My story with technique & assisting Janet Panetta
My work is an extension of the teaching practices of my mentor Janet Panetta, who infuses humor and knowledge into her ballet pedagogy as ways of easing the symbolic weight of dancing with the lion that is classical ballet. Following Panetta’s enlivened coaching, which encourages students to experiment with form as a mode of self-cultivation, self-determination, and aesthetic discovery, I have learned how to transform Cecchetti ballet technique exercises to suit a variety of bodies and training goals.
“DANCERS ARE THE MEAT AND POTATOES OF THE ART FORM”
–Janet Panetta
Who is Janet Panetta?
Janet Panetta (US) is an international teacher of Cecchetti, an Italian form of ballet technique founded by Enrico Ceccheti. After a ballet career with American Ballet Theatre, Panetta clarified the technique to share more easily with professional artists working across aesthetic divides in the dance field. She has made work as a choreographer and been an active performer, and primarily teaches her approach to ballet all over the world, regularly with companies such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s company Rosas, and school P.A.R.T.S. and Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.
Panetta’s classes and workshops have been titled, Deconstructing Ballet and Ballet for Contemporary Dancers. These pedagogical formats offer students technical information from ballet and go beyond conventions of the commercial ballet world. Indeed, Panetta’s articulation of technique can be understood as a critique of the ballet’s tendency to privilege the product over the process. In focusing on the latter, Panetta illuminates a world of study that has enhanced the performance of dancers for generations, including dancers in companies such as Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Lucinda Childs, Mark Morris, Sidi Larbi, Sascha Waltz, José Limón, and countless others.
Cultural significance of Panetta’s ballet pedagogy
Offered in a spirit of egalitarianism, Panetta transmits ballet technique as an artistic practice that might be studied by more people that professional or aspiring ballet dancers. Taking her classes, students realize that she has no expectation students perform ballet choreography on stage. However, she gives acees to the technique as a general education would provide valuable knowledge for everyone interested.
Panetta’s approach omits some of the ballet gestures in order to give students a technical focus that allows people to concentrate on the harder things in ballet like jumping and suspending at the height of a pirouette. Her coaching brings students into alignments where they can sense the gravity of their bodies more easily and use that embodied information to create a healthy dynamic to move in and off of the floor. Her method of “reducing” comes into various areas such as muscular tension, compulsive emotional presentations, and other mannerisms that are often expected in ballet educations. She often tells student’s it is ok if they do not know the French terminology. Here a reduction of language is evidence of yet another invitation to practice.
If ballet is traditionally taught inside institutional frames that dictate a fixed aesthetic point of view, Panetta offers dancers to make those decisions for themselves. Countering conventions, Panetta’s pedagogy is self-organized and risk-taking. As a model of self-direction she offers her students a template to embody a politics of self-directed inquiry through dedicated practice.
Assisting Janet Panetta
I began studying with Panetta in New York City in 2010. In the beginning, I was deeply impacted by her ability to look me in the eyes and make me laugh, even though I was very afraid to return to ballet class after a serious injury. Her class encouraged me to train in order to become more physically intelligent, and to heal. Working with Panetta quickly renewed my interest in ballet as a rigorous form of movement research and beauty.
In 2013, I became Panetta’s assistant, a role which I continue today. Being an assistant entails many overlapping responsibilities: I take the class, I learn students’ names in order to address them individually, I demonstrate movement, working closely with the pianist to illustrate a specified phraseology for the exercises, and I catalogue the work, keeping a journal of technical language, movement principles, and a documentation of Panetta’s persona, which is very captivating (after smoking for most of her life, Panetta has a raspy voice and a warm Brooklyn-Italian accent).
Over the last five years, since moving to Europe and in the timeframe of the pandemic, I see Panetta less often. However, I continue to build the relationship by conducting formal interviews, co-planning classes, and informally reflecting on our complex experiences as teachers and performers, lovers of vintage clothing and pets. Her voice contributes a valuable perspective in my frame of reference on the intersection of ballet and contemporary dance.
Ballet technique is an embodied practice and a form of knowledge that I use in my work as a contemporary performer, choreographer, mutli-disciplinary artist; and as an ordinary person. Everyday, I coordinates my body with groups of people, who I know and do not know. In this field of activity, technique functions as a tool for clarification about how I’m moving through space as an individual and with others.
Initially, I experienced my technical knowledge in a very private way. Coming from ballet training for concert stages, my dancing was meant to be seen from a great distance. Technique was a companion to all my experiences, however expressive, but it did not arrive as a practice until I was invited to perform for audiences at a closer distance in downtown New York’s experimental dance scene. Becoming more intimate with the public spatially was an occasion for me to be more explicit about the ways I was managing to command the attention of the audience, and captivate them by sure-footed movement in the context of contingent or “performative” exchanges of presence.
My understanding of the way technique structures my artistic practice changed when I left the commercial ballet world and started working with choreographers and visual artists who expected a less homogenous technical base amongst the dancers in their projects. Entering this new type of dance project was exciting because my body could be regarded in a variety of ways, not just beautiful or ethereal, but human, non-expert, and vulnerable. But there was something about my technical basis from ballet training that I wanted to bring into the equation, after all, the intelligence and athletic capacity I had gained from fifteen years of training as a child and adolescent could not disappear. It constituted my embodied aesthetic, which, even through the harsh adversity I experience as a visibly queer person, I have always cherished.
In my new role as a “contemporary” dancer, I was expected to have an alacrity of techniques (voice, floor work, improvisation, writing) and the resources to foster them in my own time beyond the limited time of rehearsal. For me and the dancers I worked with, a constantly changing constellation, there tended to be a desire to discuss how we were doing the movement. To “get on the same page” proprioceptively. My feeling was that choreographers wouldn’t bring the how as often as the what, and so us dancers had moments of anxiety about how to prepare for our roles as interpreters. Technique became a practice to mediate these tensions. If we intended to give ourselves to the performance situation fully, we needed tools and we needed to be generous about sharing our tools with each other.
Preface: Technique is knowledge that structures my artistic practice
For me, practicing how is an essential condition for approaching new choreographic ideas. How is the meeting point of the personal and the collective. How is not fixed, but it structures and supports creative work, infusing fantastical thinking with knowledge of actual possibilities. How supports and informs anything presented as a coherent production of bodies in time and space.
In performance, dancers are work in the space between aesthetics and ethics, between personal and collective reality. The work of a freelancer is a negotiation, between what the choreographer thinks your body is capable of doing and what you think your body is capable of doing. Speaking with other dancers in a collective approach to understanding choreography gives me the courage to bring my theories of how to spaces of imagination. If adversity is a struggle faced by those with less power, how can elaborating the technical aspects of aesthetic constructs makes our labor more sustainable?
I work with this question by critically returning to my technical foundation in western classical dance and specifically ballet, which dominates the iconography of dance as an art form around the world. The paradigm shift I experienced, from working with ballet trained dancers to dancers of mixed technical backgrounds, was an occasion for me to celebrate diverse ways of knowing and to acknowledge the ways in which aesthetic forms are innovated through processes of mixing embodied memories and future thinking together.
In her survey of twentieth century dance scholarship and criticism, cultural anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku signals the racial bias that upholds ballet among a plethora of techniques around the world. Kealiinohomoku claims that, “it is a gross error to think of groups of people or their dances as being monolithic wholes,” suggesting instead that we regard ballet as an anthropologist might, that is, as a form of ethnic dance (Kealiinohomoku, 1983). My hesitation to assert my knowledge of ballet in spaces of collaboration among different techniques and embodied perspectives is based on my disinterest in reifying the exploitative histories of ballet and its overall “lionized” status as “classical” dance (Gottschild, 1998).
Being conscientious of the dominant character ballet knowledge represents around the world, and the fact that I am a White man in this world, gives me an opportunity to bring my history with ballet to bear on feelings of insecurity and placelessness. How can I sense a place and feel right inside my body in that location? How can I work with the design of spaces, inhabit an experimental mode of becoming, and also feel at home wherever my body is?
Somatic modalities help me reflect on the feeling aspects of dance, which have been historically downplayed in commercial ballet. My attempt to over-ride how my body looks by centering how it feels has had a major impact on the way I communicate ballet technique with peers and students. Perhaps dance technique is a mediator in society to reflect upon how we meet each other with mindfulness, and skilful physical action.
How: Sharing technical insights
My work as a teacher involves taking kinaesthetic information to pieces, experimenting with it as an isolated concept and then integrating it into movement. The process is about understanding how to link concepts or theories with the reality of my body. Coordinating my embodied process to movement and performance, I invite others to experience the meaning-making practice that is technique.
With my growing knowledge about ballet and my conscious tending to my embodied experience, I have chosen to teach in a self-reflexive manner. Oral history pushes dance forms into the present; it creates a direct line to contemporary performance and aesthetic inquiry. I have transformed my embodied knowledge of three different ballet techniques including Vagonova method, George Balanchine Technique™, and Cechhetti syllabus. While mixing information from these techniques and styles to my ballet classes, I also bring in my experience as a practitioner of somatic modalities and the environments in which I have experienced practices such as Pilates, yoga, and Susan Klien Technique™ taught.
Becoming a teacher is an ongoing process: I pay close attention to how the exercises I propose are taken on and taken in by students. Encountering students in a wide variety of contexts, from semester-long courses, to intensive workshops, daily training, and one-on-one coaching, I commit to putting my embodied knowledge to the service of others. While accepting that I cannot presume to know precisely what others experience, I bring my knowledge as a resource from a situated perspective that is constantly evolving. My ongoing dialogues with professionals in the field and also ordinary people enriches this process. I see myself as an artist and an ordinary person. I am an expert and I am a beginner, a professional and an amateur simultaneously, which is the complex mindset I obtain in all areas of my life and work.
We cannot deny that perfectionism has created inadequate conditions for social relations. Dancers become much more at ease with their bodies when they understand that I care that they have less injuries, that they watch and listen to each other, or help each other find their placement through hands-on peer-to-peer assistance. When students accept my invitation to shed perfectionist postures, quality learning processes can take shape.
Quality work is the awareness of how to do something efficiently with renewed interest. Because ballet asks for an incredible amount of physical reiteration, it is my responsibility to offer cues of how to differentiate between control, suspension and arrival. My strong familiarity with body percussion and rhythm helps me perceive where others can work less hard and rely on ease of motion in their bodies to coordinate their movement in space and time better, that is to say, more playfully.
Dance is creating sound. Dance is listening to self as other. Technique lessons are useful for dancers to tune into the environments in which they work and live. Whether performing classical or contemporary choreography, or experimenting with movement, improvisation, or generating set choreography, musicality and grace is always at stake.
A teacher can guide students to find successful movement pathways in their body by encouraging them to use specific timing and precise measures of strength and release. Giving students individual feedback about how they approach the movement offered in class creates an environment where everyone is understood as unique. This is the environment I want to study in, and this is also the ethos of environments where I feel comfortable sharing my expert knowledge in an ordinary historical form.