emic and felt experience of touches between bodies are examined, I argue that such relations are more complex than they first look and instead predicated on two-way responsive, informative and negotiated partnerships.
35 Between Moving Bodies
Attending closely to the subtle experiences of bodies becoming within institutions and how they relate to those powerful processes, issues an important corrective to the thrall of the gifted spectacular, and permits understanding of individuals’ sensuous and embodied experiences of becoming gifted through the bodies of others. I suggest that if we get caught up in attending to how domination and hierarchy looks – the violent spectacular – we are blinded to the subtleties of intercorporeal relations, relations which are being continually negotiated through the very bodies they engage. In so doing, my approach may be applicable to other kinds of institutional life, for as anthropologist David Graeber (2012) shows, when we attend to the less overt and more subtle seemingly mundane operations of institutional power, we uncover different experiences, processes, hierarchies and understandings to consider.
A painful process
In Chapter 6, I show how the dancers’ experiences of pain serve to draw together and make tangible the temporal process of becoming gifted made manifest in bodies within the context of the institution; after all, these processes are quite literally felt by the gifted-body-in- becoming. I argue that felt pain experiences are a) continually navigated and made sense of as the gifted body becomes in pain; b) identified, measured and monitored as evidence of a body’s willingness, ability or failure to give back the gifts of their instruction; c) used as a powerful negotiation tool to coerce bodies to fulfill their obligation to return; and d) regularly exchanged between bodies as gifts that enable giftedness to accrue in the body because they were once felt by others. In so doing, I show how it is through feeling pain that bodies are
36 Introduction created and differentiated and how all pains (and not just those outwardly visible) are the result of an unjust or hierarchical relation at work on the body.
As with the look of the gifted ballet body, the look of pain has been much discussed in the balletic literature, with descriptions of blistered feet, injury or eating disorders offering a spectacular illustration of the impact of the balletic ideal (see Aalten 1997, 2004, 2005, 2007;
Alderson 1987; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011; Daly 1987; Gordon 1983; Hoogsteyns
2013; Novack 1993; Pickard 2013, 2015; Ritenburg 2010; Wainwright et al. 2005). Pain is commonly considered to be the violent result of ballet on the body, where the dancer suffers through and silences pain in an attempt to craft their body into ideal balletic shape (see Aalten
2004:271, 2005:57, 2007:110; Alderson 1987; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011:92;
Encarnacion et al. 2000:21; Pickard 2013, 2015:150; Ritenburg 2010). However, by looking at the painful impact of ballet on the body, and by linking all pain to the pursuit of a bodily aesthetic, emic and felt experiences of pain have been unexplored. In suggesting that a dancer works through pain and often silences pain to achieve a desired end result, current analysis falls back into perpetuating a Cartesian dualism in which the mind can control the body. This dichotomy is problematic when it comes to an examination of the students’ sensory and embodied experiences, as all feeling is necessarily embodied, and pain experience is no exception to this (see Jackson 2011:373; Leder 2016). Equally, positioning the body and the visible after effects of pain as something to be looked at by others, ignores that self- perception operates at the sensory level and that the gifted body is not a static object but in a continual state of becoming.
I suggest that observing such outcomes of the training process only gets us closer to understanding how a body pre- or post-pain looks like. Instead, I work to describe a gifted
37 Between Moving Bodies body that is in the process of being crafted, one that is therefore in the midst of felt experience and in pain. Rather than something to be silenced or suffered as the result of training, pain then becomes an experience which must be recognised, lived through and felt, in order for giftedness to be attained. Such an understanding allows me to examine the powerful role of pain in the accrual of giftedness and how gifted bodies-in-becoming experience their own formation.
I could take a Foucauldian approach to training (after Green 2002) to consider how bodies are controlled and shaped through the ever-present threat of discipline. Similarly, Mauss’ theory of gift exchange allows for the threat and power of pain to perpetuate the exchange and as a way to reclaim a debt from another as individuals strive to avoid affective pains of loosing face, status or wealth, or physical pains of violence and war (Mauss 1954:11). Such a thesis is easily applicable to the world of professional ballet, where the pain of injury often carries with it the threat of exclusion, as students miss out on classes or performances or are not invited to continue their training. However, I suggest that this returns us to the aporia of the gift, as discussed earlier, where exchanges become limited to that of a creditor/debtor relation. Equally, in such an analysis, pain (as power) becomes relegated to a ‘thing’ able to be wielded by and inflicted on bodies, as opposed to an experience. This is problematic not only because anthropology considers pain to be experiential (see Bendelow and Williams
1995; Jackson 2011:382; Leder 2016) but also in how Foucault shows power is not a thing to be given or withheld (Foucault 1977). Instead, I move beyond the threat of pain to show how the power to craft bodies and behaviour lies in the feeling of pain – feeling that is both internal and relational.
38 Introduction
I show how pain is productive, as it offers evidence of a body’s worthiness of the bestowal of gifts, its ability to engage in cycles of exchange, and its success or failure in becoming gifted.
The power of pain is thus operationalised by the institution as a way to coerce bodies to participate in relations of gift exchange, not as a potential threat but because students are taught how to feel pain from other bodies. Students learn how to feel pain from the bodies of their teachers and peers – bodies that have been and are also in pain. They learn that the pains of sore muscles, tiredness and feeling awkward or uncomfortable communicate (to themselves and others) that their bodies are being shaped and they are successfully receiving and repaying the gifts of their instruction. In contrast, students also learn that the pain of injuries sustained through training provides evidence of the body’s resistance to the training process or failure to engage in exchanges with other bodies. Because of this, such pains remind them of their obligation to return and offer a warning that unless changes are made, they will not succeed in becoming gifted and may not be asked to return the following year.
I suggest that when institutions coerce bodies to behave in certain ways, such as learning to conceptualise pains as positive or negative markers of progress, hierarchies between bodies may be either maintained or rearranged depending on the body’s ability and willingness to engage in exchange relations with others. These are powerful relations which the body must engage in to become gifted, but which also may prevent it from becoming so. Because the feeling of pain can either craft identity and belonging as well as differentiate bodies from each other and lead to a body’s ultimate exclusion from the institution, I suggest that the injustice of pain may lie in how students are taught to understand and feel pain from other bodies, and not in the painful outcome of training on the body. I argue that such a process is facilitated body-to-body as the pains of bodies are felt and exchanged relationally by bodies.
39 Between Moving Bodies
In doing so, an understanding of pain broadens from not only an experience within or of a body, but one between and of multiple bodies. This perhaps gives new meaning to the phrase
“in a whole world of pain”, which is commonly used to describe highly individual experience, but is also apposite when considering the shared pains between bodies within the institutional community.
Building on the historical nature of training as described earlier, I show how pains are also gifts that cycle between bodies. Pains are therefore also given ‘spiritual’ properties because they were once felt by and belonged to others. In considering cross-cultural understandings of pain, I suggest that if bodies are collectively created through the flesh of others (an understanding Diprose offers in her corporeal extension of Mauss’ thesis), then they are also made through an accretion of the felt experiences of previous bodies – felt experiences from which pain cannot be undone. It is therefore the shared and lived pain experiences that maintain the social group and determines identity and difference.
While pain is often understood as an individual and subjective experience – something that is experienced by bodies – in considering the value and power of pain to craft bodies through gift exchange in such a way, allows me to show how pain is relational and temporal – experienced between moving bodies. I argue that this approach has much to offer when examining the subtleties of body production and the powerful relations between bodies and institutions – for it is through these relations that gifted bodies are not only physically shaped but also how identity, difference, belonging and exclusion are determined.
40 Introduction
My research contribution
I chose to conduct this research with ballet students for three reasons. First, having once been a trained ballet body myself, I felt I was able to bring a certain sensibility and understanding through which to conduct the research in an environment where sensitivity to the day-to-day pressures of the training process were vital. While my previous experience of ballet has guided my research and, in particular, shaped how I engaged with the existing literature, this thesis is not about my experiences of ballet. Instead, it describes the experiences of the ballet students and teachers who generously gave me their time and whose words provide rich insight into the world of professional ballet training. Second, while ballet has been the subject of some anthropological study, research to date has focused predominantly on the performance of ballet by adult professionals on stage, with little attention paid to how ballet is trained or the emic experiences of ballet students. My research works to address this gap and in so doing offers a new perspective to the anthropological understanding of ballet. Third,
I propose that elite ballet training, an embodied practice reliant on the strict adherence to rules and apparent hierarchies between bodies, offers an excellent example of how gifted bodies are intercorporeally crafted in an institutional context. My thesis, therefore, presents a new approach through which anthropological and ethnographic investigations of the interface between bodies and institutions may be conducted.
Indeed, while the world of professional ballet training offers one example through which to illustrate and explore how bodies engage with institutional processes, there are many other kinds of institutions where bodies bestowed with very specific gifts are also the main commodity and crafted through exchange relations with expert others. For example, sports academies train the athletic body; music and fine arts conservatories craft the artistic body;
41 Between Moving Bodies the armed forces turn out the military body; prisons and correctional facilities forge the reformed body; hospitals and clinics discharge the healthy body; academic institutions foster the educated body. In such institutions, bodies are developed via intercorporeal relations to meet the very specific needs or desires of company, state or brand. These are relations between primarily human bodies, however, more-than-human bodily relations may also be readily found in institutional life. For example, animal/plant-to-human relations are evident in therapeutic and educational contexts, such as horses used to rehabilitate military members suffering from PTSD, or children learning social responsibility as they tend to a school garden. In addition, institutions are increasingly operationalising digital-to-human relations in the pursuit of gifted bodies, such as surgeons, pilots or drivers who learn from virtual simulation machines during training. In light of this, in my final chapter I conclude by suggesting that my touching analysis might equally be applied to an examination of these other kinds of gifted bodies – to explore the institutional and intercorporeal particulars of the powerful processes made manifest in and through bodies and the individuals’ experiences of them.
42 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet
Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet
In this chapter, I introduce the gifted bodies my research centres on – those of elite ballet students – and explore the way they are understood and assessed to be gifted by the professional ballet institution. In so doing, I show how Mauss’ (1954) theory of gift exchange can easily be transported into the realm of the corporeal to allow an examination of how some bodies accrue giftedness, value or prestige, while others are denied access to or dismissed from the school based on their (un)willingness and (in)ability to participate in exchanges of balletic gifts with their teachers.
Drawing on dance giftedness literature, I show how a gift for ballet may at first appear to signify that a body possesses and demonstrates the necessary abilities and attributes (whether physical, artistic, intellectual or emotional) needed to achieve success in both training and a future career. These gifts often present as raw potential or ‘natural gifts’ that can be developed in and through formalised exchanges with expert others, namely training under the instruction of ballet teachers where a gift for ballet, of increased techniques du corps (Mauss
1973), is realised in the gifted ballet body. Thus, while the evaluation of such gifts may at first appear to be based on looking for evidences on and through the student’s body, some gifts are harder to ‘see’ than others. In particular, the key attribute which I argue a body must possess in order to become gifted – the ability to give, receive and repay the gifts of its instruction – can only be assessed body to body. This is evident in the institution’s sophisticated audition and evaluation processes, which rely on daily interactions between bodies over extended periods of time, to determine those bodies in possession of suitable gifts and those which aren’t; the former being accepted into the school and allowed to continue
43 Between Moving Bodies with their training, the latter being excluded. Therefore, the processes for selecting students for entry and re-entry into the school primarily involve searching for the traces and evidences of giftedness between bodies, and continues on after a student’s enrolment according to their capacity to respond to training – an understanding not accessible within the existing giftedness literature. Yet this is a powerful intercorporeal process where assessments are made and made sense of between and within bodies. As such, I follow Diprose’s (2002) critique of Mauss’ thesis, suggesting that it is insufficient to adequately examine the corporeal dimensions of both the institutional processes of crafting the gifted body and how that becoming is experienced.
Mauss goes to the ballet
In 2017, I conducted 11-months’ ethnographic research at Canada’s National Ballet School
(NBS) in Toronto, Canada. NBS is one of the world’s leading professional ballet schools and offers elite training to gifted dancers in their professional ballet program from academic
Grades 6 to 12 as well as full-time post-secondary training for students preparing to join professional dance companies. Bodies are selected for admission to NBS on the basis that they contain a particular aptitude for ballet dancing: a property referred to emically as ‘a gift’.
Promotional material for the school states that “talent is the sole criterion for acceptance into
NBS’ Professional Ballet Program” (Canada’s National Ballet School 2015). In practice, this serves two, perhaps obvious, purposes. On the one hand, it is the potential for giftedness that determines the acceptance and evaluation of new and current students and not their family’s financial situation or social standing. In fact, talented students whose families are unable to meet the financial demands that such elite training incurs are often sponsored by a network of
44 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet donors who contribute to funding the students’ tuition and living expenses at the school. On the other, having giftedness as the sole barrier to entry also functions as a means for exclusion, whereby students with insufficient talent are not selected.
Considered in this way, Mauss’ concept of gift exchange would provide compelling sense of the professional ballet school. Bodies are selected for entry into the school on the basis that they possess a talent for ballet and begin to accumulate prestige (giftedness) from that moment of acceptance. As students progress through the years-long training program, they participate in regularised exchanges with their teachers, where formal, parcelled-out gifts for ballet (of how to stand, how to move, how to behave etc.) are given to and received by the novice dancers and where they demonstrate their worth and developing giftedness by making return presentations of skilled rendition, of increasingly honed techniques du corps.
For Mauss, this process is made possible because the giving and acceptance of gifts results in an obligation to return and with it a social bond, whereby individuals “take up the challenge” to prove that they are worthy (Mauss 1954:40) of, in the case at hand, the gifts of their instruction and membership within the group: the institution and ballet family. Participating in exchange relations with others is what determines one’s identity and belonging to the social group, as the gifts given and received contain “part of one’s nature and substance” (ibid., 10) and so the identities of individuals and their relations (the students and teachers) are given in their very exchange. This is a process of becoming which results in the ultimate creation of the gifted ballet body, a body that is now in possession of skill, knowledge and training of which it was previously not possessed, as the student successfully graduates from the school. After graduation, the dancer gives their final prestation where the prestige granted to and accumulated through their gifted body through years of training,
45 Between Moving Bodies returns to the school when they join a professional dance company and the school is able to reclaim the dancer’s giftedness as its own.
In other words, bodies that continue to engage in relations of gift exchange with their teachers, who meet the obligation receiving such gifts entails and thus develop giftedness and identity and maintain membership within the institution, eventually ‘receive’ a fully competent and gifted body from the institution – a body capable of returning prestige to the school. Considering ballet training in this way makes the process seem alarmingly simple: a gifted body is both in possession of certain gifts needed for success and crafted through a process of gift exchange. However, as the school’s practice of accepting students purely on the basis of talent shows, this process of belonging is, at the same time, also a process of exclusion.
Mauss shows that if a person refuses or is unable to accept or return the gifts given by others he loses dignity or “face” among the group and is eventually excluded (ibid., 40-41). In the realm of ballet training, if the student fails to demonstrate an increasingly skilled body and thereby fails to return (or demonstrate their capacity to return) these small and regularised institutional prestations, the teacher’s and institution’s desire to give wanes and is eventually withdrawn. Once it is determined that a body is devoid of being able to give back, its capacity for balletic giftedness or talent having been exhausted, the student is not accepted or is asked to leave the school – regardless of what other capital (financial, social or otherwise) they might have access to give. The potential for and evidences of giftedness are therefore the means by which belonging and difference are determined and a gift for ballet is the key variable through which a gifted ballet body is achieved.
46 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet
This is a complex process I will continue to describe throughout this thesis. However, I begin in this chapter by examining how such evidences are defined and assessed by the institution when determining which bodies are accepted into the school or rejected as part of the audition and re-acceptance processes. In so doing, these institutional processes will suggest a way forward to reconsider how a gifted body becomes and how it experiences its own development.
Phase one: looking for evidence
Auditioning for the school is a highly competitive two-phase process. First, the school conducts a national audition tour each year, where teachers travel to cities across Canada to assess potential students. Second, select students are invited to attend a four-week summer school held each July, where their suitability for entrance to the full-time program is further assessed as they participate in daily classes as well as one-on-one interviews along with a physical examination. This two-part audition is not unique to NBS and most professional ballet schools insist that auditioning students attend their summer programs for further evaluation. During my time at NBS, most students had attended an audition as part of the national tour, although some students were invited to participate in the summer program after sending in a video audition or impressing at an international ballet competition (such as the
Youth America Grand Prix), while others had come on exchange from another elite school.
More than 1000 hopeful students audition for NBS each year. From the 2016/2017 National
Audition Tour, 153 students registered to attend the 2017 Summer School after which only 53 took up places in the full-time program that September.
47 Between Moving Bodies
During my fieldwork I was able to observe one day of the phase-one auditions held at NBS in early 2017. Over the course of the day, aspiring ballet students vied for selection into the summer school, from Grades 5 through 12 and the post-secondary level. Those selected for
Grade 5 would be allowed to participate in the Introductory Summer School but would need to re-audition the following year for acceptance into the full-time program. When I asked one of the teachers if the day I observed was typical of days on the tour, she responded that
“talent ebbs and flows, but the turnout is usually the same”. Of the 116 hopeful students auditioning that day, only 28 were selected for the summer program.
I arrive just after 9am and there are perhaps two-dozen people sitting in the school’s central atrium. These are parents and family members of auditioning students. I have never heard this place so quiet. There are not the usual sounds of music wafting out of the studios, of children chatting as they bustle from class to class, or of the regular footsteps of artistic, academic, administration and ancillary staff as they walk the school’s mostly wood-floored common spaces. Being a Sunday the building is, of course, devoid of its usual life. In contrast, the atmosphere among the visitors is subdued, still and quiet – they have a long wait ahead of them. There is a sign-in table at the foot of the main stairs for auditioning students to register and collect a number to wear during the audition. The first group of prospective students are in the warm-up studio on an upper floor already, yet some who have arrived early for later sessions are milling about, having their hair done, listening to music, engrossed with their phones, or talking quietly to parents or friends. There is a seriousness and somewhat nervous anticipation in the air.
About 10 minutes before the first audition starts I get called in to watch. I enter the studio and am invited to sit at the audition table with the panel of five teachers. The parents are allowed to observe the audition and all sit in chairs along the back wall facing us, some look as nervous as their children. The students run into the studio and stand in lines. The 22 girls are wearing black leotards, pink ballet tights, soft ballet shoes and most have their hair tied back into a bun or at least off their face. The four boys wear a combination of white or black tops or leotards and black shorts or tights. They all look nervous. Some are attempting to smile and perform for the panel, others simply look uncomfortable.
48 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet
The audition for this level consists of demonstrating simple exercises in lines of five at a time. The first exercise allows the panel to assess posture and body proportions; the second to look at range of demi-plié; the third to look at the mobility of the feet; then a few travelling, skipping, galloping and jumping exercises from the corner and a solo jump to assess presentation, movement and musicality; and, finally a range of stretches to look at the flexibility of the hamstrings, hips and back.
At the end, the numbers of the students they would like to invite to summer school are called out. The four girls and four boys selected smile and look to their parents, their nervousness giving way to excitement, happiness and relief. They are informed that they and their parents will now attend an interview. I am told that these interviews are used, in part, to gauge their passion for dance, level of family support, interest in the program and to address any concerns they might have about the next steps. The 18 students not selected look downcast as their numbers are not called. Some are visibly confused or upset but most put on brave faces as they seek out the comforting hugs of parents and leave the studio.
The day proceeded in an alike fashion with the remaining four auditions. Each ran for 1 hour and 15 minutes and followed a similar format to the one described above, with the exercises becoming more complex and building to something resembling a ballet class with each new level. Throughout, the teachers on the panel took notes assessing each child’s physical attributes such as limb and torso proportions, height, range of motion in joints, and level of flexibility; as well as artistic attributes such as presentation, ease of movement and coordination, musicality and responsiveness. Auditions such as these are based on looking, seeing and making judgements about bodies, using these type of criteria as a way to ascertain which bodies are worth investing in – which are worthy of the gift of the school’s instruction.
As one teacher told me, “the look is quite important in the beginning, because the program is a classical ballet program. So the first part is ‘are they physically fit for classical dance training?’”.
49 Between Moving Bodies
Teachers spoke of ensuring students selected had “the tool”, i.e., the body and facility, which met certain physical and aesthetic parameters, such as toes that reached to at least under the line of the ankle bone when the foot was pointed to ensure a female student could stand en pointe; a straight alignment of the leg, so that fast and multiple beats when jumping were possible without injury; certain torso and limb proportions and ratios; enough mobility in the hips to facilitate adequate turn-out, the external rotation of the legs quintessential to classical ballet; a pleasing line of the leg made by varying degrees of ankle flexibility, arch mobility and hyperextension through the knee, among others.
Coupled with this physical tool, auditioning bodies also needed to demonstrate certain evidences of artistic gifts, such as responsiveness to music; an ease of movement and of
“being at home in their body”, as one teacher put it; imagination and creativity; and, performance quality and expression. While perhaps arguably more subjective criteria, teachers maintained that a coupling of these artistic gifts with that of the physical was essential if a body was to become gifted: “it’s always a combination of physical factors and dancing ability”, another teacher said. However, it was also recognised that, regardless of artistic talent, without the right physicality it would be difficult for a body to become gifted in ballet. As one teacher said, “hopefully those things [artistic factors] can be cultivated, but it’s really hard to change a body”. Throughout the audition process, searching for these physical and artistic gifts provided evidence of which bodies might be worthy of the school’s investment of training as well as which bodies would be likely to adapt to and sustain the rigours such elite ballet training entails. This is a process of identification and understanding not unique to NBS or ballet training.
50 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet
As early as Confucius and Plato, who both mused how the “heavenly” abilities of gifted individuals (thought to be bestowed by the divine) could be used to build and advance society
(Stoeger 2009), researchers have been fascinated by gifted individuals and have sought to identify, classify, measure, understand and foster the traits needed for success in various fields of human endeavour. While early thinking on giftedness was limited to a theological focus on gifts bestowed by the divine and, later, a metaphysical focus on the individual, the late-19th Century shift towards scientific reasoning resulted in the production of innumerable empirical literature on giftedness (Grinder 1985)1.
Situated primarily in the fields of psychology and education, the majority of research since this empirical shift has focused on giftedness as intelligence and has resulted in the creation of numerous psychological tests and models designed to evaluate and categorise the intellectual intelligence of individuals (see Grinder 1985; Robinson and Clinkenbeard 2008;
Stoeger 2009; Subotnik et al. 2011; Warburton 2002; Ziegler and Raul 2000). Building on this work by recognising that cultivating talent was just as important as identifying it, researchers turned their attention towards the education of giftedness, how best to identify those with potential and how to nurture them to reach success in their field (Grinder 1985).
This shift created intellectual room for researchers outside the traditional giftedness research fields of psychology and education to explore gifted bodies in talent-specific areas, such as sport and the arts2. Understanding and fostering giftedness in dance is one such area that has gained momentum in recent decades, yet still suffers from a dearth of research attention
(Chua 2014; Sanchez et al. 2013; Walker et al. 2010, 2011).
1 See Grinder (1985) for a detailed breakdown of these three stages in giftedness research.
2 See Vol 24, Issue 1 of High Ability Studies for a selection of recent studies on the expertise of various gifted bodies.
51 Between Moving Bodies
Gaining increased attention in the 1990s, giftedness researchers analysed the dancing body in an attempt to better characterise the physical, intellectual, emotional and cultural traits needed for success. These dancing bodies and their parts were often measured to determine the physiological and fitness factors of gifted dancers. For example, researchers explored the relationship between external hip rotation (what is called ‘turn-out’ in ballet) and hip abduction (Kushner et al. 1990); how the age that training commences corresponds to the amount of turn-out achieved by a dancer (Hamilton et al. 1992); how body composition such as limb measurements and functional ability such as grip strength differ between dancers at certain career stages (Mišigoj-Duraković et al. 2001); and, even how dancers’ brains are anatomically different to non-dancers in areas impacting motor control processes (Hänggi et al. 2010). While some researchers turned their attention toward dancers’ self-esteem, levels of motivation and cultural background (Hutchinson et al. 2013; Sanchez et al. 2013; Ureña
2004) in an attempt to define and understand elements that would lead to optimal performance and professional success, the majority of research has focused on advancing an understanding of the mechanics of the gifted body, where the look of gifted dancing bodies – their physicality – has been the predominant focus.
Across dance genres, definitions of giftedness flow between considering giftedness as performance (see Critien and Ollis 2006; Hutchinson et al. 2013) to considering giftedness as potential, recognising that it is important to evaluate dancers on their future potential and not just on their existing skills (Sanchez et al. 2013; Walker et al. 2010:167). This has led to a variety of talent identification and development models creating a taxonomy of the natural/ stable and trainable/unstable characteristics needed for success (see Chua 2014; Walker et al.
2010, 2011). Physical gifts categorised as natural are considered those which an individual is
52 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet born with, such as a particular body type and range of joint mobility, which are found to make them highly suited to meeting the physical demands of a career in ballet. While trainable gifts, what those gifted bodies can or might do with the proper training (the body’s potential), such as muscle strength, flexibility and cardiovascular fitness, are considered to be determined and often limited by those natural physical gifts. For example, while flexibility can be improved through training, research shows that “genetics contribute towards the extent to which flexibility can improve” (Walker et al. 2010:171). Psychological gifts are also classified into these categories, with a person’s personality (a natural gift) determining the extent of their development in self-confidence, motivation and passion (a trainable gift).
While this work has created practical models and framework to assess dance talent and giftedness by viewing the body, it has been argued that there has not been enough scientific evidence to suggest that any of these traits and abilities are hereditary, the result of training or a combination of both (Chua 2014; Hutchinson et al. 2013). This grey area surrounding the very factors needed to attain success in dance, and how they may or may not work together to help achieve it, speaks to the lack of clarity as to what giftedness actually is and how to measure it. In fact, there is still no universal agreement as to what constitutes giftedness
(Grinder 1985; Robinson and Clinkenbeard 2008; Stoeger 2009; Ziegler and Raul 2000), nor what constitutes talent in dance (Chua 2014; Walker et al. 2011). This is evident in the school’s approach to assessing the gifts of auditioning students.
The school communicates to auditioning students that “all students in the Professional Ballet
Program are admitted on the basis of their perceived potential to become professional ballet dancers” (Canada’s National Ballet School 2017:33). Yet it is rare for an auditioning body to have the “perfect” set of physical and artistic attributes: gifts for ballet are not equally given
53 Between Moving Bodies to bodies. Bodies come in all shapes and sizes; joints have ranging degrees of mobility; muscles, tendons and ligaments have varying capacity for both strength and flexibility; and, individuals have differing aptitudes for coordination, musicality, passion and tenacity. So the selection process is often about weighing up the pros and cons of a dancer’s existing gifts to try to determine what an acceptable combination of these would be. “If it’s only one con then there’s a good chance that it’ll work out”, said one teacher, “but if there’s five cons and seven pros then it’s a question”. Another teacher suggested that if a potential student didn’t have the best feet – if they weren’t overly arched or there were limits to the ankle flexibility – then the institution may ask “do they have enough other ingredients to make up for the fact that the feet aren’t great?”. In another example, if a potential student presented with wonderful physical facility, such as 180-degree turn-out in the hips, a straight leg with slight hyperextension, a nicely arched foot with good ankle flexibility etc., but had terrible body coordination, would the school take the gamble that those elements might improve with training? As one teacher described:
Some people don’t have such good coordination and if they have all the other things that you want you may take a chance on them to see if it’s a growth [issue]; coordination can get really crazy in growth spurts and things like that. So you want to take a chance and see how the coordination develops.
Selections at this point in the process are therefore made, in part, on ‘maybes’ – educated guesses based on past experience and the reality that the combinations of potential gifts are not always the same for each body and that bodies (regardless of how gifted they may at first look) respond to training in different ways. “I think that our yeses and noes are easy but we’re really trying to be generous and not miss anybody”, said another teacher:
54 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet
So that middle ‘maybe’ ground is the most challenging. Is that kid’s foot like that because they don’t have the full mobility they need or because they don’t have the strength? Is the fact that that leg doesn’t go because they need to loosen up a bit or is that because they’re hitting their boney limit? Obviously if you do a full physio assessment you can figure those things out but that’s not the most generous way to start this relationship. So you just do the best you can and try to be generous and try not to miss anybody who might have that talent. That’s why that two-stage process is important.
While both the giftedness literature and the school’s processes demonstrate the difficulty of providing an accepted definition of what a body needs to attain giftedness in ballet, what they do suggest is that in order to become gifted a body must already be in possession of gifts, whatever they may be, and that there is a complex relationally between not only individual gifts – the natural and trainable, stable and unstable, genetic and acquired – but also between the teachers and potential students, and the body and training environment, which interact and intersect to contribute to the appraisal and eventual accrual of giftedness. The importance and role of such informative and transformative relations will become evident as I continue to describe how gifted bodies are appraised and pursued by the institution.
Phase two: getting a better sense of ‘things’
It has been suggested that dance talent has been traditionally visually assessed by institutions based on looking for evidences of technical and physical ability alone (Critien and Ollis
2006; Walker et al. 2010; Warburton 2002). However, while it may at first appear that bodies are primarily evaluated in such a way, with close attention paid to the observable attributes needed for success, the institutional processes of extended evaluations point to the valuing of equally invisible gifts. While we might suppose that the evidences of a gift for ballet are visible and measurable, such as those I have described above, not all are immediately evident.
55 Between Moving Bodies
How responsive is the potential student to corrections? How advanced is their understanding of the muscles they need to use to perform certain movements? How much do they enjoy dancing? What is their capacity for making changes to the way they currently work their body? Do they have the dedication and tenacity required to thrive in the intense training environment?
Indeed, not being able to answer these questions and others like them through the brief visual observation of the auditioning body necessitates the second phase of the audition process – the summer intensive – where such information can often only be assessed through the intercorporeal exchanges that occur between student and teacher during ballet class. In so doing, it becomes clear that Mauss’ thesis of gift exchange, while becoming more relevant during an examination of these relational exchanges, also aligns well with the seasonal nature of the audition process where, because gifts are unable to be repaid immediately, “time has to pass before a counter-prestation can be made” (Mauss 1954:34). Thus, the institution must wait to see how the auditioning bodies respond to training. As opposed to making selections solely based on the visual appraisal of gifts at one point in time, assessing how the students perform and progress during the summer program provides the teachers with a better idea of how they might respond to the years-long professional training program and ultimately succeed in becoming gifted.
The NBS Summer School runs for four weeks each July, the goal of which is to further assess prospective students for “talent, potential, and their readiness for the rigours of the full-time program” (Canada’s National Ballet School 2017:8). During the intensive program, auditioning students are taught and observed by NBS Professional Ballet Program artistic staff; are subject to a physical examination by one of the school’s in-house physiotherapists;
56 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet and, attend a brief meeting with a consulting psychiatrist. Those being considered for selection into the school’s full-time program will also attend a series of meetings with artistic, academic and executive staff. In this way, the collective nature of gifting, as highlighted by
Mauss, is evident as the institutional community determines the student’s potential for giftedness: “for it is groups, and not individuals, which carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by obligations” (Mauss 1954:3).
Teachers spoke to me of the benefits of this longer evaluation, in particular the regular interaction during daily ballet classes, which gave them a better sense of how the student may or may not fit into and thrive at NBS. For example, one teacher spoke about nerves sometimes getting the better of students on the audition day: “if someone has a really beautiful body and maybe they’re not comfortable doing the audition and are quite nervous, you have to wait for the summer school”, she said. “It’s good because we see the whole month of July and then we can tell whether she or he will fit this professional program and if they have good potential to do this as a career.” As mentioned above, often the physical abilities and limitations of a body become clear during this phase as a result of a physiotherapist’s assessment and any technical progress made during the four weeks. Yet, the relationship fostered within the studio between auditioning student and teacher is equally important and enables the school to gauge how (if the student was to be selected for admission) they may respond to training, receive feedback and criticism, and apply corrections. This rapport also often allows the teacher to assess artistic gifts such as imagination, which can be difficult to determine in the first audition phase. “The auditions are often so scary [for them] that you don’t see that”, said one teacher when talking about the students’ need for imagination and creativity. In cases such as these, the longer period of
57 Between Moving Bodies evaluation is necessary as it allows prospective students (especially younger ones) to feel more at ease and confident to show that side of themselves.
While these gifts may become evident during the summer program, and indeed must become so if the student is to show progress and evidences of giftedness and thus be invited to join the school, the key attribute which identifies the potential for giftedness and is the means by which it is later achieved is often invisible and harder to define. This element is referred to in many ways by the teachers: some called it “the microchip”, “passion” or “talent”, others
“ability”, “the spark”, “inner strength” or simply “that intangible thing”. Regardless of name,
I suggest that what they are referring to is a body that is willing and able to be crafted and developed through the balletic training processes and which possess the ability to receive the gifts of their instruction, make sense of them, and, eventually, give them back.
In this way, the audition process involves not only looking for the physical or artistic gifts a body may possess, but searching for this undefinable “thing” that the teachers know will ensure they can craft and develop the gifted ballet body. Not only is this determined through interviews with the prospective students and talking to them and their parents about their aspirations and expectations, but also through the continued observation and exchange relations between prospective student and teacher as they forge a relationship in the studio over the course of the summer intensive. The school, therefore, already has an idea that the body they select must be responsive (to training and to other bodies).
This is a key element of Mauss’ work can be easily moved to the realm of the corporeal: that in order to accrue prestige – to become gifted – bodies must be willing and able to participate in exchange relations with teachers. Dance scholar Angela Pickard suggests that it is the
“natural” balletic gifts that determine which bodies are able to accrue capital through the
58 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet training process and which are considered “lacking or inferior” (Pickard 2015:59), such as those observable attributes I described earlier (body type, strength, flexibility, musicality, coordination etc.). However, I suggest that it is primarily the body’s willingness and ability to engage in gift exchange – to respond to training and other bodies – that determines both belonging and difference; and that a capacity for body-to-body exchange is the key attribute through which balletic capital and giftedness is accrued. This, perhaps coincidentally, also aligns with the dance giftedness literature, where despite its overwhelming focus on the look of gifted bodies and its suggestion of numerous combinations of attributes, skills and conditions needed to foster and produce dance expertise, two elements appear fairly consistent: the importance of social connections and relations between individuals within the institution, and the self-drive and willingness of the individual to participate in their own development (see Critien and Ollis 2006; Garces-Bascal et al. 2011; Hutchinson et al. 2013;
Sanchez et a. 2013; Subotnik et al. 2011; Walker et al. 2010, 2011; Warburton 2002).
Ongoing evaluation
Despite these selection processes, the school cannot be 100 per cent certain of the ways a body will develop. Changes may occur as a result of both puberty and the body’s ability and willingness to respond to training. As one teacher said: “we pick them when they’re little and then their body changes”. Young bodies are often selected for entry to the school before they reach puberty. While the school recognises that to successfully craft a “world-class” ballet body training should begin before puberty (Canada’s National Ballet School 2017:33), this can be problematic: evaluations made on the body’s evidences of a gift for ballet prior to this phase may no longer be valid once a body is impacted by various changes that puberty
59 Between Moving Bodies entails, such as to weight, fat distribution, height, muscle mass, proportions and emotions.
“Physiques can change, proportions can change as you grow into adulthood where the aesthetic of ballet may not be suitable for that physique, which is also very difficult”, said one teacher. The students’ interest levels, commitment and passion to continue to train at this elite level can also change over the years, and not all students who begin training with the school will be able to or choose to continue to meet the daily demands. “It’s such different reasons for each young person”, one teacher said:
But if someone is struggling too much to be able to stay with the flow of the training process and to stay with the school of fish that they’re swimming with to a reasonable extent, then that starts to get soul destroying. Sometimes it’s that as they’re going from childhood to adolescence their body could manage the challenge or the mental rigour at a certain age and level but the older more demanding material might not still be a fit. A lot of times it’s the kids who decide and say ‘this is not bringing me the same joy and satisfaction’.
Bodies selected into the school therefore will not always continue their training to graduation, depending on the institution’s assessment of how puberty impacts their gifts as well as how they progress and respond to the rigours of training, for:
Only students whose physical, artistic, and emotional development and progress fall within the School’s admission standards are invited to continue their training. (Canada’s National Ballet School 2017:33)
As such, once at the school, students must be re-accepted each year, their place not guaranteed. Throughout each year’s review process, those bodies deemed to still poses sufficient evidences of a gift for ballet will be invited to return, while those who fail to show development, increased technique and continuing evidence of a potential for giftedness, will not be re-accepted for the following year – their gift insufficient to maintain the exchange
60 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet relations of instruction and demonstration. Because of the rate of change experienced by the students varies, this process of evaluation can be difficult. As one teacher said:
It’s a lot of intangible stuff that has to all come together and there’s no recipe because there’s students who you think it’s not going to be a good fit physically and then they do great, and then you have a student where you think ‘man, they can’t even learn to do three pliés and one rise’ and then they find their way too. The other challenge is just not cutting them off too soon, and giving them time to figure it out a little bit. But that’s challenging too because there’s other talented kids out there that maybe this is the place they should be, so that’s a tricky thing.
As such, some bodies are more possessed of and accumulate greater value – of increasing giftedness – than others. Some will complete their training at the school and graduate, some will win places at top companies around the world, some will go on to have celebrated careers within the dance world and beyond bringing recognition back to the school – others will not. Just as the audition period to evaluate a body’s suitability for acceptance into the school is seasonal, so too are the assessments for determining which bodies are asked to return to the school and which are asked to leave. These assessments are based on an on- going year-long review by their ballet teacher, part of which includes a more formalised yearly evaluation class performed on stage for all artistic staff. Whilst the students placed much emphasis on their performance during this evaluation class and told me how much they wanted to impress those observing, the main determination about whether a student is re- accepted or not is not made solely on this singular class but is based on their performance and development throughout the year, as evaluated by their teachers.
Mauss’ ideas about gift exchange, obligation, belonging and difference are evident in the operations and processes of elite ballet training that I have described throughout this chapter.
I suggest that balletic giftedness is accrued through exchange relations with others within the
61 Between Moving Bodies social group of the institution – relations in which students willingly participate because of the moral obligation to repay a gift received and to prove they are worthy of instruction – and time must pass in order for this to happen. This is a powerful process and it is these possessions and processes which determine and sort which bodies are recognised as producing giftedness and which bodies are insufficiently gifted. The latter can only benefit from the generosity of others but cannot produce anything of equal value in return; they cannot process and return the gifts of instruction, the balletic techniques du corps which the teachers and institution would endow. The former, however, are bodies worthy of gifts – of balletic instruction and the knowledge of teaching bodies – and are thus bodies deserving of training.
I will expand on the details and broader significance of the institutional training process and the daily intercorporeal exchanges that determine both the potential for giftedness and, as I will argue, the creation of giftedness itself in later chapters of this thesis. However the school’s reliance on the long-term body-to-body evaluation of giftedness for both the selection of bodies to join the school and their ongoing re-acceptance shows that while initial judgements, made by simply observing the body, may be made about a student’s potential for or success in accruing giftedness, the ongoing evaluation of the gifted ballet body is not pursued in this way nor is the experience of such processes limited to the visual. Even as the results of this training are able to be seen on the body (the body itself being the core commodity produced by the balletic institution), the process of that formation and of the gifted body’s creation is not. This is evident in the school’s recognition of the unreliability or inappropriateness of simply observing the body for signs of giftedness at a fixed point in time
(such as a single evaluation class) and how much more insight and information can be gained
62 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet from the daily body-to-body relations between student and teacher. For, as I have mentioned earlier, the school is aware of needing to select a body that is not only in possession of physical gifts for ballet but one that will be responsive to the training process and other bodies.
These are important points to consider (and are ones I will return to later): they not only align with Mauss’ understanding of how the cycle of gifting generates both obligation and prestige and with how the school assesses and pursues gifted bodies, but they offer a way to examine emic experience by highlighting how those experiences directly correlate to success or failure in the pursuit of a gifted body. Such an understanding opens the possibility for these invisible relations and processes to be explored ethnographically, by asking how a gifted body becomes and what its experiences of its own becoming are, rather than simply identifying what a gifted body may look like. This offers important insight into the world of elite ballet training for, as I will discuss in later chapters, these gifts and the relations that facilitate them are corporeal – they reside in and belong to bodies – comprising embodied knowledge of how bodies move and how that movement feels, of pointed feet, stretched legs, erect torsos, elongated necks, poised heads and graceful arms, and how this can be communicated to others.
In fact, while Mauss’ observations allow me to consider how bodies are evaluated and selected for either acceptance or exclusion from the school – how difference and belonging is negotiated – and even how giftedness is eventually accrued through a process of gift exchange, Diprose’s (2002) work highlights a key problem: the feeling body has been forgotten in these transactions. Mauss accounts for the temporal nature of gifting, whereby a gift must go unrecognised in order for it to circulate and generate giftedness in its exchange.
63 Between Moving Bodies
This is a process evident in the long-term training and evaluation of ballet bodies and their gifts I have just described. Yet Diprose highlights that if gifts go unrecognised then they must not operate at the level of consciousness, but rather at the “level of sensibility” (Diprose
2002:9). Equally, she suggests that while Mauss shows how this forgetting of gifts facilitates belonging and bonds between people, doing so overlooks the fact that this is not an equal process and instead “depends on the asymmetrical evaluation of different bodies” (ibid.). In the case of the professional ballet institution, gifted bodies are evaluated and crafted by the institution alongside those of others, where the gifts of some are recognised at the expense of others, and where these forgotten bodies are nowhere present in places meant only for gifted bodies. Thus, all bodies which come into contact with the institution are subjected to a process of open discrimination which operates through, impacts on and arrays them accordingly, and is a process which Diprose argues is experienced by the body both affectively and sensuously.
As the school’s own processes suggest, evaluations and exchanges occur between bodies because the gifts both exchanged and generated belong to bodies – they are not material things, but corporeal. These corporeal gifts are often not visible and instead are only able to be understood through the body and exchanged on a sensory level. Teachers do not give a student a nice looking arabesque, they give the student their own embodied knowledge about how to craft a nice looking arabesque: which muscles to use, how their limbs feel in relation to each other, how their body feels when it is on balance etc. While the outcomes of such a process can be considered a material production – the gifted body – Mauss’ concept of gift exchange does not acknowledge their corporeal existence nor does it permit access to those transactions both made and experienced between moving, feeling bodies.
64 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet
As I will show in the next chapters, situating my exploration within and between bodies permits insight into giftedness as it is felt, affectively and corporeally by the bodies involved in the processes of becoming. While Diprose’s thesis “allows the possibility of better locating the operation of social injustice” (Diprose 2002:9) by accounting for the corporeal dimensions of giftedness, I extend her insight to suggest that a sensory analysis will provide a different access point to the relations of institutional power, of gifting and giftedness, particularly when that giftedness is vested in the body itself. As my next chapter will show, however, this will involve a sensory analytic which differs from what is usually applied to the study of gifted bodies.
Fieldsite selection
The ‘hot house’ training environment offered at professional ballet schools provides an excellent base through which to explore the institutional crafting of the gifted body, yet the environment at NBS is also fairly unique among professional ballet schools – a determining factor in selecting it as my fieldsite. Most elite ballet schools offer students access to academic studies via distance learning or integrated with local schools and colleges, while some provide accommodation options off-site or leave students to organise their own living arrangements. However, NBS provides academics, dance training and accommodation all on the one campus. There, students attend academic and dance classes in interconnected buildings and many also live in the school’s residence at the end of the main building’s city block. While there are a few other professional schools across Europe and Asia which offer a similar experience, the set-up at NBS is unique among schools in North America, Australia and New Zealand. This provided an ideal environment for my research and enabled unique
65 Between Moving Bodies access to all facets of the students’ lives including dance and academic classes, meal breaks, rehearsals, performances, meetings, social events and periods of free time at “res”.
Fieldwork methods: observation
During my 11 months of fieldwork, my daily routine consisted of observing daily life as it was lived by students and staff at the school. This included observing student activity over the course of the day such as lunch and snack breaks and time the students spend moving between classes. This observation was vital to understanding the various cycles of life at NBS such as rehearsals and performances, ballet evaluation and academic examination periods. To supplement these daily observations, I also attended social functions and activities such as student dances, graduation ceremonies, receptions and events for donors, external guests and parents, and various student, staff and parent meetings and information sessions. In addition,
I spent a day sitting in on the auditions of aspiring students; attended the school during the summer holidays in July when their Summer School was held for both returning and auditioning students; and, observed an international dance event hosted by NBS every four years where, in 2017, students and staff from 21 of the world’s top professional schools converged on NBS to participate in classes and rehearsals and perform with and for each other during the week-long international dance festival.
I spent approximately 200 hours observing the daily ballet classes of Professional Ballet
Program students from Grades 6 to 12 and the post-secondary program (PSP) on a rotating basis, which were split into 18 grade- and often gender-specific class groups, as well as classes in pointe, allégro and pas de deux, modern, variations and repertoire, and various
66 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet rehearsals and workshops. My observations in these classes centred on how and what the teachers communicated with students and vice versa, as well as student responses and behaviour before, during and after class. Where I had consent from parents, students and teachers, I took photographs and video of ballet classes to aid in my analysis. I also observed evaluations and performances throughout the year, both from an audience perspective as well as from backstage, which enabled me to follow the students from practising and rehearsing in class to presenting and performing the ‘final product’ on stage.
During the natural course of each day I had the opportunity to speak often to students about their experiences at NBS in a casual setting over lunch or snack breaks and in between daily classes or while waiting for rehearsals and performances. In my final months at the school, I was present at residence most days from dinner to evening snack and interacted with students and residence counsellors of an early evening. Spending this time at residence gave me additional opportunities to speak with students as they had more time to sit and chat to me instead of racing between classes.
In the first few weeks and months at the school, teachers and students were somewhat wary of my presence. While a few individuals embraced me and my research quickly and were keen to help show me around, introduce me to people and help me settle in, others were very cautious. Some teachers made it clear to me that they were concerned that I was judging them and their teaching abilities, and some students told me they thought I was spying on them for the Artistic Director. Gaining their trust that I was doing neither of these things took time and was something that I did not succeed at with everyone.
I communicated my past dance experience as a way to gain access to the school, to assure staff and parents that I was sensitive to the unique environment and pressures of the training
67 Between Moving Bodies process and that as such my presence would be as least disruptive as possible. While I believe that this, in part, helped me gain access and approval to conduct my research at NBS, this sometimes made my interactions with students and teachers difficult. Questions I would ask would often be met with suspicion and questions – “but don’t you know that already?”. This was somewhat challenging to overcome and my only strategy was to remind the students in particular during each group discussion or interview that they should speak to me as if I knew nothing about ballet, and that regardless of my own understandings my research was about capturing their experiences and not trying to find evidence of my own.
I also had to be vigilant and self-reflective in how my past experience and knowledge of training might bias my research. This was a tiring endeavour, as everything I observed, experienced and heard needed to be put through a rigorous (and often internal) self-analysis and second-guessing. Did I make any assumptions when watching that? Do I really understand what they said or should I follow up to clarify? If I knew nothing about ballet, how would I ask about that or what would I think about that? While I recognise that this type of bias is not something able to be entirely mitigated, especially when it comes to ethnographic fieldwork, the best method I had of ensuring this self-reflection was ongoing and robust was to maintain detailed note-taking in the field. These sometimes obsessively detailed notes contained my thought processes, feelings and the context in which data was collected, which after my exit from the field proved invaluable when analysing data from group discussions and interviews.
68 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet
Participants
Students who participated in my research came from each of the school’s Professional Ballet
Program levels of Grade 6 through 12 as well as PSP students. Participating students ranged in age from 10 to 21 years. Of the 171 students at the school during my fieldwork, 137 students consented to participate in my research and the remaining 34 (parents or students) declined or gave no response. Recruited using a parent consent/child assent model, this was a consent rate of 80.1%. The gender ratio of 82 female and 55 male students who agreed to participate in my research, was identical to the school’s overall 60/40 gender split and so can be considered representative.
Nineteen Professional Ballet Program ballet teachers consented to have me watch their classes and rehearsals throughout my time at the school. The length of time that they had been teaching at NBS ranged from one year to more than four decades. Of these teachers, 13 consented to participate in one-on-one interviews with me; two declined interviews when asked; and, the remaining four teachers were unavailable due to absence from the school at the time I conducted the interviews.
Interviews and group discussions
All interviews and group discussions were conducted following a semi-structured format, where the themes explored and questions answered loosely followed a pre-determined guide but were pursued organically dependant on the answers of respondents.
I conducted a total of 25 group discussions with 134 consenting students (3 were unavailable to attend the sessions due to absence from school or other commitments) in level-specific
69 Between Moving Bodies groups from Grade 6 to PSP. Totalling 21 hours and 45 minutes, these sessions ranged in length from 30 minutes to 1 hour and 15 minutes depending on scheduling constraints and the number of students in attendance. Each group contained no more than 14 students at a time.
Students in Grades 6, 7, 8, 9, 11 and 12 had the opportunity to participate in two sessions per group, PSP students in three sessions and, due to scheduling restrictions and student availability, Grade 10 students in one session per group.
During these sessions I explored the students’ sensory experiences of ballet training as well as life at NBS. The topics covered included, how they experience their bodies when they dance; their experience of music in class and on stage; how their teacher helps them to know how to move correctly; their relationships with teachers, musicians and other students; their experience of different teaching methods (demonstration, verbal direction, physical contact etc.); and, challenges and successes they have experienced during their training. I recorded these sessions and transcribed them for analysis, before deleting the audio recordings in accordance with ethics protocol. I received unsolicited feedback from a number of students about these sessions during the course of my fieldwork, where they said they found these topics beneficial and interesting to explore in-depth and in a group setting where they could hear their peers’ experiences and share their own.
Thirteen Professional Ballet Program ballet teaching staff also consented to participate in one-on-one interviews with me about their experiences of teaching at NBS. Totalling 7 hours and 45 minutes, these interviews ranged in length from 30 to 50 minutes and covered themes such as, what characterises an NBS dancer; the attributes an NBS student needs to be successful in their training and why they might not be; how the teachers know what feedback to give and how to give it; their sensory experiences while teaching; how they receive
70 Chapter 1: Finding a gift for ballet feedback from students in class; and, their relationships/interaction with students in/outside class. As with the student group discussions, I recorded these interviews and transcribed them for analysis, before deleting the audio recordings in accordance with ethics protocol. Teachers were sent the transcript from their interview for approval and invited to provide clarification where needed. Some teachers made significant alterations to their transcripts, going into more detail and providing more explanation or context to comments they had made, while others made no amendments.
Data analysis
I conducted ongoing analysis of data throughout my time in the field, which continued to inform, in particular, the questions put to students during the course of group discussions as well as enabling me to hone the themes I explored with teachers during their interviews. After leaving the field, I conducted a full thematic analysis of the 398 single spaced typed pages of student group discussion transcripts, 92 single spaced typed pages of teacher interview transcripts, 183 single spaced typed pages of personal field notes, and 182 images and 26 videos taken during ballet classes. To thoroughly identify, categorise and code emerging themes present in these documents, I conducted this analysis manually and without the use of software. While this was a time-consuming and sometimes arduous task, it allowed me to gain an in-depth understanding and familiarity with the content, which, in turn, has contributed to the depth and quality of information my data has communicated through this thesis.
71 Between Moving Bodies
The overarching themes that emerged from this analysis included: relationships, movement, music, pain, the body, identity, the senses, power, training and success/failure. From these themes, this thesis discusses the following for their roles in the crafting of gifted bodies: intercorporeal relationships; the physical and emotional experience of dancing and training; the power of pain in institutional training; the awareness of and relationship between the body and identity, belonging and difference; multisensory relations and experiences within and between bodies; institutional power relations; and, the exchange and cumulation of embodied and bodily knowledge.
72 Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies
Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies
I have so far described the gifted bodies my thesis explores and the ways in which they are known to be gifted by the institution. I have suggested that elements of Mauss’ theory of gift exchange may allow an understanding of how those assessments are made and how that becoming is achieved. However, I have identified that Mauss’ thesis gets us only so far and does not allow for an understanding of the corporeal or sensory experiences of bodies as they engage others in intercorporeal relations and participate in their own becoming. I have suggested adopting a different approach, following Diprose, to situate feeling bodies and the corporeal relations between them at the centre of my examination. In this chapter, I show that this too is an alternative approach to that usually applied to the study of ballet bodies.
As I will discuss, ballet bodies have traditionally been looked at, measured and read for signs and symbols with a view to gain insight into what constitutes giftedness, as well as what those bodies might tell us about broader cultural values and attitudes. The visible signs and symbols inscribed onto ballet bodies and the performances they give, have often been ‘read’ for what they reveal about gender relations, histories, and particular cultural milieu. Within both the giftedness and ballet literatures, this focus on the look of the professional performing gifted body has elided not only the processes the body-in-becoming undertakes in order to become gifted but also individuals’ emic and embodied experiences. In such a way, the physical body has too often been separated from the feeling body. All this has some important consequences. First, if one were to stick to the notion that gifted bodies are good for thinking through broader gendered, cultural and historical factors, then simply observing the performing body for indicative symbols and signs might not be a robust way of so doing.
73 Between Moving Bodies
Second, an approach that views the gifted body merely as a vehicle for communication of something broader entirely misses its experiential elements. How does a gifted body become?
How is that becoming experienced?
To find an avenue through which to answer these questions, I draw inspiration from elements of the literature that, while not extensively explored, point to the rich information that may unfurl when both the emic and embodied experiences of gifted bodies in becoming are examined, as opposed to simply looking at bodies. I suggest that such examination not only allows for an expanded anthropological understanding of both ballet and giftedness, beyond what the look of performing bodies can show, but addresses the limitations of Mauss’ theory, as suggested by Diprose, by offering a way forward when gift exchange is applied to the realm of the corporeal – the privileging of embodied and felt experience. For when giftedness resides in the body itself, the processes and experiences of being and becoming are self- evidently felt and embodied.
Ballet in anthropology: a brief history
Gaps exist within the ballet literature where the felt and embodied experiences of ballet bodies in becoming have seldom been explored in favour of a visual analysis of dancing bodies on stage. While the anthropological study of dance can be traced back at least to E.E
Evans-Pritchard’s The Dance (1928), where he calls for the study of dance within its social context, dance anthropology and ethnography has traditionally focused on the ‘other’ and non-Western dance forms. It is only recently that the anthropological gaze has been directed towards Western modes of dance, such as classical ballet.
74 Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies
Ballet as a subject of anthropological enquiry appeared prominently for the first time in the late-1960s when dance ethnologist Joann Kealiinohomoku argued for anthropologists to consider ballet as an ethnic form of dance. While ballet had appeared in much earlier works within the broader social sciences, history and dance studies, Kealiinohomoku’s pioneering essay, An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance (2001 [1969/70]), was the first to apply anthropological theory to the examination of classical ballet. While recognising that this was a fairly novel notion at the time, Kealiinohomoku was critical of what she considered Western dance scholars’ denigration of “ethnic” and “primitive” dance; their preoccupation with Western modes of dance being superior to all other dance types; and, making ballet appear a-cultural or universal.
In Kealiinohomoku’s essay, ballet was looked at through a different lens. She successfully challenged the evolutionist legacy of dance scholarship at a time when the discipline of anthropology had finally moved beyond this. She also challenged the notion of ballet as an international or universal dance form and defined her case for the ethnicity of ballet – with
Western traditions, values, aesthetics and symbolism evident in its performance. However,
Kealiinohomoku’s entire argument could be considered to be based only on what the performance of ballet represents. From describing the visual characteristics of the traditional performance space of a theatre, with proscenium arch and audience etiquette, to the visibility of Western cultural customs, such as certain occupations, religious beliefs and class structure evident in ballet storylines and characters on stage, as well as Western aesthetic values evident in the bodies of the dancers, Kealiinohomoku in effect argues that ballet is ethnic because of what it looks like.
75 Between Moving Bodies
So distinctive is the ‘look’ of ballet, that it is probably safe to say that ballet dances graphically rendered by silhouettes would never be mistaken for anything else. (Kealiinohomoku 2001:40)
Somewhat ironically, this analysis mimicked the approach of anthropologists and other dance scholars of whom she was so critical, who based their understanding of what constituted
“primitive” dance on visual descriptions of dance performance, such as dance critic and co- founder of the New York City Ballet Lincoln Kirstein, of whom she writes:
Although the whole body participates [in primitive dance] according to Kirstein, he claims that the emphasis of movement is with the lower half of the torso. He concludes that primitive dance is repetitious, limited, unconscious, and with ‘retardative and closed expression’! (ibid., 34)
Kealiinohomoku’s visual analysis of the performance of ballet, in part, can be explained in the context of the discipline at the time, in which anthropologists had only just begun to challenge Darwin’s evolutionist sensory hierarchy, of which sight ruled supreme (see Classen
1997:403; Howes 2003:7, 15; Porcello et al. 2010:53). However, since then, anthropological and ethnographic analyses of ballet have not followed the discipline’s interest in sensory anthropology or phenomenological theory and have seldom questioned the hegemony of sight when attempting to understand the world of classical ballet both as a cultural or social production.
The look of the ballet body
Kealiinohomoku’s essay was credited with moving dance anthropology away from its ethnocentric roots; and while her definitions of “ethnicity” and “culture” are now outdated and have since come under criticism when applied to both dance and anthropology (see
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Buckland 1999), she introduced a new focus of anthropological enquiry – the role of cultural factors in the production of ballet. This focus broadened throughout the late-20th Century to encompass dance (and therefore ballet) as a social production, not simply an expression of culture (Buckland 1999:3). However, the majority of anthropological writings has, with few exceptions, focused on the performance of ballet as a symbolic expression of gender difference and male dominance and the aesthetic creation and performance of the female ballerina (see Alderson 1987; Banes 1998; Daly 1987, 1997; Foster 1996, 1997; Hanna 1988;
Manning 1997; McRobbie 1997; Novack 1993) and has left little room for emic experiences.
Feminist critiques of ballet often point to visual choreographic or performance ‘clues’ to argue that ballet is a symbol of women’s oppression and reveal the underlying masochism in the depiction of the ballerina.
Her partner is always the one who leads, initiates, maps out the territory, subsumes her space into his, and handles her waist, armpits, and thighs. She never touches him in the same way: she does not initiate the moves. Metaphorically, she makes no movement of her own; her position is contingent on the manipulations of her partner. (Daly 1987:14)
Analysed in such a way, the (predominantly female) body is seen as a canvas upon which the social is produced, performed and disseminated, perpetuating a distinctly visual appreciation of ballet. By painting the ballerina as an object of men’s desire and lacking agency – the
“ballerina-as-victim perspective” (Grau 2005:157) – early feminist scholars were able to use the performance of ballet (the ballet body-as-spectacle) as an illustration of broader feminist theory and social commentary. Arguing for ballet to be seen as a cultural institution which both reflects and shapes gender behaviour in everyday life, dance scholar Ann Daly’s oft- cited article, The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers (1987), provides a blistering critique of one of the 20th Century’s most famous ballet choreographers,
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George Balanchine. Daly argues that ballet “is based on a dichotomized gender difference and, hence, dominance” (Daly 1987:19) and calls for an exploration of the subtleties of movement in ballet as a regulator of social order. She identifies what she sees as misogynistic and sadomasochistic patterns of Balanchine’s choreography, breaking down and describing the physical movements in great detail to illustrate such effect.
For instance, after a bit of typical Balanchine play with the presentation of hands and the intertwining of arms, the ballerina’s arms are crossed over her chest, and her partner holds her hands from behind, like reins. Figuratively and literally, the man has the controlling hand. (ibid., 13)
Daly’s etic analysis of gender relations in both ballet and society, based purely on the look of the performed movement of ballet bodies, triggered other scholars to argue against her application of ‘male gaze theory’ to the performance of ballet (see Manning 1997). Critical of the notion that female ballerinas were simply passive objects to be looked at by men, dance historian Sally Banes (1998, 1999), dance scholar Susan Foster (1996, 1997) and sociologist
Angela McRobbie (1997) among others, while taking different approaches, argued that the female ballerina was a figure of strength and more complex than simply a victim of oppression.
If one starts neither with an assumption that all women are victims nor with the idea that they are all heroines, and neither with the idea that images of women are all negative nor that they are all positive, but rather, looks closely at the evidence of the works themselves, one actually finds a much more complex range of representations than has previously been suggested. (Banes 1998:2-3)
Banes points to both narrative and choreographic moments in a number of ballets where the ballerina, while perhaps fitting into social gender norms, enacts a certain amount of agency and control of her own destiny: such as when Princess Aurora reinforces her own autonomy by not only turning down potential suitors in The Sleeping Beauty but in order to do so
78 Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies ultimately performs attitudes on balance without the aid of her male partners (ibid., 55). In so doing, she vividly suggests that when choreography and movement are analysed, the agency of women in ballet can be seen as the norm, not the exception, and thus the concept of women in ballet being simply static objects to be viewed by men “is as feasible as ice skating in hell” (Banes 1999:121).
McRobbie turns to ballerinas depicted in teen fiction to show agency in and the possibility of rejecting normative expectations through hard work in the pursuit of ‘art’. Rather than being presented with a passive femininity, she argues that “in dance fiction, and especially in ‘ballet books for girls’ the reader is presented with an active and energetic femininity” (McRobbie
1997:229). Foster too sees the ballerina’s body as a figure of strength and not passivity. By examining movement, choreography and developments in physical training she likens the ballerina to a phallus:
The choreographic and stylistic demands of ballet take the weight of the body and make it disappear into thin air. […] This obsessive aeriality reinforces the erection of the penis-like ballerina. (Foster 1996:14)
For Foster, this analysis opens the possibility for the ballerina to forge “a new identity that meets the political and aesthetic exigencies of the moment” (ibid., 3).
While these scholars have maintained that a focus on performed movement, ballet technique and the body speak against the stereotyped gendered images apparent in earlier feminist critiques, they have been criticised for too narrowly focusing on the visual representation of women, viewing the ballet body simply as a cultural symbol and text to be looked at to gain understanding, and not paying enough attention to the experience of the dancers (see Aalten
2004). Interestingly, only five years after her Hummingbirds article, Daly too recounted her
79 Between Moving Bodies use of male gaze theory – calling it “misleading” and unsuitable for explaining dance experience – and has continued to question the application of reductionist theory to dance studies (see Daly 1992, 2000).
The dichotomy between what a ballerina is and is not, as well as etic and emic attitudes to ballet, is what dance scholar Jennifer Fisher attempts to address in her essay Tulle as Tool
(2007). She unpacks the dichotomy of representation seen in the literature surrounding female ballet dancers, where “her strength is masked or evident, that she is either frilly or powerful, that she is either in charge or swooning in someone’s arms” (Fisher 2007:11-12). In interpreting the ballerina in a different way, she uses ethnography to uncover the ways in which women involved with ballet perceive themselves. Recognising that ballet and the image of the ballerina mean different things to different people and that ballet itself is continuing to evolve, Fisher highlights the gap between a visual reading of the performance of ballet and the emic experience of it. Equally, Maartje Hoogsteyns (2013) takes a critical approach to ballet studies and tackles the concept of agency in ballet by applying a dominant theory of materiality to her work. Contrasting the dualistic thinking prevalent in ballet, whereby the mind prevails over and controls the body, with the non-duality of the dancer’s relationship with her body and pointe shoes, Hoogsteyns considers the disparity between the etic and emic view of the agency of female ballet dancers. In so doing, Hoogsteyns situates the experiences of the dancers as fundamental to understanding the culture of ballet.
Anthropologist Helena Wulff’s seminal work, Ballet Across Borders (1998a), also seeks to contrast this performative focus of ballet scholarship by going “behind the scenes” to examine ballet as an occupation, the careers of professional ballet dancers and their lives off stage. For, as she writes, “what is happening on stage is anchored backstage socially, and can
80 Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies therefore be explored anthropologically” (Wulff 1998a:17). As part of this, and importantly for my critique of a visual hegemony in ballet anthropology, Wulff describes a dichotomy that separates “doing ballet and watching ballet” (ibid., 9; 1998b:107). While she uses this dichotomy to discuss the discipline’s notions of insiders and outsiders (which has relevance to herself as a former dancer returning to the ballet world), as well as the dancer’s reactions to reading a critique of a performance or watching themselves on video, this dichotomy also highlights the importance of understanding emic perceptions of ballet and the distinction between a visual reading of ballet versus the emic experience of it (as mentioned above in
Fisher). This analysis, while not explored in her work, points to the need for an ethnographic examination of the experiences of ballet dancers as opposed to what the experience of dance might look like to an outsider. However, while Wulff maintains that her ethnography centres on dancers and not dance (1998a:17), her social analysis has been criticised for neglecting the physical body (see Pickard 2015:8; Thomas 2001:104; Wainwright and Turner 2004:333,
2006.239). I will return to this point momentarily.
Parallels to understanding giftedness
While the anthropological and ethnographic understandings of ballet I have just described are limited to what the visual representation of bodies may illuminate, ignoring their emic experiences, similar gaps exist within the broader dance giftedness literature. An absence of individual experience in this literature is noted by psychologists Kendra Gray and Mark
Kunkel (2001). They suggest that most analysis has been derived from external assessment and not the dancers’ own emic perspectives. In seeking to address this, their study explores the lived experiences of ballet dancers, drawing on interviews with American ballet dancers
81 Between Moving Bodies that had been previously published in the book Off Balance (Gordon 1983). Using a grounded theory methodology, their work identifies the complex psychological ways dancers experience ballet through five themes, which had been previously overlooked in favour of a focus on personality traits, such as perfectionism, self-esteem and creativity, and behavioural patterns such as eating disorders. These five themes were termed Fantasy Creatures, where dancers spoke of a sense of escaping reality while dancing; Mechanization, where dancers described de-personalised experiences of their body as a machine, or as a body and not a self;
Commodification, where dancers spoke of feeling like they were the property of the company or under complete control of their instructors; Infantilization, where dancers experienced a sense of “unending childhood” or having to suppress more adult qualities such as sexuality; and, Sacrificial Transcendence, where dancers maintained that in order to achieve success they needed to make various social, emotional and financial sacrifices. While staying very much within the bounds of psychology, and ignoring the physical body in a similar way to
Wulff, the qualitative depth of Gray and Kunkel’s preliminary research findings again illustrate the kind of information able to be accessed when the experiences of dancers are considered and the dancers’ own voices are present in dance-based research.
In an attempt to consider other variables at play in the accrual of giftedness in dance beyond identifiable physical and artistic factors, other more recent scholars have also turned their attention to dancers’ emic experiences of giftedness (see Garces-Bacsal et al. 2011; Hefferon and Ollis 2006; Sanchez et al. 2013). In bringing talented individuals’ experiences into the broader giftedness literature, researchers have examined how individuals experience their giftedness, drawing on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1975, 1990) theory of flow. “Flow” is considered to be the psychosomatic state individuals experience where the mind and body
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“just clicks” (Hefferon and Ollis 2006:148) facilitating enjoyment and optimal performance.
Yet research into experiences of flow among dancers has been severely limited, with only a handful of literature available to date (see Csikszentmihalyi 1975; Garces-Bacsal et al. 2011;
Hefferon and Ollis 2006; Wulff 1998a:107, 2006). As a result, much of this research draws on studies conducted with athletes as a point of reference. However, this poses a challenge as it is suggested that giftedness research is not comparable across groups (Chua 2014:24; Ziegler and Raul 2000:113).
Dance talent research often draws on the broader literature on giftedness in sport to illustrate seemingly shared characteristics, such as physical skill and dexterity, the relationship between flexibility and injury, flow experiences, and the intensive training programs followed by elite practitioners. So much so that dancers have been called “performing athlete[s]” (Koutedakis and Jamurtas 2004:652). While there has been much research into the experiences of individuals as they participate in certain sports such as football (Clarke et al.
2018), basketball and rock climbing (Csikszentmihalyi 1975), tennis (Carlson 1988), rugby refereeing (Ollis et al. 2006), rhythmic gymnastics (Law et al. 2007), circuit training
(Crossley 2004), swimming (Scott 2010), among others, to assume that the experiences of individuals working with and on their bodies to reach success are the same across all fields may be unwise. For as Joey Chua argues:
empirical data show that dancers are more intrinsically motivated and significantly less competitive than basketball players (Csikszentmihalyi 2000 [1975]), have lower self-esteem and greater perfectionism than gymnasts (de Bruin et al. 2009) and have poorer postural balance than judo practitioners (Perrin et al. 2002). Therefore, the identification and nurturing processes for talented people in those two domains are usefully differentiated. (Chua 2014:24)
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To encourage research into dance-specific experience, Kate Hefferon and Stewart Ollis
(2006) build on Csikszentmihalyi’s (1975) work on flow experiences among talented individuals, which had compared the flow experiences of 28 modern dancers to chess players, basketball players, rock climbers and modern music composers. Hefferon and Ollis’ preliminary study examines the flow experiences of nine professional dancers from ballet, contemporary, jazz, Irish and Canadian dance backgrounds. While these dancers all described experiences consistent with themes of flow corresponding to Csikszentmihalyi’s work,
Hefferon and Ollis identify other themes that were unique to dance experience. These include the performer’s confidence in their own abilities; the impact of music, choreography, costumes and make-up; the importance of pre-performance routines and being familiar with the performance space; and, the role of relationships with others such as teachers and choreographers in the studio, other dancers in rehearsal or on stage, and personal relationships outside of dance. While not an extensive study and limited by a small number of study participants from a variety of dance genres, all of whom were adult professionals, their approach demonstrates how a deeper understanding of the emic experience of giftedness in dance can be gained by exploring how it feels to be gifted rather than what it looks like to be gifted. However, as a psychological concept, flow experience too has been criticised for ignoring the physical body (Pickard 2015:127).
Bringing the body into focus
As I have described, simply observing gifted bodies has overwhelmingly been considered the avenue by which certain cultural and social understandings can be gained, such as what they might reveal about gender relations and attitudes about the body. Even when the emic
84 Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies experiences of dancers have been taken into account, their experiences of both flow and ballet is primarily considered from the perspective of performance, where adult professional dancers describe their experiences when executing the finished product (i.e; performing for an audience). This view is perhaps understandable, considering the prevalence within the giftedness literature of considering talent to be observable through the performing body, as discussed in the previous chapter. However, while flow research and ballet ethnography has increasingly valued the primacy of emic experience over the dominant modes of reading and measuring the physical body for insights it might give into what constitutes giftedness, it has been criticised for too narrowly focussing on the psychological or observable experiences of dancers and for not attending to the felt body (see Aalten 2004:264; Pickard 2015:127;
Thomas 2001:104; Wainwright and Turner 2004:333, 2006.239).
In an early attempt to advance the discourse surrounding ballet from this purely visual and gendered representation, Evan Alderson’s Ballet as Ideology (1987) centred on the notion that aesthetics (particularly the idea of beauty) and social constructions, such as gender roles and even economic relations, were intertwined and inseparable. This was illustrated overtly in and through the female ballerina’s body. For Alderson, the performance of ballet could be seen as both holding a mirror to Western society as well as a vehicle through which new social norms and aesthetics were created and disseminated. Using the Romantic-period ballet Giselle (first performed in 1841), he showed how the choreography and storyline reflected changes occurring in European society at the time, while simultaneously paving the way for new aesthetic ideals.
Albrecht’s betrayal of Giselle’s first-act innocence, even though it is set in a never-never land of happy peasants and princes in disguise, contains the basic lesson that sentimental novels of the time were endlessly and
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formulaically repeating concerning “the evil consequences of seduction”. (Alderson 1987:296)
In contrast to feminist body-as-spectacle scholarship, Alderson took his analysis one step further and explored the impact of this social messaging and aesthetics on the dancer’s body, including eating disorders and psycho-social disorders. Alderson’s introduction of the body, however, remained within a visual register as he argued that the social messaging inscribed on the ballerina’s body was an image female viewers (in this case ballet students) sought to embody, with sometimes damaging results, such as anorexia:
Dance, after all, is an art that depends upon the entrenchment of its conventional imagery in living bodies: the technical training of a dancer maintains and reproduces the social bearing of the dominant style by actualizing it in the dancer’s body. (ibid., 298)
Discussing the physical body in this way, Alderson’s approach signalled the possibility for research into the experience of that embodied process for the dancers.
Exploring the impact of ballet on and its connection to the physical body (and the mind) through detailed ethnography, has gained currency within anthropology and there has been a growing body of literature on ballet as an embodied practice. In so doing, the physical training processes a body undertakes in order to become a ballet body is often referred to, yet rarely examined. In attempting to address the absence of the physical body and expand the focus of the impacts of ballet on the body, Steven Wainwright and Bryan Turner (2004, 2006)
(and also Wainwright et al. 2005, 2006) conducted an extended period of ethnography at the
Royal Ballet in London, England. Presenting the “ethnography of the ballet body”, they described the strong relationships between the body, ballet and identity: that for the dancer
“the vocational calling to dance is so overwhelming that their balletic body is their identity” (Wainwright and Turner 2004:316, original emphasis). Critically, unlike other
86 Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies approaches mentioned earlier, they recognised that the prevailing visual reading of ballet was misguided, and that:
while it is possible to read a ballet through its choreographic text, this method of study would be an odd and shallow method of understanding ballet, which is constituted by its performance. (Wainwright et al. 2005:56, original emphasis)
Looking at the ballet body as embodied cultural, social and individual identity, Wainwright and colleagues adopted a Bourdieusian theoretical framework of habitus to explore the ballet dancers’ emic perspectives of body, dance, injury and identity through ethnographic interviews. Here, ballet training and the impacts it has on the body becomes a central focus.
Yet, while they recognised that a dancer acquires the skill to learn, refine and reproduce complex movement sequences, the dancers’ embodied experiences of training – of the process of learning ballet and receiving such gifts – as opposed to its impacts on their bodies are not examined.
Anna Aalten (1997) is another scholar who has sought to bridge the gap in literature between ballet, the body, gender and culture. Not happy with what she considered the “stumbling block” of the feminist critique of classical ballet, Aalten turned to “the relationship between bodies and cultures as they become manifest in ballet” (Aalten 1997:198). She explored the emic perceptions of dancers, particularly on femininity, to show that the dancers’ bodies themselves are shaped to conform to cultural ideals. Importantly and distinct from previous scholarship, she too addressed ballet training rather than its performance. Aalten asked: “how do dancers accomplish mastering the required technique and using it?” (ibid., 206). Despite this line of enquiry, her analysis is limited to the often dramatic lengths to which female dancers have gone to achieve perfect turn-out and to describing other physical characteristics
87 Between Moving Bodies of ballet technique, such as body type and weight, dancing en pointe and the differences in movement requirements between male and female dancers. While she maintains that a ballet dancer’s body is stylised through training practices and cultural ideals, I consider this to be a missed opportunity for a deeper understanding of how a dancer learns and masters ballet technique – the movement itself – and thus accrues a gifted body from an emic perspective, and not simply what this process might represent visually through the body.
In her later works (2004, 2005, 2007), Aalten’s ethnographic enquiries continued to focus on the ways dancers work with and on their bodies. Critical of the lack of the physical body in ballet scholarship, she sought to rectify this with an examination of the long and intensive training processes of ballet dancers. However, and in a similar way to Alderson’s much earlier work, while she excels in describing the features of this embodied process, such as injury, pain, eating disorders, physical and mental control and strength, and maintains that
“with the right kind of training and exercises and enough willpower, bodies can be moulded” (Aalten 2007:114), she does not articulate in full how this process occurs. Instead, she asserts that dancers have two bodies – the tangible body they work with and ideal body they work towards – and shows how striving for an aesthetic ideal is an integral part of training and creating a ballet body. In a similar vein to Hoogsteyns’ non-materiality/ materiality duality mentioned earlier, her work points to a relationship between visual and embodied experience in the production of classical ballet and that one is perhaps not possible without the other. While scholars have focussed heavily on the power of the aesthetic of the ballet body, the embodied processes and experience which they suggest facilitate this body has, however, been overlooked.
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Importantly, Dorothée Legrand and Susanne Ravn (2009) recognised that the experience of professional ballet dancers was more complex than the prevailing visual analyses:
the body appears to be more than simply an object to be controlled and judged in relation to the ideal image of the ballet body. (Legrand and Ravn 2009:403)
Examining how a dancer’s experience could be both of their physicality and subjectivity at the same time, Legrand and Ravn found that while the visualised ‘ideal’ body was what a ballet dancer aspired to, this was based on and shaped by their bodily experience and kinaesthetic sensations, such as feeling their body move to music. They argued that the two bodies (ideal and physical) working together was crucial for a dancer’s development of both body and identity, but also for the accrual of proficiency – that nurturing sensation was “key to becoming a good dancer” (ibid., 403). Integral to this was their refusal to frame the body as
“a mere thing” (ibid., 390, original emphasis) but as a possessor of subjective experience – experience made sense of through the feeling body. Mentioning felt sensations within the body for the first time, and coupled with the ethnographic interviews and embodied perceptions of professional dancers in Wulff’s, Aalten’s and Hoogsteyn’s studies, their work signals the important relationship between the look and feel of ballet bodies and the accrual of giftedness.
Their work then offers a way forward to bring the feeing body into Mauss’ conception of gift exchange. Mauss considers identity and self to be formed through the very act of exchanging gifts with others, where boundaries blur not only between who is giver and receiver but where “persons and things become indistinguishable” (Mauss 1954:46): as the gifts exchanged both contain and become part of the people who exchange them. While the scholars above who sought to bring the body into ballet scholarship highlighted the relations
89 Between Moving Bodies between ballet, the body and identity as they related to what dancers thought about themselves, Legrand and Ravn’s findings suggest that if balletic gifts comprise bodily sensation and feeling, then the ballet body cannot be objectified and separated from the feeing body, as earlier visual analyses of the ballet body have done. Just as Diprose suggests that for gifts to go unnoticed they must operate “at the level of sensibility” (Diprose 2002:9), a fact Mauss overlooks, Legrand and Ravn suggest that the self-perception of both the physical ballet body and its subjectivity is also experienced at this pre-reflective and sensory level. I will return to the notion of identity later in this thesis, however what this understanding allows me to ask here is: how does the training of ballet facilitate the accrual of such embodied and corporeal giftedness? In seeking to answer this question, I propose an exploration using a sensory approach not based on a hegemony of sight but instead situated on and in the physical feeling body.
Training the gifted body
As referred to in the previous chapter, there is limited ethnographic research that focusses on the experiences of ballet students as they navigate the progression from student to professional dancer. Yet in order to consider how a gifted body becomes, the training process and the experiences of ballet bodies-in-becoming must be central to my approach, as giftedness research shows it is through ballet training that a gift for ballet is achieved. For example, in Carla Ureña’s (2004) doctoral study of the relationship between skill acquisition and deliberate practice, she identifies key factors in the developmental process and training trajectories of ballet dancers. These factors include the age elite training commenced; a person’s age the first time they were told they were talented; the number of hours of ballet
90 Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies class a dancer had accumulated by the time they turned 17; and, support networks and relationships with others within and external to dance.
Using Anders Ericsson and colleagues’ (1993) concept of deliberate practice, which maintains that it takes 10 years and 10,000 hours of focussed practice to attain mastery, Ureña was able to show the direct correlation between ballet training and the development of ballet expertise. Taking a cross-cultural approach and involving 200 adult dancers from the US,
Mexico and Russia, she considered that any differences in skill found between groups were the result of differences in training as opposed to natural talent or genetic factors, such as those identified in much of the giftedness literature discussed in the previous chapter. While her study asked adult professional and pre-professional ballet dancers to reflect on and answer questions about their training experiences as children and adolescents (a similar approach adopted by Hutchinson et al. 2013), in recognising her study’s limitations, she called for more research to investigate the process by which dance steps are learnt, and how corrections and feedback are given by instructors and interpreted by dancers during training.
While it may seem obvious that a ballet dancer becomes such through a training process,
Ureña’s finding that it is the training process itself which determines the rate of success in accruing giftedness in ballet, and not simply the body’s possession of physical or natural gifts, is important. First, it aligns with my description in the previous chapter of NBS’ evaluation processes, which have been devised precisely because viewing the body at one point in time is considered insufficient to gain a definitive understanding of a body’s giftedness, and that giftedness and the body’s potential is best assessed during longer-term daily interactions between student and teacher in the studio. Second, it suggests that the ongoing accrual of giftedness is determined by the presence of an invisible gift for ballet, as
91 Between Moving Bodies also identified in the previous chapter – that the dancer is willing and able to participate in the training process in which gifts for ballet are regularly exchanged between the novice students and expert teachers. I do not wish to devalue the process of identifying overtly visible
‘natural’ gifts needed for success, nor the kinds of understandings that can be gained from observing the ballet body, yet in this way the training of ballet can be understood as being not only facilitated by looking, seeing and making judgements about bodies but integrally based on the embodied relations between bodies. It is the importance of body-to-body relations, as recognised both by the institution and in the few studies of ballet training that I will discuss momentarily, which provides a way forward to address both the visual analysis, classification and objectification of gifted ballet bodies apparent in the literatures, and Diprose’s critique that Mauss’ work forgets bodily experience, by focussing on the sensory and intercorporeal experiences of gifted bodies in becoming.
In situating the body as the locus of experience in the ballet literature, scholars necessarily refer to the way in which a body learns movement. Andrée Grau (2005) built on ideas of the meanings of body, dance and perception arguing for a repositioned cross-cultural study of dance through the investigation of “structured movement systems in their specificities” (Grau
2005:142). Building on John Blacking’s (1983) notion of dance as a social fact “which exists and has meaning only through human interactions” (Grau 2005:144), she opened an interesting line of enquiry that had often been, and still often remains, neglected in the anthropology of ballet – the embodied training of movement. Grau maintained, after Foucault
(1988), that dance training was a “technology of the self” a practice whereby students:
effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain amount of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of
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happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault 1988:18, as quoted in Grau 2005:156)
Using this methodology, Grau (while not an extensive exploration) was able to link this discussion back to emic and etic notions of the body and show how a Western-centric and visually biased approach to cross-cultural dance studies would be misguided.
Even if a posture, gesture or movement visually looks the same, one cannot necessarily assume that they are generated and conceptualized in the same way, or that they ‘mean’ the same thing. (Grau 2005:142)
In this way, Clifford Geertz’s (1973) call for ‘thick description’ is evident in Grau’s work – that it is not enough to see that a person is dancing, one must understand how they are dancing. This approach has been common in dance anthropology more broadly, which has often centred on the idea that “cultural knowledge is embodied in movement” (Sklar 1991:6), and can also be seen in feminist ballet scholarship mentioned earlier, which has focussed on the analysis of movement as a fundamental step in understanding what constitutes a person’s cultural knowledge. However, understanding that dance is personified and “more than a symbolic use of the human body” (Grau 2005:159) has great potential for the study of ballet not just to explore what the learning process does for the dancer and what it represents outside the world of ballet, but also how the process of learning movement and becoming gifted is enacted, embodied and experienced.
In attempting to capture the training experiences of dance students as opposed to professionals, while outside the realm of anthropology, education scholar Rhoda Garces-
Bascal and colleagues (2011) investigated the flow experiences among 14 dance, visual arts, music, and theatre students in Singapore. Here, the students’ experiences were found to be reliant on a combination of environmental and sociocultural factors, such as relationships
93 Between Moving Bodies with staff and other students, the level of perceived support from the institution, and individual talent and self-drive. In fact, the sense of community and belonging fostered through relationships with teaching staff and peers proved vital to understanding the flow experiences of these talented students as they underwent training. Their study was limited by its small number of students across a broad range of artistic genres, and for its neglect of the physical body; however, their student-centred approach illustrates the value of ethnographic research into dance student experience, as opposed to professionals, by shedding light on the complexity of relations that exist within a training institution and the role those relations play in both the production and experience of gifted bodies.
While still not specific to professional ballet training, in analysing such relations within a university dance setting, dance scholar Jill Green (2002) applies a Foucauldian analysis in an attempt to understand the powerful processes that shape the dancing body. Suggesting that dance students are docile bodies “created to produce efficiency, not only of movement, but also, a normalization and standardization of behaviour in dance classes” (Green 2002:100),
Green illustrates the way the institution manipulates, controls and coerces students to participate in training through the “ritual” of class, which couples the ongoing self- surveillance of dancers in the mirror and the external gaze of teachers. Despite providing an in-depth anthropological analysis of dance training and how certain institutional practices might work to craft the gifted body – an approach sorely lacking from previous scholarship – her analysis firmly considers the physical body as object, ignores the embodied and felt experiences of the students, and has been criticised for denying the students’ agency (see
Pickard 2013:4, 2015:13).
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In recognising this limitation of both Green’s work and ballet scholarship more broadly, dance scholar Angela Pickard (2012, 2013, 2015) has pursued an analysis of the ballet training process grounded in Bourdieu’s theory of practice, arguing that “ballet is done by embodied agents” (Pickard 2015:13). In a similar vein to Loïc Wacquant’s (1995, 2004) analysis of the world of amateur boxing, Pickard considers the daily practice of ballet training to be the means by which the ballet habitus is created as they “achieve understanding of the social world of ballet” through embodied practice (Pickard 2015:31).
The gendered balletic body, technique, movement vocabulary, muscle memory, posture, alignment and ways of being are all forms of cultural and physical capital and the more the technique is practised, the more it becomes ascribed into the dancer’s body and becomes who the dancer is. (ibid., 39)
Pickard is critical of Mauss’ (1973) concept of techniques du corps, which she considers a reductionist approach that leads to an understanding of the body only as instrument, and suggests a privileging of the ballet body’s embodied experience in the institutional training environment as a way to correct this. In so doing, her work follows Aalten (1997, 2004, 2005,
2007), Wainwright and Turner (2004, 2006), Wainwright et al. (2005, 2006) and Wulff
(1998a:105-107, 2006, 2008:525) in her consideration of the pain experiences of ballet dancers. I return to the students’ felt pain experiences in Chapter 6 and discuss what they have to offer about understanding the powerful nature of institutionalised training. However, in the literature above, while the bodies and/or voices of students and professionals are present, their pain experience is overwhelmingly considered to be a result of striving to attain the visual and ideal look of a “perfect” ballet body and must therefore be silenced, ignored or overcome in order to embody the balletic capital needed for success.
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Although adopting a Bourdeiusian approach throughout her work, Pickard suggests that
Foucault has much to offer the ballet students’ experiences of pain. Despite being critical of
Foucault’s work when applied to more general aspects of training, as per Green (2002),
Pickard argues that in the pursuit of the “perfect” ballet body the dancer is disciplined to work their body as an object to be shaped and thereby actively absents the feeling body:
In an attempt to create the ideal ballet body, dancers learn to knowingly silence their own material bodies. Pain is not learned as a warning sign that boundaries of the body have been met, but rather as boundaries that have to be crossed. (Pickard 2015:91)
This approach remains problematic when trying to understand the dancers’ embodied and felt experiences. Because Pickard links physical capital to the aesthetic look of the ballet body and cultural capital to the observable projection of self-control over the body, pain experiences – whether the ‘positive’ soreness of muscle fatigue or blistered toes or the
‘negative’ trauma of injury or eating disorder – also become linked to the perceived visual outcome of the training process, whereby such valuable capital is seen and admired by others and thus accrued as the dancer accepts and endures “pain in pursuit of perfection” (ibid.,
119). I suggest that by both focussing on the overtly spectacular pains – of blistered feet and eating disorders – and treating pain experience as a byproduct of the creation of the aesthetic and observable body that a student must learn to overcome and silence in order to become gifted, Pickard and other scholars before her have prevented embodied experience to be understood or determined by any other sensory analytic other than vision. Their willingness to separate felt experience from the physical ballet body in such a way, also ignores the role of pre-reflective experience in the creation of bodies, as discussed above in Legrand and
Ravn and suggested by Diprose, namely that in order for the body to be perceived by the self as either subject or object, it must first be felt.
96 Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies
Despite this absence of the feeling of pain, the works referred to above show that while dancers must persevere through pain in order to achieve success, certain pains such as injury may also curtail their career. This suggests that felt experience has the potential to both facilitate and restrict the creation of dancing bodies and opens the possibility to examine how this operates at the sensory level. While Pickard’s research is the only available work to date that attends to the institutional training of professional ballet bodies, as it stands it does not allow insight into how such training (or feeling) facilitates the accrual of giftedness within the body – gifts which are by necessity embodied, corporeal and sensory – or how the student experiences such a process of becoming through her body.
Instead, while not the focus of her body of work, Wulff (1998a, 1998b, 2006, 2008) offers insight into how the process and experience of ballet and, importantly, ballet training might be pursued sensorially and has thus provided inspiration for my research – that ballet is
“taught and cultivated between bodies” (Wulff 2008:519). Wulff discusses this in relation to how the “physical culture” of ballet has been passed down person-to-person through the centuries. However, in Ballet Across Borders (1998a) she offers a brief discussion of the social nature of the ballet training process, including teacher/student relationships, peer-to- peer learning and camaraderie and the challenge of teaching and learning a non-verbal activity. On this last point, Wulff shows that teachers will use onomatopoetic words to bridge the physical/verbal gap such as “‘Eeeeeeee…’ when the music starts, in order to get the dancers into the rhythm” (ibid., 61); metaphors such as “be like a pencil” to encourage a student to straighten their back (ibid.); and, touch to make the students’ bodies look a certain way:
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The teacher sometimes went out among the girls and pushed and pulled legs and arms to make them look as she wanted them to. (ibid., 66)
Wulff suggests that such approaches are necessary to address the challenge of teaching and learning ballet where, because there is an “obvious gap between the verbal description of a combination of steps and the steps’ being executed” (ibid., 60) and that the aging bodies of teachers are increasingly unable to demonstrate adequately, simply describing or demonstrating movement is insufficient. While Wulff uses these brief and perhaps simplistic examples to illustrate the social nature of leaning ballet by being immersed in the ballet world, her work offers a glimpse of how bodies are sensorially crafted in an institutionalised setting and the kind of gifts that are exchanged, and how they are exchanged, body-to-body between teacher and student. Such insight signals the possibility for a sensory exploration of ballet training to consider the multisensory ways in which balletic giftedness is made sense of, transferred and accrued between moving bodies.
The way forward
In following the trajectory in the literature above to accept that how bodies feel is distinct from how they look, approaches to date have tried to gain insight into what constitutes a gifted body by simply looking at it and have perhaps been misguided. While such an approach offers a certain kind of understanding, where bodies can be measured, analysed and read to gain insight into broader social, cultural and gendered contexts, it ignores their experiential elements and also prohibits an exploration of how those gifted bodies become.
As I will argue in the next chapter, this is problematic, as both the way in which giftedness is experienced and the processes through which a gifted body becomes are embodied and made
98 Chapter 2: Looking at gifted bodies sense of through the body’s ability to feel. I maintain that Mauss’ concept of gift exchange allows for a better understanding of how giftedness is assessed and accrued, belonging and difference are determined, and how the gifted body is crafted within the institution, because it speaks to the relational exchanges (hinted at in the limited literature on ballet training) between student and teacher that must occur in order for giftedness to accrue. Yet it is vital to address the absence of the sensing feeling body in his work, as it not only allows for a corrective to the absent body and vision-centric analyses within both the gifted and ballet literatures, but also to extend an understanding of how gift exchange is made possible when giftedness is accrued in the body itself.
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Chapter 3: A touching analysis
In order to examine the experiential, corporeal and sensory dimensions of gift exchange that
Mauss’ thesis, as it stands, does not allow, and to draw analysis away from the dominant mode of reading the balletic and gifted body for insights it might give into broader contexts, I have asked how a gifted body becomes and how that becoming is experienced. To answer these questions it is necessary to move away from the predominantly visual analyses of gifted bodies that have been conducted to date, in favour of an ethnographic analysis that privileges the primary mode through which that becoming is both experienced and facilitated. In this chapter, I argue that this sensory mode is touch.
Of course the evaluation of ballet bodies that I described in Chapter 1 are a lot about looking, seeing and making judgements about bodies, yet we can only look at those examinations as little snapshots in time, where the results of training are made visible on and through the dancing body. As the structuring of NBS’ evaluation and audition processes show, these snapshots of the gifted body do not allow an understanding or assessment of the more subtle and less visible evidences of giftedness, which only become apparent to the institution through the body-to-body relations and longer-term evaluations between teacher and student.
Equally, Mauss’ “forgetting” of the feeling body in the process of gift exchange, as critiqued by Diprose, prevents me from analysing these body-to-body relations when the gifts exchanged are not material but instead comprise embodied and corporeal knowledge, and when giftedness is accrued in the body itself. I therefore argue that what happens between those moments when giftedness can be visually assessed, when the body participates in
100 Chapter 3: A touching analysis exchange relations with others in the process of becoming gifted, is much better pursued with touch.
Drawing on an anthropology of touch to consider its powerful and relational properties beyond that of physical contact, my proposed new sensory mode of analysing the gifted ballet body provides an important avenue by which to explore the ways bodies experience becoming gifted and the often invisible exchange processes by which that becoming is achieved. Such analysis offers an important corrective to the vision-centric and audiential analyses conducted to date. It also allows me to move beyond Mauss’ theory of gift exchange and extend his insight into the sensory realm, by showing how the production of the gifted body is both facilitated and made sense of within and between feeling bodies.
A sense of ballet
The performance of ballet is of course a spectacle. Without the audience being able to see the dancers, the shapes they make with their bodies and choreographic patterns, ballet could arguably cease to exist as a performing art. So, the literature’s preoccupation with approaching ballet through a visual analysis of its performance and performing bodies is understandable. However, vision is not the only sense integral to understanding or appreciating the performance of ballet or ballet bodies. From hearing the music or the dancers’ heavy breathing, the sound of pointe shoes bourréeing across the stage or dancers as they land from jumps, to the applause of the audience sitting in a theatre, the performance and experience of ballet is also influenced by our ability to hear. Touch is also integral to the performance of ballet. The traditional pas de deux for example, where the male dancer and
101 Between Moving Bodies ballerina dance together, relies completely on each dancers’ ability to feel the other. Despite this, aural and tactile perception in ballet has seldom been explored. Where they have been, references to touch and sound are limited to what touch looks like to the viewer and how music has an integral (and therefore often taken-for-granted) role in the cultural creation of ballet. In this way, the notion that aural and tactile perceptions in ballet are developed in connection to visual perception (see Cohen Bull 1997:274) is evident. However, as this chapter will show, when the dancer’s own experience is accounted for, this visual supremacy becomes problematic.
For anthropologist Cynthia Cohen Bull, ballet is predominated by a “primacy of seeing”, both for the dancer and the spectator:
While the sense of sight is not, of course, the sole mode of perception in ballet, it seems to organize all the other senses so as to tie them inextricably to the visual appearance of design in space. (ibid.)
This, she argues, is apparent in both the practice (ballet training) and performance of ballet, which “hone [the] visual sensibility” needed for the dancer to manipulate the body into distinct shapes and for the viewer to interpret what the movements signify (ibid., 282).
Indeed, this is evident in Wulff’s brief descriptions of a teacher’s use of touch in the studio, pulling and pushing limbs to make students’ bodies look a certain way (Wulff 1998a:66, 70).
Others, too, highlight the importance of vision for ballet dancers, where dancers are said to rely heavily on the use of the mirror or a teacher’s gaze to shape their bodies (see Aalten
2004; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011; Cohen Bull 1997; Grau 2005; Green 2002; Hall
1977; Legrand and Ravn 2009; Pickard 2012, 2013, 2015; Salosaari 2001; Wulff 1998a). For these scholars, “movement is about how the [ballet] dancers are able to make their body
102 Chapter 3: A touching analysis look” (Legrand and Ravn 2009:398), which is often considered distinct from contemporary dancers, who, they maintain, rely more on proprioception and the way movement feels.
While Cohen Bull does not ignore other sensory modes of perception in her analysis of ballet, she situates them hierarchically under and secondary to sight. In this way, her analysis of ballet, and those of others, echoes the historical legacy within anthropology of a hegemony of sight (see Classen 1997; Goody 2002; Howes 2003; Porcello et al. 2010). It is interesting then, from an anthropological perspective, that ballet has sought to be understood through the primary sense register it is thought to inhabit – vision. Briefly mentioning this link between anthropological method and subject of enquiry, Cohen Bull likens the vision predominance in ballet (something she does not consider to be problematic) to anthropologist Johannes
Fabian’s (1983) notion of visualism in anthropology – “a tendency to fix phenomena in space and time, to gravitate toward the ‘pictorial aesthetic’” (Cohen Bull 1997:283) – where analysis of symbols leads to cultural understanding. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this approach to understanding ballet through a reading of the gifted ballet body as object or symbol has been prevalent within anthropology and seldom challenged. However, acknowledging that other sensory paradigms, such as touch and hearing, are fundamental components to the practice and performance of ballet opens the possibility for their exploration and a rethinking of this visual primacy.
I take inspiration from other Western and non-Western modes of dance which have been explored outside the hegemony of sight. For example, an analytic of touch has been employed when investigating Western contemporary dance and contact improvisation (see
Albright 2013; Brandstetter 2013; Cohen Bull 1997, 2001; Houston 2009; Novack 1990;
Potter 2008) and Argentinian tango (see Manning 2006; Zubarik 2013), where sustained
103 Between Moving Bodies physical contact between two or more bodies is recognised as functional and integral to the learning process, performance and creation of new movement through the transmission and exchange of bodily knowledge. The importance of sound, hearing and rhythm has been explored in Ghanian dance (see Cohen Bull 1997), Indian kathak dance (see Dalidowicz
2015) and Tiwi dance (see Grau 1993, 2005); where bodies must be able to feel and make sense of music and sounds made by bodies, such as feet slapping the floor, in order to learn and perform movement as well as exchange bodily knowledge. Interestingly, in approaching their various dance forms through a sensory medium other than sight, the social nature of dance is exposed, as each form is found to be heavily reliant on the relationality of bodies, and body parts, in their production, performance and/or consumption. Taking a sensory approach, to better understand how these gift exchanges of bodily and embodied knowledge between moving bodies both operate and are experienced, will be an important addition to our existing Maussian understanding of exchange relations and will also offer a different understanding of the training of ballet which is not a solitary pursuit either, but also “taught and cultivated between bodies” (Wulff 2008:519).
While touch is identified as an essential element of dance (Brandstetter et al. 2013:3), the exploration of touch in ballet is severely limited. In the same way that touch has often been ignored within anthropology, perpetuating a bias towards visual and cognitive perception (see
Blake 2011; Classen 1997, 2005a; Csordas 1990; Howes 2008), so too has touch in ballet been neglected in favour of these ‘higher’ senses. The existing literature would have us believe that touch is used in ballet simply for the aesthetics of performance, where a male dancer may lift, manipulate or support a female ballerina to meet choreographic demands and as a way to communicate relationships and emotions between characters (see Brandstetter
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2013, Cohen Bull 1997; Novak 1990). In the context of ballet training, touch has been oft considered simply as a teacher’s tool to make bodies look a certain way: to shape bodies towards a visual ideal where a student’s limbs and other body parts are moved, manipulated and placed in certain ways by the teacher to reach a desired visual display through the body
(see Wulff 1998a, 1998b, 2008). Yet my fieldwork reveals touch to be more complex than this, both in the role it plays in the training process and the ways in which it is experienced by both students and teachers. Indeed, I suggest that while touch in ballet may ‘look’ a certain way to an outsider, what is missing from current analysis is the experience of touch by those involved. As dance scholar Deidre Sklar has suggested, the problem with reading dancing bodies as texts “overvalues the visual while ignoring the kinesthetic” (Sklar 2001:31).
Equally, dance scholar Jennifer Jackson suggests that external analysis leads to the “unhelpful objectification” of the dancer’s body, arguing that “the outside perspective on ballet is categorically different from the inside perspective and, thus, on the nature of what is perceived” (Jackson 2005:26). The absence of experience not only limits our understanding of touch to the level of the skin but also denies its productive and relational properties and its role in the crafting of gifted bodies. To break from this rigid and limiting conceptualisation of the use of touch in ballet, I broaden a definition of touch beyond that of physical contact to also encompass internal sensation and feeling.
Anthropology of touch: a brief history
Since about the 1960s, the senses and the body have come to be understood as socially produced rather than a purely biological or natural construction. This understanding opened discourse to consider the physical body as the site of lived sensory experience and knowledge
105 Between Moving Bodies production, and scholars have continued to challenge the visual and analytic bias of the discipline in relation to research on and through the body (Blake 2011). From this, phenomenological approaches emerged and, in particular, the work of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, based on the earlier work of Edmund Husserl, who rejected that sensory experience was an intellectual act and maintained that it was through perception – what he termed the
“pre-objective” – that we understand and engage with the world, and in turn are shaped by it
(Csordas 1990:35). This notion of embodiment was further bolstered by Pierre Bourdieu’s
(1977) practice theory and, in particular, his concept of habitus (after Mauss 1973), which acknowledged that we accumulate a certain way of being in the world – certain skills, attitudes and habits – through our physical engagement with the world. For Bourdieu, this
“socially informed body” unified and structured all practices through the use of all its senses
(Bourdieu 1977:124). Combining the methodologies of both Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu,
Thomas Csordas (1990) called for a paradigm of embodiment that shifted focus away from analysing perceptual categories, classifications and differentiation to examining the process of perception, objectification and attention. With this focus, the body is seen as the locus from which our experience of the world is situated, and that our senses act as mediators by and through which we interact with and understand the world (Classen 1997, 1999; Csordas 1990;
Desjarlias and Throop 2011).
From the 1990s, an anthropology of the senses emerged from these influences (see Classen
1997, 1999; Goody 2002; Howes 2003, 2008; Pink 2013), as scholars considered the role and value of sensory experience outside the hegemony of sight which had dominated within the discipline. Despite this emergence, the experience and role of touch was often neglected
(Blake 2011; Classen 2005a). While ancient philosophers, such as Democritus and Aristotle,
106 Chapter 3: A touching analysis had pondered the nature of touch, a theme which has continued within the philosophical literature (see Derrida 2005; English 1915; Manning 2006), it has only been in the past two decades that anthropologists have considered the value of the cultural study of touch in its own right. Championing an investigation of the communicative, social, historical and powerful properties of touch, and pioneering an anthropology of touch, Constance Classen suggested that one of the reasons why touch had perhaps been neglected was because of “the customary Western emphasis on the brute physicality of touch” (Classen 2005a:5). As scholarship has since shown, our understanding of touch however need not be limited to tangible physical contact.
It is commonly understood that our senses do not work in isolation, but that they work together as a “cohesive phenomenological complex that gives rise to a total experience of the body in the world” (Potter 2008:458). However, touch has been said to be the most fundamental sense – a proto-sense – from which all other perception emerges and which allows us to ‘make sense’ of information we receive from other senses (Bannon and Holt
2012:3; Chidester 2005:50; Gibson 1962:97; Lysemose 2014:352). This diffuse nature of touch and the way in which it interacts with, informs and is inextricably linked to our other senses, makes it notoriously difficult to define (Blake 2011; Classen 2005a; Lysemose 2014).
Derrida highlights this problem as it was presented by Aristotle in On the soul, “what is the organ of touch; is it or is it not the flesh […]?” (Book 2, Part 11 in Derrida 2005:5), to which
Derrida answers is threefold: first, touch is something which is experienced internally; second, the skin acts as the medium of touch; and, third, the object of touch can be both material and immaterial.
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Touch, then, when considered in this way, becomes an experience more complex than merely physical contact with the skin, as the literature on ballet and dance suggests (see Brandstetter
2013; Brandstetter et al. 2013; Cohen Bull 1997; Houston 2009; Novak 1990; Potter 2008;
Wulff 1998a, 1998b). Instead, it becomes an experience which also captures internal sensations and feeling. A broadened definition of touch, therefore, to encompass not only its literal application as a physical sensation on the surface of the body caused by material external pressure, but also a sensation within and between bodies, allows for an investigation of the ways in which bodies experience becoming gifted when they participate in touching relations with others. It is this broadened definition that I adopt in my investigation of these experiences.
Teaching with touch
My research reveals that, while creating a desired aesthetic or ‘look’ through the student’s body was indeed one reason for teachers to employ touch, where a teacher might approach a student, for example, to manipulate their leg in arabesque to achieve a more pleasing line through the body, the use and experience of touch was more complex and integral to not just the look of bodies but also their creation. In ballet classes I observed, touch was always present, yet the types, quality and frequency of touch varied. Some teachers made physical corrections at the start of class and became less ‘hands-on’ as class progressed, some employed touch throughout class, while others only used their hands when students were unable to make sense of verbal feedback or visual demonstration. The amount of physical contact also decreased over the course of training. Teachers of the junior grades employed physical contact frequently to guide the young bodies into the regime of giftedness and of the
108 Chapter 3: A touching analysis ballet, while teachers of senior students utilised touch proportionately less and less often as those gifted bodies began to take form. Despite the varying frequency with which physical contact was employed across the levels, it became apparent that teachers used touch to teach students how their bodies and movement felt. “I’m using touch for them to find out more about themselves”, one teacher said.
While I am not dismissing the role of touch in the visual and external creation of the look of the ballet body, touches to the gifted body during training also transmit information to be made sense of internally, resulting in the feel of the gifted body. In this way, physical touches were ‘made sense of’ by the gifted-body-in-becoming through touch, which in turn facilitated the body’s own creation and awareness of itself. For example, teachers would stroke their hands down a student’s arm, back, leg or even face, to encourage a release of tension or a certain quality of movement; with their fingers they would poke or prod specific areas of the body, such as the top of the hamstrings or under the scapula, to encourage the student to activate the desired muscles to execute a movement; they would hold and support various body parts, such a student’s leg in the air, so that the student could work to achieve the movement and placement correctly and efficiently without having to support the weight of their own leg; or, they would help to move a student’s body, such as encouraging more external rotation through the hip or guiding a deep back bend, to help the student access more movement and learn how that increased movement should feel even if they hadn’t yet the strength or ability to execute it by themselves – to show what the student should be working towards and quite literally provide a ‘helping hand’. They used touch to encourage the feeling of motion and how the body should move in space, such as pulling an arm forward during a leap to help the student travel farther. They used touch as a way to guide a movement, such as
109 Between Moving Bodies holding a hand above a student’s head and asking the student to touch it with the top of their head each time they jumped, to encourage a higher, straighter jump; or, as a reminder and to bring a student’s awareness to a certain area of the body to teach them to self-correct, where a brief touch to the back of a student’s neck would create an immediate and physical response from the student, seen clearly through their body, who would straighten their spine, stand taller and drop their shoulders away from their ears.
Students spoke about these types of corrective, communicative, supportive, helping, encouraging touches, as gifts to help them feel their bodies and learn what was correct and incorrect. “Let’s say my hips are tilted”, said one student, “they would fix me and then I know the feeling, or I know what it feels like when it’s in the right position”. Knowing that that feeling signified “correct” movement or body placement, as activated by physical contact from their teacher, empowered students to recall that feeling in their bodies at a later stage.
As another student described:
If she actually takes me and shifts me over the balls of my feet, then I like know where I’m supposed to be. So that means when I’m doing a combination I can check and be like ‘ok, it felt like that when she placed me there’, so I know that I’m in the right spot.
In another example, I observed a teacher approach a student and brush his hands along the student’s arms to encourage more length during an exercise. Once the class finished, I asked the student what that felt like. He said that as soon as he felt the teacher’s hands on him, his whole body reacted: his supporting leg pulled up taller, his spine straightened and he became more aware of the placement of his arm and entire body. “I wouldn’t have felt [that] if he just told me to lengthen my arm”, he said.
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In these ways, physical contact facilitated internal feeling which led to an accumulation of bodily knowledge and accrual of giftedness, where informative touches by the teachers helped the students to feel their own bodies and draw on those feelings to guide their development and progress during training. As one teacher said:
Physical corrections are really important because they do really help you bring a kid into a new position that they’ve never been in before. And letting them know that it’s usual to feel unusual, if that makes sense? Like, ‘I am asking you to stand in a new place and your body’s going to want to stand in its old place and you’re going to feel like you’re falling’ – to acknowledge that it’s going to feel strange, but to actually stand there and support them long enough so they can start to feel where that [new] place is.
Touch also would often succeed where other modes of feedback failed. Students spoke about how physical contact could enable them to feel the correction where verbal and visual cues could not: “you can’t really correct it, you can try to make it look like that but it’s not the same feeling”, said one student. Another described how being physically corrected was most helpful “because you actually know what you’re supposed to feel like instead of just like imagining what you’re supposed to feel like”. In class, teachers would often employ physical correction when it became apparent that a student was not understanding verbal or visual feedback. For example, during an adagio exercise a teacher was trying to help a student find the correct upper-body alignment and placement in effacé devant. “Go diagonal-to-diagonal”, the teacher said, demonstrating the correct alignment through his own body. After watching the teacher’s demonstration and making a number of adjustments to her position, the student was unable to achieve what the teacher wanted. “You can't feel it?” the teacher asked, to which the student shook her head. The teacher then walked over to the student, held one side of the student’s hips and one of her shoulders and manipulated her body into the desired alignment. “Now?” he asked. “Uh-huh, yep”, the student replied. This type of scenario where
111 Between Moving Bodies teachers would use physical contact to better affect the desired outcome through the students’ bodies was common in classes I observed during my fieldwork. As one teacher described:
“when I explain something in long sentences it can be quite hard to understand, but when I touch and use my hands it’s so much easier to explain everything at once”.
While the literature discussed above suggests that touch leads to the look of ballet bodies, I suggest that touch first leads to the feel of bodies, an internal process facilitated by exchanges between novice and expert bodies which in turn often facilitates the necessary external aesthetics of ballet performance. “I’m using the touch for them to find out more about themselves”, said one teacher:
So, you’re using that to get a better aesthetic, and I think you’re using touch to reaffirm, so they know for themselves, they have to know for themselves. So that means they have to touch their own arm, or touch my arm, or have the sensation of you’re sitting with your arms on a table and it has the same feeling and sensation.
Thus, the training process, including regularised touching exchanges between teaching and student bodies, teach the gifted ballet body how it feels whilst dancing and how students may equate that feeling with how their body looks to an outsider (their future audiences). As another teacher said: “there’s a distinction between what a dancer feels and what someone on the outside sees and trying to bring those two together is the goal [of training]”. By learning how their bodies feel, students are more able to recreate movement consistent with the technical and artistic demands of the profession, because, as the same teacher said, “they can’t turn around and look at the muscle, so they actually have to feel the sensation of what’s happening in their bodies to make the movement”.
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What is touched touches back
An anthropology of touch doesn’t only show that, beyond physical contact, touch experience captures internal sensation and feeling: it also shows us that what is touched touches back
(Blake 2011; Brandstetter et al. 2013; Classen 2005a; Derrida 2005; Houston 2009; Lysemose
2014; Manning 2006), and that it is through these ongoing and informative exchange relations that bodies are collectively created (Lyon and Barbalet 1994; Manning 2006). While
Diprose is critical of Mauss forgetting the feeling body – an absence I have begun to address above – she also shows that to truly understand the operations of generosity and gift exchange both bodies must be accounted for (Diprose 2002:115). Just as Diprose maintains that the clinician’s body has been overlooked in favour of the patient’s experience in the clinical encounter (ibid.), so too have the bodies and experiences of teachers been overlooked in the existing analyses of ballet. As I have shown in Chapter 2, these often don’t account for bodies or experience at all and when they do, only account for the dancing body. The role of the ballet teacher is critical, “facilitating the learning process of creating dancers by breaking down new skills into manageable chunks, directing deliberate practice activities, and most importantly, providing the necessary corrective feedback and motivation” (Ureña 2004:60).
However, the teachers’ body too is present (and equally a present) and a participant in these corporeal relations, which are not “just an encounter between a singular body” (Diprose
2002:115) and the norms of balletic discourse – the eyes of the teacher. In also considering the teachers’ touching feeling body, it becomes clear that not only is the student’s ability to feel and make sense of their teacher’s informative touches vital to the process of becoming gifted, but the teacher’s own sense of touch is integral to this process and their ability to assess if the students are receiving the gifts of their instruction and accruing a gift for ballet.
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The teacher’s ability to feel the touches given to them by the students’ bodies allows them to give and receive feedback instantly and simultaneously. For example, a touch of a hand to a student’s thigh enables a teacher to feel if certain muscles are being used or not and to draw the student’s attention to the muscles needed to correctly execute external rotation. “You can get a good sense of what’s happening in their physicality”, one teacher said:
Because when their body is in the correct alignment you feel an ease come into their joints, an ease come into their muscles, so you know that this is all in balance, everything’s in alignment where you would anatomically want them to be.
Touch often allowed teachers to access this information better than simply trying to look for the results of their feedback on the students’ bodies. “You can say to somebody ‘keep your abs engaged’, but to actually feel their abs you can figure out if there’s muscles there”, said one teacher. Another teacher described how when she physically held or touched a student’s body, she was able to better understand why they might be moving in a particular way.
“Everybody’s body is a little bit different in shape”, she said, “so [by touching them] you can know ‘oh no, that’s just how their rib cage is, it’s not just sticking out, that’s how their ribs are built’”. Another teacher described how, when placing her hands on a student’s hips, her sense of touch allowed her to feel how much more turn-out capacity the student had:
If I tell the student to give me all their weight, then I can feel how much is available in their hip socket for turn out. Just telling them to ‘turn out’ can sometimes lead them to just grip muscles and they aren’t able to access what is really available. So to be hands-on is another way to actually be able to gauge their potential, and help them feel a better way to work.
Another teacher said that when he employed physical contact in the studio, he could “get other bits of information” from a student. “Like, if I go to fix an arm or something like that and it feels really stiff and it doesn’t move, then you know you have a whole other problem to
114 Chapter 3: A touching analysis address; it gives you a lot more information.” In this way, touching the students’ bodies enabled the teachers to feel and assess if they were actively participating in the process of gift exchange – of receiving and giving back the gifts of their instruction – while at the same time allowing them to transmit new information and gifts to the student.
Touch facilitates becoming gifted
While touch was not the only sense relied upon to get a student to move in a desired way and feel their bodies, or for a teacher to assess a student’s responsiveness, it played a vital role in the studio, becoming both functional and integral to the training process and transmission of balletic gifts – embodied and bodily knowledge – between teacher and student, and thus the students accrual of giftedness.
While the benefits of using touch to transmit information between teacher and student were many, the need for touch seemed to decrease as students progressed in their training. While physical corrections were often highly valued by the students when receiving new corrections, enabling them to feel a new weight placement or alignment through their bodies, for ongoing corrections that they were still working on getting right, they spoke of non-tactile reminders being more efficient. “When they find something for you to start working on it’s good for them to come up to you and fix it for you”, said one student, “but as you progress it’s a lot easier if they just say ‘that thing’ and then you just fix it”. In group discussions where junior students had spoken about their need and desire for physical corrections, senior students were less likely to value being touched by their teacher. “I feel like when I was younger them fixing me was better, but now, we know our bodies so well”, one senior student
115 Between Moving Bodies said. “I feel like when you’re older you know your body better so you can just get verbal feedback and adjust”, said another. Teachers too agreed that physical contact was more effective with the younger students. “I think that by Grade 12 you don’t want hands-on
[corrections], but I would say in the beginning stages of training you actually want that feeling”, one teacher said.
If physical contact leads to the feel of bodies, I consider this initial need for physical contact and then relying on it less and less, as evidence of the training process in action as bodies accrue giftedness by acquiring greater bodily knowledge and ability to feel their own bodies over the course of many years. For ballet students, as the sensory knowledge about how their bodies and movement feel becomes embodied and they subsequently advance in their training, the corrections they receive become more about fine-tuning their established technique and pushing for more sophistication of both movement and artistry, preparing them for the rigours of professional performance.
During my fieldwork it became apparent that this gradual and increasing embodiment necessitated a move away from physical contact – used primarily to affect feeling and bodily awareness – towards demonstration, gesture and more nuanced verbal direction. For example, one teacher said she often used her hands to guide junior students to make sure they understood what she wanted their muscles to do, because the younger students were “not mature enough to understand and process all the information through their body”. However, by the time they progressed into senior grades students had, generally, already gained much of this information about how their bodies felt. “By the time they get to me, they know what they’re supposed to be doing”, said another teacher who considered physical contact to be less important with senior students, “it’s all been played out precisely for them”.
116 Chapter 3: A touching analysis
Of course, in relation to the age at which students often begin full-time training at the school
(turning 11-years-old on average for entry to Grade 6), a correlation could also be argued between their preference for/against physical corrections with the brain’s developing ability to process abstract thought. Psychologist Jean Piaget’s (1952, 1964) significant body of research into the cognitive development of children allows me to propose that, developmentally, that adolescent students only begin to develop the ability to grasp the abstractions needed to implement complex verbal corrections effectively from 11 years of age and into adulthood3. During my fieldwork, when one teacher described how teaching younger students sometimes necessitated the use of touch over verbal description, she touched on this very problem:
I think to stand in front of a 12-year-old and say “could you please engage your sartorius muscle?”, like what an obscure muscle to ask them to locate and then utilise in the manner in which you want, not just to engage it but to dynamically engage it. That’s a 27-day-long talk to get them to the same point that just lifting them up with one hand on their standing side and grabbing the heel of their gesture leg and putting it there can do. Then they feel it, then they know that this is their capability of alignment and now they have to find the muscular support for this boney alignment.
In Development and Learning, Piaget (1964) explains the four stages of development, to which I include examples as they relate to ballet training. First, children typically develop sensorimotor skills by age 2, where feeling their body interact with the world around them leads to knowledge, such as a teacher’s touch facilitating bodily awareness. Second, they develop the ability to think about things symbolically by age 7, where one thing stands for another, such as being able to stand as tall and straight as a tree or make their leg move as fast as a shooting arrow. Third, the ability to start logical thought processing occurs by age 11,
3 The actual age range that this formal operations stage occurs has been widely debated but does, generally speaking, occur within this timeframe, dependant on both biological and environmental factors.
117 Between Moving Bodies where problems begin to be worked out in the brain, such as understanding that they must bend their knees and push off with their feet in order to jump high or spot their head in a turn to prevent becoming dizzy. Fourth, they move on to the final ‘formal operational’ stage of processing abstract thought and testing hypotheses, such as reproducing or translating into their bodies verbal direction – what the teacher tells them – about the way in which a specific muscle should be used with a certain quality and dynamic, in order to execute a movement correctly.
The progression through these four stages is dependent on both biological and environmental factors (Piaget 1964:178) – factors in ballet that could be considered both ‘natural’ gifts, as mentioned earlier, and the training process itself. Coupled with the way in which embodied sensory and bodily knowledge is progressively gained through the training process, this may explain, from a physiological perspective, why physical contact is preferred by younger students but relied on less and less as the students’ brains develop the flexibility and capacity for processing abstract concepts. This also speaks to the fundamental and powerfully productive nature of touch and its role in the process of crafting bodies through sensory exchanges with other bodies.
From an anthropological perspective, a Bourdieusian theoretical framework of habitus is also at play here, where a dancer acquires the skill to learn a particular way of moving, through a training process. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, there has been little focus on ballet training within anthropology, yet it is acknowledged that the process of transformation a body undergoes from student to professional is similar to an initiation where bodies must undergo years of ritualised training in order to become a professional member of the ballet world (see Federico 1974; Hall 1977; Novack 1993; Schechner 1995; Sutherland 1976;
118 Chapter 3: A touching analysis
Turner 2005; Wulff 1998a, 1998b). Within the dance education and research literature, ballet training has been analysed pedagogically (see Morris 2003; Weidmann 2018) and through
Bourdieusian and Foucauldian lenses (see Green 2002; Pickard 2012, 2013, 2015), where it is suggested that a ballet dancer and the dancing body is manifest through the various stages of training or by the technologies of institutionalised ballet training. Similarly, within the broader giftedness literature, it is also recognised that in order for giftedness to develop a body must undertake years of deliberate practice (see Chua 2014; Critien and Ollis 2006;
Ericsson et al. 1993; Hutchinson et al. 2013; Law et al. 2007; Ollis et al. 2006; Sanchez et al.
2013; Subotnik et al. 2011; Ureña 2004; Walker et al. 2010; Warburton 2002) and, in the case of ballet and dance expertise, undergo an “arduous” training regime (see Aalten 2004:267;
Anderson and Hanrahan 2008; Chua 2014; Coupland 2013; Pickard 2012, 2015; Ureña
2004). Following Mauss’ view to consider that initiation most often happens at adolescence, where “it is at this moment that they learn definitively the techniques of the body that they will retain for the whole of their adult lives” (Mauss 1973:80), dance training has been said to incorporate the body into the tradition of ballet whereby “rigorous exercises reshape their bodies” (Schechner 1995:39).
However, as I mentioned earlier, Mauss’ techniques du corps has been criticised for being
“reductionist” when applied to dancing bodies (see Pickard 2015:53). Pickard suggests that by treating the body as an instrument to be shaped, Mauss separates the physical from the experiential self as well as the operational environment (ibid.). This echoes elements of
Diprose’s critique of Mauss’ theory of gift exchange, as mentioned earlier, in which she too suggests that Mauss has “forgotten” the feeling body. Pickard considers that her Bourdieusian and embodied approach to understanding the ballet body in training, focussing on the
119 Between Moving Bodies development of habitus might address this. However it does not quite succeed in doing so as her analysis of pain experience, as I described in the previous chapter shows. Diprose maintains that through a privileging of felt experience intercorporeal generosity is made possible, as the circulation of gifts is experienced at the level of the sensibility. By building on this through my application of a touching analysis to the training of ballet bodies, and recognising, after Legrand and Ravn, that the physical balletic body and dancing self are also both made sense of at the level of the sensible, I propose that it is the ongoing and regular exchanges of corporeal and sensory knowledge (gifts) between teacher and student – what I consider to constitute the training process – that results in the embodiment of giftedness and thus crafting of the gifted body over time.
The gift of time
Time, however, is precisely what enables such a process to occur and bodies to be created. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Mauss’ work highlights that there is a temporal dimension to this process, as returns are not always instantaneous, and indeed can’t be if they are to operate.
Mauss attended to such delays in counter-gifting through their role in establishing long-term bonds and obligation between individuals and groups that such a debt entails (Mauss
1954:34). Bourdieu (following Derrida 1992) has suggested that these time lags are what allows the gift to operate as such, where only once the gift is forgotten can the counter-gift truly be made generously rather than under obligation (Bourdieu 1997:232). For Derrida, part of the aporia of the gift is that once it is recognised as such, it ceases to be so (Derrida
1992:16). He therefore maintains that generosity is only possible if the gifts are forgotten
(and therefore the obligation to return is forgotten), by both the giver and receiver, and
120 Chapter 3: A touching analysis enough time has passed for the counter prestation to be made without acknowledgement of it being a gift. As Schrift notes:
what the gift gives, in the end, is time, nothing but time – time to forget, time to return, time for a delayed reciprocation that is no longer simply a return. (Schrift 1997:10)
As Diprose (2002) discusses, Friedrich Nietzsche’s pathos of distance shows how this time lag or distance between the present and future self – in this case, the self that receives the balletic gift and the self that is able to make the counter-gift of the body’s acceptance and application of the teacher’s instruction, by demonstrating increased techniques du corps of which it was otherwise not possessed – is integral to the body’s transformation:
A distance or difference within the self, between the present self and an image of the self toward which I aspire, is necessary for transformation of the corporeal self. (Diprose 2002:24)
Thus, I propose, not only does the forgetting of gifts make the gifts themselves possible, it also makes the creation of the gifted body possible, thereby becoming an integral part of the institutionalised crafting of gifted bodies.
Besides the delay between the student’s acceptance to the school and their final gift of a graduating body as detailed in Chapter 1, there is often a delay between the student receiving the smaller more regularised sensory gifts bestowed on them by the teachers in the daily course of training and of making a return prestation by showing they have understood and applied these gifts through the body. For example, a touch to a shoulder may result in an instant response where the student’s awareness is brought to her shoulder by the hand of the teacher, enabling her to assess its position and make a physical adjustment accordingly.
However, in contrast, a correction to alignment in arabesque, where a student must
121 Between Moving Bodies strengthen certain muscles in their back, legs, stomach or hips in order to execute the desired change, will take time to eventuate. “It’s not simple to change”, one teacher said, “sometimes it’s a very long process [where] bit by bit they try to understand and apply corrections”.
During class, teachers would often encourage students to keep working on something even if it wasn’t immediately eventuating through their bodies. “You’re not there yet”, said one teacher to her students, “but in a couple of years you will be”. Teachers spoke about needing to remind themselves that some corrections took more time than others and that each student’s rate of progress would differ. “Everybody’s time is different”, one teacher said:
You go to Grade 1 or senior kindergarten, some of them start reading in January, some in February and some in May, and that’s exactly the same with dancing. Some will get it in a month, some of them in three months, so I have to keep reminding myself.
Another spoke of needing to “figure out whether it’s their inability to change or whether it’s their lack of desire to change”:
And I have to figure that out before I show my frustration to them, because yes it gets frustrating when you have to say the same thing a thousand times and nothing changes, but I’ve learned that I have to make sure they really want to change before I show any kind of upset mood toward them.
It was this need to navigate the relationships with the students in the studio and to get to know how each responded to feedback that most teachers described as being vital for them to best assess whether a student was receiving or resisting their guidance. “Sometimes it doesn’t change, sometimes it takes a year for it to change”, one teacher said:
You give it [the correction] and there are just certain students where you know ‘ok, you don’t have it today, but I know that if I leave that with you you’re intelligent and you’ll make work of it’, and some you just need to bang them on the head with it day after day until it changes.
122 Chapter 3: A touching analysis
However, just as these exchanges were operationalised and made sense of at the level of the sensible, so too was this delay understood through the body’s capacity to feel. For example, feeling a student’s muscle quiver or fire sporadically under their hand, told the teachers that the student understood the correct muscle to use but that they were not strong enough yet to sustain its use. “When I just walk in the distance, I can see their face and I understand if they’re trying, but when I touch their body it’s easier to feel”, said one teacher. “I can sense that they want to work with me and try to change even though they can’t fully make the change right away.”
Multisensory, multibodied training
As outlined in Chapter 1 in relation to the school’s audition process, that the gifts of bodies are evaluated intercorporeally – between moving bodies – and not only by sight, necessitates a protracted assessment process for which bodies are taken into the school and which are not.
As such, as Diprose notes, this is a process of forgetting the gifts of some while memorialising the gifts of others – a key difference to Mauss’ understanding of how the forgetting of gifts operates. This is a point I will return to in Chapter 5. However, the delay necessary for gifts to be exchanged also determines the very nature of the training process, where bodies are subjected to the long-term evaluation of their ability and willingness to receive and repay gifts and their accruing giftedness for ballet. Such assessments necessarily involve years of intercorporeal exchanges between student and teacher, allowing for delays in counter-gift, which are made sense of by both the students’ and teachers’ capacity to feel.
This is a process which results in the creation of the gifted body over time, as the feeling and
123 Between Moving Bodies awareness of movement within and between bodies comes to reside within the gifted balletic body, the intricacies of which I will explore in my next chapter.
So far, I have argued that touch is a defining and essential element of ballet training, facilitating the processes by which a gifted body-in-becoming embodies the corporeal and sensory knowledge needed for its own creation and success. It is, therefore, through touch that the gifted body becomes. As I have shown, touch need not be conceived of as only physical contact. In considering the complex role of physical contact and feeling in the production of gifted ballet bodies, an anthropology of touch allows me to conclude that touch and internal feeling and sensation cannot be undone from one another, but that they work together to produce knowledge and, ultimately, craft gifted bodies. In highlighting the relationality of touch – that what is touched also touches – I have begun to address the way in which gift exchange operates at the corporeal level, a process that relies on delays in which gifts can be returned. Pushing my analytic of touch even further in the next chapter, to examine the complexity of sensory relations, allows me to access both the students’ and teachers’ multisensory experiences of the training process – of gift exchanges made and made sense of within and between bodies – and to examine how the senses work together to produce the gifted body.
124 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet
Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet
In this chapter, I illustrate, through detailed ethnography, how the application of my touching analysis allows insight into not only the kind of gifts needed for success in ballet, but how such gifts cycle between teacher and student and are made sense of, by their capacity to feel.
Such felt relations thus facilitate the accrual of giftedness within the gifted body.
In attempting to move Mauss’ thesis into the corporeal by privileging sensory experience, I have already argued that, while a visual analysis of performing bodies enables certain understandings of what giftedness might constitute, different kinds of understandings begin to unfurl as other sensory modes are considered. Rather than simply identifying what a gifted body is, I suggest that both students and teachers experience and make sense of ballet training through manifestations of touch, which become integral to the training process, as the senses and bodies work together to facilitate the result and production of movement, exchange and accumulation of bodily knowledge, and success in crafting the gifted body.
To examine this process of becoming, in this chapter I continue to expand my definition of touch beyond that of physical contact between bodies, to consider how it is experienced as, a) a sense of motion and somatic awareness or feeling inside bodies, such as a dancer feeling her leg muscles activate as she launches herself through the air in a leap; b) the awareness of bodies moving in-sync but external to one another in space, such as bodies dancing in formation without coming into direct physical contact; and c) the experience of bodies being activated by music or bodily sounds. If taking a phenomenological approach to understanding embodied habitus can enable us to understand social institutions by examining the bodily relations within them (Csordas 1994:14), I suggest that my touching analysis of ballet
125 Between Moving Bodies training will illustrate how “institutionally-shaped sensory experience is both a product of dance training and the process by which successful training is achieved” (Potter 2008:447). In so doing, I am able to better connect Mauss’ theory of gift exchange with the process of ballet training, where it becomes apparent that the exchanges of corporeal gifts with other bodies activate feeling, facilitate the accrual of giftedness and assessment of progress, and depend on movement, where boundaries become blurred between what is internal and external, body and self, and self and other. For, as Serres shows, when considering the relationality of the senses, the body and the self are not limited by the skin – they reach beyond it (Serres
2008:303).
The exchange of balletic gifts
Let me begin with a brief outline of the way in which I suggest gifts for ballet are exchanged and made sense of between bodies during daily ballet classes. First, teachers deliver feedback, information and corrections to the students in multisensory ways, such as the touch of a hand to the back of a student’s shoulders to encourage correct posture; the clicking of fingers to emphasise specific timing; or, the gesture of a leg to demonstrate the desired movement dynamics. Second, this information is received by the students and taken into their bodies through their sensoria. Third, in return, teachers assess through their own bodies and sensoria the students’ application of gifts given and received as they see, hear, feel, smell and
(as I will argue) even taste the effort and changes made (or not) by the student. These are regularised and institutional intercorporeal exchanges between teacher and student which occur every day of the training process – a process in which these multiple and sensory relations enable the accrual of giftedness and the ultimate crafting of the gifted body.
126 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet
While this might seem to be a simple or obvious process, this is a different understanding to how ballet training has been commonly understood within the literature (see Wulff 1998a;
Pickard 2015). As discussed previously, here, the process of teaching and learning ballet has been reduced to a visual process, whereby it is considered that:
Essentially dancers are shown visually through someone else’s body; their teacher’s or a peer, what to do and they copy with their own body. […] This development of ballet technique through constantly copying movements and repeating in the ballet class, is how some physical capital is accrued by the young dancers. (Pickard 2015:62-63)
As I have argued in previous chapters, reducing both the experience and training of ballet in such a way is misguided, as it effectively separates the physical and experiential body; a problematic outcome when considering an embodied practice such as dance. Instead, I suggest that acknowledging and attending to the informative and transformative multisensory exchanges between student and teacher – experienced and made sense of by touch – better enables an understanding of how giftedness is accrued and how gifted bodies are crafted through a process of gift exchange between moving bodies. This allows me to extend Mauss’ thesis by showing that, when applied to the corporeal realm, gift exchange is a process, as
Diprose suggests, which operates at the sensory level.
Tasteful bodies
In a conventional sense, exploring taste among gifted bodies in training might be limited to their experiences of food and nutrition. I suggest that to limit taste experience in such a way denies other powerful experiences. While the root of the word ‘taste’ comes from the Old
French tast meaning ‘touch’, today the word most often relates to a) the sensation and flavour
127 Between Moving Bodies perceived in the mouth, such as the taste of an apple; b) a small or limited amount of food or drink or experience, such as a taste of the action; or, c) a person’s liking for, interest in and ability to discern quality in something, such as a taste for fashion (‘taste’ Oxford English
Dictionary 2018). Paying close attention to this last iteration, the concept of tastefulness and the aesthetics of ballet bodies enables another avenue through which to explore the role of multisensory experiences in crafting the gifted body.
As I have said, the idea that ballet is a visual art form becomes problematic when considered through a sensory lens and my broadened analytic of touch. In common usage, aesthetics is associated with the concept of visual beauty and artistic taste, yet the word’s etymology belies this superficial focus. Derived from the Greek aisthesthai meaning ‘perceive’, and later aisthētikos, “relating to perception by the senses” (‘aesthetic’ Oxford English Dictionary
2018), the original concept of aesthetics lies in our ability to gain knowledge via our senses.
Accordingly, it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that the term became associated with tastefulness
(ibid.). Despite its etymology, concepts of tastefulness have come to be culturally understood through our ability to see and hear, such as assessing art or music, while touch and smell have not been considered aesthetic senses (Montero 2006; Serres 2008:153).
Bourdieu (1984) considered aesthetics to be inscribed onto bodies as part of the formation of habitus, suggesting that normalised attitudes about what was tasteful or not determined both a distinction between social classes and between various kinds of capital, in which “all agents, whether they like it or not, whether or not they have the means of conforming to them, find themselves objectively measured by those norms” (Bourdieu 1984:29). Pickard briefly drew on this view, to examine how balletic capital was accrued by students as they underwent ballet training and how, in turn, their balletic habitus was crafted, where “particular bodily
128 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet appearance, technical and stylistic ability are deemed to hold high corporeal, physical and cultural capital, […] and these forms of currency are what the dancers in the field aspire to gaining” (Pickard 2015:11). For Pickard, defining ballet as a performance art, enabled her to link various balletic aesthetics – of body shape, technical mastery, movement quality and expression – to how they were visually perceived, both by outsiders and by the teachers and students. However, I argue that it is not simply the role of vision that allows us to evaluate the taste of dancing bodies, but that they are also made sense of, by both the bodies themselves and other bodies, through touch.
I ascribe to the proposal of philosopher Barbara Montero (2006) who makes the case for proprioception (the feeling of movement within one’s body) to be considered an aesthetic sense. As my expanded definition of touch also encompasses internal feeling and sensation, as outlined in the previous chapter, a consideration of the body’s ability to make aesthetic choices based on touch experiences allows me to reconsider the primacy of the visual in ballet and challenge the notion that both dancing and non-dancing bodies make aesthetic judgements based solely on how ballet bodies or movement look. Taste, therefore, becomes vital to the creation and experience of the gifted ballet body, whereby it must balance these two aesthetics – fitting the visual mould as well as possessing highly developed sensory perception.
As Montero argues, vision is not the only sense by which dancers assess aesthetics as “one can deem a certain movement beautiful based on one’s proprioceptive experience of the movement” (Montero 2006:231). Students during my fieldwork spoke of knowing how movement or their bodies looked on the outside because of how it felt inside their bodies,
129 Between Moving Bodies where feeling movement led to an appreciation and understanding of its artistic tastefulness.
As one student said:
When I feel like I’m working well it’s more like, I don’t know, it’s like I have this kind of sense of inner awareness. I don’t know. Like I’m just more aware of what my body’s doing and what it looks like, like from the outside. Which is a big thing for dancers, knowing what you look like.
Teachers often encouraged the students to hone their ability to feel how their movement looked, providing directions such as “feel the beautiful line” or “feel yourself make that beautiful shape”. For example, during a ronds de jambe exercise, one teacher asked the students to “picture the head of your femur, that beautiful round [action]” as the students moved their legs in a circular motion, thereby encouraging them to not only feel the joint working deep in their hip but to associate that feeling with the look of the action itself.
Evaluating the taste of movement also extends to being able to feel the movements of others.
Montero suggests that other bodies evaluate the taste of bodies in tactile ways, where
“audience members may base certain aesthetic judgments about dancers in part on the internal experience of movement one has while watching dance” (Montero 2006:240)4. Even the way in which dancers and teachers spoke about movements being “delicious”, “juicy” or
“yummy” allowed me to consider how the taste of movement might feel, for as anthropologist Judith Okely shows, language becomes meaningful once it is understood within its sensory context (Okely 1994:46). Teachers would sometimes tell the students how their dancing made them feel. For example, during one class, a teacher told her students after they had performed an exercise, “when you do it that way I get shivers, I feel connected to
4 I experienced this almost every day while watching classes over the course of fieldwork and often made reference to it in my field notes. For example, on March 31, 2017 I wrote: “when watching these girls dance, I still find my body responding physically — my head moves in the direction of the movement, my legs tense in preparation for a jump, my body stiffens when something doesn't quite work out for them.”
130 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet you”. Students would also respond in similar ways when watching their peers dance. After watching rehearsal for a group piece, one student told me that their dancing gave him
“goosebumps” – “there were so many beautiful moments”. When I asked him what he meant by “beautiful moments” he described feelings of calm, peace, and a connection between the dancers and how they were projecting toward him and the audience.
In understanding that aesthetics might also be made sense of through a sense of feeling,
Montero shows how boundaries become blurred between inside and out. Where bodily aesthetics are commonly thought to relate to the external look of bodies, considering the experience of touch allows me to show how aesthetics also relate to the feel of bodies, where the relationship between a person’s self-perception and that of others becomes linked, often through movement. Of course I do not suggest that the look of ballet bodies does not play a role in the crafting of gifted bodies. I consider it vitally important as a way in which the body becomes within the context of the institution, as Pickard (2012, 2013, 2015) shows. Teachers would often advise students to be aware of how they looked, to consider the lines they were making with their bodies – of straight legs, pointed feet, supported arms, elongated spines, poised heads etc. – and how a future audience might view their movement. Students too often spoke of whether or not their bodies measured up to how they wanted them to look. However, while I do not deny the powerful importance of working the present (physical) body towards a future (ideal) body (a key element of the temporal nature of training I discussed in the previous chapter), it is important to note here that the look of bodies is not the only aesthetic worked towards by dancers. The dancer’s ability to deliver various movement aesthetics, such as powerful and dynamic allégro, flowing and controlled adagio, or fast and crisp footwork, and the teacher’s ability to assess such movement aesthetics through their own
131 Between Moving Bodies bodies, are vital to the gift exchange process. While perhaps resulting in an outward look on or through the body, these aesthetics operate within and between bodies, able only to be executed as the dancer feels her own movement and the movements of others. In this way, movement itself can be considered a variant of touch, which allows me to continue to expand my definition of touch to encompass the feel of moving bodies.
Moving bodies
Awareness of movement and the body in space is often referred to as kinaesthetic awareness or proprioception. Within dance scholarship this is often considered separate to our sense of touch (see Potter 2008), yet an anthropology of touch shows us that touch is a) experienced through movement (Classen 2005a:2) that it is through movement that tactile knowledge is formed (Chidester 2005:56); and c) that even touch is movement (Manning 2006). These approaches highlight the inseparable relationship between touch and movement and that one is not possible without the other.
My approach builds on the work of anthropologist Caroline Potter (2008), who investigated the role of the senses in the development of the contemporary dance student’s identity, in turn providing insight into the sensory means through which movement is created and experienced in an institutional setting. Writing against the visual hegemony of both dance and anthropological scholarship, Potter argued for a broader and more experiential approach to understanding the senses, beyond that of the traditional Euro-centric five senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Her work followed that of Sklar, who disagreed with the common practice of ‘reading’ movement as a text and instead advocated that dance be
132 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet considered “not just as visual spectacle but as kinesthetic, conceptual, and emotional experience that depends upon cultural learning” (Sklar 2001:32).
Potter determined that in contemporary dance, kinaesthesia, or a sense of motion, was central to shaping all other sensory modes. Exploring dance students’ experiences of kinaesthesia –
“a dynamic sense of constantly shifting one’s body in space and time in order to achieve a desired end” (Potter 2008:449) – during classes at a London contemporary dance school,
Potter found that kinaesthesia was the way in which the dancers perceived both movement itself and their progress during training. In this way, the sense of motion was integral to both the practice (training) and performance of contemporary dance, as it allowed the students to not only feel their bodies move but also feel themselves accruing giftedness.
While Potter’s primary focus was the experience of kinaesthesia, her analysis also relied on the experience of touch to illustrate how the senses did not work in isolation. Examining contact improvisation, Potter described her own experience of how touch between dancers could provide the impetus for new movement:
in one instance I acutely perceived the contact of my face to my partner’s, while in the next I felt myself falling as we tried to maintain back-to-back contact. (ibid., 458)
Her experience highlights the interplay between kinaesthesia and touch and that, rather than touch informing new movement (as suggested in her description above), it is in fact “the constant motion of both partners [which] led to frequently shifting points of physical contact”
(ibid.). Regardless of whether it is touch that informs movement, or movement which informs touch, what this speaks to is the relationship between touch and a sense of motion between bodies in the creation of movement, giftedness and gifted bodies.
133 Between Moving Bodies
Building further on the relationship between touch and movement, anthropologist Ruth
Finnegan (2005) suggested that our understanding and definition of touch should also encompass the experience of bodies working together, alongside and in-sync with each other without the need for physical contact. To illustrate this, she uses examples such as marching or dancing in formation, “where the [participants’] shared somatic experience surely rests on more than just sight or sound” (Finnegan 2005:23). While this type of “somatic interconnectedness” has been discussed in broader dance scholarship (see Potter 2008), and has been briefly mentioned in relation to professional ballet dancers where they describe a felt proximity to one another (Wulff 1998a:107-109, 2006:133), its relationship to touch has not been clearly drawn.
Students spoke to me of this shared somatic experience, of being able to feel other dancers around them in space. They described feeling unified, like an “army” or “squad” when dancing in a group, and feeling connected to others in space as they worked towards a common goal; “you kind of get like an energy from people around you”, said one student.
They spoke about feeling a “bond” with others as they executed the same movements, which often pushed them to work harder. As another student said: “if I’m in a group and everyone’s doing the same thing, it really just like inspires me or uplifts me”.
Not coming into direct physical contact, yet still giving and receiving bodily awareness with others in space, facilitates the creation of gifted bodies as the students learn how to move with one another. This also trains the students to move their self-awareness beyond their own bodies, allowing them to collectively experience the self in relationship with other bodies.
“Cause you’re trying to almost feel like you are the same person”, said one student:
134 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet
Like you’re trying to feel like you almost are them. So if you get that connection, if you just imagine that you’re doing it as one, it’s a lot easier than “oh I have to follow them” in like the exact same timing.
In this way, experiencing movement together with other bodies often broke down barriers between internal/external and self/other, where the students needed to learn to freely move their attention between one and the other.
Needing to learn to not only visually assess where others are in relation to their own body but to also feel where others are or how they were moving in interrelatedly, is a vital skill for any ballet dancer moving into a professional career, which most often involves many years in the corps de ballet dancing in formation with a group of others. Students were very aware of needing to develop the ability to dance as a corps and this often arose in group discussions.
“All of us have to start learning how to keep in place and have our own space,” said one student, “because when you’re dancing in corps de ballet you have to like really be where you’re supposed to be, you can’t just go everywhere”. Developing the ability to feel not only their bodies in movement, but also other moving bodies, is an integral step in becoming a gifted body and relied heavily on sensory feedback. Such an ability to feel other bodies, without coming into direct physical contact, also illustrates how gift exchanges operate and are made sense of between moving bodies, where the evaluation of the receipt and return of gifts is not limited by a sense of sight, but instead defined by a sense of feeling.
Seeing bodies
As already mentioned, I do not wish to dismiss the power of sight and its role in the crafting of gifted bodies. A sense of sight is highly important as students look at their teacher’s and
135 Between Moving Bodies classmate’s demonstrating and dancing bodies, or at their own body in a mirror or on screen, to gain understanding of how they should move or position their body. It is equally important to the teachers’ assessment of the students’ bodies for evidences of understanding and application of gifts given. While the anthropological literature, as discussed earlier, suggests that the mirrors and demonstration are simply employed as a tool to make bodies look a certain way and that students will mimic or mirror the physical demonstrations of others (see
Aalten 2004; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011; Cohen Bull 1997; Coupland 2013; Grau
2005; Green 2002; Hall 1977; Legrand and Ravn 2009; Pickard 2012, 2013, 2015; Salosaari
2001; Wulff 1998a), my research demonstrates that experiences of watching bodies directly, in a mirror or on screen, are also mediated by a sense of touch.
As I have previously noted, the process of learning ballet is often considered to be visual, where ballet is learnt “through watching others dance and processing this information together with other ballet students” (Wulff 1998a:61-62). However, when watching other bodies, both students and teachers described to me how they analysed the ways in which those bodies were moving, not only the way they looked. This enabled them to consider the ways in which their own bodies were or were not moving or how their bodies used to move.
Thus, understanding bodies in movement via their sense of sight is an important gift for students to receive and for teachers to give, where sight leads to internal feelings and sensation and, in turn, movement.
While the corrections a student makes or the feedback a teacher gives, after watching another body demonstrate a movement, may appear to be analytically and visually mediated, neuroscience research shows us that when we see another body perform an action, the same area of our brain activates as if we were performing the action ourselves, enabling our body
136 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet to understand the intended message – we feel the movement and knowledge of the other (see
Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004). In the same way that touch allows us to appreciate the taste of moving bodies, as discussed earlier, this mirroring phenomenon creates direct links between feeling bodies to enable us to experience empathy, physically and “without any cognitive mediation” (ibid., 183). This observation not only allows for a consideration of how the visual analysis of movement, while mediated by sight, is made sense of and transmitted through touch, but also how Diprose’s suggestion that intercorporeal gift exchange operates at the sensory level is made possible.
Taking my expanded definition of touch, from which internal sensations and movement cannot be undone, I consider now how sight, which may ‘look’ distinct from a sense of touch, need not be separated from it, as visual experiences indicate certain kinds of touches to the body. Students spoke of the benefit of seeing their teacher demonstrate a movement, both correctly and incorrectly, where the correct way enabled them to see what they were aiming towards and the incorrect way alerting them to what their body was currently or could potentially do if they weren’t careful. During group discussions, some students said they preferred to see the movement demonstrated correctly:
If you see someone do something incorrectly then you know “ok don’t do that” but then also does that mean do it over here? or over here? or wherever. But if you see someone doing it correctly then it’s more precise.
Other students said they learnt more from watching the teacher demonstrate the incorrect way. “It’s helpful”, said another student, “because when you’re confused about a correction they give you and then they show it, like they show what you were doing wrong, it helps you understand what they were talking about”. Regardless of their preferred way of receiving a
137 Between Moving Bodies visual correction, students maintained that it was vital for them to see others execute movement in order to execute it correctly themselves.
This also extended to watching their peers dance, which often offered clues as to how they might move better, such as seeing how another student might coordinate their arms and legs to better arrive at a particular moment during an exercise or complete a movement. For example, one student described how when she was moving and struggling to execute a step, she sometimes lost track of what was happening with her body, but that by taking a step back and watching others, she could better analyse what might help her. “You can learn so much from that, I feel like, cause when you’re dancing you’re not always seeing what’s going on, and a lot of the time it’s internal”, she said:
So when you can see something external on someone else, more physical, then you can see “oh that didn’t really work”. Not “oh they didn’t do it”, but it’s like “oh that didn’t work for them” or “this worked for them but it doesn’t work for me, why can they do it?” and sort of see what they’re doing differently.
But sight-activated touches also played a role in how the teachers and students assessed progress, and as a result became part of how the students experienced their own becoming.
Similar to the way students described dancing with others enabled them to feel a sense of togetherness, whereby they experienced their bodies both individually and collectively, students and teachers described how watching moving bodies enabled them to, in a sense, feel those bodies, without coming into direct physical contact, and which in turn led to feeling in their own bodies. For the students, those feelings activated by sight often allowed them to compare their own bodies to others, alerting them to their own progress. For example, one senior student described that while watching a junior class through one of the studio’s
138 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet observation windows, he remembered the way his body used to feel at that age and in so doing, realised how much he had improved, particularly as he watched the junior students struggle, in this instance, to stay turned out and on balance during an adagio exercise.
It just like hit me and I was like “oh my god, that is so what it felt like for such a long time” and like I am so glad I’ve been able to, like I’ve cracked a little bit more how to turn out.
For the teachers, their ability to see their students was vital to their ability to provide feedback and assess progress. Similar to the ways the students described making sense of watching the bodies of others, the teachers also described feeling the bodies of their students without coming into direct physical contact. “I actually feel what’s going on in their body”, said one teacher:
I mentally step into their space and then, because I have my own body experience, I go “oh, they had no idea that the hip is meant to be here”. So you sort of, and you can sense what they’re missing, like “they’re not doing A or B” and then you can tell them.
Of course, all teachers maintained that they couldn’t understand exactly what the students were feeling. “It’s always a guess-timation”, said one teacher. “You can’t feel what anyone else is feeling”, said another. This is a problem I will return to later. However, despite this challenge, teachers spoke of how watching the students dance made them remember how their own body felt when they used to dance, which in turn enabled them to offer better instruction. “There are some things like the plié movement”, said one teacher:
They’re going down, but really there’s an opposition happening where you’re supposed to be going up as well. That would be based on what I see – if I don’t think it’s happening – but also what I felt as a dancer. Because I’m trying to describe to them in words what that feeling of lifting up as you’re going down is. That would come from how I processed that as a dancer, as well as going to learn how to teach – going to teacher’s classes
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and learning how to make those explanations – but really that’s coming from what it felt for me and working to articulate that in words for them.
Such an understanding again demonstrates the multisensory nature of the crafting of gifted bodies, and the role other bodies play in that process. But intercorporeal experience is not limited to that between two distinct individuals, but also reflects the relations between body and self.
Seeing myself versus being myself
I argue that the students’ experiences of looking at their own bodies, either in the mirror or on video, were also made sense of through touch. It has been suggested that the use of mirrors for dance training coincided with the emergence of ballet training in the late-18th Century as the technology for the production of mirrors grew and ballet became popularised (see Cohen
Bull 1997; Ehrenberg 2010; Foster 1997). Today, the mirror is still considered a useful tool in training the ballet body5 (Ehrenberg 2010), but as mentioned above, existing literature considers the role of the mirror in ballet as a tool to allow dancers to visually assess their bodies to make them look a certain way. Aside from facilitating the external ‘look’ of the ballet body, this work often discusses how mirrors impact and affect a dancer’s sense of body image, identity and self-worth, as well as the role the mirror plays in the dancer experiencing themselves as both subject (a dancer) and object (a dancing body), whereby the act of viewing their body separates the self from the body which becomes simply a tool or object to be altered. While these discussions offer much to an understanding of the ways in which
5 Of course mirrors are also used to train other types of bodies where they can be commonly found in fitness centres, gymnasiums and studios for martial arts, other dance forms, pilates and yoga etc.
140 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet dancers identify with their bodies and the ballet world more generally, as I have suggested in the previous chapter, to focus on the visual objectification of the body in such a way, blinds us to its sensory and embodied qualities and prevents insight into how intercorporeal generosity both operates and is experienced at the “level of sensibility” (Diprose 2002:9).
Interestingly, there is literature that acknowledges and explores contemporary dancers’ embodied experiences of mirror use and how it affords a sensory image-feeling feedback loop: the dancers look at their bodies, see perhaps that their shoulder is raised, send their attention internally to assess how the shoulder feels, make the physical adjustment by lowering the shoulder to the desired position, and look again in the mirror to see the result
(see Ehrenberg 2010). However, here the mirror use of contemporary dancers is seen as distinct from ballet dancers who are considered to only worry about the look of their bodies and not the feel (ibid., 180). This of course is problematic as human experience is after all embodied (Crossley 2005:16). Instead, my research suggests that mirror and screen use also leads to internal sensation, feeling and movement for ballet dancers. Just as visually assessing other bodies is made sense of through a sense of touch, so too is looking at bodies in the mirror or on video, where gift relations between the physical body and its reflected image facilitate the production of the gifted ballet body.
Many students spoke about the mirror as an object being at once their “best friend and worst enemy”. Working in the mirror could reveal feeling and awareness in their bodies while at the same time deceive and distort what the body was doing. The double-edged sword of the mirror, both revealing and obscuring, often led to a love-hate relationship with using the mirror in class. When the mirror aided feeling and body awareness, providing a “dancer- mirror feedback loop” (Ehrenberg 2010:175), students spoke about it helping them to better
141 Between Moving Bodies make and maintain corrections. “It’s just like this constant back and forth and you’re constantly looking and feeling”, said one student. Another student described how looking in the mirror enabled her to see what her body couldn’t always feel, which in turn led to new feeling:
Sometimes I get corrections and I can’t feel it. Like with my arm, if it’s a little like this [she demonstrates a droopy elbow in second position] I can’t feel it at all. So then it’s good to like see it. Then I try to look and fix it. Like it’s usually about fixing the whole alignment and then I look away and try to feel what it feels like and then I try it again.
Others agreed that the mirror was important to help them remember how movement felt at a later stage. “Normally when I look in the mirror I see it and then I try to memorise the feeling that I have when I am doing that movement”, said one student. “I look in the mirror and I can correct myself and then the next day when we’re facing away from it then I can think about what it felt like and how to adjust that on my own”, said another.
However, this sensory feedback loop could also malfunction, where looking into the mirror could distort their bodies or the reflection itself could be misleading and hinder their ability to self-correct. Students described how looking in the mirror would often result in incorrect alignment through their bodies as they strained to see themselves. “If you start staring at the mirror too much, then you’re like displacing your head or not doing the proper upper body”, said one student, “then you’re making the lines worse in a way. You’re not dancing, you’re just watching really”. Others spoke of how their reflection could “trick” them into seeing things that weren’t actually happening. “Sometimes they make your body look a little funny”, said one student, “then you try and correct what you see in the mirror, but really you’re just overcorrecting what you’re doing cause the mirror is incorrect and wavy”. The various
142 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet distortions in the mirrors, often described as “warped” or giving a “fun-house” effect, challenged the students in trusting both what they were seeing and feeling.
While these distortions observed in the mirror were often related to the perception of body image, with students explaining how certain mirrors would make various body parts look
“huge”, “enormous” or “fat”, this wasn’t always the case. For example, one student described how when he was working on an arabesque, he looked in the mirror and the shape of his supporting leg had changed, which led him to make adjustments that were unnecessary:
I stood in the mirror and looked over, I don’t have hyperextension, but when I looked in the mirror I guess something was wrong because I had pretty big hyperextension. Like I don’t know what happened, but my leg was just like a ‘C’. It was really weird. So I thought maybe I was leaning back a bit and the mirror just over-exaggerated it, so then I went forward and then I was off balance […] and like stumbled a bit.
Just as seeing their bodies as physically bigger or smaller could have a negative impact on self esteem and body image6, so too could the realisation that their bodies didn’t look as good as they felt. “I’ll feel myself and it feels pretty good but then I’ll look in the mirror and it’s like a completely different story, and I’m like ‘oh no’”, said one student when describing what caused a bad day in class. “I felt like I was really working hard and it like felt really good but then it doesn’t look as hard as I’m working.” In this way, mirrors also helped to facilitate the students’ ability to better assess what movements were tasteful or aesthetically pleasing by not only allowing them to see their bodies but helping them to fine-tune their internal feelings that became linked to their body’s outward appearance. “Even though what I
6 Interestingly, some students expressed that the “fat mirrors”, which were often considered those you did not want to stand in front of, were actually helpful in alerting them to what needed fixing. For example, one student described how he liked being in front of a “fat mirror” because it exaggerated how his body looked which then made the corrections he needed to make appear more obvious. “Especially for my postural alignment or if something’s off it’ll really show me what’s off because it’s so warped”, he said. “And I can’t miss it, I really need to fix it. Whereas if I go to where it’s really slim then I might overlook [it].”
143 Between Moving Bodies feel may feel really nice”, said one student, “I look in the mirror and I realise that my hip is like way in the air and it doesn’t actually look like as nice as it feels”.
While the mirror allowed students to feel and see their bodies simultaneously, students often spoke of how mirrors only afforded a one-dimensional view of their bodies; and so, when movements became more complex, viewing themselves on video could offer more insight.
For example, one student described how when she looked in the mirror she struggled to see her entire body:
I usually focus on like a certain part, like my feet or my turn-out or my arms or something. But when I like step back and watch like the evaluation [video] or something I can really see how it all connects and how my whole body looks.
Another said that her teacher had told her that her backside was released when she danced,
“but I never saw it in the mirror until I watched my evaluation video, and then I realised that the whole class my butt was sticking out”. Some students spoke of the feeling being “stripped away” from their bodies when they watched themselves dance on video and of finding it unpleasant to watch their body move after the fact, unable to fix elements immediately as they could with the mirror. Yet others described how viewing a video of themselves dancing allowed them to recall what their bodies had felt like at the time and to assess whether those feelings were accurate or not. For example, one student described how he had stumbled slightly in an exercise and remembered it feeling terrible, but when he watched the video after class, he found that “actually, it wasn’t that big of a deal”. Whether a help or hinderance, this sensory feedback loop, facilitated by both mirror and screen use, is important for bodies- in-becoming, as together with physical corrections from teachers and watching others dance,
144 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet it provides valuable feedback and allows the accrual of giftedness to be monitored through the body.
Of course, ballet is rarely performed for a camera alone and never performed solely in front of a mirror. While mirrors were a constant presence in the studios, teachers often faced the students away from the mirror during class, to help them get used to feeling rather than seeing their bodies. For, as ballet teacher and dance scholar Chelsea Weidmann suggests:
For the sake of their full development as dancers, it is the teacher’s task to help students break their reliance on the mirror and realize that the mirror is a tool to aid self-awareness – not the end goal of training. (Weidmann 2018:59)
The mirrors were used often in classes I observed, when teachers asked the students to self- assess what was happening with their bodies, yet teachers often made it clear that students should use the mirror both sparingly and wisely. For example, in one class the teacher told a student that his arm was slightly too high. “When I do it and look in the mirror, invariably my arm will be too high”, the teacher said, “so you have to look at it, ask yourself ‘how does it feel?’, then find a way to recreate that when you don’t have the mirror”. In another class a teacher told her students that “the mirror won’t tell you how it feels, it will tell you how it looks”, as she encouraged them to work facing away from the mirror.
Students described how dancing away from the mirror allowed them to put their internal feeling to the test. “Sometimes dancing when we have days where we’re not looking in the mirror is kind of nice”, one student said, “because you get to feel what you are doing rather than look at it”. Others agreed that while the mirrors were important to teach them how to better feel their bodies, they had to ensure they didn’t rely on them all the time, because when they were dancing they “should be thinking like inside your body instead of looking”.
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Another student said that his body felt better when he didn’t watch himself in the mirror,
“cause I’m actually dancing like what I feel like inside and not looking at the mirror and doing everything from looking at myself on the outside”.
Considering experiences such as these might seem to speak of a separation between the way bodies look and feel. However, rather than mirrors only affording a tool through which to feel their bodies or equate how their body looked with how it felt, the mirror also blurred the boundaries of Being, where students experienced not a reflection of themselves, but an extension. Students spoke of how the mirror enabled them to experience their bodies internally and externally at the same time and how it allowed them to become their reflection.
“I don’t think about looking at myself through the mirror it’s just like, it’s not a mirror, it’s just like me dancing”, said one student. This ability to, in a sense, embody the mirror facilitated both connection and disconnection from their bodies. “I feel like it takes me out of my body”, said another student, “to look at me looking at my body is, like, so many layers away from being in my body. Why would I want to do that?”. “You just kind of leave your body and you enter that mirror, like that mirror’s you now”, said another.
That dancers experience themselves as both subject and object, as I have said, is a common observation made in the literature. Yet by examining this through an analytic of touch it becomes evident how feeling is activated by visually mediated relations between bodies (both physical and imagined) and how such gift exchanges are made sense of and made possible through felt experience. This offers an important dimension hitherto overlooked not only in the ballet literature on the role of the mirror as a training tool but in Mauss’ theory of gift exchange – that it is the feel of bodies which facilitates exchanges of corporeal and sensory
146 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet gifts and thus leads to the accrual of giftedness (of bodily knowledge and movement) and the production of the gifted body.
Misplaced mistrust
It was common for students to mention distrust of either what they saw or felt their bodies doing. Students would complain about the “fun-house” effect of the studio mirrors, where a mirrored panel of the wall might make them look too tall, short, fat or thin. Equally frustrating for some, was not being able to feel their bodies accurately, where shoulders felt balanced, legs felt straight, hips felt square or feet felt pointed, but in reality were not. Within anthropology and beyond, to at least as far back as Plato, there is much literature on how individuals distrust their senses (see Goody 2002; Howes 2008; Serres 2008), and indeed the students did speak of “not trusting” how their body looked or felt. Yet I agree with Serres’ view in being critical of the notion that our senses deceive us (see Serres 2008:253). Instead, while the students would talk of distrust or deception, this was most often directed at the content of the feedback such as what the mirror displayed or a teacher’s opinion – “you just have to always keep in the back of your head that you can’t trust the mirror”, said one student
– and not the process of exchange or perception itself.
While all students referred to needing to trust the teachers’ corrections and the motivation behind them, they sometimes struggled with this and recognised that feedback was not always helpful, such as getting contradictory corrections from different teachers, which led to feelings of disconnect with their bodies, because, as one student said, “they’re not in your body”. As mentioned earlier, teachers also acknowledged this and commonly spoke of the
147 Between Moving Bodies challenge of not being able to truly know what their students were experiencing and how this meant the process of training was often “trial and error”. “I have memories of how my teachers gave me feedback and suggestions”, said one teacher:
They wouldn’t say if it was right or wrong, they’d just say “ok, this is the gift I’m giving to you, give it a try”. Because everyone’s different, […] you give different key points to guide them. So when I apply something to them I always try my best to ask them, to make sure we are on the same page.
The students’ distrust of their own sensory experiences was always coupled with how important they felt it then was to receive other sensory feedback; where if they couldn’t trust the way their body felt, they looked at it in the mirror or relied on the teacher to watch them and offer feedback visually, aurally or tactilely, or vice versa. As one student described:
There are like three factors. It’s like how you feel, what you see in the mirror, which could be an illusion, and then there’s what the teacher says. And of course the teacher is usually right but not always, and you’re not always right with how you feel. So it’s kind of just unfortunate that the three factors are all just so subjective in their own way and they can be very misleading. So it’s hard.
In this way, I came to understand that this wasn’t distrust of the senses resulting in a privileging of cognitive processing, or even a distrust in the intercorporeal gift exchanges and training process, so much as an understanding of the importance of not relying on one sense or one exchange alone to gain knowledge or understanding about the body in the world. One teacher discussed this process with me:
A lot of times I think I start out with a verbal instruction and if I see that they’re understanding me but their muscle might, or some part of their body, is not quite able to accomplish it, I may then go in and use my hands to demonstrate the power the muscle needs to have or actually how much more they can get out of the muscle if I can do it with my hands. […] It’s a very interesting process I think, and it’s very much an experimental process between two people. Because I can’t crawl inside their body and direct it, all I have is my ability to articulate what I think the movement requires of them
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– what the sensation is. As I’m getting older I’m not able to demonstrate it as well, which is very tricky because pictures, moving pictures, are really really, as they say, way more important than words in many ways. […] So if I feel that I’m speaking to them about words or trying to get my own articulation of what I felt and what has to happen, if I don’t feel that that’s adequate enough, and because I don’t have the ability any more to really show them these things, I revert to a couple of things. I will actually get something off a video that I think would be very helpful for them, like that movement. […] I will bring that and say “see how that looks? That’s the aesthetic that you want, that’s what we’re trying to achieve”. Or I’ll use someone in class that’s getting it – and trying not to make it so it’s a favourite student or anything like that, but just to explain to them that visuals are really important [and] “because I can’t really show you these visuals any more, I want to find someone who is accomplishing it so that you can see it, to see what it looks like”. So I’ll do that, or I’ll video them with a phone or an iPad, so they can see [themselves]. Because a lot of times they think they’re feeling that they’re doing it and they get frustrated – “but she keeps asking me and she keeps harping on me about this” – but when you show them what they look like that’s a very powerful tool I find.
Thus the process of becoming gifted – the intercorporeal exchanges of corporeal, sensory and embodied gifts for ballet – involves both teachers and students drawing on all available feedback from their own body and the bodies of others. My examination of this process reveals just how complex and important the relationality between the “tangled web” (Serres
2008:270) of the senses is – relations I suggest which are made sense of through touch, our proto-sense – and that these gift exchanges operate at the pre-reflective and sensory level to facilitate the creation of the gifted body. However, as hinted at above, such exchanges are fraught with the possibility of injustice occurring, where both students and teachers cannot be certain of how the other will receive or interpret the gifts given. This is an important and fundamental point in respect of my application of Mauss’ thesis into the realm of the corporeal and powerful institutional crafting of bodies; and is one my next chapter will address in depth.
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Hearing bodies
Auditory experiences are also threads in this “web” of intercorporeal sensory exchange. A sense of hearing and ability to listen, not only to the music but also to the sounds bodies make, is integral to the training process and production of gifted ballet bodies. These relational sound experiences offer indications of bodies being shaped by and made sense of through touch, as teachers rely on their sense of hearing to evaluate the students’ receipt of their instruction and students learn that certain sounds equate to certain feelings in their bodies, resulting in movement. Students spoke to me of how music and sounds made by bodies helped them to feel. Their described experience echoes research among professional dancers who have reported that they did not hear the music but felt it through their bodies
(see Legrand and Ravn 2009:401). Students and teachers also described to me how sound helped them connect to and feel others, without coming into direct physical contact. In the same way that vision facilitated internal feeling and sensation and fostered invisible links with feeling others, thereby resulting in movement, I suggest that these sound-elicited physical feelings and connections with feeling others are vital gift exchanges between bodies which help to array bodies in space and facilitate artistic expression, movement quality and technical proficiency.
I observed that teachers would often make sounds with their voices and bodies to communicate with students during class. With their voices they would alter tone, rhythm and volume to direct movement and encourage changes in movement quality. For example, as a fondu is supposed to be done with an oozing, gooey, resisted quality, a teacher might draw the word out to describe this quality – “fonduuuuuu”. They would also create onomatopoeic words (as also identified by Wulff 1998a:61) in order to illustrate how a movement quality
150 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet might sound, even when the movement itself was silent. For example, during class a teacher used his voice to encourage a student to extend his glissade farther. “It’s not ‘eek!’ it’s ‘taa- tum’”, he said, where the shrill-sounding “eek” illustrated a short, small movement, and the more luxurious-sounding “taa-tum” reflected a long, large movement. With their bodies the teachers would clap their hands, click their fingers or stomp their feet to reinforce timing and dynamics. For example, one teacher said “listen” as he stomped his foot on the floor next to a student to emphasise the timing for the closings in battements tendu. On another occasion, a teacher slapped her own leg to emphasise the timing and strength with which the students should close their legs in battements jeté.
While students must listen to such sounds made by their teachers, students must also learn to be sensitive to the sounds made by their own bodies. Sounds like brushing feet, clapping thighs or banging heels all served as audible reminders about what movements were correct and incorrect and how their bodies felt when executing them. For example, when a student hears their heels banging on the floor as they lands heavily from a jump, this may be a signal that they are not articulating through their feet, that their eccentric control is lacking, or that their weight placement is too far back and not over the balls of the feet. This sonic event brings awareness back to how their body is feeling, to ask “what are my feet doing? where is my weight placement?”, so they might correct these elements and, in turn, produce the desired quiet landing.
Teachers not only encouraged this sensitivity to sound in the students during class but also relied on their own hearing when teaching, describing how different sounds made by the students’ bodies “told” them different things – that if they heard or didn’t hear a particular sound “then you know that something’s not right, there’s a technical aspect that’s not
151 Between Moving Bodies working”, said one teacher. For example, in one class when helping students as they worked on pirouettes à la second en dehors, the teacher said they were making too much noise with their heels at the end of each turn. “Press” he said as he encouraged the students to squeeze into their plié and not let their heels bang into the floor, “there should be no noise – we’re not drummers”. In another class, a teacher told his students during an allégro exercise, “every time you’re landing I hear [he stomps his foot] that”, he said:
That means you’re not going through your toes, you’ll damage your foot! Strength is control, strength is a feeling, strength is not [he stomps on the floor], strength is [he articulates his foot silently].
In yet another example: a teacher told her students that they weren’t coming down with both feet together during échappés relevé sur les pointe as she could hear each foot make a sound
– “da, da”, she sang as she mimicked the action of the feet with her hands.
The teachers’ and students’ need to develop the gift of sensitivity to bodily sound is similar to that experienced by Indian kathak dancers and teachers, where their bodies must be able to feel and make sense of feet slapping the floor in order to teach, learn and perform movement correctly (see Dalidowicz 2015). Anthropologist Monica Dalidowicz described how variations in sounds made by students’ feet would alert the teacher to the potential reasons why the correct sound was not being made, such as lack of strength, control or stamina, and to then provide corrections accordingly. Equally these sounds were vital for the student to pay attention to and “tune” their felt and heard experiences together:
If we consider the rather mechanistic task of slapping one’s foot upon the floor over and over, a dancer needed to learn how to hold her weight, how to initiate the movement while keeping relaxed in the hips, knees, and feet, and how to ‘tune’ these movements in accordance with the sonorous production of a ‘slap’ on the floor. The sensation of the foot on the floor and its
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vibration was inseparable from the action’s auditory expression, and dancers must continually monitor the varied sensorial input. (ibid., 845)
During my fieldwork, the importance of this relationship between sonic and felt experience became plainly evident: where bodily sounds, physical contact and internal feeling and sensation could not be undone from one another. For example, one student told me that he knew he was executing battements tendu correctly if he heard his foot brush along the floor, but the absence of the sound meant he had to focus more on articulating his foot with sufficient pressure into and along the floor:
If I don’t hear a sound, I’m not very happy with myself because I know that I’m not really using the floor. And it’s so comfy to use the floor, when you really go through them [the metatarsals] I can just feel the whole foot release and open up.
Another said that during cabrioles the clapping sound their thighs made would alert them to the fact that their legs were insufficiently rotated; that they needed to fight harder to employ the correct muscles to sustain their rotation mid jump: “they’re not supposed to clap, they’re supposed to be so turned out”. In this way, bodily sounds were made sense of by the students’ sense of touch, following my expanded definition of touch, both manifest as physical contact
(feeling their thighs connect with each other in the air, feeling their feet push into and off the floor etc.) as well as internal feeling and sensation (feeling their weight placement and centre of gravity, feeling the correct muscles activate etc.), and these sounds, when taken into bodies, ultimately resulted in movement.
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Feeling the sound of music
That sound or music enters the body is not a new concept within anthropology (see Paul
Stoller’s 1994 article on Soghay spirit possession, where the “cries” of the violin entered the bodies of spectators and mediums, as an example of this). Yet since at least Alan Merriam’s
(1964) seminal work suggesting an anthropology of music, the anthropological enquiry of music has most often considered the cultural role of music, such as the way it arrays listeners or music makers by class or gender (see Classen 1997; Garcia 2016), its affective properties
(see Qureshi 2000), or the cultural or social importance of music or hearing (see Classen
1997; Magowan 2018; Stoller 1994), while individuals’ emic sensory experiences of music have been of lesser focus7.
Within both the ballet and dance giftedness literatures, it is understood that music coupled with movement is what constitutes dance, and that musicality – considered the body’s sensitivity to and ability to express music through movement – is a key trait of gifted dancers, integral to ballet training, and needed for a successful career (see Chua 2014; Côté-Laurence
2000; Critien and Ollis 2006; Hamilton et al. 1989; Pickard 2012, 2015; Warburton 2002;
Weidmann 2018). Indeed, during my fieldwork, when asked what traits they look for in potential students, the majority of teachers indicated that musicality or a natural affinity for movement to music was a key element. However, within the literature, the dancer’s emic experiences of the relationship between music and movement has been largely overlooked, in favour of considering how bodies look when dancing to music as opposed to how they feel.
One exception to this is Legrand and Ravn, whose ethnographic research among professional dancers briefly illustrated how the dancers’ experiences of music being felt through their
7 See Miriam Cihodariu (2011) for a “rough guide” to the history and development of musical anthropology.
154 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet bodies showed how their physicality and subjectivity were made sense of by sensory perception: “the hearing subject is thus experienced as bodily through the perception of bodily sensations that music elicits” (Legrand and Ravn 2009:401). Their approach allows me to consider the ways in which music and sound elicits feelings within and between bodies, blurring boundaries between self and other – feeling which thus enables gift exchange to both operate and be experienced intercorporeally.
In the same way that physical contact from their teachers or viewing dancing bodies enabled the students to better feel their bodies, as touch and sight led to feeling, so too did the sound of music lead to internal feeling and sensation. “I like how the music sort of vibrates in your body when you do it [dance]”, said one student during a group discussion. By feeling the music through their bodies in such ways, by experiencing music become a part of them, students spoke about how it helped them to feel how to move correctly. “When you’re really feeling the music you’re connecting the music to your body”, said one student, “like you’re allowing – it’s not just your ears, you’re not just listening to it – you’re like making that connection, like you’re letting the music kind of lead your body in a way”. This sense of the music leading their movement was common; and while the dynamics and quality of the music of course played a role in this process such as fast, sharp-sounding music inspiring a fast, sharp movement quality, the students’ experience of music went beyond simply mimicking its sound with their bodies.
Students described how music enabled them to execute movements more effectively, such as jumping higher or turning faster depending on the accents and rhythm; and to feel how different steps should link together – to feel, as one student suggested, the “shape of the movement”. “It’s almost like a guideline, ‘this is how you do this movement’”, said one
155 Between Moving Bodies student. “It’s sort of like the music is behind my back using my arms to do what I need to do”, said another. Another reflected on the way the music played during an adagio exercise would help him to keep his leg in the air during a grand rond de jambe. “You sort of connect it [the leg] to the music and feel like how long it’s going to go for and you fill the music”, he said. Feeling the music in this way helped students to not only move but to know which movements to perform and played a direct role in their ability to execute movement sequences. For example, one student described how music left an “imprint” on his muscles, that on feeling the music in this way, he would then know how to move. “It’s kind of like helping me through the exercise in knowing what movement might come next”, he said.
Others expressed how the music “spoke” to them, and that by listening they could hear the movement. “It guides me. It sort of tells me what to do”, said one student, “like it [the music] gives a rhythm and then that rhythm sort of speaks the word tendu or plié to me”. Students also expressed how this knowledge resided in their bodies and not their brains and that the required movement could sometimes only be accessed through music. As one student described:
[During my evaluation one year] we had a jeté [exercise combination] in the centre and I was trying to think what it was to try to go over it but I couldn’t remember it at all. So then I went on stage and the music started and it all came back. So I think now I just have to rely on my body because my brain thinks I don’t know it but my body actually knows what’s going on.
These experiences echo Wulff’s observations of professional dancers (1998a:103-104) and how learned movement could be “called up by the music” (2006:132). However, considered sensorially, and similar to hearing bodily sounds, the students’ reported experiences of music further reveal the transformative quality of music as it enters their bodies, touches their muscles, ligaments, tendons and bones, and produces particular ways of moving.
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But music and bodily sounds didn’t only lead to individual movement, but aided movement as a group. Students spoke of how music and the sounds other bodies made allowed them to dance together with others, to move together in a group as if one person. While this might be seen as the result of rhythm and timing helping them to move at the same time on the same counts, feeling the togetherness and synchronisation of sound and movement also enabled them to feel each other. “It helps like everybody stay together”, said one student, “so they’re not going at different times, everybody is doing the same timing”. Another student spoke of how being musical together as a group was often more enjoyable than dancing musically by themselves:
I really love if we’re all like really on time and all being like musical together, then that can be even more fulfilling than if we’re doing like a solo and we’re like on with the music. But when there’s like a large group and everyone’s being super musical I feel like you can even have more of an impact.
Students described how when dancing in formation with others, either in the studio or on stage, they would often rely on sounds to alert them to where other dancers were when they were out of sight. These sounds signalled to them that they were in the correct position, executing the correct steps or moving at the correct time. “When you’re stepping down you hear everyone’s foot step together, you can just sense that we’re all together”, said one student, “but sometimes when you hear people’s shoes hitting the floor at different times you know, you just get a good sense of everyone”. Sounds entered their bodies, allowing dancers to feel each other – other feeling moving bodies – without coming into direct contact with those others. Hearing the nuances of the music, the subtle squeak of pointe shoes, the soft thud of others landing from jumps, the hurry of running feet or the heavy breathing of their
157 Between Moving Bodies peers, music and sounds made by other bodies became integral to learning how to dance as part of a group, a vital skill for a gifted ballet body to learn.
Just as described earlier in respect of taste and vision, sound can also elicit shared responses with non-dancing yet feeling others. Students described how sound connected them to the audience during a performance as music inspired their movement, which in turn moved other people.
We’re taking that extra step to put that feeling that we get, that makes us want to move, to then make another feeling that will move other people.
Experiences such as this reflect ethnomusicologist Regula Qureshi’s work on how we experience music, where “the physical sensation of sound not only activates feeling, it also activates links with others who feel” (Qureshi 2000:810).
Students described their shared experience with the audience as a “link” that enabled them to feel. “It’s more you feeling them”, one student said. “It’s something about the energy with every audience”, said another. They also described how feeling the music linked them to the musician playing the music, such as the way in which the musician’s fingers would touch the piano keys determined how a note was played – its accent – which in turn determined how they felt in their own bodies when dancing:
The pianists here are also just so tremendous, they know how they should play a note, like how they should accent their fingers on the keys to make us want to do something. Like they’ll hit those high notes when we’re supposed to be at the top of a jump.
Conversely, when there was a disconnect between musician and dancer it didn’t feel right.
“Because when it’s off you can feel it so much in your body”, said one student. Students
158 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet described this relationship with the musician as a “two-way” communication, where they worked together in tandem to produce movement:
So like the musician is putting a lot of feeling into their music and then we can like sense that, then we can put a lot of feeling into our dancing.
Equally, a three-way relationship between dancer, viewer (whether teacher or audience) and musician was also important for the students who could feel the impact of the collaboration through their bodies. “You are all kind of reaching whatever emotional peak or whatever point that’s trying to be made through the whole piece, everyone’s reaching that together”, said one student. “It’s not really ‘we’re presenting it, you’re seeing’, everyone is like, if it’s a good performance, everyone is invested equally.”
The students’ and teachers’ experiences of tuning into other bodies with the assistance of a shared sonic event echoes Alfred Schütz’s (1951) ideas about the sociality of music. In his study he suggested that any shared performance experience, both with other performers such as dancing or making music together or those between audience and performer, is a “mutual tuning-in relationship” (Schütz 1951:79) where the distinctions between and experiences of bodies blend to become not ‘you’ or ‘I', but ‘we’ as bodies attend to both the inner (emotion, feeling etc.) and outer (facial expression, movement, posture etc.) experiences of the other’s.
Just as Shantel Ehrenberg (2010) suggested the dancer-mirror feedback loop, where vision and feeling becomes intertwined and integral to the production of both movement and gifted ballet bodies, similarly, a sensitivity to sound, to other bodies and to internal sensations becomes vital to the social production of movement and in turn the production of giftedness, where ballet bodies must be responsive to and communicate in intercorporeal gift exchanges with other moving, feeling, hearing, seeing bodies.
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Considering reciprocity
Through the training process, students learn that certain sights, sounds and even tastes, equate to certain feelings in their bodies; where, for example, hearing their heels bang on the floor enables them to feel that their weight placement is incorrectly backwards; seeing their elbows droop in second position allows them to feel which muscles are not engaged; or, by feeling the tastefulness of their own movement. These images, sounds and tastes come to reside in the student’s body itself, as feelings, noises and visual cues provide reminders or alert them to what their body is doing, enabling them to better feel what is happening inside their bodies.
In response, teachers too rely on their senses to assess if the students are receiving the gifts of their instruction. Analysing multisensory experiences in this way, to consider them to be made sense of through touch – and expanding a definition of touch to incorporate physical contact, internal sensations and feeling, and invisible connection with others in space, from which movement cannot be undone – allows me to illustrate how sensory reciprocity and an openness to other bodies is central to the process of creating gifted bodies.
In exploring these relations within and between bodies, as I have just done – relations which clearly operate at the level of sensibility – it is apparent that boundaries become blurred between inside and out, self and other, and body and self. Thus, this chapter offers an important corrective to the dominant mode of analysing the look of bodies in both the giftedness and ballet literatures. In so doing, I have shown the richness of the accessible ethnographic data when taking a sensory approach distinct from vision, as students gain an understanding of their own development and experience becoming gifted and teachers make judgements about dancing bodies through these multisensory intercorporeal relations. Yet this
160 Chapter 4: Making sense of ballet investigation also leads me to think about what other senses besides the visual are critical to how bodies experience institutional power, and how they participate in its relations.
Such relations as I have described in this chapter may indeed appear to be reciprocal; where each body equally informs the other as part of the process of sensory exchange – an exchange which results in the gifted body. However, this process of generosity crafts not only student bodies, but also teaching bodies, and also distinguishes between those student bodies which are capable of balletic giftedness and those which are not – both necessarily hierarchical relations. As such, Diprose’s suggestion that such relations reproduce and are in fact enabled by difference is evident: that “even within the pretense of equality, […] the self, or the complex of selves rendered equal, maintains itself by marginalizing others deemed inappropriate to the system” (Diprose 2002:33). Exploring this in my next chapter will enable me to return to the second element of Diprose’s critique of Mauss as discussed in Chapter 1 – that neglecting the feeling body also prevents an understanding of the powerful injustices that not only occur in, but make possible, the process of gift exchanges between bodies.
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Chapter 5: Powerful gifting
In this chapter, I examine the operations of power which enable the gifts I have just described to be given, received and repaid, and how these operations facilitate the creation of bodies, identity and difference, and the institution. In so doing, it will become apparent that all relations within the institution, not only those overt or visible, harbour the potential for both generosity and injustice, as gift exchanges succeed or fail based on a body’s willingness or ability to hold itself open to others.
In addressing both Diprose’s critique of Mauss’ theory of gift exchange and my own criticisms of the existing literature on ballet bodies as missing the experiences and processes of bodies becoming, I have turned my attention towards the institutionalised training of gifted ballet bodies. As I have so far suggested, a Bourdieusian theoretical framework of habitus can be readily applied to acknowledge that a ballet dancer acquires the ballet habitus – defined by both the skill to learn, refine and reproduce complex movement sequences and the dancer’s identity and membership to the ballet world – through a training process (see Pickard 2012,
2013, 2015). For Bourdieu (1977), the formation of habitus was not just experiential but also connected to power, because it guided thinking and behaviour, resulting in the creation and maintenance of social hierarchies, such as a student learning how to behave and relate to both teachers and peers within the school. Pickard (2012, 2013, 2015) offers this connection to power as a way to somewhat reconcile her Bourdieusian approach with Green’s (2002)
Foucauldian analysis of ballet training, although I argue that there are elements of Bourdieu’s theory that also align with a Maussian approach.
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For instance, Bourdieu’s theory of practice and his notion of habitus emerged from his analysis of gifts and their exchange: he determined that generosity is made possible not by individual intent or consciousness but because of habitus, a disposition which individuals acquire through being taught “or through early and prolonged exposure to social worlds in which it is the undisputed law of behaviour” (Bourdieu 1997:233). This could be understood in much the same way as Mauss considers the power of gift exchange in its creation of social identities, hierarchies and bonds between bodies and groups. For Mauss, it is these social worlds that enable the exchange of gifts, as groups “carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by obligations” (Mauss 1954:3); and while the capital or prestige accrued by such exchanges may reside with an individual, crafting both individual and collective identity in the process, it is the group that enables them.
A Bourdeisian analysis of ballet training may show that the students accrue various types of capital as their bodies are shaped into balletic form and that the structure of training enables the creation of identity and balletic disposition – an understanding of which goes a long way to explaining the powerful and perhaps agentive role of the body in the training process.
However, I argue that Mauss’ theory of gift exchange allows me to examine how this currency cycles between bodies within the social group and the institution, and the powerful ability of these relations to shape identity, belonging and the accrual of giftedness.
As I have previously established these are corporeal and sensory gifts – of ways of moving, holding, working and feeling the body and its parts. I have described these gifts exchanged between moving bodies in the training of ballet and how they are made sense of by both the teachers’ and students’ ability to feel, recognising, after Diprose, that for gifts to actually be gifts they must indeed operate at the sensory level. Applying a sensory analysis based on
163 Between Moving Bodies touch has allowed me to access these experiences and describe the process by which bodily information and sensory gifts (of muscles, movement and feeling) are exchanged via body-to- body relations. This is an approach distinct from existing analyses of ballet and ballet training which have maintained that it is through vision, the look of bodies, that ballet becomes embodied. However, framing the training of ballet as a social economy based on the body-to- body exchange of corporeal gifts, and extending Mauss’ thesis into the corporeal and sensory after Diprose, enables these intercoproreal relations to take precedence over the gifts themselves.
In other words, it is not what is given or received, the gifts themselves, which ultimately matter in this analysis, for these simply determine what kind of gifted body is produced. For example, where balletic gifts, such as those I have been describing, craft ballet bodies, so too would military gifts (of marksmanship, battlefield tactics or methods of engagement) craft military bodies; academic gifts (of mathematics, writing or reading) craft academic bodies; or even ice hockey gifts (of skating, puck handling or shooting) craft ice hockey bodies etc. If I am to examine how the body becomes gifted, it is important to analyse the relations and power that enable the gifts to be given, received and reciprocated. As Diprose shows, it is the intersubjectivity of carnal bodies, their intercorporeality, which is the basis of social power and not its results (Diprose 2002:106). In attending to the intercorporeal, intersensory relationships and thus the identities established between bodies in the cycle of gift, receipt and counter-gift, I propose that such operations of power become evident.
To do so, I continue to place touch at the heart of my approach. I have already brought a sensory approach to Mauss’ thesis on gift exchange, to examine the dancers’ felt experiences of becoming gifted and have asked how a gifted body becomes. I have argued that touch is
164 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting the primary way in which the ballet body becomes as such; it is the relations of touch with oneself, with other dancers, with teachers, with surfaces, that create and sustain the ballet body. Accordingly, I have applied this touching analysis to explore multisensory experiences of student and teaching bodies during training. My analysis has yielded insights into relations both between and within bodies, and how they are experienced through the body’s capacity to feel. By framing touch as the primary sense by which all other sensory information is taken into and made sense of by bodies, I have illustrated how it is through feeling – of feeling bodily sounds, feeling music, feeling the tastefulness of movement, feeling internal sensations, feeling their body in space, and feeling how their bodies look – that students make sense of their progress in attaining giftedness. In addition, understanding touch in such a way has enabled me to show how this may also extend to a relationality between bodies – for what is touched simultaneously touches – as the students and teachers work to interpret the bodies and felt experiences of others. This is an understanding for which I have argued Mauss’ thesis, as it stands, does not allow.
In ignoring the feeling body, Mauss overlooks the pre-reflective basis for generosity – that exchanges are made and made sense of by and between sensing bodies. This oversight prevents an understanding of the body-to-body reciprocity needed in order for gifts to cycle and thus bodies and identities to form. To continue to address this limitation, I now take my exploration a step further, to illustrate how these processes and sensory relations are made possible through operations of power. In this chapter, I continue to build on Manning’s (2006) examination of the political nature of touch. I illustrate how touch – which she shows is not a
‘thing’ which can belong to or be given to another (Manning 2006:xiii) – may be conceptualised in the same way that Foucault (1977, 1994) understands power to not operate
165 Between Moving Bodies as a ‘thing’ possessed or wielded by bodies. Instead, that the power of touch comes from its relationality, that it is defuse and exercised and experienced through feeling bodies, will offer an important understanding to the power of gift exchange to craft bodies and further moves
Mauss’ thesis into the corporeal world.
I argue that the powerful relations that craft bodies and form the basis of the institution cannot be understood through a visual exploration or the traditional surveillance of bodies.
Indeed, if we do get caught up in attending to how domination and hierarchy looks – the violent spectacular – we are blinded to the subtleties of intercorporeal relations, relations which are being continually negotiated through the very bodies they engage. After Foucault
(1977, 1994), we can quite easily attend to the look of power as it marks and trains bodies; but I show how touch provides another way to understand institutional power and its relations, where the gifted body and the institution itself are made possible through felt exchanges. In the case of ballet training, the result of these powerful relations is the material ballet body – a body both crafted through the bodies of others and yet made distinct from them – and the process of becoming is experienced inside and between bodies through their capacity to feel.
Through this chapter’s investigation, I show how generosity and an openness to other bodies
– of living in ambiguity – becomes central to how power is negotiated and gifted bodies become as they participate in their own creation. By proposing this touching analysis of power, I offer a new perspective through which to consider gift exchange, our understanding of the institutional crafting of bodies, and how bodies experience and relate to these powerful processes that shape them.
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Bodies of the past
In Chapter 3, I suggested that it was the temporal dimension of the training process – the forgetting of gifts and delay in their return, and of distance within the self – that allowed balletic gifts to be given and the gifted body itself to transform. However, this process is not only defined by the future outcomes of giftedness on the body, but also by the past and the bodies which once possessed such gifts. In fact, as Mauss shows, it is the historical legacy of the gifts which give them the power to both cycle between and transform bodies (Mauss
1954:43).
Ballet is taught person-to-person, with a more than 400-year tradition of its embodied and bodily knowledge being passed from teacher to student down the generations. Tracing the pedagogical lineage of any ballet school has been likened to examining a complex family tree
“in which dancers, teachers and choreographers all play a part” (Fournier 2018) and NBS is no different. During my year at NBS, roughly half the professional ballet program full-time teaching staff had been students at the school prior to their professional dance and teaching careers; and all were either graduates of the school’s in-house teacher training program or had been trained as a teacher by the school’s founding principal prior to the establishment of the formalised program. Because of this, NBS can boast a continuous 60-year pedagogical lineage from which to ground the identity of the school and the quality of training. However, the school’s pedagogical lineage does not only begin with its formation in 1959. Like the majority of professional ballet schools around the world, this lineage can be traced directly back to the reign of French King Louis XIV whose 1661 establishment of the Académie
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Royale de Danse8 – the Western world’s first dance institution – marked the beginning of classical ballet as we know it today (see Homans 2010 for a detailed history of the evolution and global spread of classical ballet).
From the court of Louis XIV to NBS’ founding principal, Betty Oliphant (by way of the
French, Danish and Russian schools of training), and to the school’s current artistic staff (who are able to trace a more recent and global ballet lineage comprised of teachers, dancers and choreographers they worked alongside and learnt from in their professional dance careers), to today’s students at NBS, these students are learning the balletic techniques du corps that have been passed down, person to person, body to body, spanning continents, balletic styles and generations. As ballet has no universal written texts9 and because its traditions are physical and oral, as dancer-turned-historian Jennifer Homans has described, “it is held instead in the bodies of dancers” (Homans 2010:xix) to be, quite literally, handed to others.
Through a Maussian lens, I can consider how this genealogical characteristic of ballet training imbues the handed-down knowledge with power – what Mauss calls “the magical legacy of the people” (Mauss 1954:42) – as teachers pass on what their teachers taught them and students accept these precious gifts that they will eventually also pass on in time. Just as
Mauss maintains that the power in “these precious family articles” is conceived as such by all who possess, receive and repay them (ibid.), the students I spoke to were aware of how important and valuable this legacy was in their pursuit of giftedness. As one student told me:
8 Louis XIV’s Royal Academy of Dance ceased to exist in 1789 with the French Revolution. As a result, the Paris Opera Ballet School, established in 1713, remains the oldest surviving ballet training academy in the world.
9 There have been various forms of notating dance since the 1400s, and the first ballet- specific notation system was created in the court of Louis XIV. However, none have maintained currency nor been put to universal use (see Foster 1996:7; Guest 1989; Homans 2010:xix; Wulff 1998a:153).
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“what the teachers are bestowing upon you is like, like think back, it’s probably like generations of like a little morsel of knowledge, you know. They’re like ‘take it!’”.
This bestowal of generational knowledge contributed to the students’ trust in their teachers’ approaches, instilling loyalty and defining belonging to the NBS family. “We’ve been given this base that has been shown to work through like years, like years of all these other dancers who’ve become like stars and we’ve seen that that base works”, said another student:
So we put that base on our bodies, but it’s going to be different for everyone in the way that that base works because [another student] may have longer legs than me so that’s going to be different for extensions or even tendus, but then I may have longer arms than her or a shorter torso, like just like different things where we have to find how this base like works for our own bodies.
It is this power in the embodied knowledge itself, of these embodied “physical memories” (Homans 2010:xix), that can be considered to confer privilege on the receiver and at the same time a moral obligation to the giver.
Obligation and identity
I have suggested that ballet training might be usefully conceptualised in terms of a series of intercorporeal historical gift exchanges, of sensory and corporeal knowledge, that manifest, ultimately, in the gifted body – a body that is the result of formalised and regularised exchanges in which a gift for ballet is realised and embodied in a gifted dancing body over time. Yet Weidmann suggests that “the idea that the teacher gives information and the student receives and understands it is appealingly simple, but the classroom reality is more complex”, where if the student is to succeed, they have an obligation to take an active role in their own
169 Between Moving Bodies training (Weidmann 2018:56-57). I suggest that when considered through a Maussian lens, such an obligation born of intercorporeal and senso-historical gift exchanges comes to reside in the body itself, where the bodily gifts of knowledge, skill, training – of increased techniques du corps – have become embodied.
The students must demonstrate through their bodies that they have accepted the gifts to prove that they belong at the school – to prove they are worthy of gifts given and the prestige of becoming gifted. Such evidences are examined through the bodies of their teachers, an ongoing process of sensory evaluation I described in the previous chapters. Failure to make a return over time, because of unwillingness or inability, increases the risk of dismissal from the institution and the training process as students submit to ongoing evaluation and yearly re-acceptance processes. Students are therefore aware that if they are to avoid this fate – the loss of prestige which the embodied gifts confer and exclusion from the social group and institution – they must willingly participate in the cycle of receiving and repaying gifts, where teachers parcel out gifts depending on their ability to reciprocate. For example, as one student described:
When I’m having a good day then the teacher is correcting me lots and is like just giving me more and more to work on. Like they can see that you’re improving if they keep giving you more corrections. But if they just leave you with one correction, […] if they don’t come back and it’s just like one correction, then it’s kind of like they’re like “oh you haven’t really improved on that correction so I can’t really give you more”.
Another student spoke of needing to ensure that the teacher understood they were accepting the gifts given, especially when the teacher accused other students of not responding to training. “[I] take that opportunity to, like, kind of show off”, she said, “because I want to show her that I’m working and that I’m trying to do well”.
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Similarly to the broader giftedness literature, as detailed in Chapter 1, where it is recognised that to achieve success students must be willing to participate in their own development (see
Critien and Ollis 2006; Garces-Bascal et al. 2011; Hutchinson et al. 2013; Sanchez et a. 2013;
Subotnik et al. 2011; Walker et a. 2010; Warburton 2002), students are therefore obligated to actively participate in this gifting cycle with their teachers – knowing that if they do not they run the risk of not progressing, being excluded from the school and not becoming a gifted ballet body.
Not all bodies are the same
Yet not all ballet bodies are created equal and indeed not all professional ballet institutions craft the same kind of ballet body (see Morris 2003). Some craft graduates specifically for their own national or state company. Others, like NBS, craft dancers able to be marketed to a broad selection of the world’s top companies. So, attending NBS is not the only way for a student to become gifted. Indeed, some students who are asked or choose to leave the school before graduation, go on to join other schools and move on to professional dance careers – becoming gifted through exchange relations with other bodies.
Equally, NBS does not craft one type of gifted body. I have suggested that the core purpose of the professional ballet institution is to craft bodies capable of joining these top companies, which aligns with NBS’s marketing materials. However, in recognising that not all graduates will go on to forge careers in dance and that those that do will have careers of varying lengths and so must eventually transition into other post-dance careers, the school also aims to prepare students for “life-long learning and post-secondary education” (Canada’s National
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Ballet School 2017:33). Teachers spoke about not only fostering “versatile” dancers capable of joining top companies, but of crafting individuals able to contribute in any field of endeavour (dance or otherwise). In asking herself “what type of tools are they going to leave with?”, one teacher said: “I think more than anything else it’s being true to themselves and finding their voice with a commitment to using their voice responsibly, creatively and effectively”. The gifted bodies created by the obligation which arises from the institutionalised senso-historical gift exchange are thus necessarily different from each other.
Indeed, many students that successfully graduate from NBS move on to non-dance fields. Of the 15 Grade 12 students that graduated during my time at the school, two decided to take up places at university in non-dance programs; five accepted full or apprentice contracts with leading companies around the world; and, the remaining eight chose to continue their studies in the post-secondary program at NBS or at other professional ballet schools. However, regardless of which career path its graduates take, NBS (although perhaps not outwardly acknowledged) is also committed to crafting a gifted body capable of giving back to the school, a body that will represent NBS and act as ambassador in the outside world – as one teacher said, “they are not just offshoots of NBS, but they’re NBS embodied in values”. This is all part of Mauss’ notion of the gift, where “the thing given is not inert”, instead:
It is alive and often personified, and strives to bring to its original clan and homeland some equivalent to take its place. (Mauss 1954:10)
In other words, the gifted body will always seek to “give back” its accrued prestige or value to the institution, to seek “a return to the place of its birth” (Diprose 2002:6). Not only do former graduates return gifts of prestige to NBS through their dance careers, others contribute to the broader NBS family and perception of the school as a global leader of holistic dance
172 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting education through their careers as choreographers, educators, researchers, academics, health professionals, artists, business owners and managers, to name a few. Many also go on to either raise children who are accepted into NBS or to give back to the school through alumni events, student mentoring and support, guest speaking, event assistance, or even as employees in artistic, administration or allied roles. In doing so, the generational gift exchange, and with it the formation of both gifted bodies and social bond, is perpetuated.
Bodies are also institution making
Mauss’ work illustrates how gift exchange creates a “bond between persons” (Mauss
1954:10) and in turn how such bonds form the basis of institutions, such as clan, tribe or marriage. Institutions may then be understood through not only the types of bodily relations and social bonds they create but also through those which make the institution itself possible.
Family is seen as an institution by Margaret Lyon and Jack Barbalet (1994) in the same way that the professional ballet school would be considered an institution in a Foucauldian sense.
However, Lyon and Barbalet move beyond a Foucauldian analysis as they show that the body is not simply a passive or docile object on which external agency is inflicted by social processes, but that it is also (and at the same time) an agent in its own social construction
(Lyon and Barbalet 1994:48).
By giving bodies social agency, while not denying that bodies are both subject to and of social power, Lyon and Barbalet show how bodies work individually and collectively to create order within the context of the family. Where a Foucauldian institution such as school, hospital or prison, is defined by the dispersal of bodily relations within it (Foucault
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1977:202), Lyon and Barbalet argue that the family institution is also comprised of “fleshy” relations, where “the same men and women sleep in the same beds and touch the same bodies, that the same children are kissed, spanked and fed” (Collins 1981:995, in Lyon and
Barbalet 1994:56). The means by which familial bodies experience their relatedness and become family thus also resides at the level of sensibility.
Lyon and Barbalet’s understandings have much to offer my examination of the balletic institution – so often referred to by teachers, students, parents and staff as the “ballet family”.
Students often spoke about being part of this family, a sense of belonging that on the one hand was actively propagated by the institution in student meetings and assemblies, and on the other appeared to be genuinely felt by students10 as a product of their collective giftedness. Students described how everyone at NBS “spoke the same language” and how it was through shared felt experience that these institutional bonds developed. For example, during a group discussion one student described how training “with people who, like, feel what you feel too” helped her to feel part of the community. In response, another student said:
“you can relate to other people really easy because they’re in the same environment and they’re kind of going through the same things as you. So I think that really brings us together”. In another discussion a student described how different his experience was with his ballet family compared to when he was with his “real” family:
Cause when I’m home, like when I wasn’t here, when I was dancing at my old studio and living at home, my Mum, like if I had an injury or something, she’d be like “go take the garbage out” and I’d be like “I can’t, like I need to rest” and she like wouldn’t understand that. But here they like understand everything, everyone understands like the life of a dancer I guess.
10 The theme selected by students for the 2015/16 Student Year Book was ‘Family’ and passages within it reflect this sense of togetherness and belonging.
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Considered more broadly, the shared experiences of the training process – the intercorporeal senso-historical gift exchanges – therefore enable the institution and institutional identity, where gifted bodies experience themselves both within and belonging to the institution. For
Lyon and Barbalet, this is all possible because individuals experience themselves both “in and as their bodies” (Lyon and Barbalet 1994:54, original emphasis) and this joining of body and self is achieved through the embodiment of emotion:
Emotion activates distinct dispositions, postures and movements which are not only attitudinal but also physical, involving the way in which individual bodies together with others articulate a common purpose, design, or order. (ibid., 48)
Similar to the way Diprose suggests that bodies are both of their physicality and affectivity as mentioned above, Lyon and Barbalet consider emotion to be how experience, including the senses, is evaluated, but that we must first experience sensations through our body before we can evaluate them (ibid., 57). Therefore feeling, both affective and haptic, given it is through the haptic system that bodies gain affective information about themselves and the environment (see Gibson 1962:97), is fundamental to the creation of gifted bodies. I suggest, then, that institutional senso-historical relations not only create feeling within bodies, crafting identity, belonging and gifted bodies, but are also experienced by the gifted bodies’ ability to feel. Such a realisation goes a long way to understanding what Diprose means when she suggests that gift exchange and corporeal generosity operates at the “level of sensibility” (Diprose 2002:9).
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The problematic gift of identity
For Mauss, the especial power of the gift to make and maintain social bonds arises from its spiritual status: the transfer of a possession – or in the case at hand, skill, knowledge or capacity – is part of the personhood of the giver (Mauss 1954:44-45). In this way, corporeal transactions give the identities of ballet students and of teachers in their very exchange, where “what is constituted through the gift is the social identity of each in relation to the other” (Diprose 2002:6). The physical feeling body is also given in such exchanges as “the person is her or his body” (ibid., 117) and so identity and body cannot be undone from one another. This is especially true of ballet training where the gifts exchanged belong to bodies.
It is clear from the genealogical nature of the ballet training process how gifts given and received might contain “part of one’s nature and substance” (Mauss 1954:10) – of both body and identity – as teachers pass on the gifts they have previously received in their own intergenerational and intercorporeal exchanges with past teachers, and students claim and embody the value of gifts born from such senso-historical training.
I consider that as teachers move to give such gifts that once belonged to others to bodies of the next generation, they transform from student to teacher in the very exchange. Equally, I propose that in receiving the gifts of senso-historical training, the new body claims identity as student, poised to transform from the exchanges with their teachers, made expert by their own previous gift exchanges. In this moment, as both bodies claim value and prestige through the giving and receipt of gifts with another, their relationship and obligation towards each other – the social bond – is formed, perpetuating the exchange (Mauss 1954:41-43; Diprose 2002:6).
Acknowledging that the cycle of exchange constitutes identity and social bonds, I now return to another important critique of Mauss’ thesis: he overlooks that in order for a gift to be given
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(and thus identity and belonging to be forged) that something has to have already been taken from others – that relations have already been established (Diprose 2002:4-8; Schrift
1997:10). For Derrida, the impossibility of generosity – the aporia of the gift – is such that as soon as a gift is given, bodies become entwined in an economy, a cycle, of obligatory exchange (Derrida 1992:24), which, as Diprose points out, at its heart, is not generous
(Diprose 2002:2-4). As the self is constituted in the present by an exchange with another and thus made different from the other, as soon as “self-present identity […] is claimed, something has been taken from the other without acknowledgment of the accompanying debt to the other incurred” (ibid., 8). In fact, Derrida suggests that if a gift is to be given it must happen before any claim to the self, which of course is its impossibility as the self is constituted by the exchange:
That is why, if there is gift, it cannot take place between two subjects exchanging objects, things, or symbols. The question of the gift should therefore seek its place before any relation to the subject, before any conscious or unconscious relation to self of the subject. (Derrida 1992:24)
While I am not concerned in this thesis with whether generosity is possible or not, it is
Diprose’s discussion about how the impossibility of generosity (as outlined by Derrida) might be overcome that is of interest to me – that if gifts are only made possible before self-present identity is claimed, then they must operate at the pre-reflective and sensory level (Diprose
2002:9). It is this which allows me to consider how gift exchange not only produces identity and belonging but also difference, and how this might operate within the balletic institution.
That the self can only exist or be assessed if it is in relation to the other, for Diprose, is possible because:
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body identity is never individual: it is fundamentally intersubjective, based on the nonvolitional generosity of intercorporeality and fashioned with reference to the social and familial situation. Further, it is because the body is constituted in relation to others that it is ambiguous, opened to the world and to others, and so can act at all. (Diprose 2002:68-69)
The ambiguity Diprose refers to here is that although the self (both body and identity) operates through another, each remains separate through a feeling of difference – I am constituted through you, which involves a sense of the difference between us (ibid., 117-18).
Thus, understanding the other’s experience is never actually possible. However, Diprose suggests that there is no need to reconcile such ambiguity, but to instead acknowledge that the relation is built on corporeal generosity – an openness of bodies towards the other “that not only precedes and establishes communal relations but constitutes the self as open to otherness” (ibid., 4).
Diprose illustrates the possibility of this kind of sensory generosity through an examination of the clinical encounter: where in order to attempt to understand the experience of a different body to aid treatment and diagnosis, “the clinician’s body must have already lived through that experience, or must at least be open to it” (ibid., 119). Such an openness is also evident in ballet training, where teachers draw on their own past experiences of dancing to help them better understand how the student may or may not be interpreting and experiencing the balletic gifts given.
As one teacher explained: “I had a long career, I danced [for] a long time, and I don’t do ballet anymore of course but sometimes when I demonstrate something I still feel it […] it’s still inside”. Their previous experience enables teachers to better understand what the students’ bodies might be experiencing. In another example, a teacher said that because she herself had hyperextended legs, it was easier for her to help a student who, because of their
178 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting hyperextension, was having a hard time standing without pushing backwards through the knee. “I am very comfortable explaining it to the student and I can feel with my body how to do it”, she said. But this also meant that she found it difficult to help students who had challenges that she hadn’t experienced:
I didn’t have any problem with my upper body. […] Many people have winging scapula but I didn’t have that. I never had a problem with the bone sticking out, so actually I cannot feel why they’re doing this – “why are they lifting their shoulder? why are they having trouble?” – I cannot feel [it].
That teachers could not feel what was happening inside the bodies of students but needed to be open to trying to relate to and understand the students’ felt experiences as best they could in order to teach, was an ongoing challenge when engaging in bodily knowledge exchanges with the students. “Living in ambiguity is part of it too, understanding that even though it feels like this to me that it doesn’t necessarily feel like that to them”, said one teacher:
So I do rely on that [how my body felt] in the sense that that’s where I might start, but I’m certainly open to the idea that they’ll say it doesn’t feel like that at all and have a different way of defining it. And really the only thing that matters is that it works for them.
In this way, the gifted ballet body is, by virtue of the senso-historical nature of the training process, crafted through an interlacing of other bodies and their experiences, but in so doing, is necessarily made separate from them.
As teachers maintained an openness and attempted to understand the students’ experiences and bodies, despite ambiguity, this also meant that the teachers too were learning from each interaction and exchange. As one teacher told their students during class: “I’ve been in the ballet world for a hundred-billion years and I’m still learning”. This need to continually learn from each exchange and each new body was a process another teacher explained to me:
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I have really good muscle twitch and I went to the cramping state so fast because my muscles contracted so strongly. I’m super sensitive in every way. So when I have to deal with people who don’t have that type of muscle or sensitivity, who need to repeat a movement a hundred times before they ever get to that cramping stage, it’s harder for me to understand. It’s taken me a while to know how to teach the different types of bodies that aren’t like mine. To know that “ok, well this type of person needs four repetitions before they really feel their muscles contracting and this one may need, seriously, a hundred relevés before they maybe feel a little bit crampy”. So that’s how it’s sometimes quite difficult for me to relate to all different types of bodies. What I feel and what they feel can be vastly different, and that’s where I have to really be able to go back and forth between different body types. […] I think we’re all individuals and I think the wonderful art of teaching is to be able to be empathetic to different people that aren’t like you, so you can help them be their best – not be like you.
While traditionally “ballet classrooms have been far more likely to contain a master- apprentice relationship than one of co-learners” (Weidmann 2018:56), the examples above illustrate how easily such hierarchies may fluctuate, where the teacher becomes the student and student becomes the teacher, each learning from the other. Equally, they show that bodies harbour a kind of sensory simpatico, in which felt and embodied balletic gifts can be drawn on to connect with and understand others, long after they become part of the dancing body.
Many dancers-turned-scholars mention how ballet is still felt in their bodies years after their last class (see Wulff 1998a:1; Novack 1993:36). This has also been observed in professional dancers, where “dance is for ever inscribed in their bodies” (Wulff 1998a:6), a sensual recall in which the “feel of the movement” can be brought back (Homans 2010:xix). Such a felt reference was certainly evident among teachers, as illustrated above. However, I suggest further that such embodied sympathy is a vital element of gift exchange, which is predicated on bodies collectively holding themselves open to the possibility of knowing and learning from others. In fact, it is because of this ability to learn from and understand another’s body that Diprose suggests it is possible to move past Derrida’s problematic of the gift.
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In a state of potential becoming
Diprose considers that as gifting involves giving part of one’s self to another, then bodies are necessarily always in formation, thus a final state of Being is never reached. For Diprose, bodies are never finished but are forever involved in a continual crafting made possible through intercorporeal relations and the giving of oneself to another:
Corporeal generosity is a writing in blood that says this body carries a trace of the other, so this body and its cultural expression are not finished, and neither you nor I have the final word. (Diprose 2002:195)
Manning also shows how such relational exchanges facilitate this sensory feedback loop between moving bodies, which in turn enable their continual creation – “I reach out to touch you in order to invent a relation that will, in turn, invent me” (Manning 2006:xv). Bodies thus are not static beings but are ontogenetic, “always in genesis, in a state of potential becoming” (ibid., xxi). To truly get at the nuances of bodies-in-becoming, both Manning (see also 2014) and Diprose argue for bodies to be felt in a state of continual movement.
Indeed, ballet training emphasises this – that a body is never finished and what it can do can always be worked on and improved. Having a continual goal of striving to improve their body’s capabilities, was a regular theme when I spoke to students. “You can always be better, things can always improve”, said one student. “I always love that there is no end”, said another, “like you can’t just say ‘oh, I’ve, you know, I have 180-degree turn-out so my turn- out is perfect’:
Like I don’t think you can have 180 degrees of turn-out in everything you do. […] There’s always something to work on and always something to improve and I just love finding something else every day and working on things that I need to work on.
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Students often referred to this as a “journey”, as a process of becoming. “It’s just that constant like re-discovery and refining”, said one student, “it takes a lot to constantly be not settling in the way that you move but always trying to see if there’s something more”. As I described in my previous chapter, this continual progression was made sense of through their bodies and their ability to feel, as teachers encouraged students to consider what they could do as a “work in progress”. “I also like the physical aspect and like pushing yourself to your limits each day”, said one student, “so you think that you can’t do any more but then the next day you do even more than you did the day before – it’s amazing to me what the body can do”.
Maintaining an openness towards other bodies, allowing for their continual creation is, therefore, vital for gift exchange to operate within the institution. Yet the differences between bodies that such relations generate are also vital to this process, for, as Diprose suggests, too much familiarity between student and teaching bodies “may transgress the indistinguishable line marking off his or her difference, threatening the security of the identities of both” (Diprose 2002:119). It is this threat of injustice, a possibility generated from not being able to truly understand the other, which not only operates through the institution arraying bodies accordingly but also constitutes it, for bodies and their relations are institution making
(Lyon and Barbalet 1994:56).
Institutionalised injustice
Diprose continues to move past Derrida’s aporia of the gift by suggesting that the ongoing creation of bodies is a process defined by the asymmetrical appraisal of bodies and their gifts
182 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting which “constitute hierarchical relations of domination” (Diprose 2002:9) within the institution, where:
All production of identity and difference is not only social and corporeal but also passes through the bodies of others, and parsimony and social injustice rest on memorializing the generosity of some while forgetting the giving of others. (ibid., 75)
My descriptions in Chapter 1 of the process of selecting certain bodies for admission into the school over the bodies of others, or indeed the re-evaluation process where certain bodies are selected to continue their training and others are not, might be pointed to as evidence of the injustice of such a process. However, this would deny the fact that there are many other kinds of hierarchies which operate between bodies and in doing so, would miss the main point of
Diprose’s thesis: that such evaluations, such relations which open the potential for injustice to occur, are “fundamental to human existence, sociality, and social formation” (ibid., 2). In recognising this difficulty, I return to my touching analysis of ballet training and what it might have to offer an understanding of the asymmetric intercorporeal relations that Diprose suggests are at the heart of gift exchange.
It is widely accepted within the ballet world that “students are expected to carry corrections from one class into the next” and that graduates progressing into professional careers are expected to be able to work autonomously and be reflexive in their self-examination
(Weidmann 2018:57-60). This was a necessity made explicit in the classes I observed.
Teachers often urged students to work for themselves, to “be your own teacher”, “be your own coach”, or “be your own doctor” during class. “The more invested you are in learning from your body and being your own teacher the faster you’ll progress”, said one teacher when trying to encourage her students. Another told students that they needed to be able to
183 Between Moving Bodies think independently and not rely on their teacher to tell them what to do: “it’s a very important quality as a dancer”.
While the teachers told the students that unless they took responsibility for their own training they would not improve and therefore not succeed in a professional career, the impact of this was reinforced during their daily interactions where corrections were given or withheld based on student response. “You really have to work for yourself”, said one student who went on to tell me about how one of his classmates, who was no longer at the school, wasn’t trying enough so their teacher got angry and said he would not correct him until the student started working. “He didn’t speak to him for months”, he said.
I witnessed teachers often express frustration when students didn’t remember an exercise and refuse to provide feedback until the student demonstrated that they could remember the setting. For example, in one class when a student couldn’t remember an exercise, the teacher moved him to stand in front of all the other students and told him, “I’m going to stop you every time you get it wrong. Come on, you don’t want these guys [points to classmates] to kill you. Just like in a company, you don’t want to let them down”. Students said that when it came to making specific corrections, this could be a long-term issue. For example, one student told me that when her teacher had been asking her to fix the line of her hands – a correction that she struggled to understand and actually thought she had applied – the teacher didn’t give her any other feedback until she had made that change. “That was the only correction she gave me for like a while”, she said, “I was very frustrated but I just had to fix it”.
I observed that a desire to work for themselves rather than to please others was closely tied to the students’ ability to succeed, both at the school and in any future career. “You work as hard
184 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting as you want to improve”, said one student, “it’s a little independent in that way, that you have to control how hard you work in order to get the results you want”. When a student told me that one teacher didn’t offer as much feedback as other teachers, they said: “but it’s good because next year, hopefully, we will be in a company and when you’re in a company you don’t get corrections really”. Another student who had decided not to pursue a dance career after graduation, told me that they liked the “idea” of ballet but had realised that they weren’t prepared to put in the effort. They said that any effort they had put in was always for the benefit of pleasing the teacher and receiving praise, rather than for their own improvement or enjoyment. Another told me about needing to remind herself who she was working for, especially when she felt the need to impress her teacher. “When you don’t get it you’re like
‘oh I’m letting her down’”, she said, “but like sometimes when I do that I have to remind myself that I’m not dancing for her necessarily, I’m dancing for myself”.
Teachers too spoke of needing to foster independent dancers who could think for themselves and work collaboratively with others, rather than relying on being told what to do or being
“parented” by teachers, directors or choreographers. Failure to show that they could do this was often one reason for students to not be reaccepted or why they, like the student mentioned above, decided that a career in ballet was not for them. “I think that’s hard even for some dancers that are successful here”, said one teacher:
They aren’t used to finding their own discipline and I think that they never reach that place where they have to find it. So then little by little as they go through the years, we’re not seeing it either, and that may be something that makes them unsuccessful.
Now, I can readily apply a Foucauldian analysis to the world of ballet training, after Green
(2002), by considering this process as a coercion of the students by the institution to willingly
185 Between Moving Bodies participate in the cycle of gift exchange with their teachers – that it is for their own good. In fact, just as Diprose, after Mauss, shows, while at first glance relationships might seem as if they are built on equality, where, in the case at hand, the student willingly chooses to engage to work for themselves and not to please the teacher, relationships that occur between and produce bodies comprise unequal power structures (Diprose 2002:34) – the teacher is still a teacher and the ultimate decision-maker regarding the student’s future. Therefore, no matter how equal or collegiate these relations might appear the students must regulate their behaviour and do as they are told if they are to succeed. It is because of this that the potential for injustice is inextricably tied to these relations.
When bodies engage each other, they do so without knowing the result or consequence of their interaction (Manning 2006). This is because when I make the decision to engage with you, I cannot be certain of your reaction and how in turn you will engage with me. Using two people dancing a tango as a trope, Manning explains that when bodies interact, influence
(power) is negotiated:
I lead, you follow, yet even as I lead, I follow your response, intrigued by the manner in which we interpret one another, surprised at the intentness with which our bodies respond to each other. (ibid., 17)
This unpredictability of interaction was evident in the ballet studio during my fieldwork.
Most often interactions between student and teacher appeared to be based on mutual body-to- body discovery, such as those I describe in the previous chapter: where both bodies opened themselves to each other as they engaged in multiple sensory exchanges, aimed at ensuring the message given was understood correctly and made sense of through the other’s body.
However, certain exchanges sometime failed to produce desired results, as previously mentioned, leading students to speak of a “distrust” in the mirror or a teacher’s touch, thus
186 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting necessitating relations that drew on all available sensory modes. Yet there also appeared to be a limit to how often a teacher was willing to participate in such exchanges without feeling results.
In many classes I observed, teachers would express frustration, disappointment and even anger when a student appeared not to be applying themselves or making sense of their instruction. “You never listen to me”, said one teacher to a student as they worked on port de bras, “look at me, don’t you understand?”. “Shame on you”, said another teacher to a student who appeared not to be applying himself during an exercise, “you learnt this in level one, come on! You’re just going to have to repeat until it gets there”. These interactions, and others like them, were often met with silence from the student who appeared to try to process what the teacher was telling them and do what was being asked of them. When I followed up with these students after class, they would often tell me that when they didn’t apply a correction it was because they didn’t understand it.
Misunderstandings were usually easy for the students to clarify with a simple question or two, and in classes I observed students would ask questions more often than not; however, this did not happen all the time. Students told me that they were sometimes too scared to ask a teacher to clarify what they meant because either they perceived the teacher to be in a “bad mood” or they were afraid of getting “in trouble” for not having understood. “She is yelling
‘foot! foot!’ but I don’t know what she means”, said one student, “but if she’s in a bad mood
I’m not going to ask”. I observed this dynamic in a number of classes. For example, in one class when a student did ask the teacher a question the teacher became apparently frustrated:
“I’m showing you what I want, you’re not paying attention”. In another, a student looked upset after a teacher reprimanded her for getting an exercise wrong. “I knew the exercise and
187 Between Moving Bodies what I should be doing, I just got flustered and made a mistake”, the student told me after class, “she got angry and thought I didn’t remember it”. As a result, the more teachers expressed anger or frustration, the more some students failed to understand the teacher and continued without actually clarifying what the teacher meant.
These examples echo anthropologist David Graeber’s (2012) experience of working hard to try to understand and influence people in a position of power, to assist him gaining power of attorney for his ailing mother, only to find he acted stupidly in the process.
The problem, I realized, was that most of this energy was going into a continual attempt to try to understand and influence whoever, at any moment, seemed to have some kind of bureaucratic power over me – when all that was required was the accurate interpretation of one or two Latin words, and a correct performance of certain purely mechanical functions. (Graeber 2012:108)
Graeber shows that institutional power operates in this way where those in subordinate roles
(i.e., the students) are often the ones who have to try to understand the needs, feelings, thoughts of the dominant (the teachers) and not the other way around (ibid., 117-119). He goes so far to suggest that this is “the single most powerful force preserving such relations” where the people subjugated by institutional processes end up caring about the people who benefit from their subjugation “far more than those beneficiaries care about them” (ibid.,
119).
Of course, to leave this analysis here would be highly unfair to teaching bodies, for as I have shown in the previous chapter, in order for an exchange of corporeal gifts to occur and for gifted bodies to be created there must be an openness of both bodies towards each other.
Teachers did often ask the students questions to gauge their level of understanding – “Does it make sense?”, “Do you understand?”, “Can you feel the difference?” etc. However, it
188 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting remains important to point out that, when taken at face value or witnessed as I did in the studio, statements heard and interactions observed between teachers and students might be seen to suggest either a relation based on domination (in which teachers get angry at students for not working enough), masquerading as one built on equality (in which students work for themselves alongside the bodies of teachers), or vice versa.
In reality, these relations and their hierarchies are not determined simply by the establishing of identity and difference – the teacher and the student – but are continually negotiated and renegotiated during the multiplicity of regularised gift exchanges which occur on a daily basis in the studio, exchanges that are made sense of through the body. That power relations and hierarchies between bodies are not always as they first appear offers an important contrast to the visually based analyses of institutional power (both within the world of ballet and beyond), and is a point on which I will now expand.
Looks can be deceiving
Let me first return to the discipline’s understanding of institution-body relations. In a strictly
Foucauldian sense, this has for the most part been limited to the way in which an institution controls and disciplines individual bodies as a way to produce social bodies. As Foucault has said:
power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. (Foucault 1977:25)
Arising from this view, bodies have been seen as docile and plastic, subjected to forces beyond their control, willingly shaped and trained by the social processes of the institution
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(Crossley 2005; Green 2002; Lyon and Barbalet 1994). This has often been the position taken by feminist scholars when analysing the performance of ballet bodies, as described in Chapter
2, where male bodies are seen to manipulate and control female bodies and in doing so reflect and shape broader social attitudes about gender. However, for Foucault, this is a subtle process where “power is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised, and that it only exists in action” (Foucault 1994:208). In this way, power (as action) is dispersed and embodied via social interaction through the “net-like organisation” of the social body, within which individuals are not only the effect of power but also the vehicle of power as they willingly self-regulate and participate in their own domination (ibid., 214).
After Foucault (1977, 1994), focus has been placed on the way in which institutions use surveillance to control the masses, by making bodies more observable and therefore knowable: for example, prisons overseeing inmates, states mapping communities, schools educating students, militaries training soldiers or hospitals organising/examining patients.
Surveillance operates to subtly coerce bodies, usually through the threat of discipline, which ensures the compliance of individuals in their own subjugation. Resistance to this domination, while always in potentiality, is an unattractive proposition for the individual, as it is punished by the institution with exclusion from the group or practices that the individual requires for success, such as a student’s expulsion from school. It is through surveillance then that power is exercised and knowledge is attained by the institution in a cyclical manner as each reinforces and results in more of the other (Foucault 1977:195-228):
since the surveillance techniques that make individuals visible serve simultaneously to control those individuals and to make them possible objects of knowledge. (Crossley 2005:225)
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This is a thesis easily applied to the domain of professional ballet training, which “requires subjects to be observed and corrected through the ritual of dance technique classes” (Green
2002:100).
At NBS, much appeared to be structured around the surveillance of the students’ bodies. Each studio had internal observation windows through which other students, teachers, staff and visitors would regularly peer as classes were in progress. All studios had a full wall of mirrors for students to view themselves and each other during class. The studios at the front of the building had another wall entirely of windows overlooking the main street where passersby could clearly see the students training. Students took classes on stage in the school’s theatre each week, getting used to the performance space and projecting for their future audiences, while guests such as donors, visiting teachers or company directors would often sit in to watch students take classes. Even the building was panopticon-esque in its design: the executive offices were located towards the centre of the building which opened onto a large atrium in which the cafeteria and main common area, where students congregated between classes, were observable and from which one could look up or down to other floors and dance studios.
However, as Diprose notes, while everything about the design of the institution may suggest that only certain bodies may surveil or examine others, this ignores the fact that “bodies that touch are also touched”, that “for every eye or hand on skin, there is skin on hand or eye” (Diprose 2002:116). In arguing for the accounting of both bodies when examining the operations of corporeal generosity, Diprose shows that all bodies are both an object for others and also a subject for itself; and the evaluation of bodies is contingent upon the relationality between self and other as they meet “through the touch” of the institutional encounter (ibid.,
191 Between Moving Bodies
115). In response to Diprose’s critique of Mauss’ thesis as not allowing for an account of the sensory relations between bodies or of recognising that in order for something to be given something has to have already been taken, I now extend her insight into the importance of paying attention to the sensory reciprocity of bodies: through my touching analysis of gifted bodies, as outlined in the previous chapters, and what that analysis may reveal about operations of power. For, “the ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots” (Trouillot 1995:xix).
(In)formative touches
In calling for an anthropology of touch, Classen defined touch as a learned social practice that was a “fundamental medium for the expression, experience and contestation of social values and hierarchies” (Classen 2005a:1). In a similar vein to how identities of both self and other are given concurrently in each exchange, understanding touch as a social practice enables touch between bodies to be seen as relational and always involving a simultaneous action and reaction (Blake 2011; Brandstetter et al. 2013; Derrida 2005; Houston 2009; Lysemose 2014;
Manning 2006).
In all touch there is both a touching on something and a being-touched by something. This is equally so whether the toucher touches himself or touches something else. Accordingly, the toucher is offered to himself both as the one touching and the one touched. (Lysemose 2014:347, original emphasis)
While the idea that touch encompasses both touching and being touched concurrently appears much earlier in the literature than touch being seen as a social practice (see Derrida 2005 on
Jean-Luc Nancy), the added sociality of touch offers room to explore its political nature when
192 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting touch is experienced between bodies and gift exchanges are made sense of through a capacity to feel.
If our senses help us mediate appropriate social relationships, then relations between bodies are negotiated acts and ethical discourses (Classen 2005a; Finnegan 2005; Manning 2006) as we learn to understand the appropriateness or not of types of relations depending on the specific group we are in. Exploring the political nature of touch between bodies, Manning
(2006) devised what she termed “politics of touch”, founded on the premise that both touch and politics are relational. In highlighting the enacted, diffuse and relational properties of both touch and power, Manning’s work can be understood to parallel a Foucauldian understanding of power, knowledge and body production in her examination of the senses.
Manning counters the idea that “senses are controlled by one body and given to another or withheld” (Manning 2006:xii-xiii) in the same way that Foucault (1977, 1994) maintains power is not held by or inflicted on another. Where Foucault sees power as action (1994:208),
Manning considers touch as movement, and both maintain that it is through action/movement that individuals (bodies) are collectively created.
In relation to ballet students training within an institution, this touching analysis reveals different dynamics at play within peer-to-peer and student-teacher relationships that a purely visual analysis does not – as what physical contact looks like is not how it feels. For example, as mentioned in Chapter 2, the traditional pas de deux has often been visually analysed for what it reveals about gendered relations and social attitudes, where the male appears to control and dominate the female body. Instead, I suggest that while looking at bodily relations may at first suggest a particular hierarchical relationship, when the emic and felt experience of touches between bodies are examined, such relations can be considered to be less about the
193 Between Moving Bodies domination of one body over another – of male bodies controlling female bodies – and more about a responsive, informative and negotiated partnership.
All students in my study agreed that for the experience of dancing with a partner not to feel awkward or uncomfortable each body had to communicate, trust and “listen” to the other.
“You have to feel like you have a good connection with them”, said one student, “because if you don’t really it can just, like not awkward, but it will feel like uncomfortable the whole time”. Both male and female students described how when they danced well together it felt as if they were one person. They spoke of the need to work together, being aware of what their own bodies were doing and stressing the importance of being sensitive to their partner’s body and actions. “It’s like learning another body”, said one student. Feeling the slightest adjustments in their partner’s body enabled the students to assess how those changes would affect them and to know how to adjust themselves – all the time being aware of how they would, inevitably, affect their partner in turn. “We are both essential to each other”, said a female student, “you should be doing the same amount of work”. “It’s sort of like two people extending into one body”, agreed a male student:
Because you’re giving force but they’re also giving force. You both do things for each other that the other one can’t do […] that no one person could do alone.
Male students spoke of the importance of making sense of what their partner needed from them through their capacity to feel. “If you’re holding them at their waist and you’re feeling pressure into your left hand, then they probably need to be a bit more to the right”, said one student, “then you can feel the equal pressure in either hand and you can know that they’re on their leg”. Female students spoke of making sure they communicated what they needed from their partner and making sure they were in control of what their body was doing. “Because if
194 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting we’re not, then our partner will be like, they can’t feel where we are”, said a female student,
“so it’s kind of like they have to do their part and we have to do our part”.
Both male and female students agreed that dancing together necessitated a continual give and take, where one partner at various points was more in control of the movement than the other.
For example, when executing a supported pirouette, the female may have more control as she initiates the turn and holds her position firm as she turns, but then the male may assume control to help her finish the required number of rotations, keep her on balance, or stop her at the end of the turn, to enable her to execute the next movement, such as a développé à la seconde. In this way, through physical contact and moving together in space, power/control is negotiated between each pair, and the decisions to move each dancer makes with their bodies in response to the feedback from their partner’s body is what determine success or failure of the movement. I suggest that this understanding also has much to offer when applied to the
“look” of teacher-student relations.
(In)appropriate-looking relations
The appropriateness of physical contact between teachers and students has been a growing area of concern since the 1960s (see Owen and Gillentine 2011) where it has been
“increasingly marginalised for associations with pain and abuse” (Bannon and Holt 2012:3).
Because of this, touching children has become highly politicised and strictly legally and socially controlled (Blake 2011:8; Synnott 2005).
195 Between Moving Bodies
Green points to such an evolution of physical contact in the dance studio in her Foucauldian analysis, where once students were touched teachers now control behaviour in more subtle ways:
While physical poking, prodding, and pushing were common teacher practices in ballet and early modern dance training, we have developed new ways of ensuring docile student behaviors. Recently, as there have been a number of lawsuits against dance teachers who physically abuse student bodies, there has been a movement to find less overt ways of producing normalized behaviors in student dancers. (Green 2002:100)
Indeed, many world-leading dance teaching organisations have developed detailed policies and codes of conduct for teachers, designed to protect and safeguard children and vulnerable people, which often include the direction that physical contact with a child should be avoided for fear of misinterpretation (see Royal Academy of Dance 2013:8). The (in)appropriateness of touch as a teaching method has been debated in dance magazines and news forums, which suggest that teachers should ask permission from the student before touching; that touch should be limited to the extremities such as hands and feet; that male teachers should avoid touch altogether; and, that students should be encouraged to self-correct using a mirror (see
Brancatisano 2016; Dursun 2016; Marshall 2009; Outevsky 2013; van Ulzen 2013).
However, these types of suggestions and directives have been met with challenges from educators who insist on the importance of touch and its role in the social and physical shaping of bodies, acquiring of knowledge, and growth and development of children (see Bannon and
Holt 2012; Owen and Gillentine 2011).
if we, as educators and as societies, diminish or become fearful of the negative implications of touch in our daily working/dancing lives and in this fear do not teach and learn with touch, we devalue one of our most basic and informative sensations. (Bannon and Holt 2012:4)
196 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting
Teachers at NBS too recognised that moving away from physical contact in the studio could be problematic. “I personally find it very difficult that we are moving into a day and age with fewer and fewer hands-on corrections”, said one teacher:
There’s so much from my training where if I hadn’t have been getting physical correction I don’t know if I ever would have fully understood it. It can be the simplest of touch, it doesn’t have to be aggressive, I’m not talking hitting, smacking, clawing, hair pulling – none of that. I’m just talking about somebody pushing against your sit bone and your hamstring will naturally fire over the top of that bone and start spinning the bone in the right direction. So hands-on for me is so fundamental.
Employing physical contact in the studio was a complex and ongoing negotiation between bodies, as described in Chapters 3 and 4, as teachers responded to the bodies of students through their own bodies and gauged the receipt and application of corporeal gifts. Teachers spoke of their use of touch being guided by student feedback and that this often changed as both student and teacher became more familiar and comfortable with each other throughout the school year. “I will talk about touch and if they’re comfortable with touch, if they’re not comfortable with touch”, said one teacher:
Because it is their body and I don’t want to take over their body without permission, but I also want them to understand that when I’m using my hands I’m trying to show them either where the focus of the muscle is or using my hands in the way that I want the muscle to work.
Others explained that their relationship with the students dictated the type of touches they employed. That by fostering a friendly, caring and trusting relationship focussed on the goal of helping them become better dancers, the teacher could physically correct the student in ways that may not have been considered appropriate, and perhaps even seen as abusive, had that relationship and trust not been there, such as gently pinching or hitting a limb to
197 Between Moving Bodies encourage activation of a muscle. “You get to know the students that understand why you’re putting your hands on them”, said one teacher:
They understand fully that you’re quite literally handing them their technique. Whereas, some people are just not great with being touched, they don’t enjoy having somebody grab their foot halfway through an exercise and rotate it more or lift up their upper back for them – they’re not as keen on it.
As described in Chapter 3, students too spoke about the important role touch had in their training, especially in the early years, where they were still learning how their bodies felt. “It doesn’t bother me, I think that’s normal”, said one student. Some also acknowledged that the types of touches they received in ballet would not be appropriate outside the dance studio. As one student explained:
For someone to come up and touch or help them [a non-dancer] rotate their turn-out muscles that would be weird, but for us that’s pretty normal.
In this way, teachers and students were continually engaged in negotiating boundaries between what was acceptable and what was not, with each informing the other as they participated in the daily exchanges of sensory and corporeal gifts.
Such relationality suggests a generosity and openness that operates between bodies as they negotiate social worlds and goes a long way to describing the concept of giftedness that I am crafting in this thesis. Only by attending to the intercorporeal senso-historical gift exchanges
– relations negotiated and made sense of through the body’s capacity to feel – can we begin to understand behaviour in its social context, where:
a slap on the wrist may signal a prohibition to the body that delivers it, but not to the body that receives and thereby lives it, or it can mean something different to that same body in a different situation. (Diprose 2002:104)
198 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting
I must, however, pause here to qualify that I do not intend this analysis as an attempt to silence or take away from the seriousness of abuses that have impacted members of the dance community in recent years, cases in which both male and female teachers have been charged or convicted of sexual assault and inappropriate behaviour towards students (see Casben and
Blumer 2016; Mangione 2015; Parra 2018; Tucker 2018) or where male directors, teachers and dancers have been fired, charged and sued in the wake of the ballet world’s #MeToo scandals (see Cooper and Pogrebin 2018; Pogrebin 2017; Tanner 2018). While I have pointed to the ongoing openness and exchange and negotiation that is at the heart of balletic gift exchange, these abhorrent examples highlight how delicate such as process is and how easily relations built on generosity can become unjust. But to focus on such overtly violent examples, prevents an examination of the more subtle operations of power, of both generosity and injustice, that occur on a regular basis and upon which relations the institution is built.
What I have sought to illustrate in this chapter is that if bodies that are touched simultaneously touch back and as a result are both always in formation, then boundaries also become blurred between who is leader and follower, manipulator and manipulated, controller and controlled. Just as Diprose suggests that an openness to other bodies allows her to move beyond Derrida’s perceived aporia of the gift, a moving touching analysis allows me to challenge not only how we ‘see’ gifted bodies but also how we ‘see’ power relations and hierarchies such as these, that is, by appreciating moving bodies in reciprocal (in)formative relationships. In this way, bodies and their relations can instead be understood to be in a state of constant formation, always improvised, always negotiated, always moving. Such an analysis has the potential to challenge existing understandings of ballet based on the look of relations. Rather than seeing touch as a tool of domination (and with it exposing the potential
199 Between Moving Bodies for it to be seen as violent or inappropriate), I argue that touching relations made up of both physical contact and both bodies’ ability to feel, are the process by which gifted bodies are crafted. In so doing, it becomes evident that such interactions are both complex and subtle with the other being an active, willing and equally informing partner, whose body simultaneously touches, negotiates and informs the other.
Beyond touching
In this chapter I have suggested a new avenue to consider institutional power in the world of professional ballet training. Focussing on the intercorporeal relations and the senso-historical exchanges that occur in the spaces within and between bodies necessitates a turn away from the traditional visual surveillance of what the look of bodies or relations might tell us, towards an analysis that privileges touch as the means by which the creation of gifted bodies is both achieved and experienced.
My touching analysis has allowed me to consider how this process enables the social crafting of bodies, both physically and affectively, where bodies quite literally feel the giftedness accrue in their bodies, as their muscles become stretched, strengthened and sculpted and their movement takes balletic shape; but where bodies also feel their identity as both dancer and member of the school taking shape. In so doing, it has become apparent that these powerful gifting relations and assessments made about bodies are based on remembering the gifts of some and forgetting those of others, thus relations within the institution are always unequal even if they pretend or appear not to be.
200 Chapter 5: Powerful gifting
As my next chapter will show, the results of these powerful processes, while in the case of ballet may sometimes be seen on bodies, are primarily felt. An analysis of pain provides a tangible illustration of the injustices done to and vested in bodies, in that whatever form it takes, whether in the case of ballet training, blistered feet, sore muscles, injuries or the distress and disappointment of exclusion, it always indicates that an unequal relationship is at work on the body.
201 Between Moving Bodies
Chapter 6: Bodies in pain
In this chapter, I argue that pain experience can be usefully understood as the embodied registration of injustice or inequity; the vesting of hierarchical relations that might operate on or between bodies. Pain is entangled and inextricably intertwined with giftedness; both are operationalised by the institution and accrued by bodies during the training process. In the ballet training process, the physical reshaping of bodies is a violent transformation as bodies are made in accordance with institutional will. This transformation has, in fact, been frequently understood and analysed by recourse to pain. For example, it has been suggested that professional classical ballet dancers’ attitudes to pain “epitomize the connections between the individual and the institution” (Wainwright and Turner 2004:317; see also
Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011:92; Wainwright et al. 2005:62).
For dancers, pain is omnipresent and commonly considered collateral to the rigour of daily training, both positively (pushing the body to its limits to facilitate development) and negatively (the career-ending disaster of injury). While the conceptualisation of these polar pains illustrates how membership to the social group shapes the individuals’ response to which pains are acceptable or unacceptable (just as it shapes the appropriateness or not of types of touch and intercorporeal relations as detailed in the previous chapter), it is limiting – pain can only be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it can impel or restrict, it can only be constructive or destructive. But I propose it is possible to treat pain as far more complex than these limited binaries, to consider the relationality and productivity of pain, where gifted bodies are made and differentiated through felt experiences as opposed to pain being a byproduct of their becoming or a brutal result of training. Taking such a stance, as I did in the previous chapter
202 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain in respect of power, allows me to consider how bodies register and relate to pain and how they experience their own becoming through institutional discourses – especially that of giftedness.
To unravel this experience, in this chapter I move beyond the painful spectacular of ballet training – of bloody and blistered feet, injury and eating disorders – to instead challenge the notion that dancers actively silence their bodies (see Aalten 2005:64, 2007:118; Pickard
2015). I reframe the common binary of good and bad pain and I continue to apply my touching analysis, privileging felt experience, to consider the myriad oft-invisible, ever- present pains experienced by and between bodies and how they both signal and facilitate giftedness. Such an approach will allow me to show in this chapter how it is through pain that the gifted body is made, differentiated and makes sense of its own and others’ becoming during the intercorporeal senso-historical training process.
In considering pain’s powerful and productive properties, I continue to move an understanding of gift exchange beyond Mauss’ thesis. Mauss did not engage with pain directly in his theory of gift exchange, yet the role of pain is signalled in his discussion of the capacity of violence to reclaim a debt from another – of the pain of status or wealth lost, of the destruction of people and property through fighting and war – and that the potential for such pain, and thus wanting to avoid it, would provide motivation to ensure counter-gift and the maintenance of social bonds (Mauss 1954:6-12). However, and as with other embodied gifts discussed throughout this thesis, I suggest that the power of pain to facilitate such an obligation to return, is derived not from the threat of potential violence if the return is not made nor a want to avoid pain (for in the world of ballet training pain is always present and,
203 Between Moving Bodies as I will show, regularly sought after and encouraged), but because pains are actively exchanged between bodies in the course of training.
We already understand the temporal nature of felt pain experience and how it may influence behaviour, where the memory of past pain or the awareness of present pain causes an individual to think about how to avoid future pain and to make changes in behaviour accordingly (see Leder 2016:449; Throop 2008:272-73), such as an injury causing a student to adjust his technique. However, the notion that the power of pain to shape behaviour and bodies is derived from its embodiment in past bodies – because it once belonged to and was felt by others – offers an important dimension hitherto overlooked in the balletic literature.
Understanding the role of pain in the institutionalised crafting of bodies depends not just on considering how bodies are crafted and arrayed within the institution through the painful threat of discipline (after Foucault 1977). We must also consider how pain itself is conceptualised as non-threatening through training with other bodies. As I have suggested throughout this thesis, felt experience is the means by which gift exchange is perpetuated, made sense of and how gifted bodies become. Such an examination of pain, I propose, provides a tangible and felt account of the powerful body-to-body relations this thesis has described, relations which craft identity, difference, belonging, the gifted body and the institution.
The look of pain
I suggest that an understanding of the felt experiences and embodied meanings of pain in ballet has been limited in two ways. First, by the literature’s dominant focus on the look of
204 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain bodies in pain such as injury (born of the discipline’s common visual analyses of gifted bodies as outlined in Chapter 2); and second, by the linking of all suffering to the pursuit of the visual ideal of the ballet body – of thin, lithe female, and slim, strong male bodies (see
Aalten 2004:271, 2005:57, 2007:110; Alderson 1987; Pickard 2013, 2015:150; Ritenberg
2010).
As I argued in Chapter 2, such a focus on vision (of both the look of bodies in pain and the painful impact of the look of bodies) has served to perpetuate a mind/body dualism in which the physical body-as-thing can be shaped towards and impacted by a visual and imagined ideal. It has also positioned the (often female) ballet body as an unchanging object, fixed in both time and space, to be observed by others. This has ignored that perception of the body as either subject or object is first made at the sensory level (see Diprose 2002; Legrand and
Ravin 2009), and that the gifted body is not a finished or bounded entity but in a continual state of becoming – it is a moving body (see Diprose 2002; Manning 2006, 2014; Serres
2008). This oversight has resulted in the felt experiences of and emic meanings given to pain being put aside in favour of the common perception that dancers actively silence pain in order to accrue giftedness and a gifted body, the consequences of which I will now discuss.
When examining the pains of ballet students I could point to the outwardly obvious results of the training process, of which there were many, as the students’ bodies were shaped into gifted form. Suffering was often overt, readily seen on the students’ bodies when they modified exercises, sat out of class, removed their shoes to reveal bloody or blistered feet, or had body parts bandaged up with strapping tape. Such temporal and visible evidences are often discussed in the balletic literature, as referenced in Chapter 2, where the overtly violent impact of ballet training and culture on the body is analysed by outsiders after the fact for
205 Between Moving Bodies what it might reveal about social and cultural attitudes to, in particular, gender and body image. For example, calluses, corns, bunions and blisters on predominantly female feet have been considered not just the material result of unequal pressure or friction between the shoe and foot, but painful evidence of the female body conforming to and perpetuating the aesthetic of the etherial feminine through dancing en pointe (see Aalten 1997:209; Pickard
2015) – pointe shoes have even been called “instruments of torture” (Fisher 2007:9; see also
Colucci and Kline 2008:6). Injuries, often framed as disastrous, have been described as injustices caused by overworking the body to push physical boundaries in an attempt to craft the ballet aesthetic (Aalten 2004:271; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011; Wainwright et al.
2005). Equally, eating disorders and their visual manifestation in painfully thin and gaunt bodies have been attributed to the dancer’s unrelenting pursuit of the “perfect” body – defined more by aesthetic taste than function – as dancers compete with each other to win places in companies and be cast in desirable roles (Aalten 1997:207, 2005:62; Alderson 1987;
Daly 1987:17; Gordon 1983; Hoogsteyns 2013:119; Novack 1993; Pickard 2013,
2015:97-99; Ritenberg 2010). While it has been suggested that “women are taught from an early age that ballet is a synonym of pain” (Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011:93), in light of such positions, I argue that it is in fact the visual representation of the dancing body that has become such a synonym.
My criticism of the ballet body as simply a “victim” of the unrelenting pursuit of a spectacular ideal body echoes anthropologist Megan Warin’s critique of the common oft- taken-for-granted representation of anorexia – that it is the painful outcome of striving for thinness (Warin 2010:8). As she suggests, framing “thinness as the definitive bodily marker of anorexia” (in the same way that I argue that the visual ideal of the ballet body has become
206 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain synonymous with pain), prevents an examination of the complex experiences of bodies in suffering – experiences that are “embodied, corporeal, felt and sensed” (ibid., 9). I have made an equivalent point throughout this thesis in relation to ballet bodies, gifted bodies, touch, power and hierarchies – that by focussing on their appearance, felt and embodied experiences have been obscured. This oversight in current analysis is problematic because the way bodies or relations may look is not how they feel and, therefore, a visual analysis may be both misguided and limited. I now extend this critique to the look of pain.
Although the painful results of ballet, such as those described above, may indeed be evidenced on the body, able to be observed and analysed by outsiders, they allow insight into only what the pre- or post-pain ballet body looks like. In contrast, the gifted body I aim to describe in this thesis, is one in the process of becoming, and as such is a body in the midst of felt experience and thus in pain. Just as Warin argued that bodies continually navigate different stages of anorexia (ibid.), I have shown that gifted bodies too must be considered in an ongoing process of formation – not inert, but moving. As such, it is imperative to examine emic felt experiences of that becoming as it occurs and not simply what the results of that becoming (such as pain) might look like on bodies. However, while attention has been paid to the visible suffering of dancers and what that might reveal about particular social or cultural milieu (of the world of ballet and beyond) there has been comparatively little research into dancers’ pain experiences, coping styles and meanings ascribed to pain (Anderson and
Hanrahan 2008:10).
While the spectacular of pain resonates throughout the literature referred to above, the subtle, less visible pains suffered by dancers – of aching muscles, fatigue or even the pain of competition – are less present. The existing research commonly maintains that such pains are
207 Between Moving Bodies something to be endured by dancers, where suffering is an inevitable byproduct of either training or performance, which must be silenced, overcome or conquered (see Aalten 2005,
2007; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011; Anderson and Hanrahan 2008; Encarnacion et al.
2000; Green 2002; Hamilton et al. 1989; Macchi and Crossman 1996; Pickard 2015;
Wainwright and Turner 2004; Wulff 1998a:106, 2006, 2008:525)11. In this context, pain once again is made synonymous with the quest for the ideal ballet body, in which the balletic capital needed for success is accrued through silencing the body (see Alexias and
Dimitropoulou 2011:92; Encarnacion et al. 2000:21; Pickard 2015:91). As Pickard suggests:
the young dancers in the context of ballet schooling were learning to, and were encouraged to, practice the sensation of pain. The purpose of such practice was not as a warning to the body, but to silence the body and pain, ignore the pain and use the pain as a signal to continue working. (Pickard 2015:145)
It is also often said that dancers require a high tolerance or stoical attitude to pain in order to succeed (Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011:92; Anderson and Hanrahan 2008; Pickard
2015:90, 118; Turner and Wainwright 2003:270; Ureña 2004:10; Wainwright and Turner
2004:317; Wainwright et al. 2005:62; Wulff 1998a:107, 2008:525); and that pain is a defining quality of deliberate practice, put up with and persevered through because the individual recognises that it is the means by which giftedness is achieved (Critien and Ollis 2006:182;
Ericsson et al. 1993; Hutchinson et al. 2013:22; Subotnik et al. 2011:18; Ureña 2004; Walker et al. 2010:176). This suggests that silencing the feeling body may be the means by which a gifted ballet body is realised.
11 There is a broad body of literature on attitudes to pain among elite sportspeople which also perpetuates the idea of training and playing through pain (see Malcom 2006). However, as research has shown, “ballet dancers do not exhibit pain coping styles similar to other sport performers” (Encarnacion et al. 2000:20). In recognising this I have chosen not to refer to this sport-specific literature within this thesis.
208 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain
Scholars have employed philosopher Drew Leder’s (1990) concept of the absent body to suggest that the goal of ballet training is to craft a body that is not present, suggesting that dancers work through pain to reach a state of flow in which movement comes naturally, without awareness of the body; however this bodily absence may be disrupted through the pain of injury (Aalten 2005:58, 2007:111; Turner and Wainwright 2003:272; Wainwright and
Turner 2004:317). Thus, pain is necessary for the development of the gifted body, but may also be its downfall. Such research often considers the dancers’ quest to overcome and silence pain as evidence that they treat their bodies as a tool to be shaped and an object to be silenced at will, suggesting a mind/body separation is experienced and actively encouraged through the training process. However, as I have shown above and in earlier chapters, this dichotomy is problematic when it comes to an examination of the students’ sensory and embodied experiences, as all feeling is necessarily embodied, and pain experience is no exception to this (see Jackson 2011:373; Leder 2016). Indeed, while the above work suggests that the power to craft bodies may lie in the silencing of pain, I suggest instead that such power exists in the feeling of pain.
During my fieldwork, as students spoke about how their bodies felt during training, what became evident was how integral their sensibility to pain rather than a denial of pain was for their development as dancers – their accrual of giftedness. I recognise that the language of pain people use “arising out of their own comprehensions and perceptions, is a superior guide for understanding their experience” (Jackson 1992:139) rather than simply trying to fit their experience into existing conceptualisations of pain, and as I suggest, rather than relying on what the look of the body in pain might elicit. Pain experience is also ambiguous – it is not only subjective but invisible – and it is impossible to understand another’s experience of pain
209 Between Moving Bodies without mediation (see Bendelow and Williams 1995:142; Classen 2005b:110; Free
2002:145; Jackson 1992:139, 2011:371-76; Leder 2016:445).
How the students described pain – the language of pain they employed – varied. They described feeling as if they, their body, muscles and joints, and even movements were tense, cramped, gripped, painful, hurting, awkward, awful, uncomfortable, weird, off, struggling, burning, cold, clenched, sore, tired, broken, hard, fatigued or strained. They spoke of physical pains such as sore feet, bruised and chaffed skin, cramped muscles and stiff joints, as well as affective pains such as homesickness, competition, feeling sad or depressed, and stressed about their futures. This sensibility to pain also included an awareness and feeling of the absence of pain where students spoke of feeling free, easy, light, loose, fluid, comfortable, natural, normal, electric, dynamic, and less painful, less gripped, less cramped, less tight etc.
This is not to say that students did not speak of seeking to overcome, work through or block out certain pains, such as sore blistered toes or muscle fatigue while training – “things just, like, can be painful”, one student said, “like your toes can hurt but you just have to kind of push through”. However, pains and absences were a constant part of life for the students and were felt through the body on a daily basis – “your muscles are always sore”, said another student, “ballet’s not comfortable”. That students could employ such a dynamic language of pain and suffering suggests that pain was, far from being silenced during training, actively and regularly felt and negotiated through the body. Thus, just as “silence does not imply the absence of sound” (Coates 2005:642), a silencing of pain does not equal an absence of feeling.
The students’ experiences of navigating feelings of pains and absences speak to the movement towards becoming a gifted body – a continually negotiated to-and-fro between
210 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain giftedness and mediocrity, success and failure, as they feel too much or not enough pain – the intricacies of which I will discuss momentarily. In the same way that linking all pain to the look of the ballet body has served to fix and objectify the body as described above, suggesting that dancers silence or absent their bodies to attain giftedness also serves to make the body static and ignores the feeling body in movement. Indeed, such a suppression of pain and, therefore, moving bodies also speaks to a politics of silence. Far from signalling absence, silence operates to bridle, deny and camouflage bodies, experiences and histories
(Coates 2005; Trouillot 1995). Silence signifies uneven relations, operations of power that serve to obscure but also to fix bodies in time and place – for bodies are not silent, they are silenced (see Trouillot 1995). Equally, and in relation to the embodied and felt experience of pain, Warin and Simone Dennis (2008) show how while keeping silent was a decision made by bodies in response to trauma and suffering, such silence did not equate an absence or completion of pain, but:
an ongoing experience that is continually ‘done’ – not simply remembered as passed, but actively forgotten, remembered, revised, re-remembered. (Warin and Dennis 2008:112)
In light of this, I suggest that the silencing or overcoming of the dancing body’s pain (and before that, its feeling of pain) is too caused by uneven power relations at work on the body.
These are relations I have argued previously that are not always visible, although their results, such as pain, may be; and the dancing body is one that, as opposed to having worked through such sensory experience, is actively in the here-and-now negotiating, feeling and becoming through it.
I have suggested that by conceptualising pain or even the body itself as something dancers work to actively overcome, researchers have seldom examined the emic and sensory
211 Between Moving Bodies experiences of balletic pain. Resultantly, the literature itself effectively silences dancers’ experiences of pain – it is passed over on the way to the goal of its diminishment. To address this limitation, I propose considering pain through the lens of my touching analysis – to privilege the felt experiences of moving bodies-in-becoming, bodies that are in the thick of such experience and not those that have moved beyond it.
Throughout this thesis I have argued that all felt experience is necessarily embodied and the creation of bodies operates at the sensory level, made sense of through a body’s capacity to feel (after Diprose 2002). To consider pain in such a way, as something not only to be silenced or as the result of training, as the balletic literature above suggests, but as an experience which must be recognised, lived through and felt in order for giftedness to be attained, provides intellectual room to examine the effective (and affective) role of pain in the powerful, dynamic and negotiated process of becoming gifted (as described in the previous chapter), and how gifted bodies-in-becoming experience their own formation.
The power of pain
Anthropology’s understanding of how pain works to shape institution-body relations (after
Foucault 1977) reveals how disciplinary power is dispersed through the institution to control behaviour and not only array but craft bodies accordingly. “Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals as both objects and as instruments of its exercise” (Foucault 1977:170). Foucault’s work shows how institutionalised disciplinary techniques have evolved from the infliction of physical pain on the deviant body towards the less overtly violent punishment of exclusion operationalised
212 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain through observation. He argues it is through the ever-present threat of such discipline that bodies are coerced to willingly participate in the operations of power vital for their own development and success, but which simultaneously serve to subjugate them.
As I have shown previously, such a theory might readily be applied to my examination of ballet (after Green 2002). However, I could equally consider the powerful role of pain to shape and maintain social relations and control behaviour during exchanges with other bodies through Mauss’ consideration of the threat of pain. As referred to above, pain, while not expressly examined by Mauss, is evident in his analysis of gift exchange through the description of the threat of violence – of the pains of losing face, status, wealth or social bonds – if gifts are not given, received or repaid and where failure to do so is “the equivalent of a declaration of war” (Mauss 1954:11). Thus, for Mauss, pain is the means by which a debt may be reclaimed from another if the obligation to return is not met, and it is the potential for and threat of such pain that regulates individual behaviour and social bonds.
Both Foucault’s and Mauss’ framing of the powerful role of the threats of pain and exclusion to shape behaviour and maintain the obligation of exchange is certainly evident in the world of professional ballet training. For students, the physical pain of injury often carries with it the threat of the pain of exclusion. As I have previously argued, injury signals the body’s inability or unwillingness to return the gifts given, thereby increasing the risk of missing out on roles or performances or the ultimate exclusion of not being reaccepted the following year.
I suggest that the threat of such pain serves to regulate students’ behaviour as they are obligated to participate in exchange relations to avoid such a fate. I discussed in the previous chapter that this is an obligation understood by the students and felt through their bodies.
Through unequal relations with their teachers, they are taught that to progress and attain
213 Between Moving Bodies giftedness, they must work for themselves (“be your own teacher”), all the while needing to actually do what they are told. Considered thus, it is easy to understand how the pain of injury becomes the “fault” of or at least responsibility of the student, signalling that they have not followed instructions, that they have not met their obligation to give back.
Such individual culpability for pain also echoes the Western biomedical attitude to pain, injury and illness: patients are often seen to be responsible for their own suffering, perceived to be caused by personal failures, where the “victim” is blamed for their own pain (see Bell
2016:35; Jackson 2011:380; Leder 2016:455). The perceived risk to the body, then, becomes not the illness or injury itself but the person’s inability or unwillingness to control certain behaviours. For example, an obese patient’s inability to regulate diet or exercise is considered the threat to the body, not the obesity itself, or as anthropologist Kirsten Bell posits “it’s not, for example, HIV that presents the risk to health, but individuals’ inability to control their sexual behaviour” (Bell 2016:35, original emphasis).
The body’s responsibility for controlling behaviour and resulting pain was certainly evident in the ballet institution. This was a culpability made clear and reaffirmed when students would advise teachers and staff of injury or illness, which I observed on numerous occasions being met with responses of suspicion, mistrust and blame – “what did you do?”. Such interactions, I suggest, consolidated students’ fears of the stigma attached to being ill or injured by reminding them of the continual monitoring of their pains and how certain pains are considered threatening. This resulted in an ongoing pressure to perform and succeed among students that, in turn, often manifested in more pain – both physical and affective – and is a process I will now describe.
214 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain
It is commonly understood that pain and injury are seen as a threat to both the physical body and identity of dancers (Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011:92; Turner and Wainwright
2003:272; Wainwright and Turner 2004:312; Wainwright et al. 2005:50-52; Wulff 1998a:
105-107). I have previously suggested that recurring injury was often interpreted by the institution as a sign that a particular body might not be suited to becoming a gifted ballet body – that the body was not able to meet its obligation to other bodies and the institution.
Because of this, the students’ ability to give back, as signalled by pain and injury, was closely monitored. I was told by teachers and staff that they kept an eye out for patterns of behaviour, such as injury or illness, and that therapy was offered to students if needed – some said, students would “fake” being sick or injured if they were tired or questioning if they really wanted to dance. When I attended meetings and spoke to teachers, residence counsellors and other staff, it was clear that the institution was aware of (and often sensitive to) the myriad pains experienced by students and how these pains might impact on the students’ success.
They would often talk about the particular dynamics of students’ social groups, when there were concerns about some being bullied or left out; they would discuss the progress students were making with recovery from injury, the treatment plans prescribed by medical professionals, and the impact of existing injury on the students’ overall wellbeing. They would raise concerns about students being tired or sick considered to arise from not getting enough sleep, staying up too late, or not making use of scheduled down time appropriately.
They would share worries about changes in students’ weight and/or eating habits, and would debate the possible impact of screen and social media use on all of the above, and its possible detrimental effect on students’ artistic and communication skills. In discussing pain in such a way, it became clear how opportunities arose to discuss the very terms of gift exchange – of a
215 Between Moving Bodies body’s capacity to meet its obligation to the school, and how such capacity could be evidenced through pain.
Teachers and staff would often share with me their speculations and observations about why students had become injured. Some thought the winter months resulted in more injury, where students’ bodies reacted to the drop in temperature; some put injuries down to a particularly stressful or tiring time of the year, such as the lead-up to performances or evaluations; while others said they noticed injuries would coincide with elements of technique the students had been focussing on in class, such as back strains when they had been working on their arabesque. When multiple students were injured from one class, teachers sometimes shared their concern and bewilderment with me. “It’s interesting why it’s happening now, because they’ve been so good all year”, one teacher told me during class. Others were less likely to have me observe their classes when students were injured – “I don’t want you to think they’re like this all the time”. In this way the pains of students, and the causes of their perceived lack of counter-gift, were continually monitored. Yet this monitoring and consideration also speaks to the power of pain and the political implications of being and crafting a body in pain.
The teachers’ deployment of their students’ pain as an excuse – for me not to watch classes, or to explain away pain to either me or other teachers – provides evidence of the power pain holds for all bodies, not only the gifted body-in-becoming. I might interpret these excuses as a sign that they felt the injured students would reflect poorly on their ability or giftedness as teachers – for both bodies must participate in the process of gift exchange. Indeed, during the evaluation process, not only did students receive feedback on their dancing but teachers were also evaluated, which resulted in a heightened level of anxiety for both groups. I recorded in
216 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain my fieldnotes the atmosphere in the school in the weeks prior to evaluations: “the staff and students are more stressed, there are more sick students, injured students, cranky teachers”.
When injuries prevented students from participating in some or all of their evaluation class, teachers expressed their disappointment that the other teachers would either not be able to observe their students or would not witness students performing at their best. For example, one teacher looked visibly upset as they told me that two of their “best girls” would not be doing the evaluation, while another spoke of their disappointment because injured students would not have the chance to showcase their improvement.
Such anxieties I suggest, when considered through a Maussian lens, may be understood because the prestige of the teaching body is determined by the student being able to return the gifts bestowed on her – a return only able to be made once the student ‘receives’ a fully competent ballet body upon graduation and goes on to join a top company (as I described in
Chapter 1). I have already suggested that certain pains, such as injury, could jeopardise the student’s place at the school. If this happened and the student was not asked to return the following year to complete her training, not only would the student not attain giftedness, but the teacher would not accrue the generational prestige her giftedness would have conferred – of an increasingly gifted teaching body. This was a reality that would often hit home for teachers during summer school and at the start of a new school year. Many teachers told me how they felt the selection of potential students would impact their teaching experience in the coming year. “Sometimes I see a student in class and think ‘why are you here?’, but you still have to teach them”, said one teacher. “It’d be nice if we had some talent to work with”, said another as they peered through an observation window. Another told me how deflated she felt as she thought of the students they had “let go” at the end of the previous year – “they already
217 Between Moving Bodies had at least one year of training under their belts, but now we have to start all over again”, she said.
The power of pain to impact both suffering and non-suffering bodies, is also evident in
Wulff’s findings among professional dancers: where injury is a risk to the injured dancer and has the potential to harm others, as dancers lose partners or roles when they are shuffled around to fill vacancies as a result of injury (Wulff 1998a:106). Thus, in addition to the physical pain of injury:
injured dancers often experience not only a psychological frustration over not being able to dance for a period of time, but also guilt over affecting others adversely. (ibid.)
That pain could have such great effect on bodies (and not only those in pain), that it may imperil giftedness in such a way, illustrates the power of pain and how it may be used as a tool to not only craft bodies but coerce them to participate in their own becoming.
Students at the school were aware of the continual monitoring of their pain (and thus ability to make a return) and often expressed to me their distrust or confusion as to how peers, teachers or parents might respond to their injury or illness. As a result of the power of pain to curtail their progress, students would often try to hide their pain from others. Students told me they were unwilling to inform teachers or parents when they were injured or ill or even to seek treatment for injury for fear that they would be excluded from training, miss out on performances or auditions, or that teachers would stop paying attention to them and, in the words of one student, “give up” on them. Because of the perceived negative outcomes of others “finding out” about an injury, students would often take class or participate in a performance while injured, telling me that they knew they shouldn’t but that they weren’t
218 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain going to let it “get in the way”.“I’m not going to miss what’s coming up”, one injured student told me in the lead up to an event. “We are used to dancing under pressure and trying to give our best even if we’re not feeling our best”, another explained:
I guess you just want to show them the best side of you so they want to have you here. […] Sometimes you’re hurt or you’re tired, but you don’t want to show that so much.
This tough-it-out attitude reflects research among professional dancers who were found to ignore and push through injuries for fear of losing roles in upcoming performances (Aalten
2005, 2007; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011; Anderson and Hanrahan 2008; Wulff 1998a:
106), and the ballet students often celebrated their ability to do this. “I was pleased with myself that I pushed through my hip injury”, one student said as I asked how they felt their performance went. Another student shared his excitement and relief – that a “great weight” had been lifted – when he recovered from injury before a performance, even if it meant he felt unprepared and under rehearsed. “I don’t really feel ready, but it’s very New York City
Ballet”, he said, referencing a common perception expressed by students that jumping straight into a performance or new role at the last minute was expected once they entered a company and therefore a sign of professionalism and giftedness12.
Students were aware of a perceived stigma attached to being injured and what it might say about their attitude or ability to engage in training and become a dancer; what I have suggested throughout this thesis, is defined by their capacity to receive and return the gifts of their instruction. In this way, pain could be operationalised as a powerful negotiation tool.
“I’ve already been told I can’t get sick again”, one student told me as she cried about a
12 The students’ perception of this is backed up by Wulff’s ethnographic research among professional ballet dancers, in which she observed dancers being moved into roles at the last minute to fill gaps left by injured or ill dancers and thus performing with limited rehearsals (see Wulff 1998a:106, 2008:522).
219 Between Moving Bodies recurring injury that had flared up again. She was stressed and upset about not being able to do class but expressed her feeling that she had to work through the pain anyway. When I asked her if she had anyone to talk to about how she was feeling, she told me that she didn’t want to tell her parents for fear they would get angry and upset; and she didn’t want to tell her teachers, because she was worried that they would dismiss her as someone unsuited to a career in dance – “I just don’t know what to do”. Similarly, another student told me that he was feeling bad because his teacher had gotten angry with him for being injured. “He doesn’t really understand injuries”, he said. When I asked him what that meant, he said “because if you do class the way he says and listen to what he says you shouldn’t really get injured”.
In considering the conceptualisation of the pain of injury (and the cause of it as either the students’ responsibility or the teacher’s failing) as threatening, because it signals that a body is not meeting its obligation to return, the injustice of pain may, therefore, not only lie in the pain itself but how pain is conceptualised through technologies of power. In other words, the painful outcome of institutional power on the body, such as injury or exclusion, isn’t the only injustice operating on bodies (although it may be the most obvious), for as I will discuss momentarily, pain in ballet is omnipresent. I argue that the threat of injustice lies in how bodies are taught to consider and feel pain – pain which must be felt in order to become gifted but that which may also prevent them from becoming so.
The problem of pain
Let me now return to the role of pain in Mauss’ work. While the ability of pain to perpetuate gift exchange is perhaps useful to examine its role in the production of gifted bodies, I
220 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain consider there to be a problem with Mauss’ conceptualisation of pain when it comes to corporeal gifting. As discussed in the previous chapter, Foucault’s work enables us to consider how power is not held by one body and inflicted on another. In contrast, Mauss’ view of the power of pain through its threat or infliction on another as a way to reclaim a debt and perpetuate an exchange, suggests that power (as pain) can only belong to one body and be given to another or withheld as a ‘thing’. As Foucault argues, such a formulation is problematic, as power “is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery” whereby the whole institutional apparatus continually produces relations of power, arraying individuals accordingly (Foucault 1977:177). When it comes to touch – of which pain is an oft-considered facet and a sensation which cannot be separated from any other experience felt through the body, including movement (see Classen 2005b,
2012:xiv) – I have also shown previously how the power of touch lies not in the ability for it to be inflicted on another, but in its relationality. These touching relations – of bodies engaged in (in)formative exchanges with others – not only craft bodies but duly position them alongside and through the bodies of others. For touch is not reducible to a thing, “there’s no
‘the’ sense of touch” (Derrida 2005:111), it is a relational experience.
Interestingly, an anthropology of pain too shows that pain is commonly considered a ‘thing’ rather than an experience, in which pain is conceptualised as something to be treated or overcome, in turn perpetuating a mind/body dichotomy and preventing embodied understandings of and meanings ascribed to pain (see Bendelow and Williams 1995; Jackson
2011:382). This is problematic because all experience, feeling, and thus all pain, is of course embodied (see Crossley 2005:16; Jackson 2011:373; Leder 2016). Another problematic dichotomy resulting from the positioning of pain as a ‘thing’ is highlighted by Diprose: that
221 Between Moving Bodies when considered through a lens of corporeal generosity, suggesting (as Mauss does) that such power-as-pain can be given to or withheld from another and used to recover an outstanding counter-gift, places pain within the parsimonious binary of a creditor/debtor relation (Diprose
2002:28). This serves to make generosity impossible, thus adding to the perceived aporia of the gift (see Derrida 1992). To address this, and drawing on Nietzsche’s (1989) genealogies of morality – of justice and punishment in social relations – Diprose suggests instead that if debts can be repaid through pain, through the body, then “the status of the creditor is built from the flesh of the debtor” (Diprose 2002:28).
It is in accounting for such fleshy relations that I have attempted to address the shortcomings of both Maussian and Foucauldian approaches to corporeal gifting – that shortcoming being that they neglect the feeling body in their view of bodies as objects or instruments of power
(see Classen 2005b:122; Diprose 2002; Jackson 1996:22; Lyon and Barbalet 1994:49;
Pickard 2015)13. In light of the above-mentioned limitations, I now suggest that the conceptualisation of pain is no exception to this. Instead, in placing the sensing, feeling body at the centre of my analysis (after Diprose), pain too becomes an experience not just within or of one body, but also between and of multiple bodies, as they each become (the gift of Being) through the senso-historical training process – a process I have previously described in which embodied gifts cycle between moving bodies within the institution.
This bodily approach has much to offer to our understanding of how not only giftedness but pain is operationalised within the institution. As I have described above, bodies are aware of
13 Even Pickard, who suggests that her Bourdieusian approach to ballet training addresses Foucault’s limitations when it comes to the feeling body, has acknowledged that while Bourdieu’s work may privilege the agentive role of bodies thus allowing for an account of what bodies do, it “does not, however, fully account for the physical and psychological experiences of felt sensations in the ballet body” (Pickard 2015:152). From a theoretical perspective, this is a limitation in Bourdieu’s work also reflected in Jackson (1996).
222 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain the surveillance of their pain by the institution: in response they self-regulate behaviour, are coerced to take responsibility for their own actions, and thus perpetuate the gifting cycle. As
Foucault shows, power is dispersed within the institution through bodies via an “inspecting gaze”:
a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. (Foucault and Gordon 1980:155)
Yet as I argued in the previous chapter, when it comes to accounting for the embodied and sensory crafting of gifted bodies, such surveillance is not facilitated through a one-way visual gaze, but through two-way felt body-to-body relations. Using Manning’s (2006) observations on the relationality and politics of touch, and Diprose’s (2002) work on corporeal generosity,
I explained that while the institutional set-up may suggest that only the bodies of students are observed, this overlooks the fact that every encounter is relational. These are relations that necessitate a give and take, in which bodies continually inform each other as they are crafted through the bodies of others. In other words, if pain is a way by which giftedness can be assessed by the institution, but such giftedness is monitored and facilitated at the sensory level between bodies, then I suggest that the pains of bodies are also felt relationally by bodies. Attending to the felt experiences of gifted bodies becoming through pain, in such a way, will not only allow me to move beyond the limitations of considering pain as a ‘thing’, but also offer a corrective to how pain is commonly presented within the literature on ballet, as outlined above.
223 Between Moving Bodies
Shaping meaning and feeling
If I consider that the feeling of pain signals a body’s capacity for receipt and counter-gift and therefore accrual of giftedness, such a suggestion first necessitates an examination of how certain pains come to be understood and felt by bodies. This is something I will now argue is also learned from and shaped by the bodies of others.
In her brief examination of the pains of ballet students, Pickard maintains that the social construction of pain within the ballet school remains split between a dichotomy of good pain and bad pain (Pickard 2015:143); and that such terms provide “fictive accounts” through which pushing the body past its limits is legitimised by the ballet school (ibid., 157). This has also been suggested in how adult professional ballet dancers are reported to conceptualise pain as both good and bad, which is reinforced by the ballet company (see Alexias and
Dimitropoulou 2011; Wainwright and Turner 2004:137). Within an anthropology of pain,
Jean Jackson suggests that when pain is categorised, such labels – like the “fictive” good or bad pains suggested by Pickard – often refer to the cause of pain and not the experience
(Jackson 2011:373). While Jackson illustrates this by discussing the distinction between mental and physical pain – a distinction she dismisses, suggesting that pain is always of both mind and body “because the pain experience is always embodied” (ibid.) – the labeling of students’ pains as good or bad can be understood to be categories created by the institution as a way to legitimise the training process and the continual presence of pain. For example, in my research, students were taught that certain pains they experience were good, such as sore muscles or fatigue, because they were felt when they were working well – that is, when they were receiving gifts of balletic techniques du corps and actively working to make a return through their bodies. Equally they were taught that other kinds of pains, such as muscle strain
224 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain or even being emotional, were bad because they were felt when they were not working well, that is, when they were not succeeding to adequately participate in exchange relations with their teachers.
In classes I observed, when students told their teachers of certain types of pain such as sore muscles, they were often encouraged to persevere, work through it and understand it as a positive sensation. “That means you’re working well”, a teacher responded when a student said the backs of his legs were sore after an exercise. “It’s a matter of not giving up and learning to work through it”, said another as she tried to encourage her class to continue working. When students would get upset with themselves at not being able to execute a movement or sequence correctly, teachers would often tell them to stop crying and be more resilient – that it meant there was more work to be done. “You’ve got to let it go”, said a teacher when a student started to get upset that her pirouette wasn’t working, “you just haven’t practised it enough”.
Consequently, in the ballet world, categorising pain as good or bad is used to reinforce dancer’s attitudes to pain; but it also serves as another way to coerce the students into meeting their obligation as part of the gifting training process – of receiving and giving back the gifts of their instruction. This powerful nature of pain, as operationalised by the institution in such a way to shape gifted ballet bodies, allows me to further consider how such institutional power is operationalised at the level of sensibility and made sense of through the feeling body. In so doing, I examine how not only attitudes to pain, but feelings of pain, are learned and therefore social as students engage in institutionalised relations of exchange with other bodies.
225 Between Moving Bodies
Within an anthropology of pain, we understand that the experience of pain is universal, yet the meaning or importance ascribed to it differs (Bendelow and Williams 1995:156-57;
Classen 2005b:110; Free 2002; Jackson 2011:371). Pain is historically contingent, culture specific and shaped by others (Bendelow and Williams 1995:160; Classen 2012; Free 2002;
Jackson 2011:371), which “not only shapes the interpretation and meanings we attribute to pain, but also the responses to it which we fashion” (Bendelow and Williams 1995:156-157).
In the same way that the exchange of bodily knowledge, mentioned in earlier chapters, is at once individual and collective – and as Manning considers touch, and Foucault considers power – so too is pain, as students learn to understand the appropriateness and meaning of types of pain through training, in the context of the ballet family. As I discussed in the preceding chapter that felt experiences were exchanged between bodies during training, I argue similarly that it is through such body-to-body exchanges that students learn to associate the feeling of pains and absences with the accrual of giftedness.
While students were taught to persevere through certain pains and that by doing so they would likely improve, this came about not from simply being told to ignore pain but by being taught how to feel pain. Teachers would encourage the students to “listen” to their bodies to know when it was ok to work with pain and when it was best to stop. For example, in one class I observed, a student informed her teacher that her hip flexor hurt in passé and seconde en l’air. Her teacher told her to avoid those movements, to “work pain free today”, and to avoid massaging the sore area, otherwise it would continue to be aggravated. In a different class, another teacher spent time with a student to help her to activate the correct muscles in a battement fondu à la seconde en l’air so she did to not strain an existing hip injury, as I recorded in my fieldnotes after analysing recordings I made of the class:
226 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain
She places one hand on the back of the student’s gesture-leg hip and with the other arm she supports the weight of the student’s leg in the air at 45 degrees. Encouraging her to get the leg open more to the side she asks “any pain?”. “A little bit” the student responds as she points to the front of her gesture leg hip. “A little bit here?” the teacher clarifies as the points to the same area. “Uh-huh, yep” the student replies. The teacher then walks behind her and encourages the student to make sure she isn’t sinking down into her supporting leg. “Ok, do it one more time. If you feel like this is going up do you feel less pain?” she asks as she places her hand to the back of her other hip. The student takes some time to think and look at her body in the mirror as she plays around with feeling the difference between sinking down in her supporting leg and hip and then lifting out of it as advised while the teacher maintains hold of her leg. She eventually agrees, “yep”.
In yet another class, when working on cambré to the back while standing in arabesque à terre, students were reminded to elongate and lengthen through their spines, articulating each vertebrae as they bent backwards, “so you’re not crunching bone onto bone” their teacher counselled. Teachers would also advise that incorrect technique, even if it felt good, would lead to injury; and warned students against such practices as banging their heels into the floor in jumps, holding tension in their hips or working with torso, limbs or head out of alignment etc. because “that’s going to lead to future injury”, as one teacher warned. Regardless of whether teachers encouraged students to work with and through pain, or without it, these exchanges of embodied and senso-historical gifts served to educate the students about the appropriateness, or not, of types of pains leading to the conceptualisation and feeling of certain pains as positive or negative.
While this is reflective of the way in which the institution facilitates the social conceptualisation of pain as either good or bad, the teachers responses to their students’ pains may also be explained by the notion that it is the people who are not suffering pain that most often tout the benefits of it (Jackson 2011:377). However, I suggest that it is not because the teachers weren’t suffering that they responded to the pains of their students in such a way, but
227 Between Moving Bodies because they had suffered and that such suffering was still felt in their bodies. In fact, it is because other bodies had once suffered, that pains could be experienced as good or bad, positive or negative and thereby operationalised as power at all.
The pains of bodies past
I now briefly return to the limitation of Mauss’ use of pain as discussed earlier – that it is operationalised as a ‘thing’ to reclaim a debt, thus perpetuating a mind/body dualism and confining the power of pain to a creditor/debtor relation. Diprose suggests the way to reclaim pain from such a parsimonious relation is to consider the role of pain in the process of becoming – that as Being is crafted as bodies give part of themselves to others and receive parts of others in return, then pain (a necessarily embodied experience) also signals how bodies become through the very flesh of others (Diprose 2002:28). She illustrates this through an examination of pains and pleasures exchanged, and identities, differences and hierarchies consequently formed during sexual and medical encounters:
the clinician brings to the present encounter not just an abstract medical model of a “normal” body but a history of interlacing with other bodies, skills, gestures, and uses of pleasure and pain, all pregnant with meaning, and all of which inform her carnal style and hence her perception of the situation. And, insofar as the clinician is an agency of domination, her perception of the situation involves living that history through the body of the patient, imposing that history on the other’s body, and making it familiar and hence similar to her own. (ibid., 118)
In other words, when bodies engage in relations with other bodies, in order to make sense of the other, they transmit and thus reproduce their own embodied experiences and meanings ascribed to them, meanings which had been crafted through their own exchange relations with previous bodies. While not examined, Pickard’s reflection on a ballet teacher’s attitude
228 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain towards pain – a teacher who had once been a student at the school she now taught at and a dancer in the company associated with the school – is also reflective of such an embodied history of pain:
the teacher’s pain threshold, expectation of pain tolerance and model of pain was probably based on her own understanding and experience of pain embedded within the ballet culture. Therefore the teacher, I suggest, is concerned with transmitting the aesthetic heritage that she embodies and is therefore reproducing her own ballet schooling or training as well as the ballet culture, which is also embedded in the company. (Pickard 2015:86)
Given the temporal relationality of past, present and future feeling bodies within the professional ballet school that I have established in previous chapters, I can use this to also consider the role of pain experience in the crafting of gifted bodies. While I have suggested in the preceding chapter that balletic gifts and identities cycle between bodies because of the
“sacred” power they are ascribed by the generational nature of ballet training, I argue that pain experiences also perpetuate such cycles of exchange and obligation because they too were once felt by past bodies. In the balletic world, pains are shared between a community of past, present and future bodies. Such an understanding offers an alternate conceptualisation of the common phrase “in a whole world of pain”, where, instead of denoting a highly individualised experience, it encapsulates both shared and felt pain experiences.
In drawing on their own past pain experiences, felt through their own previous gift exchanges with past bodies, I observed that teachers would often guide the students through certain pains. “I know the certain burning that happens in my abs when I know that they’re engaged to the point of fatigue, so I ask my students to get to that stage”, said one teacher:
And many people will have it at fifty crunches, some will have it at a hundred crunches, some will have it at ten crunches before they really feel their abs working. So it’s for them to understand what their burn, their little
229 Between Moving Bodies
burn point, where their muscles start to really grow and have more engagement. So that’s what I say, “try to find that little burn that tells you where your muscles are fatigued and are starting to grow more fibres”. So I talk about my feeling and, again, I don’t expect it to happen in the same way that it would happen for me, so they can find their own process to get to that place.
Another teacher described how she “hated” doing relevé lent when she was dancing – “it was just so hard and arduous and heavy” – but that she could use this prior experience to assist the students through exercises that they too found difficult, challenging or painful.
I think there are times where you have to give it to them and say “yeah, this one’s a bit of a challenge, but you’re going to be fine, you’ll get on top of this in no time at all. I bet you in six weeks you’ll just have it”.
Teachers would use their past suffering to explain how certain changes the students were being asked to make might feel strange or uncomfortable at first but that this meant they were now using the correct muscle, executing the correct movement or standing in the right position. “My teacher always says when you feel comfortable it’s not right”, said one student,
“she says that like you have to feel like you are working hard. So it’s a bit uncomfortable when you’re working hard and really like sweating”.
As I suggested in the previous chapter, Mauss allows us to consider how gifts are imbued with power because of their genealogical nature. In classical ballet training, felt experiences that once belonged to past bodies are handed body-to-body down the generations and it is the embodied nature of such gifts for ballet that enable the cycle of gifting to perpetuate within the institution. In recognising that pain is one such felt experience, pains are also given
“spiritual” properties by the students because they too once belonged to other dancing bodies,
“cause they, like, know – they have wisdom in the dance world”, said one student.
230 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain
The power of pain embodied in past bodies is not a new concept in anthropology, although a focus on the intercorporeal transmission of suffering to other bodies has only fairly recently emerged (see Kidron 2011). In examining the intergenerational suffering embodied by the descendants of trauma victims, such as genocide survivors, the ability for past pains inscribed onto bodies to be affectively and physically experienced by other bodies and inform bodily relations is evident. For example, familial bonds are shaped as the pain of a Holocaust victims’ tattooed identification number is experienced by his descendants as they touch it, look at it and imagine “what it felt like when they burned it into his flesh” (ibid., 457). Such work offers a powerful account of the intercorporeality of the embodied memory of suffering, of empathic bodily relations and sensory sympathy as mentioned in the previous chapter, and how such experience shapes bonds within the institution of the family. It does not, however, allow me to examine the intercorporeal nature of shared pain experience when the power of pain is operationalised to produce particular kinds of bodies – an institutional crafting I suggest is made possible because the pain of past bodies is actively taught, felt and shared by bodies in the present.
I consider, instead, that anthropologist Jason Throop’s (2008) explanation of how land is gifted between Yapese matri-clans, may better allow such an understanding. For the Yapese, the suffering of previous generations is accrued in the land itself, when the women and children must work on the land to repay the debt that will be accrued when the land is gifted to the wife in the event of her husband’s death (Throop 2008:267). For ballet bodies-in- becoming, the students are expected to suffer through their bodies to earn the right to claim giftedness and the gifted body as their own, before making their final prestation to the school as they eventually give back the prestige given them – to return their giftedness “to the place
231 Between Moving Bodies of its birth” (Diprose 2002:6) – by joining top dance companies or giving back in other ways such as teaching, mentoring etc..
But this is a body whose embodied gifts once belonged to others who also suffered through their own previous senso-historical gift exchanges with other bodies. Just as Throop suggests that for the Yapese the “land itself can be understood as the accretion of past generations’ work, service, effort, striving, endurance, and suffering as crystallized into a material form” (Throop 2008:267), so too, I suggest, is the gifted body made material through an accretion of past generations’ felt experiences – a point made in the previous chapter in relation to sensory experience from which I now suggest pain cannot be undone. The ability of the Yapese women and children to cultivate the land was directly tied to their ability to endure and work through pain and that such discipline in turn maintained the social bonds of family and community as they placed their own feelings, wants and desires behind those of the broader social group. Nevertheless, I have maintained that the gifted body is crafted not through the suppression or overcoming of pain experiences (as the ballet literature too suggests) but through the felt experience of such pains. Considering pain cross-culturally in this way, enables me to argue that it is the shared lived experience of pains and their absence, and not their silencing (as both the ballet literature above and the common Western conceptualisation of pain as something ‘bad’ would suggest), that maintains the social group of the ballet family and institution and also crafts bodies through the felt obligation to receive and return the bodily gifts given.
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Making and differentiating bodies
While not suggested by Throop, his examination of how Yapese women and children suffer on the land to accrue worthiness of receiving it once the husband/father dies, and in so doing maintain the social bond between both family and clan, is an example of gift exchange operating through bodies – through sensibility and through pain. For, as discussed in the previous chapter, a touching analysis has enabled me to show how feeling bodies are institution making. Throop suggests that in observing the women’s and children’s suffering through working the land, the men feel compassion for them which causes them to care for and share knowledge with them, thus maintaining the social bond. “The bonds that are formed through the exchange of knowledge, land, and food are predicated upon a dynamic interchange of feeling” (ibid., 268).
The bonds formed between bodies are therefore based on a relation of compassion and suffering, a relation evident in the professional ballet institution where the teachers responded with sensitivity to the pains of students. For example, in one class, the teacher told her students that she was going to “save their legs” by not having them do much jumping, because the piece they were performing the following day was demanding and tiring for their bodies. In another class, female students were told to remove their pointe shoes to “save their
[toe] nails” during the first week back from holidays. Teachers would often ask their students at the start of class how their existing injuries were going, if there were any new pains to be concerned about, or where they were tight or sore. These exchanges reveal a lot about the complex and negotiated relationships between student, teacher and attitudes to pain, as it became evident that both bodies learnt from each other’s felt experiences. For example, at the start of class the teacher asked a student how her injured calf was, to which she only smiled
233 Between Moving Bodies in response. “Don’t ask?” the teacher enquired further. In reply the student nodded, sighed and let out a small laugh, “ok then” the teacher said. In another class a teacher spent the first five minutes talking to a student about her sore knee, asking what movements hurt and working out a range of alterations to certain exercises that she could do to avoid the pain yet continue to train.
As discussed in the previous chapter, by drawing on their own previously felt experience, teachers often demonstrated compassion and understanding – a kind of embodied simpatico – as they encouraged students to be aware of how they felt when they moved, where “finding that perfect placement might actually feel better and more efficient” than if their placement was off and they had to tense and grip their muscles. In an additional example, one teacher recalled her own felt experience as she advised her students that during a développé devant the higher the leg went the more their backs could “lean” to counterbalance the leg: “doesn’t it feel easier that way?”, she asked.
While the above examples serve to illustrate how shared pain experiences between teacher and student might help to unify and define the ballet family, I also suggest that they show how shared pains enable the monitoring and measurement of the success and failure of bodies to meet the obligation to give back. Pains and compassion felt between bodies helped to define students’ worthiness of belonging to the ballet family – a membership contingent on their ability to return balletic gifts – as they bonded over shared pains such as sore muscles, blistered feet, fatigue or homesickness. Just as Wulff found during her ethnographic fieldwork among professional ballet dancers where the standard daily greeting of “Hello, how are you?” elicited “detailed descriptions of aching feet, backs or knees, rather than a positive reply” (Wulff 2008:525), this was also the case during my fieldwork. Here, students replied
234 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain to each other, their teachers and to me, by describing (often with great enthusiasm) how tired they felt and how sore their bodies were14. During these conversations, students would often feel the need to qualify their pains by saying that they “supposed” it was a good thing, reinforcing the value of certain pains. After particularly demanding classes, students would often talk amongst themselves, comparing where and how much their muscles were sore, how many blisters they had on their feet, how tired they were or how much they had sweated.
In this way, they would measure their accrual of giftedness through and against other bodies.
The group discussions also brought out these shared responses, as students agreed with what their classmates were saying. As one student asked his peers:
So have you guys experienced when you’re tired or sick or something and you don’t really want to like think about anything so you just kind of like think about the music and then it kind of helps you get through the class?
“Oh yeah”, said all the students at once, nodding their heads in reply. “It definitely makes, like when you don’t have music, exercises feel longer and harder”, agreed another.
Affective pains – of shared feelings of homesickness and missing friends and family – were also part of defining belonging to the ballet family and giftedness, especially for those students living in residence. “I do miss my family a lot”, said one student:
14 This type of reply was not just limited to students but was also a common response from teachers when talking amongst themselves or with me. For example, during evaluation classes where teachers were required to sit in the theatre for long periods each day there was a lot of talk about needing to stretch and get up and move and how painful sitting still was. Teachers would also often remark on their observation that I was able to sit down for such long periods while I was watching classes: “I don’t know how you can do it”. Pointing this out, while on the one hand empathetic, was a way in which it was made clear that I was not entirely part of this “ballet family”, and that my body was different and perhaps not sufficiently gifted. Interestingly, my body was often cramping and in spasm from sitting and writing for long periods, yet due to my not wanting to disturb classes I endured this pain. Perhaps these pains were alerting me that my body, which was once in possession of balletic gifts, was now being crafted into the body of the ethnographer – a body of entirely different capacity.
235 Between Moving Bodies
I know for other people they do get homesick and it’s hard to be away from their family [too]. But then again you do have your friends and you can always like go to them and they are kind of like your second family or your brothers and sisters, especially since we see them and live with them like everyday, so they kind of become another family figure to support you as well.
Comparisons and sharing pain experiences like this aligns with Pickard’s suggestion that the accrual of balletic capital and prestige among the group was linked to their ability to withstand the most discomfort, an ability determined by the social group as ballet students compared and paraded blisters after class (Pickard 2015:118). However, I suggest it was the shared feeling of pain, as opposed to its overcoming that served this purpose. Indeed, part of the power of shared pain was because pain also served to differentiate gifted ballet bodies from the bodies of others.
The ability for shared pain experience to assist in forming social bonds and difference from the bodies of outsiders was highlighted by Wacquant in his ethnographic account of boxers, who were found to:
relish the fact that they “share membership in the same small guild,” renowned for its physical toughness and bravery; they enjoy knowing that “they are different from other people. They are fighters.”. (Wacquant 2004:68)
The ballet students too expressed a sense of difference from non-dancers – a difference identified through their capacity to feel. “Do you ever like go out and realise how much more we have – like we’re inside ourselves – than the general public?”, one student asked his peers during a group discussion:
The way that we can feel these little twangs and to be, like, so in-tune. Cause [other] people it’s just their bodies and it’s just like they’re using them, but we’re like being them.
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As mentioned in the previous chapter, students spoke about how this sense of belonging created an environment in which everyone was working hard and achieving more, i.e., working to meet the obligation of giving their gifts back to the school. “Everyone’s very interested and passionate about what they’re doing here, and it’s great,” said one student:
I mean everyone’s not passionate about it every second of the day, especially when your toes are bruised and it’s day six of the week and you’re dragging your feet a little bit, but once you get going it’s always good. […] It makes you feel like “yeah, I’m in the right place and I belong here”. So this is a comfortable and safe place for me to do what I’m passionate about because everyone around me is as well.
This safe place extended beyond working in class but also to friendships and camaraderie among students. A number of students, mostly male but also some female, spoke about how they had been teased or picked on by students at other schools, but that since coming to NBS they felt safe, accepted and that they belonged. “At my old school some people used to tease me about being a ballet dancer”, one student said, “but coming here we’re all ballet dancers so they just think it’s normal”. “Yeah, the same”, another student responded, “I don’t get teased about doing ballet [here]”. These experiences highlight the power of shared pain experiences to not only produce and reaffirm belonging to the social group, but that it is through such shared experiences that bodies identify and measure their ability to give back, providing evidence of their capacity for or worthiness of giftedness.
As a result of this, when the students’ pains didn’t measure up to those of their peers, shared experiences also provided evidence of a failure to make a return. Students would often express feeling left out or left behind when they were injured and how hard it was to maintain focus when their training was disrupted. One injured student told me he felt aimless and that it was hard to be in the classroom with students who were not injured. He said he often
237 Between Moving Bodies compared himself to another student who had been injured the previous year and had worked
“almost obsessively” to get back to full strength. He knew he should be doing this too – to keep his body in shape while he couldn’t participate in all of class – but just couldn’t make himself do it. “I know I have to keep my cardio up, that’s a big thing”, he said, “but I’m just floating around aimlessly. I might stretch, go get some ginger tea, but I just wander the corridors”. Some teachers recognised this type of response, and would sometimes give injured students exercises to work on at the side of the room, or send students out of the studio to work independently elsewhere, so they weren’t just sitting and watching. “It’s just too hard to be here when you can’t join in”, one teacher said.
It was not unusual to see students participating in class with strapping tape around ankles, knees, hips or shoulders; modifying exercises around their injury, such as avoiding jumping on an injured foot or keeping their legs low to avoid straining a sore hip; or, only doing part of class and then taking themselves off to the side to work independently on conditioning exercises or down to the gym for cardio on the exercise bikes. These types of situations, where students were able to continue to train to varying degrees, were common; however, acute and more serious injuries did occur where students would be completely prevented from participating in class and directed to rest until such time as their injury healed sufficiently for a gradual return.
Having to take time out because of injury to heal, re-train or both, elicited mixed responses from students. Many resented having to slow down even though they acknowledged that by doing so they would recover, improve, prevent re-injury and thus recommence their accrual of giftedness. One student spoke about her frustration when her injury took a long time to
238 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain heal. “The doctor told me the more I dance the more it might hurt, so that has to go back to me still trying to re-train everything”, she said:
So it was really hard to do that this year. It was really sad, because I thought it’d just be something where I could just be treated and then I could just keep dancing. But it’s definitely kind of the hard way around.
Frustration, disappointment, upset and sadness were all common emotions among injured students I spoke to15, especially where their training had been compromised for longer than they had expected. “I’ve had an injury that’s dragged on for longer than it’s supposed to”, another student said:
So it’s just been very frustrating getting back into doing things and then feeling like I still can’t do stuff that I should have been able to do by now. Because it’s just, it dragged on for so much longer than me and my teacher expected. So it’s just been annoying to have to wait so long to be able to start jumping again.
In this way, the pain experience of injury – while perhaps providing a ‘positive’ in allowing a student to get back on track with their training or ‘negative’ because it signalled that they weren’t meeting their obligation to return as mentioned earlier – could have other painful implications as students were differentiated from others through the feeling of pain. Such differences felt through the body were also felt between bodies as shared pain experiences served to maintain and disrupt social hierarchies within the institution.
Hierarchies made and re-made
15 These feelings towards injury are not uncommon and align with those expressed by elite students at another Canadian professional ballet school, The Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, who were interviewed by Macchi and Crossman (1996) on the impact injury had on their lives.
239 Between Moving Bodies
Pain was often responsible for re-arraying bodies within the institution in relation to each other. Not only did students speak about their fears of being categorised by teachers as
“always getting injured or sick”, being overlooked for castings or being taken out of performances, but they spoke of falling behind when their peers were progressing. When students were told to take time off to recover, they spoke to me about feeling depressed at not being able to dance and how they felt it impacted their standing among others within the school. “When someone is injured they automatically get put at the bottom”, one injured student said, “I know that because when someone is injured and I’m not I feel better than them”. Students also spoke about how difficult it was to watch others dance and improve while they had to sit out.
When sitting with a group of students who had all missed classes that day due to injury or illness, I asked how they felt when they missed class. “Shit”, said one, “like, I need to rest to get better but I know that everyone is in class getting better, like improving”. While we were chatting, another student came over to join us and raved about the class he just had – “it was just so good!”. “Oh don’t tell me that!”, said one of the injured students. “Oh no! That’s not fair”, said another. Sentiments like these were common among students I spoke with, who said they felt sad when they couldn’t dance due to injury and that they became more upset watching those who could. Injured students expressed feeling left out, left behind, not part of the group and less important than un-injured dancers.
However, it wasn’t only injury that disrupted these social bonds, but also the pain of competition. One student told me how being “overlooked” for performances affected her relationships with her classmates. She said she had “tried really hard” to make friends but that it was hard to get past the “pecking order” in the class; and that even though the competition
240 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain was often not talked about, “you feel it just the same”. “You know when you’re at the bottom when you’re not cast [for performances …] that cuts deep”, she said. Another told me that they didn’t feel part of the social “clique” and attributed their feeling of isolation and loneliness to having a body they felt was different to the others, which also meant they didn’t always get cast in performances. These were experiences that went against the grain of what I was usually told by students about how they experienced the harmonious ballet family –
“we’re like best friends with everybody in our class”.
I witnessed pain like this being played out among social groups within the school on numerous occasions during meal breaks and in between classes. In one instance, a group of students were warming up for class and talking about casting choices for a performance which had just been announced. Only one of them had been selected for a particular piece, however, the student couldn’t do it because they had just become injured. The injured student said they were “bummed out” about this, yet the other students laughed. “Yeah well at least you got cast!”, said one. “Yeah, I’ve missed out on four castings now”, said another. The student got upset, telling the others “you guys are jerks”. After this everyone became silent and it wasn’t until a number of minutes had passed that one of the other students eventually asked, “are you ok?”. “Yeah, I’m just bummed out, and I’m not saying that you’re not bummed out either, it’s just hard”, the injured student responded. Because casting decisions could have such an impact on relationships, another told me that students learnt not to discuss casting decisions in front of those who had not been selected – “you learn to not talk about it”, she said.
In light of this complexity of felt experience, I propose that all pains experienced by the students are not only due to the senso-historical nature of the training process, but enable
241 Between Moving Bodies such a process to operate – a process in which, as I have already established, that hierarchies and identities are delicately and continually negotiated between bodies and the potential for injustice is ever-present. If all pains are productive, in the sense that they allow the student and the institution to register, monitor and facilitate the body’s progress, then both the dancers’ attitudes to pain as well as the experience of pain itself can be seen as the result of and reinforced by the regularised injustices which result from intercorporeal senso-historical gift relations.
It is this I have attempted to illustrate in this chapter: that all pains experienced by ballet- bodies-in-becoming are not only caused by the very structures and relations that serve to facilitate the gifted body’s creation, but that also perpetuate the operation of institutional power, and that the examination of felt pain experiences offers a tangible account of that process.
The feeling of pain
I conclude this chapter by returning to the students felt experiences of pain, as they provide a vivid illustration of this process. As previously observed, it is commonly understood that dancers, like athletes, suffer both positive and negative pain during the course of training.
Good pains, such as sore muscles, are considered those which signal the dancer’s progress and physical reshaping of their body, while bad pains, such as injury, are those which have the potential to curtail progress or even end careers. In the balletic literature mentioned earlier, while the embodied experience and feeling of such pain is often not discussed, good pains are often described as pleasurable and worthwhile. This is because the absence of pain
242 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain is what will enable them to accrue the physical and balletic capital needed to be successful
(Pickard 2015); and, because the feeling of certain pains signal the body improving as it is pushed to and past its limits (see Aalten 2005, 2007; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011;
Anderson and Hanrahan 2008; Bendelow and Williams 1995; Pickard 2015:143-47; Wulff
1998a:107). Considered through a lens of gift exchange, as I have proposed, the institution mobilises pain in such a way to control and craft bodies, to remind them of their obligation to participate in exchange relations with other bodies, and to receive and return the balletic gifts cycled therein.
Such operations of power result in the body feeling pain in certain ways. For example, when describing how their bodies felt while dancing, students often spoke about the pleasure derived from the presence of certain pains. One student described pain being enjoyable because it signified the effort she was putting in. “I like the feeling that you get when your muscles hurt”, she said, “you know you’re working hard so you just keep doing it, even though it’s painful”. The students often described how feeling pain allowed them to become stronger or improve their technique. “They always say, like when you’re tired, that’s when things like start to get stronger and stuff”, said one student:
So then I try to think like “oh I’m so exhausted right now, but like inside my body I’m actually getting stronger and getting better each day by doing more when I get even more tired”.
Another described how he celebrated feeling and actively worked to produce certain pains because they indicated his accrual of giftedness:
After class, I can feel it, like it’s so sore and just walking up the stairs is awful but it’s so satisfying because I know I’m going to be able to do that [movement] better.
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Learning to feel pain in such a way often seemed to be at odds with the students’ felt experiences – a contradiction that could be difficult for the students to make sense of. “I find it overwhelming”, one student said, “it is uncomfortable to do all that work. It’s uncomfortable but it feels good”. This could be symptomatic of the protean and dynamic nature of pain (Classen 2005b; Jackson 2011:374; Kleinman 1992:170; Watkins and Maier
2003:232) and that given the overlapping nature of pain experience, it is almost impossible to tell where pain stops and pleasure starts (Classen 2005b:109). Indeed, in light of this messiness, Pickard suggests that a pleasure/pain dichotomy is insufficient to explain dancers’ felt experiences because of the seemingly “reciprocal relationship between pleasure and pain” during training (Pickard 2015:143-47). While I too suggest that such distinctions become insufficient when examining the experience of pain, this is not only because of the reciprocity of sensory experience but because of the way such categories have been created by the institution to impose feeling onto the body – feeling that determines whether a body is worthy of the gift of training or one that is perhaps a bad investment.
The students learned that in order to monitor their own progress or failure in becoming gifted they must feel pain in certain ways. “I find that if you’re doing it right then it’s just uncomfortable like in your muscles and stuff”, said one student. “So let’s say you’re in an arabesque and your leg is right behind you or square, it’s going to hurt your back a lot but you know that it’s right.” Others spoke of cramps alerting them to incorrect placement or muscle use. “If I’m doing it wrong, something is hurting”, one student said. While such
‘good’ pains were omnipresent during training, the supposed ‘bad’ pain of injury was also commonly felt by bodies. As I have mentioned earlier, the pain of injury has often been
244 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain categorised as bad and something negative and detrimental to the dancer’s careers, however, injury was also often considered a catalyst for change.
Literature on pain suggests that pain can bring awareness to the body’s limitations and possibilities, allow for or signify achievement, or provide the impetus for change (Bendelow and Williams 1995:154; Leder 2016:457-58). This is indeed true of the pain experiences of ballet students. Research shows that the majority of injuries sustained by classical ballet dancers are as a result of the training process – either through improper technique and form, or overtraining and overburdening the body (Aalten 2005, 2007; Alexias and Dimitropoulou
2011; Anderson and Hanrahan 2008; Encarnacion et al. 2000; Wulff 2008:525) – but that professional dancers often use their injuries as a chance to make changes to how they are working and to re-connect with their bodies (see Aalten 2005, 2007). Applied to ballet bodies-in-becoming and considered through a lens of gift exchange, I suggest that the feeling of pain is shaped by the institution to offer a warning to students – not to the threat of the pain itself – but as a reminder of their obligation to repay.
I propose that students learned that the feeling of the pain of injury was evidence of their failure to receive and give back the gifts of their instruction. In turn, this provided an opportunity to improve technique and strength in order to get ‘back on track’ and prove their worthiness once again. In this way, the institution shapes the feeling of certain pains as something that Bell terms a “teachable moment”16 (Bell 2016:56). For example, a senior student who had been doing classes with junior students as she recovered from injury, said that, although it was frustrating not to be able to participate in her regular classes, it was
16 Bell describes this in the context of public health where such moments are actively encouraged by medical professionals when an individual suffers a “health event” and as a result is encouraged and motivated to make lifestyle changes, such as cutting back on alcohol, sugar or fatty foods and getting more active, in an attempt to avoid future illness.
245 Between Moving Bodies helpful to be forced to slow down and revisit areas of her technique – something she wouldn’t have been able to do if she hadn’t been injured:
That’s what’s helpful, like cause now I’m in class with like little babies and so it’s like really going back to like basics. But it’s kind of nice, it’s like “oh this is how a tendu is actually supposed to be”, you know?
Injured students were therefore given space and time to make a return and to prove that they were a good investment; and pain was operationalised by the institution as a not-so-gentle reminder of the gifts to be repaid. This was a challenge that not all students readily succeeded in achieving, especially when those areas that needed improvement were elided by their daily good pain experiences, such as sore muscles. Students often made reference to not always being able to trust their daily pain experiences, where bad habits became so ingrained in their bodies that they felt correct and yet in some cases actually led to injury. “I have had a hip injury for almost, for like over a year now, and the reason is because I was using the wrong muscle to turn out”, a student said:
So now I have to like re-train my turn-out and use a completely different muscle memory. So it’s really hard to change it after you’ve been doing it for like so long. It just feels totally different and it doesn’t feel like I’m doing it right, when I am, and then when I’m doing it wrong it feels correct.
Of course, when students failed to do this – to align their feelings of pain with how they were conceptualised by the institution – they ran the risk of being appraised as a body unable to give back and being excluded from the school. Throughout my fieldwork, I was prohibited from asking the students whether they had been re-accepted or not. However, many students sought me out to share their stories and experiences of not being asked back for the following year or chose to raise the subject themselves during group discussions. “It wasn’t a very good year for me”, one student said:
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I had to make a lot of hard decisions and I learnt a lot of stuff about my injuries and like my body that wasn’t the best thing for my dance career.
Another student said that they were confused about why they had not been asked to come back. “The reasons, I find that they don’t always make sense”, they said:
Like for me, they said it was because of my injuries, which I kind of understand, but it’s like, I’m not the only one who’s had bad injuries. Like, I know people who’ve had way worse injuries than me. I was confused. I just think sometimes they’re not being completely honest with the reasons, which really pisses me off, cause it’s like “I’m leaving so you might as well just tell me the truth!”.
These examples suggest that when institutions coerce bodies to behave in certain ways, hierarchies between bodies may be either maintained or rearranged depending on the body’s ability and willingness to engage in exchange relations with others. These are powerful relations which the body must engage in to become gifted, but which also may prevent it from becoming so. An examination of pain offers a visceral understanding of this process – of the interface between body and institution – as the institution teaches bodies not only the meaning of pain but how to feel pain through exchanges with other bodies, bodies which have also felt the same pain. As I have shown, such embodied meanings and feelings of pain are crafted by the institution and imposed on bodies as part of the senso-historical training process, where power as pain is operationalised and felt between moving bodies.
Productive pain
Throughout this chapter I have suggested that both the look of bodies-in-becoming in pain and pains suffered in the pursuit of the ideal ballet body – such as injury, eating disorders, blistered feet, sore muscles or fatigue – are not the only injustices at work on the body.
247 Between Moving Bodies
Instead, through a lens of gift exchange I have been able to set aside the spectacular of pain and the impact of ballet training on the body – of the look of the body pre- or post-pain – to consider bodies in pain. In so doing, I have argued that it is through all felt experience that bodies are crafted and differentiated and the process of becoming is made sense of by and between feeling bodies.
Pain is currently understood as it relates to the institutional crafting of bodies as a technology of power, after Foucault, where the threat of discipline motivates and coerces bodies to willingly participate in cycles of their own domination. This can be easily understood of ballet training, where students’ bodies are observed for signs of pain, students train through and hesitate to report illness or injury, and teachers offer excuses for pain. This behaviour may be understood to be driven by either the fear of what certain pains may signal – that students are not able to give back the gifts of their instruction and thus unable to accrue giftedness and return prestige – and/or what the outcome of such pain may be, namely losing standing among the group or being outcast from the ballet family. However, the power of pain in ballet to shape bodies and behaviour in such a way, and thus its injustice, is also because pain is conceptualised as non-threatening.
In the ballet school certain pains were actively encouraged, sought after and even celebrated because they were understood to signify the body changing and improving, of gains made and boundaries crossed. In this way, some pains signalled a failure to return and others signalled a return being made. Therefore, rather than the physical threat of the potential for pain perpetuating relations of exchange, I have argued that the power of pain to perpetuate a body’s participation in training is because of the senso-historical nature of the training process, where the obligation to give back, to participate in relations with other bodies,
248 Chapter 6: Bodies in pain resides in the body precisely because those pains were once felt by other bodies. This is a temporal dimension to pain that I have shown existing visual analyses obscure, which instead have fixed the gifted body-as-thing in both time and space.
It is because of the suffering of past bodies and the ability of pain to be exchanged between moving bodies that students learn to conceptualise and feel certain pains as good or bad, painful or pleasurable and how pain signals their own and others’ becoming. Yet, as I have shown, pain is powerful not only because it can construct the gifted body or allow bonds and thus hierarchies to be maintained between bodies, but also because it harbours the potential to disrupt such bonds and hierarchies, re-arraying bodies within the institution accordingly.
Considered in such a way, the injustice of pain lies not only in its impact on bodies but in how it is operationalised to facilitate the gifted body.
In this chapter, I have suggested that pain provides compelling insight into the powerful process of the institutionalised crafting of gifted bodies. This is a process in which felt and shared pain experiences are continually navigated and made sense of as the gifted body becomes in pain, not after surpassing pain; are identified, measured and monitored as evidence of a body’s willingness, ability or failure to give back the gifts of their instruction; are used as a powerful negotiation tool to coerce bodies to fulfill their obligation to return; and, are regularly exchanged between bodies as gifts that enable giftedness to accrue in the body because they were once felt by others. Thus, the power of pain lies in its capacity to make, differentiate and make sense of gifted bodies, as they are arrayed by and vested in hierarchical relations with others during the senso-historical process of becoming.
249 Between Moving Bodies
Chapter 7: Conclusions
As previously described, despite literature acknowledging that a ballet dancer is created through a rigorous training process, examining the intricacies of the training system – how ballet is taught and learnt – has seldom been the subject of anthropological enquiry. This could be explained by Ann Nugent’s notion that:
Because ballet, in the way it is taught and presented, depends on tight organisation and adherence to rules, its practices are seldom subjected to rigorous questioning. (Nugent 1996:33)
However, this need not be limited to the institutional world of the professional ballet school.
Such an explanation could arguably be true of other forms of institutional life, such as the public service, banks, hospitals, schools or even families, where rules and regulations govern behaviour to such an extent that they become an unquestionable truth or given, and individuals acquiesce to following certain procedures or rules of behaviour because it is simply ‘the way it is done’.
We experience such social and bureaucratic processes in almost every aspect of our lives. For example, when travelling on public transport we might load money onto a metro card instead of paying with cash; when calling a service provider we might be forced to navigate through a series of phone menu options and recorded messages instead of talking directly to an agent; when borrowing library books, buying alcohol and tobacco, boarding flights, entering gyms, clubs and workplaces etc. we might be asked to present identification cards; when attending a new doctor, dentist, vet, fitness studio, therapist, practitioner etc. we might be required to complete various forms and answer questions which may or may not be relevant to us; and, when saying hello or goodbye we may be obliged to shake hands, hug or kiss etc. regardless
250 Chapter 7: Conclusions of personal preference. Yet these apparent “dead zones” of experience, seemingly lacking in interpretive depth, have not traditionally been placed under the anthropological microscope
(Graeber 2012). Considered too stark or perhaps too devoid of symbolic richness, the power imbalances that often underscore these encounters – of rules enforced and violences threatened – are therefore often ignored in favour of analyses of more overt kinds of power, such as physical violence (ibid.). For, and complementary to Nugent’s reasoning:
There are dead zones that riddle our lives, areas so devoid of any possibility of interpretive depth that they seem to repel any attempt to give them value or meaning. (Graeber 2012:123)
Thus, as Graeber shows, as seekers of meaning and signification, anthropologists are drawn to other more spectacular displays of power – of cockfights, initiation and ritual – that appear to provide enough density in which to apply our interpretive tools.
As I have pointed out in this thesis, this has indeed been the case with respect of performed ballet bodies, in which scholars have frequently examined discourses surrounding the power of the gendered encounter (of male bodies manipulating and controlling female bodies etc.) and the violent impact of the ballet aesthetic on the body (of anorexic bodies, injury, and bloody, misshapen feet etc.). But this omission is not limited to ballet. I have also drawn on discussions about the social, legal and ethical implications and appropriateness of adults touching children to show how, when considered through a sensory approach valuing the relations between and openness towards other bodies, a focus on hierarchical relations that appear violent to others are perhaps not the relations in which the operations of power can be found. As such, my touching analysis may have much to offer when applied to institutional life outside the realm of professional ballet training.
251 Between Moving Bodies
While some might take my approach to be a denial of such visible injustices, this would indeed be an absurd position to take – the world of ballet, to take the case at hand, is highly gendered and hierarchical, in which bodies are arrayed accordingly. Yet, as this thesis has shown, gender, teacher/student domination and the ballet aesthetic are not the only powers operating in the ballet world; nor are they the only processes by which bodies are arranged or relate to each other. As Graeber suggests, when considering a master whip a slave it would be problematic to assume that the only power in operation is that the master is communicating to the slave, through the infliction of pain, the need for obedience, demonstrating a “terrifying mythic image” of autocratic power – for while this is true, it is not the only element of the interaction worthy of attention (ibid., 123-124).
Similarly, my work does not seek to deny that visible injustices occur – indeed they happen often enough to have warranted significant attention, as evidenced in the literature. Instead my argument is that by focussing on overt displays of power as observed through the body we, quite literally, overlook the other powerful and decidedly more regular injustices that occur between bodies and within institutions – of the ballet school, university, family, society etc. – and which allow those institutions to operate. After Graeber, it is precisely for this reason that anthropologists should subject such institutional practices, and the social injustices that enable and perpetuate them, to rigorous questioning – for “if we ignore them entirely, we risk becoming complicit in the very violence that creates them” (ibid., 123).
Of equal importance, I suggest, are the analytic tools we use to investigate such practices. In this thesis’ introduction, I argued that anthropologists must hold the analytic tools they use to account; a need for rigour that is especially true of sensory tools and ethnographic approaches
(see Pink 2015). Throughout this thesis I have found the visual analyses of gifted bodies and
252 Chapter 7: Conclusions relations between them to be wanting, when it came to an understanding of how bodies are crafted and experience their own becoming. Following the notion that the way movement looks is distinct from how it feels, I have applied a touching analysis in an attempt to access those corporeal and intercorporeal experiences, made sense of through the body’s capacity to feel.
I could be argued that I might have applied other sensory modes of analysis to an examination of ballet which would have allowed access to other understandings. For example, the role of sound and hearing as music and rhythm array ballet bodies relationally, physically, spatially and temporally comes to mind, as an analytic perhaps suitably applied to classical ballet. This is a sensory mode which interestingly has also been ‘overlooked’ in favour of vision, as mentioned in Chapter 4. Scholars have shown that this sensory paradigm enables rich understandings of social groups and practices, such as the social, temporal and place-making communicability of sound and rhythm experience among Australian indigenous groups (see Magowan 2018). However, I suggest that while such an approach may have enabled me to examine the role of sound to shape a sense of locality, social identity and belonging, it would not have allowed me to examine the felt experiences of bodies as they engage in and with each other during the powerful processes of becoming. Instead I have shown how touch – the relational sense by which all sensory experience is made sense of by and between bodies – is an analytic which provides insight into operations of power at work on, through and between bodies and institutions and experienced at the level of the sensoria.
In this thesis, I have sought to challenge and reframe not only our current understanding of ballet but, perhaps more pertinently, our understanding of institution-body relations, as well as the application of vision as an analytic to such an enquiry. In applying a touching analysis
253 Between Moving Bodies to the examination of the sensory and corporeal experiences of individuals, I have shown how belonging, identity, difference and institutions are crafted and how gifted bodies make sense of and experience their own and other’s becoming, via the powerful relations that cycle within and between bodies and institutions – relations which are not easily seen. Far from being too stark, devoid of meaning or lacking interpretive depth, I conclude that such an approach offers rich insight into how individuals relate to, experience and are crafted by operations of power and how such power cycles between bodies and institutions. Thus, my approach might be applied to other forms of institutional life.
Future gifts
In examining the operations of power and crafting of gifted bodies in such a way, my approach may also have much to offer as other kinds of body-to-body relations play an increasing role in institutional life. I have discussed how ballet training, taught person-to- person, perpetuates a centuries-long tradition of embodied and bodily balletic knowledge being passed from teacher to student down the generations. I suggested that this embodied history of ballet – of felt experience shared between bodies of the past, present and future – gave power to the exchange of balletic gifts because they once belonged to and were felt by previous bodies. It was such power that perpetuated their exchange and obligation for recipients to give back the gifts of their instruction.
However, there is a suggestion that with the advent of (especially digital) video technology, film is becoming the text by which ballet is not only recorded but shared between bodies (see
Homans 2010: 546-47). During my fieldwork students regularly turned online to watch and
254 Chapter 7: Conclusions often learn or draw inspiration from professional dancers and other students performing variations, executing certain steps or taking class in both recorded and live-streamed settings.
The school itself facilitated such digital relations as teachers told students to go online to watch specific videos to help with training or to explore what their future “competition” (for jobs etc.) was capable of. Throughout the year, classes, performances and dance events held at NBS were also live-streamed to a global audience. However, while the institution facilitated such digital-to-human relations, it nonetheless grappled with the increasing role technology was having in the world of ballet. From debating the potential negative impact of social media and screen time on the students’ health and wellbeing, to the challenge of
“reaching” an audience becoming more accustomed to watching dance on a screen than in a live setting, the school was aware of the possibility of a changing nature of ballet training and performance and what such a digital turn might herald.
Such concerns were often framed as an “intergenerational” issue – that there was a disparity between how students and teachers used or understood technology. This perhaps problematises the intergenerational nature of ballet training I have examined in this thesis: training I have found to be facilitated through a senso-historical exchange in which bodies learn gifts once felt through and belonging to the bodies of expert others. For, if those teaching bodies have not experienced what it is like to learn through and from digital bodies, what impact might that have on the training process and thus crafting of ballet bodes? In turn, what might such answers have to offer to our understanding of operations of power and the crafting of gifted bodies?
In light of such questions, while beyond the scope of my thesis, I suggest that my touching analysis may offer an interesting avenue through which to examine the way embodied gifts
255 Between Moving Bodies may be transmitted between moving bodies, both digital and flesh-and-bone, and how the institution may operationalise such relations to craft the gifted body.
This technological turn is not unique to the ballet world. Societies are finding more and more ways to apply such digital technologies to the realm of the corporeal and the crafting of gifted bodies. For example, online education, webinars and virtual classrooms are now commonplace in colleges, universities and corporate training; and live-streamed fitness, make-up, craft or cooking tutorials are easily accessible on social media, facilitating a digital point of contact between bodies. Taking the application of emerging technologies a step further than simply a way in which two human bodies may connect digitally, virtual reality simulation and even robotic technology is increasingly employed to teach and evaluate various techniques du corps, where driving, flying, weaponry, sporting or surgical skills etc. are now learned from the bodies of machines and computers.
In a coming together of digital and sensory studies, in recent years scholars have turned attention towards how bodies interface with technology taking a sensory approach to such examinations. For example, scholars have investigated how bodies relate to, find meaning in and experience driving in sensorial and “often invisible and unspoken ways”, and what such understandings might have to offer in a world of emerging and future autonomous driving technologies (see Pink et al. 2019). Others have examined the evolution of haptic interfaces, from vibrating gadgets to touchscreen displays, to show how they have stimulated and often attempted to alter our sense of touch (see Parisi 2018). In building on such work, I suggest that my touching analysis when applied to the digital/material institutional crafting of gifted bodies may elicit interesting questions and information about the operations and experiences of power in different kinds of body-to-body relations.
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Beyond ballet bodies
If I was to consider the role of other kinds of bodies in institutionalised body production, such as digital bodies, my thesis may also have something to offer to an examination of relations between human bodies and those of other species. Multispecies ethnography has gained attention within anthropology, in particular, over the past decade (see Kirksey and Helmreich
2010). Scholars have turned towards examining the contact zones between human and other actors, such as animals, plants, microbes, viruses, insects etc.17 While again beyond the scope of my thesis, the ballet students interacted with other species on a regular basis, interactions which were designed by the institution. In a perhaps obvious example, the students’ relationship with the food they ingested (of both animal and plant origin) was shaped each day, when they were fed from a menu designed by the institution for its nutritional and sometimes therapeutic qualities. Certain plants and animals were thus conceptualised as fuel for the body, such as ginger to aid digestion, reduce nausea and stress and improve circulation; olives to reduce inflammation; lamb to build healthy tendons; and, chia seeds to build muscle. The benefits of ingesting various species were displayed on screens in the main dining area where students ate lunch and snacks each day.
The discursive power of such messaging and thus relation with food, as well as discrepancies between the students’ sensory experiences of eating and the institutions conceptualisation of certain species as friend or foe, was evident when I spoke to the students. Many maintained that they didn’t always enjoy eating the food on offer – describing the taste or texture as unpleasant – yet they recognised that it was “healthy” and “good” for them. “We get given the healthy food here, so it’s very good for our bodies”, said one student, “since coming here
17 See Vol. 25 Issue 4 of Cultural Anthropology for a special issue on multispecies ethnography.
257 Between Moving Bodies
I’m more aware of what I’m eating.” Drinking ginger tea, made freely available for all students and staff throughout the day was one such example. “At first I thought it was gross”, said one student, “but then I found myself not being able to get through the day without it – I don’t think I even like the taste”. Indeed, the teachers’ oft-zealous promotion of the benefits of drinking ginger tea was the subject of jokes among students who said it was touted as a
“miracle cure-all”. “If you’re sick, drink ginger tea! If you’re tired, drink ginger tea! If you’ve got a broken leg, drink ginger tea!”, one student joked.
Students often complained that certain foods, such as desserts, had been “taken away” from them and no longer served, which only encouraged the students to visit the shops and buy such foods for themselves. While they understood that this was the way the school was making the menu “healthy” and trying to control what they were putting into their bodies, some found the approach perplexing – “at least if they served it to us they could control what we were getting”, one student said. During meals when students would complain about the food, I would ask what they would rather be eating. They would describe eating pizzas, burgers, pasta, chocolate, chips, fried chicken, muffins etc. and show me pictures on their phones that they would all gush over – “yum, that looks so good!”. However, such reactions were usually qualified by comments echoing the institution’s messaging: “but if we did that we’d get fat, so […] I make myself eat vegetables because I know they’re healthy”, said one student. These examples illustrate how the institution facilitated different kinds of bodily relations and (as similarly described throughout this thesis in relation to touch and pain), how the institution also shaped the conceptualisation of those relations as appropriate or inappropriate.
258 Chapter 7: Conclusions
This is not limited to the ballet world. Research has shown how relations between bodies and food are a key component to crafting other kinds of bodies. For example, boxers are taught by their trainers about the dangers of ingesting certain foods in the lead-up to a fight (see
Wacquant 1995:77-82). Equally, “more-than-human” relations between humans and the animals they eat can shape identity and belonging, as an examination of dog meat consumption in South Korea as a discursive practice illustrated (see Dugnoille 2019).
Aside from our interface with other species through their ingestion, there are other examples in which human-to-non-human interactions are crafted through institutional discourses aimed at shaping a certain type of body. For example, medical facilities or charitable groups foster relations with various animals to craft healthy bodies, such as therapy horses to assist former military or emergency service personnel with post-traumatic stress disorder, or therapy dogs to assist people suffering from anxiety; prisons and correctional facilities use other species to craft reformed and rehabilitated bodies, such as dogs being cared for and trained, or vegetable gardens being planted and tended to by prisoners as part of rehabilitation programs; and, schools use plants and animals to craft socially aware and responsible bodies, such as children learning to care for a classroom fish or guinea pig etc., tending a flower or vegetable garden, or even looking after an egg so it may hatch a chick.
While the gifted body’s relation with food, as mentioned above, is perhaps not the most robust of examples in the rich field of multispecies ethnography, I suggest that it illustrates the utility of a touching analysis in an examination of such human-to-non-human relations, as they are facilitated by institutions to craft a particular kind of gifted body.
Indeed, the value of multisensory approaches has been increasingly recognised when applied to multispecies investigations (Hamilton and Taylor 2017:Ch.6). While not the main focus of
259 Between Moving Bodies their book, Lindsay Hamilton and Nik Taylor suggest that an application of multisensory tools, beyond that of vision, is vital for multispecies ethnography in two important ways:
Firstly, and pragmatically, because animals inhabit a deeply sensory world where language is less significant, tuning into our own senses equips us better for the sort of posthuman, species-inclusive ethnography we advocate. Secondly, prioritising disembodied, “sense-less”, research works to maintain normative assumptions about rationality located in mind/body dualisms. Given that much work with other animals rests upon challenging such assumptions, it seems hypocritical to continue using methods that signal an unreflective acceptance of them. (ibid., 112)
There’s is an argument that echoes those I have made throughout this thesis in relation to the crafting of gifted bodies – the need for privileging the sensory mode in which embodied and bodily experiences and relations are located, and to challenge assumptions about hierarchies and operations of power as they cycle and are felt between bodies. Thus, my thesis, I suggest, may provide new insight to the study of power, the crafting of bodies and body-institution intercorporealities, when applied to an examination of the felt relations between human and more-than-human (be they digital or natural) bodies in other institutional contexts.
Chapter summary
Throughout this thesis I have argued for attention to be paid to the invisible relations and felt experiences of gifted bodies as they engage in institutionalised processes of becoming – that by doing so, different understandings of not only body production but relations of power become accessible, relations and processes that are not easily seen. To do so, I have challenged the predominant visual analyses of gifted bodies conducted to date and instead applied a touching analysis to my examination of ballet bodies in training.
260 Chapter 7: Conclusions
In Chapters 1 and 2, I provided an overview of the limited research in the fields of giftedness and ballet. I showed that, for the most part, this literature has focussed on identifying factors needed for success, such as body type, while experiential elements and emic perspectives of what it is like to become gifted have been ignored. While some preliminary studies paved the way for exploring how professional dancers experience their giftedness using phenomenology, qualitative analysis and flow theory, I suggested that these had been limited by small numbers of participants and lack of dance-genre specificity. In particular, research into classical ballet dancers had commonly maintained a focus on the physical body – the
‘look’ of the gifted ballet body – with little exploration of sociocultural, relational or experiential factors.
Although the literature acknowledged that giftedness was an ongoing process and more multidimensional than the look of bodies alone, in these chapters I identified that the process by which a dancing body becomes gifted had also been ignored in favour of a focus on the finished product – adult professionals. As a result, studies involving child and adolescent students had overwhelmingly focussed on classifying and measuring the dancing body as a way to help identify talent and the potential for giftedness (in attempts to better guide talent selection and training programs), while the experiences of those students undergoing such training had rarely been explored. Interestingly, I identified similar gaps in the anthropological literature on ballet, where bodies and their relations had been visually assessed to gain understanding into broader social, cultural and gendered contexts, denying their experiential elements, and where the experiences of adult professionals far outweighed those of students in training. I considered these gaps to be problematic as the ongoing processes through which a body becomes gifted are located and experienced in and through
261 Between Moving Bodies the body. Thus, I also sought to offer a corrective to the visually dominant focus within both literatures – of reading the body for insights it may give into social or cultural contexts.
To do so, I drew inspiration from the broader literature on dance, whereby in studying other forms of dance, scholars have recognised the breadth and depth of experiential information to be gained from taking sensory and embodied approaches, and where the relationality and sociality of dance experience became accessible. This provided intellectual room to rethink and reframe the gifted body by asking not what a gifted body is, but how it becomes, an examination that necessitated privileging the experiences of those bodies in becoming.
Framing ballet as a social production reliant on and experienced through the relational deployment of feeling bodies and their parts, allowed me to challenge the hegemony of sight and address limitations in the ballet and giftedness literatures by exploring other sensory paradigms. It also allowed me to transport Mauss’ thesis on gift exchange into the corporeal, after Diprose.
In Chapter 1, I described how Mauss’ thesis might easily be applied to the corporeal and ballet-training world. Through an examination of the school’s audition and re-acceptance processes, the core elements of Mauss’ concept of gift exchange were evident. First, obligation, where the dancers must prove they are worthy of the gifts of their instruction.
Second, seasonality, in which time has to pass for counter-gift to be made. Third, how prestige and value is accrued through gift exchange, where students accumulate talent/ giftedness during training with expert others. And finally, how social belonging and difference is determined through the ability of individuals to receive and give back gifts, where students must demonstrate their ability to respond to training to be accepted/re- accepted or risk being excluded.
262 Chapter 7: Conclusions
However, I identified that as gifts for ballet materialise in the gifted ballet body, Mauss’ thesis was insufficient through which to examine corporeal gifts or the experience of their body-to- body exchange. Instead, drawing on Diprose’s observations that if a gift can ever truly be a gift then it must go unnoticed, and therefore operate not at the cognitive but at the sensory level, I suggested that a sensory analytic centred on the felt experiences of bodies might get closer to an understanding of how gift exchange both operates and is experienced by feeling bodies. Deciding on such a way forward was also inspired by the way in which the ballet school evaluated and assessed gifts for ballet and the accrual of giftedness.
In Chapter 1, my fieldwork showed that while it might at first appear that bodies were only visually evaluated by institutions, with close attention paid to the observable (often physical) attributes needed for success, the institutional processes of extended audition and re- acceptance periods pointed to the valuing of equally invisible gifts (the “microchip”); and that the intercorporeal relations between bodies was a vital means by which such giftedness was assessed. As such, I discussed how the school’s selection and evaluation process was conducted in two parts because bodies rarely possessed a perfect combination of balletic gifts
(and so decisions were often based on “maybes”) and certain gifts could not be easily seen on the body. This recognition resulted in bodies being first appraised during the phase one auditions for body type and shape, muscle strength and flexibility, range of motion in joints, musicality and coordination etc.; and then further evaluated throughout the phase two summer school depending on how they responded to training over time. Recognising that gift exchange was thus conducted and a gift for ballet both assessed and realised between bodies, in turn necessitated a sensory analytic that would account for such felt exchanges of bodily knowledge.
263 Between Moving Bodies
In Chapters 3 and 4, building on an anthropology of touch and in particular touch as a proto- sense, I explored how relations between bodies were facilitated and made sense of through touch, as well as how the institution continued to evaluate bodies once they were accepted into the school. My analytic of touch – as an experience incorporating physical contact, internal feeling and sensation, feeling other bodies without direct contact, and movement – provided access to complex multisensory gift relations experienced by both the students and the teachers as they navigated the intercorporeal training process of crafting and becoming a gifted body. This was a training process in which I argued that embodied gifts were exchanged, experienced and made sense of through touch – the core element of ballet training
– and the bodies’ ability to feel, as giftedness was facilitated between and began to accrue within bodies. I showed how intercorporeal relations facilitated knowledge (sense) and body production, as well as providing sensory feedback through which progress – the student’s ability to meet the obligation to give back – was continuously assessed and monitored body to body.
I argued that sensory relations between ballet teacher and student thus enabled the cycle of gift exchange. First, the teacher transmitted information to the student via physical touch, verbal feedback, musical or sonic comment, or visual demonstration. Second, the student processed, made sense of and acquired the bodily knowledge of the teacher through their own sensoria, before transmitting information back to the teacher through their body. Finally, that bodily knowledge was received by the teacher through their sense of sight, taste, touch, smell and sound. For example, the feel of a touch of the hand to a stomach enabled the teacher to know and the student to attend to what his postural muscles were doing; the sound of a brush of a foot along the floor enabled the teacher to know and the student to feel that her dégagé
264 Chapter 7: Conclusions was executed correctly; the look of a student’s body suspended briefly in the air mid-leap enabled the teacher to know and the student to feel that his take-off was coordinated and his body supported by the correct muscles; and, the smell of sweat circulating in the studio enabled the teacher and students to know that effort was being made to respond to training.
Through this examination it became apparent that the risk of misunderstanding, and thus injustice, was always present in these relations, regardless of how collegiate they may at first have appeared. Although students and teachers would talk about the need for students to
“work for themselves” and “be your own teacher”, I showed how this expectation was still built on the ability of the student to do what they were told – a necessarily unequal relation. I described how students spoke of the frustration they would feel when teachers didn’t understand what their body was doing or how their body was feeling, or when teachers questioned if they were accepting and applying the gifts given. I described, too, how teachers would speak of this difficulty in trying to understand the students’ accrual, understanding or application of the techniques du corps necessary for their success. It was this potential for misunderstanding, the misinterpretation of the other’s body, that I suggested necessitated the training process’ reliance on various multisensory gift exchanges between bodies – techniques of transmission aimed at maximising the potential for success in each exchange.
In Chapter 5, I extended this analysis further to draw parallels between Foucauldian understandings of the diffuse and relational properties of power and a conceptualisation of touch as relational and involving a simultaneous action and reaction, after Manning. Such comparisons enabled me to show how touch not only facilitated the exchange of balletic gifts between bodies – of embodied corporeal and sensory knowledge – but also provided a way to understand operations of power and powerful relations that can not always be seen. Similarly
265 Between Moving Bodies to my earlier critique of Mauss, I showed that while a Foulcauldian approach might be easily applied to ballet training, his work has too been criticised for neglecting the feeling and agentive body, seeing bodies as objects to be shaped by institutional processes. In extending
Foucault’s understanding of institutional power into the sensory, through my touching analysis – centred on the felt and relational experiences of bodies – it became evident that bodies were collectively and continually made and also made different from one another, by the operations of generosity and injustice which cycled within the institution. In particular, this approach allowed me to show how certain kinds of body-to-body hierarchies, such as teacher/student, adult/child, or male/female relations, may not be how they appear. Building on the discipline’s understanding of touch as a proto-sense by which we process all other sensory experience; as a felt experience within, between and external to bodies; as a negotiated and ethical discourse; and, as an ongoing and relational experience, I have offered an alternative to how we perceive power to operate between bodies and institutions. In particular, my findings showed the powerful process of becoming to be built on regularised senso-historical intercorporeal presentations of embodied and bodily knowledge. These were processes, potentialities and outcomes keenly felt through bodies, driving behaviour, and thus shaping certain kinds of bodies.
In challenging the visual hegemony of both ballet and gifted scholarship, as well as how we commonly ‘see’ hierarchies and body-to-body relations and operations of power – to write against viewing the body for insight it might give into broader contexts – I have shown the corporeal relationality of bodies, of gifted bodies crafted alongside and through the bodies and embodied gifts of others. In doing so, I have shown that an analytic of vision has not only obscured and often denied the felt experiences of bodies but, in turn, has prevented an
266 Chapter 7: Conclusions understanding of the sensory interface between bodies and institutions. This is a contact zone vividly illustrated through my ultimate examination of the dancers’ felt pain experiences, as I demonstrated that pain was operationalised by the institution to craft the gifted body.
In Chapter 6, I suggested that pain, as a technology of power, served to both craft the gifted body and provide feedback through which bodies and the institution could monitor success. I moved past the look of pain as it marked gifted bodies, as well as moving beyond Mauss’ conceptualisation of the threat of pain as a way a debt may be reclaimed from another, and
Foucault’s notion of the threat of discipline to coerce behaviour. Instead, I described how the power of pain to perpetuate the obligation of exchange lay in the way it was conceptualisated as a signal of the body’s ability or failure to receive and make counter-gift – a measure of generosity – and not in the threat of the pain itself.
I examined the students’ felt pain experiences as they offered a sense of how gift exchange operated between bodies, as the felt pains of previous bodies given to bodies in the present perpetuated the obligation of exchange; how the shared feeling of pain served to facilitate identity, belonging and difference within the social group; and, how the institution shaped the experience of pain felt by bodies as they learnt which pains signified or helped the accrual of giftedness and which pains served to remind them that they were not meeting their obligation to return. Through this examination I argued that a sensory analysis of felt experience, from which pain could not be undone, would show how a body’s generosity – its ability, willingness and openness to engage in exchange relations and return the gifts of its instruction – was made sense of and the gifted body ultimately crafted, between moving bodies.
267 Between Moving Bodies
Glossary
A adagio A series of slow and controlled movements of the body, performed with grace and fluidity. allégro Various jumping movements. The term is used in music to designate a brisk or lively tempo, and ballet borrows this term to describe steps and movement that share this characteristic. arabesque A position of the body in which the dancer stands on one leg with the other extended to the back. The arms may be placed in various positions to create the longest line possible from foot to fingertip. The back leg may be positioned with the toes touching the floor (à terre) or at various heights in the air (en l’air). attitude A position of the body similar to arabesque but in which the non-weightbearing leg is bent at a 90 to 145-degree angle. The thigh is rotated outwards so that the knee is lifted towards the height of the foot. The leg can also be positioned in front of the body (devant) with the thigh rotated outwards so that the foot lifts towards the height on the knee. Arms may be placed in various positions.
B battement fondu A slow, sinking, coordinated movement of the legs in which the dancer begins by gradually bending the standing leg while lifting the other foot towards the ankle. As the standing leg slowly straightens, the non- weightbearing leg unfolds to a fully extended position with the toes on the floor (à terre) or off the floor (en l’air). Can be executed to the front (devant), back (derrière) or side (à la seconde). battements tendu A movement of the leg in which the dancer begins standing with their legs together (first or fifth position), slides one foot along the floor to a full extension with toes pointed on the floor, and then reverses the movement to return to the starting position. Can be executed to the front (devant), back (derrière) or side (à la seconde).
268 Glossary battements jeté A similar movement to a battements tendu except done at a quicker tempo, with a sharper dynamic, and in which the toes of the moving leg extend a few inches off the floor. Can be executed to the front (devant), back (derrière) or side (à la seconde) bourrée Multiple fast movements of the feet performed either high on the balls of the feet or en pointe, to give the illusion of gliding or hovering above the ground. Can be performed on the spot or travelling in any direction.
C cabriole A jumping step in which the dancer springs off one leg, tosses the other into the air (to the front, back or side), beats both legs together at a 45 or 90-degree angle while in the air, and lands back on the take-off leg. cambré An arching movement of the spine. The movement is instigated by the head and neck and followed by the upper back. Can be performed to the side or to the back. corps de ballet The body of dancers in a professional company who dance together as a group and do not perform solo roles.
D dégagé A smooth extension of the foot along the floor to end in a fully extended leg with toes pointed on the floor. Can be executed to the front (devant), back (derrière) or side (à la seconde). demi-plié See plié développé A movement in which one foot slowly draws up the front or back of the standing leg towards the knee and then the leg unfolds to become fully extended in the air. Can be executed to the front (devant), back (derrière) or side (à la seconde)
E
échappés relevé sur les pointe An escaping movement of both feet, usually performed by female dancers. Starting with the legs together and one foot in front of the other (fifth position), the dancer bends her knees in a plié before shooting open her feet to an open position of the legs en pointe (to second or fourth position) and back again. Both feet travel rapidly and
269 Between Moving Bodies
simultaneously an equal distance from the centre of the body and arrive en pointe with straight legs, before reversing the movement to finish. effacé devant A placement and direction of the body in which the dancer stands facing one of the front corners of the room in a position with arms and legs open from the centre of the body (not crossed over the centreline). For example, standing facing towards the front left corner with the left leg extended in dégagé devant, the arms are placed in an open position (fourth/attitude) with the right arm lifted and left arm to the side, the upper body gently leans back and the head is poised towards the top arm and audience. en pointe When a dancer stands on the tips of her toes.
F fondu See battement fondu
G glissade From the French ‘to slide’, a travelling step. Starting with the legs together and one foot in front of the other (fifth position), the dancer does a plié and then slides one foot along the floor to the front, back or side. They then transfer the weight onto the outstretched foot by pushing off and extending the other foot as they glide across the floor and then quickly join the second leg to the first to finish in a plie back in the starting position. Can be performed with an adagio or allegro quality, and with or without a change of feet in the final position. grand ronds de jambe A movement that begins with a développé devant and then the extended leg is opened sideways and carried around the body maintaining the height to end at the back in arabesque. May also be done in reverse, beginning with a développé derrière and ending in an extension devant.
J jeté A jumping step in which one leg is tossed into the air (to the front, back or side) before the dancer springs off the other leg and lands onto the extended leg. This can be done as a jump on the spot, or as a travelling leap.
270 Glossary
P pas de deux A dance performed in pairs, usually between a male and female dancer, in which movement is facilitated between both bodies. passé A movement of the leg in which one foot passes from the front to the back or vice versa. This can be done in multiple ways, but in its most common form (retiré passé) the dancer will draw one foot up the front/back of their standing leg, pass the foot to the back/front of the knee, and slide the foot back down the leg. pirouette A step in which one or more turns are made standing high on the ball of the foot or en pointe on one leg. Can be done with the arms and non-weightbearing leg in various positions and turning towards or away from the standing leg. pirouettes à la second en dehors A series of pirouettes usually performed by male dancers. One leg is held in the air at the side of the body while the dancer performs a complete turn, turning towards the elevated leg. The dancer briefly pliés on the standing leg at the end of the turn before rising back up onto the ball of the foot to make another turn, this is repeated for the desired number of turns. The leg is held in the air to the side of the body for the entire series of turns. plié A movement in which the dancer bends both knees. Sometimes performed on one leg as in the above example. port de bras The carriage of the head, arms and upper body.
R relevé A movement where the dancer rises up onto the balls of the feet or en pointe. Can be done with a smooth controlled or quick sharp action. relevé lent A slow and controlled movement in which the dancer raises one leg straight in the air to the front (devant), back (derrière) or side (à la seconde). ronds de jambe A circular movement in which the dancer brushes one foot along the floor in a dégagé devant, carries the leg in a circle around the side to the back, before brushing back through to the front to repeat. Can be executed in reverse starting with a dégagé derrière, as well as with the toes on or off the ground.
271 Between Moving Bodies
S seconde en l’air A position in which one leg is held fully extended in the air to the side of the body.
T tendu See battements tendu turn-out The external rotation of the legs from the hip joint.
272 References
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