Project Outline

Title:

Concerning Technique: Ballet Practice Against the Western Archive

Research Area:

Arts Education / Performance Theory / Embodied Aesthetic / Technique

Research Institution:

The University of Applied Arts Vienna

Research Questions/Topic: 

What is at stake in teaching classical ballet in the wake of mass exclusions?

Abstract

Powerful actors in society have chosen what to put in the western cultural archive and now, dominant aesthetic and ethical biases are being addressed vigorously across the globe. New decisions are required for how we take up practices from the archive. How have past centers of power affected present learning? How should we continue to study western classical systems, styles and techniques? 

Critically returning to classics, and their “staying power,” how can we re-imagine the archive as a space of multivocal perspectives? How can we include (non-normative) practices and experiences that have been excluded from past consolidations of knowledge? Can technical lessons in the dance studio become opportunities for decolonial practice and theory to meet? How do we situate ourselves verbally and physically so as not to state experiences that are not ours to state and still work toward aesthetic and embodied skill on individual and collective levels? 

In my project, practice-led modes of research foreground lateral exchange as an essential premise for knowledge-transfer processes. The research proposes to develop a method of collaborative learning, which aims to bring ballet into dialogue with queer feminist and antiracist discourse. Developing this line of creative scholarly research, the project culminates in an interactive manual that offers creative insights into the research question: What is at stake in teaching classical ballet in the wake of mass exclusions? 

Context

Social exclusions in the performing arts are broadly hidden inside Eurocentric rationalities of aesthetic taste and individual talent. Among other art forms secured in the western archive, classical ballet could be considered an institution that was politically protected from harsh critiques of structural inequality, sexism, ableism, classism, and racism. Aligning with the modern neoliberal context, ballet is often facilitated by private institutions, where its practice largely takes place outside public scrutiny. 

Artists studying classical forms are routinely subjected to non-critical examinations of technique. By “non-critical” I mean that a singular logic is offered without acknowledgement of social, historical, and political context, or a format where cultural complexities are illuminated to inform collective participation. Performing arts practices facilitated in non-critical ways tend to perform a disservice to curious individuals, their bodies, and the communities of which those bodies are a valuable part. 

In her survey of twentieth century dance scholarship and criticism, Joann Kealiinohomoku signals the racial bias that upholds ballet among a plethora of techniques. Suggesting we regard ballet as an anthropologist might, that is, as a form of ethnic dance, she argues that “it is a gross error to think of groups of people or their dances as being monolithic wholes”. The point Kealiinohomoku makes is that writing on ballet is an example of a monopoly on knowledge. I add that the existing literature, by and large, represents a powerful collection of biased views that are particularly triggering to anyone negatively impacted by economic, racial, and gender inequality. 

Turning to Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s scholarship on American performance helps us consider how Africanist aesthetics are significant, yet written out of monolithic assessments of western dance history. Gottschild challenges the consolidated history of ballet by developing a theory of “Creolization,” a process by which American culture is an amalgam of multiple cultures that mix together in an ongoing process of cultural exchange that leads to specificity, and thus, advancement. As it pertains to ballet, Gottschild’s project is counter-hegemonic, not dismissive:

“To state that ballet is a form of ethnic dance lends a democratic perspective to this cultural form. Along with European orchestral music, it has been lionized as “classic” – that is, beyond classification, in a class by itself – so that it is isolated from and raised upon a pedestal above other world art forms. To separate ballet in this way, to deem it “high” art while other forms are considered something less, sets up an unreasonable, ethnocentric hegemony” (Gottschild, 1996).

Gottschild’s intertextual scholarship is a methodological approach my project draws from. Seeking nuanced perspectives on the western archive, how can we address the “gross errors,” to borrow Kealiinohomoku’s language, of the library? Gottschild’s intertextual approach illuminates for readers the complex ways ballet is not evolved by dominant power positions. For example, Gottschild exposes that George Balanchine’s dances drew technically and stylistically from his collaboration with Katherine Dunham, a Black dancer who choreographed using jazz music and African polyrhythms. 

Bringing this cultural information to bear on contemporary dance practice allows for anti-racist sentiments to shape and disrupt assumptions that ballet should be white, heterosexual, and upper class. I have done close-readings of Kealiinohomoku and Gottschild with BA students in my courses in the past years. It has been exciting for me to see students get interested in the politics of ballet as an unfinished story. How can participation with western systems take place without the expectation that the practitioner ideologically affirms cultural supremacist views? 

In western contemporary dance culture, ballet technique continues to be a popular physical practice among freelance professional dancers and university students. Interestingly, many participate in ballet training despite the fact that their contemporary dance work does not call for a “classical” aesthetic. Ballet proposes many physical challenges absent from contemporary practices and techniques. Ballet’s emphasis on linear extension, going down into the floor and up in the air with jumps and turns, and working with complex musical structures, all benefit dancers involved by expanding their movement possibilities. Innovative ways of teaching ballet give contemporary dancers unique options to discover movement. Working from a place of not knowing what bodies might do, ballet is potentially a site of practice that brings consent, labor, and experience to the fore of the western cultural archive. 

Project Goal & Plan for Realization 

The project builds a critical dialogue with the western archive. As a queer person, I am particularly interested in bringing my personal point of view from training in and teaching ballet in relation to the social and embodied anxieties of those routinely marginalized. I specifically aim to address the ways in which racial and sexual bias is upheld in western classical dance and how to become accountable for practicing techniques privileged in the western canon.

The dissemination form of the research will be a deconstructed manual of classical ballet that exists as a multi-media artwork involving writing, film and live performance. The manual is envisioned as a digitally interactive resource for dancers and theorists interested in ballet from a twenty-first century artist-practitioners’ point of view. I will work closely with artistic and academic supervisors to theorize the conceptual and practical aspects of the object and how it might be “held” and cited by viewers across disciplines of the arts and humanities. New critical dimensions will arise in the process that inform the shape of the final research outcome.

Methodology

Theoretical lenses/literature review: Investigates ballet technique from historical perspectives in the arts and humanities. Seeks to establish a theoretical framework that grounds practice-based approaches. Perspectives and discourses of interest are notions of queer phenomenology (Ahmed); cultures of the self (Foucault); intertextual readings and invisibilization processes (Gottschild); intentionality and care (Sharpe); and embodied research (Spatz). 

Genealogy review from manuals to manifestos: How did the Enlightenment’s force against consolidated power in the French monarchy yield changes in the way ballet has been practiced, administered, and theorized? Genealogical approach investigates historical manuals for insights on transitions of power that produce counter-hegemonic momentum in society. How did the Enlightenment and the Black Lives Matter movement reframe cultural knowledge and western cultural archives? Manifestos, activism and BIPOC efforts will be my guiding contemporary discourses for twenty-first century ballet.

Between athletics and somatics: Personal movement research documenting the space between the two physical pillars of my embodied practice: ballet and Klein Technique. My research will build critical self-reflection and establish comparison in terms of spectacle and embodied labor. What happens when these practices are articulated alongside each other through the lens of teaching and performance? 

Pedagogy in practice: Organize material traces from collaborations with teachers and students, class notation, syllabi, feedback, video, and written documents. Thus far I have been building these activities at The University of the Arts (UdK) / HZT and at Zurich University of the Arts. (See Portfolio section “Teaching in University Settings”). 

Ideas for Reflexive Documentation

Video essays and performative time studies are methods I use to build the disruptive, dissonant, and deconstructed force of the manual. My documentation practice involves extensive photo, voice, sound, and video collection and editing procedures. I use this process in live performance making. For an example, please visit andrewchamplin.com/studio.