UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CHICHESTER an accredited college of the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON BALLERINAS IN THE CHURCH HALL: IDEOLOGIES OF FEMININITY, BALLET, AND DANCING SCHOOLS Virginia Christine Taylor MA (Cantab) MA (Staffordshire) Doctor of Philosophy DANCE IN THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS September 2003 This thesis has been completed as a requirement for a higher degree of the University of Southampton WS 2235610 X TN€ ?~3. 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 3~ 0) '''Y UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CHICHESTER an accredited college of the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ABSTRACT The 'Church Hall' is a metonym for the Private Dancing School, ubiquitous in the UK, whose principal clients are young girls. The thesis interrogates the notion that taking part in ballet is a capitulation to the 'stereotypically feminine', by analysing the testimony of girls aged between 8 and II who attend local dancing schools. It presents their comparative assessment of the pedagogies in their primary schools and dancing classes. The thesis interrogates the stability of the idea of 'feminine' and its relationship with the political position of women, employing the theoretical, conceptual foundation for the obverse of a phallogocentric value system developed by psychiatrist Ian D.Suttie (1935), and the possibilities of loosening binary oppositions offered by the semiotic (Greimas') square. The thesis also proposes that the 'symbolic spread' (Frye, 1976: 59) of ballet, and hostility to it, are cognate with the concerns, dynamics, and reception of literary romance, and that both are perceived by the 'guardians oftaste and learning' (Northrop Frye's phrase, 1976:23) in terms which demonstrate Suttie's 'taboo on tenderness'. The thesis brings into representation the history and relationship to the state of British dance culture's 'Private Sector', in dialectical relationship to the largely negative terms in which it is cast by the academic dance community and the maintained education sector. The thesis challenges most private dance schools' exclusion from access to an authentic ballet 'text' by arguing it to be, like ballet's history in the working theatre, marginalised on ideological as much as artistic grounds. It recognises the place of the dancing class in social history, and presently, as a locus of social capital (Putnam, 2000) and, with reference to information from parents and popular culture, as a 'Women's Room' (French, 1977). The study is in part ethnographic, in part literary criticism, and in part historical; it considers representations in fiction, criticism, historiography, and other sources; it also draws on research in cultural and critical theory, education, anthropology, the history of art, sociology, hermeneutics, and other philosophy. It is post-positivist and qualitative. Neither its historical and social findings, nor its theoretical approach, have appeared before in the critical record. DANCE IN THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS Doctor of Philosophy BALLERINAS IN THE CHURCH HALL: IDEOLOGIES OF FEMININITY, BALLET, AND DANCING SCHOOLS by Virginia Christine Taylor This thesis has been completed as a requirement for a higher degree of the University of Southampton II CONTENTS Abstract 11 Contents 1Il Tables iv Acknowledgements v Definitions and Abbreviations vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Origins of the Research: 'The Streatfeild Incident' 12 Chapter 2 Apologia, Ephemera, North and South: the Church Hall, 21 the Opera House, and the Welfare State Chapter 3 Interviews, The Schools, Methodology, A Critical 35 Assessment of the Sources Chapter 4 The Private Sector Dance School 57 Chapter 5 'Girl Power': or 'We're different from them but we're not 78 really' Chapter 6 Plato, Aristotle, Romance, and the 'Taboo on Tenderness' 98 Chapter 7 'When People Think of Ballet, They Think of Pink' 111 Chapter 8 Mothers and Daughters . 127 Chapter 9 Utopia in the Church Hall: Going to Dancing and Going 148 to School Afterword 173 Appendix 1 Issues of Race and Ethnicity 184 Appendix 2 Consent Forms, Research Ethics Declaration 186 Appendix 3 Summer School 1999 Questionnaire and Responses 194 Appendix 4 Extracts from Key Stage 2 League Tables 1998 204 Appendix 5 Geographical Distribution of Schools and Faculties, from 208 1999 CDET directory Bibliography 209 III TABLES Analysis of 'faculties' by geographical area, from 1999 UK Directory of Registered Dance Teachers who enter students for society examinations, The Council for Dance Education and Training 67 Parental questionnaire Summer School 1998 137 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank University College Chichester for the financial assistance which made this research possible, and its academic, library, and administrative staff for their support and patience. She also offers thanks to teachers and officers from schools and Teaching Societies in 'The Private Sector' for their generosity and trust in allowing her access to their students and their culture, and for their time in providing information and answering questions. She is most particularly grateful to her principal gatekeeper 'Ruth', and to the other proprieters of the schools where the interviews took place, 'Miss Richards', 'Miss Davis', and 'Francesca'; and to the parents of the young dancers for allowing her to talk with their children. The study owes most and the author offers most thanks to her principal informants from Miss Richards' School: Cassandra aged 9 -1° Elizabeth aged 8 - 9 Jane aged 11-12 Buffy aged 8 - 9, sister of Helen Karen aged 10 -11 Helen aged 1° - 11, sister of Buffy Anna aged 11 - 12 Susanne aged 8 - 9 Kerry aged 10, cousin of Jessica Jessica aged 11, cousin of Kerry And in addition, to the Summer School participants Clio aged 9, Hermione aged 8-9, Jo aged 10, Carolyn aged 10, Perdita aged 9, Rosa aged 9, Lucy aged 10, Sophie aged 10, Paul aged 8, and Christopher aged 14: from the Southern School, Barbara aged 9: and to the 41 other girls who contributed to interviews, and to the girls and parents who returned questionnaires. v DEFINITIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS 1. Abbreviations and Special Terms Used in Transcribing Interview Material • cause because (contraction) • dead a superlative (spoken Northern English, in use in my 1950s childhood) • errrm vocalised particle denoting a process of thinking underway • inaud. inaudible • me my (pronounced short' i' as in win) • phatic Phatic: my appropriation of the term, defined in my Oxford Talking Dictionary as 'serving to establish or maintain social relationships rather than to impart information'. I use it specifically to denote a vocal but not a verbal response which the girls used frequently to offer support, agreement and recognition to something said, particularly something which for one reason or another was slightly revealing, difficult to express, or especially important. It is an unvoiced moment of breath, a sort of quasi-laugh. On the tapes I discovered that I did this too; I don't know if! do it in every social context or ifl was unconsciously reflecting the girls' conventions. I think, although it is worrying to say so, that it is a culturally feminine English speech code, just as Swedish girls (but not boys) say 'ja' as an indrawn breath with the initial letter impl icit. This was told me in conversation with a dance group of nixed nationality (Swedish, Danish, US, French). It may indeed have a Nordic origin since I have heard older male Westmorland speakers express agreement with a similar [y]es. • 'play voice' a high-pitched, largely unvoiced tone. Adults retain it to talk to small children, animals, and sometimes to other adults in distress. (,Here, kitty kitty kitty') • s.r. 'sous rature', (under erasure): that is, crossed out, but the original term still present. In recent theoretical usage, a word crossed through, deleted suggests 1) it cannot have its meanings completely removed and 2) the word is inadequate, but there is no viable alternative to it. This idea loosely follows Derrida following Heidegger. I do not mean here Heidegger's original distinguishing Being from beings, or indeed the more complicated ofDerrida's analysis of the line of erasure (see Silverman 1989), but I appropriate the term's imaginative resonance. • skit tease, parody (verb: not in use in my childhood 40 miles away - either new or specific to locality. Sounds Norse so probably local). • stuff noun denoting 'big abstract concepts' • V author's initial, used to denote her speaking in interviews • yeh yes (local pronunciation, open e - yes with missing s) • denotes change of speaker, when I cannot identify the voice. vi 2. Historical Note The southern girls used what I caIl 'rising intonation', a newish phenomenon common among younger English speakers, possibly an Americanism, to invite agreement and understanding. The voice rises at the end of a sentence in quasi-interrogative style. I believe it is thought sophisticated or cool. The northern girls did not do this. It may weIl serve the purpose of 'phatic' above - but is less 'tender' (Suttie, 1960 [1935]), demanding agreement rather than hoping for it. The majority of my present English-speaking undergraduates use 'rising intonation', although so far, those with English as a second language do not. 3. Style and Conventions (i) Singular They He/she: unless the sense or sentence renders it impossible, I will use an impersonal singular 'they' or 'their' to avoid using bulky hislhers and slhe. 'Singular they' is discussed in Ann Bodine's' Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: singular "they", sex-indefinite "he", and "he or she'" (1998:[1975]). Bodine points out that English has linguistic devices to use for sex­ indefinite referents, and that the present movement against sex-indefinite 'he' (sometimes seen as a feminist attempt to alter 'correct' language) is a counter-reaction to attempts by prescriptive grammarians to alter the language in the opposite direction (ibid.: 125), that is, the move to institute 'he' to supplant other strategies in use. An Act of Parliament of 1850 legally replaced 'he or she' with 'he'.