ARTISTIC

RESEARCH

Doctoral

Project

Concerning Technique: Ballet Practices Against the Western Archive

Research Institutions: The University of Applied Arts Vienna & Zurich University of the Arts

Supervisors: Ruth Anderwald & Leonhard Grond

This PhD project investigates alternative educational practices in the performing arts. It focuses on approaches to classical ballet training that deviate from the western canon’s conception of rigor as linked to virtuosic appearances. In the research, ballet technique is examined as a site of feeling, aligning with other dance forms like contact improvisation where, according to Steve Paxton, sensation is the palette of the dancer. Prioritizing sensation in ballet training creates dissonance with standardized learning structures that value image-production over feeling. In feeling we encounter vulnerability, and the opportunity to instruct repetitions of movements not from the position of mastery, but rather, from the intention to connect with others and situate embodied knowledge in practices of care. How might alternative ways of studying traditional forms embolden dancers to re-imagine the social dimension of learning embodied aesthetics? 

 

The wish for this research is to reveal what becomes possible when the boundary of a classical art form is pushed at the level of embodied technique, which is always transmissible. Working with the concept of anarchive developed by Erin Manning, the research approach is self-reflective and collaborative, in particular, it engages with traces of the independent ballet teacher Janet Panetta (1948-2023), whose pedagogy theorized ballet technique as a place to re-imagining traditional hierarchies of dancer to dancer and teacher to dancer. A documentary film will be created as an alternative archive, exhibiting reflections of Panetta’s alumni students, as well as creating other performative and discursive spaces to unpack what is lost when we diverge from traditional ways of learning. 

  • Public Colloquium 2024

  • Envelope 6

    CONTRIBUTION TO THE UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA RESEARCH JOURNAL

    The experimental essay articulates multiple, fragmented positions, for instance, the movement facilitator, the child, and the author of academic scholarship. The narrative folds in on itself, describing an encounter with pedagogy that evolves into a renewed interest in sensual experience face to face with standardized ballet training, histories of self-abnegation and striving to be the normative image of classical ballet.

  • FIELD RESEARCH WITH LENIO KAKLEA & ANDREW CHAMPLIN

    IMPULSTANZ VIENNA INTERNATIONAL DANCE FESTIVAL

    How can technical, embodied consciousness support the conceptual work involved in the creation of dance and performance? And how can a choreographic idea challenge our preconceived notions about technology and technical knowledge?

    In this co-facilitated workshop we explore how to structure a process that creates space for specific movement vocabulary and specific choreographic ideas and tasks, particularly those of the Western canon, and work as a group to understand how embodied knowledge with technical valences might benefit our art. Since it is not always about dramaturgical skills, we view skill as an open question that leads us from experience to experience in our exploration. When is technical knowledge not essential to our project? When could it be further refined?

    Technical development is taken here as a possibility, a circumstance, an opportunity to engage in a level of embodied skill that can contribute to the vitality of our performance and its perception. Furthermore, we view choreography as a set of tools and ideas that structure and challenge our ways of embodying materials and presenting them. Over the course of the week we share our discoveries, discuss our experiences learning, observing and showing them to each other and begin creating choreographies using our newly developed tools.

    July 31 - August 4, 2023

  • Envelope 5

    CONTRIBUTION TO THE UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA RESEARCH JOURNAL

    For Envelope 5, I have contributed an expose that outlines the notion of squaring-off. Squaring-off comes up in my research on ballet technique in physical and theoretical resonances. Simultaneously, the notion contains an idea about bringing one’s body into relation with geometries in space in order to produce a feeling of unity, and, additionally, about encountering power structures that feel diminishing to the curious practitioner’s body. The expose offers a self-interview about my research topic and a poetic infographic that gives readers a space to visualize the complex experience of practicing a technique from the western canon.

    Published June, 2023

    Visit the Exposition on the Research Cataloguee

  • PUBLIC COLLOQUIUM

    THE UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA

    As an advancement of my PhD at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, I presented recent findings of my artistic research in multiple forms: the contribution of a sculpture in the group exhibition of the Art Research PhD program, and a public lecture performance followed by a critique by the community and guest critic Mariella Greil. Taken together, the presentation offered a personal narrative about performer training that allows fellow researchers to imagine alternative ways of being in one’s body in the face of rigid systems like traditional ballet pedagogy.

    The experience of presenting at this early stage of my research project allowed me the chance to test different ways to communicate experiences in the body, in other words, to present embodied research. As I attempt to work between spaces of art and scholarship. Through practice and risk-taking expressions of my thinking, I question how my embodied communication forms are methodologically viable with conventional academic structures. What insights resonate through the performative situation, and which lack coherence?

    May 24, 2023

  • Junior Research Group

    ZURICH UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS

    Through the Junior Research Group of ZHdK, I had the opportunity to invite guests VK Preston, Concordia University, and Macklin Kowal, Aristotle University, to join me in a series of conversations on the topic of aesthetic training and practices of the body in the context of epistemic shifts in higher education. The series of conversations concluded as an opening-up. The conversation that was once an intimate exchange became more public with the inclusion of fellow artistic researchers in the junior the research group. Themes that emerged included the relationship between practice and theory, the effect of trends in the art market on the university and its positions and structures, and the practice of art-making in the context of global changes to the way an education is administered, and knowledge developed and shared.

    March 30, 2023