(Re:) Claiming Ballet

The collection of essays demonstrates that ballet is not a single White Western dance form but has been shaped by a range of other cultures. In so doing, the authors open a conversation and contribute to the discourse beyond the vantage point of mainstream to look at such issues as homosexuality and race. And to demonstrate that ballet’s denial of the first and exclusion of the second needs rethinking.

This is an important contribution to dance scholarship.  The contributors include professional ballet dancers and teachers, choreographers, and dance scholars in the UK, Europe and the USA to give a three dimensional overview of the field of ballet beyond the traditional mainstream.

It sets out to acknowledge the alternative and parallel influences that have shaped the culture of ballet and demonstrates they are alive, kicking and have a rich history. Ballet is complex and encompasses individuals and communities, often invisiblized, but who have contributed to the diaspora of ballet in the twenty-first century. It will initiate conversations and contribute to discourses about the panorama of ballet beyond the narrow vantage point of the mainstream – White, patriarchal, Eurocentric, heterosexual constructs of gender, race and class.

This book is certain to be a much-valued resource within the field of ballet studies, as well as an important contribution to dance scholarship more broadly.  It has an original focus and brings together issues more commonly addressed only in journals, where issues of race are frequently discussed.

The primary market will be academic.  It will appeal to academics, researchers, scholars and students working and studying in dance, theatre and performance arts and cultural studies.  It will also be of interest to dance professionals and practitioners.

Academics and students interested in the intersection of gender, race and dance may also find it interesting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789383638

Book preview

(Re:) Claiming Ballet

(Re:) Claiming Ballet

Adesola Akinleye, editor/curator

First published in the UK in 2021 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2021 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

Copy-editing: Newgen Knowledgeworks

Cover image credit: Dancer Nena Gilreath, in The Leopards Tail by Waverly Lucus, Photographer Keiko Guest

Frontispiece image credit: Agata Lawniczak

Production manager: Laura Christopher

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Contents

Foreword

Katy Pyle, Founder and Artistic Director of Ballez Company

Foreword

Virginia Johnson, Artistic Director and former Principal Dancer of the Dance Theatre of Harlem

Introduction: Regarding claiming ballet/reclaiming ballet

Part One: Histories

1.Ballet, from property to art

Adesola Akinleye

2.Should there be a female ballet canon? Seven radical acts of inclusion

Julia Gleich and Molly Faulkner

3.Arabesque en noire: The persistent presence of Black dancers in the American ballet world

Joselli Audain Deans

4.Portrayals of Black people from the African diaspora in Western narrative ballets

Sandie Bourne

Part Two: Knowledges

5.The traces of my ballet body

Mary Savva

6.Ballet beyond boundaries: A personal history

Brenda Dixon Gottschild

7.Auftanzen statt Aufgeben and the Anti Fascist Ballet School

Elizabeth Ward

8.Dancing across historically racist borders

Kehinde Ishangi

Part Three: Resiliences

9.The Dance Theatre of Harlem’s radicalization of ballet in the 1970s and 1980s

Theresa Ruth Howard

10.‘Showgirl with red pointe shoes’: Personal testimony as social resilience

Theara J. Ward

11.‘Can you feel it?’: Pioneering pedagogies that challenge ballet’s authoritarian traditions

Jessica Zeller

12.The ever after of ballet

Selby Wynn Schwartz

13.Ballethnic Dance Company builds community: Urban Nutcracker leads the way

Nena Gilreath

Part Four: Consciousnesses

14.The Counterpoint Project: When life doesn’t imitate art

Endalyn Taylor

15.Ballet’s binary genders in a rainbow-spectrum world: A call for progressive pedagogies

Melonie B. Murray

16.Dancing through Black British ballet: Conversations with dancers

Adesola Akinleye and Tia-Monique Uzor

17.Ballet aesthetics of trauma, development and functionality

Luc Vanier and Elizabeth Johnson

Notes on contributors

Index

By no means the first, this book just scratches the surface of the contributions of the many brilliant dancers of our communities; the book looks forward to sitting alongside more books, histories, and of course more dances.

In the spirit of multiplicity that this book represents, we begin by offering two Forewords representing different generational acknowledgments.

Foreword

Katy Pyle, Founder and Artistic Director of Ballez Company

With this book, we remember ourselves, and remember that ballet is awoken, enlivened, radicalized and made better by our work outside the racist, cis-heteropatriarchal mainstream status quo. Through the braveness of celebrating the very differences we represent, a path is carved to make ballet truly relevant today. The ballet canon is studded with transgressive acts that created seismic shifts; acts of change have inspired and transformed the art of ballet from being a lonely re-enactment of a bygone Western European colonial era into a site of contemporarily relevant, beautiful art with transformational expressive power.

Art must electrify, challenge and Queer in order to stay alive. The Queer, the different, the other have subverted mainstream ballet throughout its history, whether intentionally or by the de facto nature of our presence, and thereby propelled its evolution. Our contributions have always been present in ballet, in the training, the culture and the performance – so much so that we have been folded into the fabric of ballet itself, but also usurped, made invisible and threatened with disappearance.

I fell in love with ballet as a young person when it showed me that I could use my body to be expansive, generous, dramatic, expressive, precise, powerful and graceful. At the same time, ballet also taught me to betray myself, through hiding my gender, my sexuality and the beauty of my powerful frame. The gatekeepers in ballet asked me to be subdued, fragile and quiet, which I could only accomplish through disordered eating and the suppression of my truth. For those of us not within the definitions of ballet’s current mainstream status quo, our relationship can be abusive. For me, ballet was the great love of my life, and I felt as if I had to betray myself in order for us to stay together.

Once I left ballet, came out, came into myself and developed my artistic voice, the thought of returning to ballet felt like it could only be some kind of postmodern, conceptual joke. I could not perceive myself inside the form as anything but funny, strange or ironic – so I founded Ballez, which embraced those contradictions. And it was not until I found my ‘dancestors’ that I was able to become myself within the form, able to recognize my lineage within it, and accept the fact that I am part of shaping its future.

It is important to know your ancestors, and for those of us in dance, I offer that we might know our ‘dancestors’. In order to know belonging in ballet, I needed to know mine. I needed to know those who came before and those doing it now alongside me. My ‘dancestors’ make it possible for someone like me to claim my place and make my work. I know now that my ‘dancestors’ are out there, have always been there, in the ether, in the history – both visible and invisible – in the passion of dancing that passes from their bodies to mine, through teachers, performances and the myriad communications of dance, over time and across continents – all the dancers who pushed ballet at the edges, blurred the boundaries and Queered ballet as they helped it mature, those who shaped it from the inside out, moved it forward, broadened it from its limited fifteenth-century European fashionable court dance roots and towards the rich field ballet is today, in the twenty-first century. Until I called my ‘dancestors’ in, I could not really hear the call that ballet was making to me … those dancers are my lineage … Bronislava Nijinska (and her brother Nijinsky), Ida Rubinstein, Agnes DeMille, Katherine Dunham, Raven Wilkinson, Maria Tallchief, and living legends Ernesta Corvino, Yvonne Rainer and Janet Panetta.

‘Ballet is Woman’, but not in the way Balanchine meant. The foundation for the work of ballet has happened in and through women’s bodies. Ballet has been carried through us: the dancers, teachers, rehearsal directors, designers, fundraisers, aficionados and choreographers who have spent our lives within the form. The emotional and expressive potential that lives within ballet’s steps, affects and ways of connecting is present because of our often-invisible labor. The intelligence and emotional expressivity of our work is at the heart of ballet’s expansive knowledge.

Contrary to the idea that women need men to shape our expression into something knowable, we know and can shape our own expression. Sadly, ballet historians and choreographers alike have painted a picture of women’s bodies as inexpressible and unknowable, and through that continual, willful ignorance have left us to feel alone and shamed in our isolation, cut off from the power we possess and that we could claim together.

This is also due to the proprietary nature of traditional ballet lineages and culture, which renders ballet the property of the elite and denies that, at its best, it is an artform that cannot be owned (as Adesola Akinleye effectively argues in Chapter 1). The history of ballet dancers being the literal property of the nobility paved the way for this false thinking, as countless dancers were repressed and oppressed throughout ballet history to serve the wills and desires of those in power. Yet, even inside that controlled world, dancers have communicated their humanity, their beauty and their truth, pushing the form of ballet far beyond its patrons’ and producers’ limited mindsets.

Sadly, the thinking used to maintain the racist, cis-heteropatriarchal status quo in ballet that designates the elite, standardized technique – what is truly classical and in line with tradition – makes clear who is inside and who is outside the center. And why should we pay attention to the fringes, to one another, when we all know the rules of who belongs and who does not, and why those outsiders don’t fit in? We all know, from our first ballet classes or performances, what is ‘correct’ and what is not. This applies to technical standards as much as dress code and classroom decorum. And we carry this lineage in our bodies right alongside our technique. These deeply internalized value systems do not just damage us, they also isolate and fractionalize us away from one another. Why should we waste our time connecting to more outsiders? Aren’t we all trying to get in? To curry favor with the king in the center of the palace? Everyone working in ballet maintains this system – even if it hurts us, and sometimes, especially if it does – and the cycle continues into the future. So often, once we have arrived somewhere close to belonging, even at the expense of our own truth, the cycle of exclusion is continued – for example, telling our students to lose weight and change their hair and attire because we want to protect them from the pain of exclusion. And we know what is expected: so often the teachers, dancers and all those working in ballet maintain the rules, always focused on the center and never really looking to the side, to see each other, to notice what is and has always been happening to us.

Further, sadly, with all this focus on the center, sometimes the whole ballet world can seem hopelessly out of touch, and we can lose opportunities to build coalitions with others who live outside the status quo. When I was an 18-year-old student at Hollins University, Theresa Howard (a contributor to this book, Chapter 9) came as a guest artist to teach us ballet. Walking into class, I was so overwhelmed by recent ballet-inflicted trauma upon my body that I could not bring myself to take class. I disavowed ballet entirely, and thus lost out on the opportunity to work with a potential ally who could have taught me about surviving and thriving in ballet unapologetically as yourself, not despite difference but in its embrace. Today I regret very much that I was so lost in my own fears, shame and insecurities that, instead of joyfully showing up to her classes and learning, I changed my major so I would not be required to take ballet. I think about this now, and I want to issue a note of warning. When we are divided, we are conquered, and this fits in nicely with the historical roots of ballet evolving within colonial culture. I am ashamed that I fell for it, and today I can forgive myself, but I know that there are so many others out there who, like me, cannot or could not wake up to the power of our potential allies. However, the only way that witnessing can happen is if each of us keeps going. And I know now that I have to look harder, look further beyond what the center tells us to pay attention to – negatively or positively – and be vigilant in that work, to ensure I do not fall prey to false narratives of isolation.

While dancers have often failed to recognize one another, historians have actively maintained the racist, cis-heteropatriarchy in ballet, focusing on men and their work and largely ignoring the radical and vast experiences and contributions that Black, Indigenous, non-White, Queer, cis and trans women and female-assigned people have made throughout ballet history. This erasure has far-reaching ramifications, as the culture of ballet, emboldened by the historical record, makes teachers and artists continually feel unsafe to include vital parts of themselves in the studio or on the stage; yet, those parts do find their way to the studio and stage, and are the moments of memorable magic that create turning points within the form. When those moments are unnamed, they disappear like so many of Giselle’s Wilis at dawn – and perhaps that is precisely what those in power would prefer.

This book calls upon the strength of our ‘dancestors’ to help us invoke our own stories. We have to tell our own stories and, in learning from one another’s stories, further our understanding of this form, in its history, its present and its potential future.

We belong in ballet and, far from being an annoyance, we are its medicine. When ballet has to stretch to embrace those of us who ask for more, for bigger and greater artistry, the form has the potential to become more than a relic of bigoted, misogynist history. We must reclaim our own dancing bodies, our ideas, beliefs and values, claim our own ‘dancestors’, and witness and embrace one another. In doing this work, we not only liberate ourselves as artists, we also learn, grow and inspire, becoming good ‘dancestors’ for those who follow in our footsteps.

Foreword

Virginia Johnson, Artistic Director and former Principal Dancer of the Dance Theatre of Harlem

I offer sincere gratitude to Dr Adesola Akinleye for her invitation to write a Foreword to this important collection. Like so many older Americans, I am weary of the topic of diversity in ballet. We have been talking – and acting on – this topic for as long as I can remember. Yet, in June 2020, as US cities again erupt in protest and violence over the persistence of racial inequities, it is not at all surprising. It is time for ballet to come into its full realization as an artform for and by all, and may this volume be a means to accomplish that goal.

My privilege is to have spent my life in ballet. I fell in love with it at a very young age when the Royal Ballet came to Washington, DC in the 1950s and performed at a converted movie palace on F Street. The ballet was Swan Lake, and it was the Act I pas de trois that hooked me. Only now do I question whether the cherished memory of tiny dancers moving with synchronous beauty seen from the highest balcony occurred because those were the tickets my mother and father could afford, or because that was where the Negroes were permitted to sit? Washington DC remains a very segregated city, but in the 1950s it was the law.

I was blessed to have parents whose mission in shaping the futures of their offspring was twofold: (1) to expose us to the inspiration, solace and character-building rigor that only art can provide; and (2) never once allow us to feel or experience the fact that the color of our skin would limit us for our entire lives. Our childhoods were filled with piano lessons, drawing and ballet classes. The piano was pure drudgery and I never practiced; while I loved drawing and painting, it was ballet that seized and held me. Weekly lessons became daily lessons until ballet became the thing that propelled me over the color line and into a very White world.

I went to my classes, took my corrections and strove to achieve mastery. I had no idea that the people in that world did not want me. It was not until days before my graduation from the Academy of the Washington School of Ballet (WSB) that the director – who had spent the past five years training me in ballet – called me into her office to tell me that I would not have a career and should try modern dance because no ballet company would hire a Black dancer. This was pretty stunning, but even now I remember not being deflated. I was on my path and I was determined to find a way.

However, the year was 1968. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated; the city was in flames. It was time for me to wake up. Throughout the time I was at WSB, such civil rights-era milestones as lunch counter sit-ins, right-to-vote marches, even the momentous March on Washington were all around me; however, the dawning of an empowered Black identity had not yet registered for me as I pursued ballet’s transcendence. In retrospect, I wonder how I could have been so oblivious, but I was: I only thought of ballet. From this perspective, I think it was a zone of certainty that soothed the agonies of adolescence. But I also had identity issues to resolve and only much later did I realize the power of ballet as an expressive art form, one that transcends its origins to speak across race and culture.

Crisis ensued: as I became aware of the world beyond the studio, beyond the insular fantasy of perfection, I began to be embarrassed by my love of this European artform. Loving ballet caused me to question every aspect of who I was. Was I an ‘Uncle Tom’? Why did I not value my African heritage? If ballet didn’t want me, why did I want it?

So the trauma of Dr King’s assassination was the spark for violence, but it was also the beginning of renewed social justice activism. Among the few bright lights that sprang out of the anger and despair was Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH). By 1968, Mitchell, a dynamic and talented young Black man, had carved out a space for himself in the exclusive and WASP-ish world of ballet in New York. Dr King’s assassination had stopped him in his tracks. How could he use his talents and the place in the world he had worked so hard to achieve to continue King’s work? His answer was a school and then a company in Harlem.

When he incorporated DTH with Karel Shook in 1969, there were multiple objectives, among them the notion that ballet belongs to all of humanity. True, it began in a European court and has been used through its 300 years to signify the aristocracy, but he knew it was greater than its origin. To start, though, Mitchell opened a school in the basement of a church in Harlem to tap into the demanding methodology of training that is crucial to achieving the beauty of ballet. His goal was to employ that system to change the lives of the young people of Harlem.

It took me a while to find my way to Harlem, but when I got there I found my artistic home and my love found an unexpected purpose. Flash back to the Swan Lake Act I pas de trois. It is very literarily European – peasants dancing for their higher-class masters. But to insist on literal meaning is to rob ballet of its power to speak across cultures and express the essential human quest to transcend limitation. Arthur Mitchell allowed me to see how much more ballet was, and to love ballet for its unforgiving standards and the use that can be made of that challenge.

My years performing with DTH allowed me to believe in ballet again. More than that, I came to understand that ballet is an exquisite and powerful tool and that, properly employed, it can be used to effect social change.

Now my work at DTH has been to prime the art form of ballet to that task. Ballet’s meaningful purpose is not merely social reassurance, but human validation. Yes, it inspires and uplifts, and while it currently is awash with fluffy superficiality and attenuated athleticism, its potential is to be the force so interestingly explored in the essays in (re:) claiming ballet. Author Zadie Smith has said, ‘All dance is a discourse on freedom.’ Replace ‘dance’ with ‘ballet’ and you have the future of this glorious art form.

Introduction: Regarding claiming ballet/reclaiming ballet

Adesola Akinleye

Despite a strong rhetoric to the contrary, for many, ballet has the possibility of being a connected, holistic and liberating experience and art practice. Across the form, there are teachers, choreographers, artistic directors and performers who do not adhere to the common misconception that ballet is owned and populated by mainstream Whiteness, residing in a controlled aesthetic that has little to offer diverse experiences as a form of personal-expressive movement. This anthology sets out to acknowledge the alternative and parallel influences that have shaped the culture of ballet and to demonstrate they are alive, kicking and have a rich history. The focus is on a healing of the ballet community, not a critique of the ballet establishment – although in places critique is necessary to give context to the parallel work being carried out and the reasons why. The book highlights that the ‘we’ of ballet is complex and encompasses individuals and communities who have immensely different relationships with the artform but who have all contributed to the diaspora of ballet in the twenty-first century. (re:)claiming ballet aims to initiate conversations and contribute to discourses about the panorama of ballet beyond the vantage point of the mainstream (White, patriarchal, Eurocentric, heterosexual constructs of gender, race and class). As the first quarter of the century ticks away, we are made aware by international and local events that humanity is tasked with the endeavor of who and what we are in the globally networked, postcolonial project that is the twenty-first century. In this sense, (re:)claiming ballet calls for a decolonization of ballet by recognizing a fuller contribution to the artform than the narrow exclusively White, straight male persona that is recognizable as destructively and distractingly dominant in mainstream constructs of what ballet can achieve.

This anthology regards claiming ballet as a reclaiming of sites and sights that have pioneers and histories of difference, Blackness, Queerness and diversity in the ballet studio and on the stage. Through sharing the thoughts, experiences and histories of those involved across the diaspora of ballet, we draw a picture of the wider possibilities for what ballet means by re-remembering those who challenge mainstream misperceptions of where and how ballet contributes to the field of dance and beyond. In acknowledging alternative and parallel ways of caring for and practicing ballet, it is possible to become aware of a fuller, more rigorous and inspiring offer that ‘attending the ballet’ can mean to audiences. We are consequently able to reconsider the nature and role the artform can play in the consciousness of the communities where its theatres, schools and companies reside. It is a reconsideration that has a bearing on how the dance itself remains vitalized.

At times eclipsed by mainstream propaganda, diverse ballet communities continue to uphold artists’ historical role of reflecting, contributing and responding to social cohesion, wellbeing, political landscape and the complexities of personal and cultural identities. The chapters in this anthology take an ‘it is already happening approach’: the acknowledgment of deeply rooted, dynamic challenges to narrow patriarchal, heteronormative, racist, classed notions of what ballet means as an artform. The contributors come from a range of backgrounds from performers, to scholars, to those crossing from a practical career in ballet to academic careers to artist-scholars. In its attempt to capture voices from across the broad field of ballet, this anthology has become a diverse, largely first-person account, sociocultural study rather than an academic treatise.

Emerging at the time of European colonial expansion that began in the fifteenth century (Wynter 1995, 2003), ballet rides the inheritance of colonialism and cultural hierarchy. Ballet was born into this European social-economic exercise. It cannot be ignored that the reasoning that attempts to justify the isolationist attitudes of mainstream ballet today (excluding perceived types of race-class-gender-sexuality) is informed by past colonial rationalizations to support European imperialism. This legacy informs the current Western understanding of the art world and is perpetuated in the way ballet is referenced, classified and represented. By acknowledging ballet’s place on the stage of European imperialism, we can start to separate the artform from colonial propaganda. Imperialism focused on a European centre, which was experienced as colonialism at its edges. Colonization was the imposed activity of new European-drawn communities as the imperial focus expanded (Loomba 2005; Wynter 2003). Along with other aspects of European culture, the colonial experience involved (ballet) assimilating, appropriating, conforming to and absorbing the cultures that were encountered as it travelled the globe. Nevertheless, however misappropriated it was, by its nature ballet as an artform moves us beyond, and is more than an aesthetic manipulator for, European expansionism. As any artform does, ballet absorbed the richness of the cultures into which it was introduced (Gottschild 2003). However, imperialist sponsors have repeatedly used the artform to further colonial aesthetics. Such heteronormative, classed narratives of the notion of ballet can pervasively drown out the spectrum of human sensibilities that dance can so ably exemplify, but the working class, non-White, Queer constituents who have loved and danced ballet steps have legacies of their own that prevail – albeit often as part of ‘underground’, invisibilized cultural histories and communities.

The chapters in this book are written from within these communities rather than about them. There is no denying that the history of Europe and those of its former colonies are inextricably linked. However, those artforms that travelled the web of trade routes span and encompass the influences, horrors and joys that join us together globally in the twenty-first century. Those who have nourished their practices with the riches of colonialism have created exclusive mainstream White, heteronormative, class-conscious, male-dominated spaces for their experiences with ballet to be witnessed. They occupy funded geographic locations such as large concert halls, psychic location such as the divination of heroes and heroines of ballet’s ‘his’-story (see Chapter 2), and imagined locations such as the narrow representation of what ballet looks like in images, films and books (see Chapter 9). These mainstream locations gain gravitational pull by being well funded. Simultaneously, to forefront funded, exclusive spaces of ballet’s colonial appropriation, there is an implication that those not present are mediocre (at the edges of ballet) or invisible within ballet (taking up no space at all). However, places of ballet are produced across the full range of artists, audiences and supporters of the diaspora of artforms. We recognize that a measure of how far one is located from the orbit of mainstream funding can be the artistic energy, emotional labour and time taken up by just remaining practising the artform. Even when it is a struggle to be present in the shadow of the mainstream, alternative and parallel spaces continue to exist (see Chapter 7 and Chapter 13).To call these spaces marginalized or invisible adheres to a sense that the centre of ballet is lost to racist, misogynistic and gender-confining paradigms. This anthology is therefore not about ‘finding’ or ‘discovering’, or even dreaming, alternatives in from the imagined ‘margins’; it is about aspects of ballet that exist, have long existed and have rightful places within the diaspora of ballet (see Chapter 4). These resist the affront of being called ‘marginal’ by being central to the people involved with them (see Chapter 6). They challenge invisiblization by being witnessed and historicized by the communities that value them (see Chapter 3, Chapter 12 and Chapter 16).

A place in and for ballet beyond the exclusively White European, patriarchal, classed, heteronormative body can be contextualized by seeming to be in-place by being out-of-place in mainstream ballet. The limited view from the vantage point of mainstream ballet fractures the meaning of ballet by ‘them-and-us’ gatekeeping that students new to ballet, and potential artists, have to surpass or be inducted into. Thus, a vicious cycle of limitations, trauma and fatigue becomes synonymous with taking a place on the stage of ballet (see Chapter 11 and Chapter 17). By their nature, non-mainstream, inclusive, alternative or parallel overviews of ballet revise colonial hierarchies and offer networks of humanity (see Chapter 14 and Chapter 15).

In coming together, the contributors to this volume also call for the importance of critiquing the narratives of the places where ballet happens. Together, the chapters rupture the veil of displacement imposed on ‘difference’. The ghettoization of ‘difference’ has nothing to do with artistic quality, but is simply an arbitrary attempt by a small but empowered group to profit from constructs of race, class, gender and sexuality that suppress. We suggest the terrain of ballet is multi-populated. The ballet stage is full, complex, resistant, compassionate and poetically contrasting. By acknowledging this, we can also develop new pathways to new places and artistic expressions for ballet.

It should not be a surprise that the chapters in this book recount experiences, histories and imaginings that are knowable despite their variance from the perceived ‘mainstream’. If we begin in difference, in the acknowledgement of a diaspora of ballet (through expecting and nurturing difference), then we provide ourselves with the apparatus to better notice the moments of understanding, similarity, knowing and connection on which art thrives. If we insist on conformity to sameness, then we become preoccupied with the moments of incomprehension of each other. Ultimately, ballet is an artform, not a bodily archive for a privileged few. There is undeniably a public silence and private terror (Allison 1994) that mainstream exclusively White, heteronormative, class-conscious, masculine-dominated structures have invested and nurtured in ballet culture. This collapses into the way ballet classes and rehearsals are conducted, the way bodies are addressed, valued, starved and dismissed, and the subject matter of the stories mainstream ballet portrays. Within this, voices that break the silence (sometimes purely through their ‘difference’) are portrayed as unknowable, unintelligible, uninformed, culturally unavailable and even unreliable in order to suggest that subordination is necessary. However, there is a universal understanding of utterances of liberation that challenges dominant discourses.

The granular nature of the chapters offers glimpses into the questions, choices and creative processes navigated by artists as they encounter limiting patriarchal, racialized, classed, heteronormative social constructs. It is not a surprise that, in their projected ‘otherness’ by the mainstream, across the diaspora of ballet, artists/students/audiences of ‘difference’ give continuity to and are part of the genealogy of the relationship of arts with power and society in European history. To be surprised by the chapters would adhere to the political, social landscape that presumes a centralization around the exclusively-White European, patriarchal, classed, heteronormative body. Across the diaspora of ballet, the ongoing refusal to passively be displaced from the notion of ballet should not be unexpected.

Many ways to read this book

This curated collection includes the work of scholars and artists from the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, with the aim of offering a rearticulation of the cultural mapping of ballet. There is a focus on debunking the idea that ballet is solely the property of European, White, straight narratives. The anthology looks at Queering ballet through attention to those long-standing companies, teachers, artists, choreographers and scholars who challenge the racial and gender limitations to which mainstream ballet appears to adhere.

The book is in four parts. Each has a short overview offered to give context to the chapters that follow. Themes emerge across the four parts of the anthology, including the current inadequacy of the ballet world to tell the rainbow complexity of human passions and lived experiences – particularly the unbelievable but prevalent narrative of straight, masculine domination over acquiescing frail females that the ballet dancers themselves do not illustrate or accept in their own lives. The contributors examine the theme of how the artistically and physically wearing activity of visibility has generated the resilience to fuel community building and activism, thus making ballet relevant to local communities beyond the walls of the studio or theatre. They tackle the theme of how the environment of the ballet studio can shape the psychological as well as the physical approach to what ballet can be; this concept emerges alongside the importance of pedagogical reflection, lest ballet should become the gateway to exclusion and trauma. The book is designed to start new conversations about what ballet is already and in so doing, make more visible parts of the diaspora of ballet culture that often remain unacknowledged. The contributors are not attempting to represent or summarize ‘diversity’ across the field; rather, they share some areas of ballet beyond the mainstream, while inviting further artistic outputs and scholarship to join them in contemplating what ballet has been, is and can be as a global artform. The reader is invited to take different routes through the book: from cover to cover, by part dipping in and out, by reading each part independently or by journeying through the book across different chapters using the index.

The book is in four parts

Part One: ‘Histories’ comprises chapters that interrupt the macro grand narrative of a monoculture ballet institution. The chapters in this section question underlying assumptions and highlight invisiblized histories in order to reveal ballet within contexts that recognize the full potential of the form. In Chapter 1, Adesola Akinleye discusses how ballet can be liberated from being the property of a few to an expressive artform: a living breathing expression rather than a relic of a disconnected past. In Chapter 2, Julia Gleich and Molly Faulkner expose the lack of a female choreographic canon despite ballet’s extensive history of female choreographers and innovators. In Chapter 3, Joselli Audain Deans overviews a practically invisiblized history of African American ballet from the turn of the twentieth century. Part One of the book closes with Chapter 4, in which Sandie Bourne traces a multiracial, multicultural history in the ‘traditional’ narratives within ballet performance.

The chapters in Part Two: ‘Knowledges’ look at learnings about and knowledges for, how to engage with and contribute to ballet through personal journeys that etch stories of ballet on a micro level. Contributors illustrate the lived realities of ballet and what it has meant to strive to dance beyond the limitations placed on ballet by mainstream claims of what it should be. In Chapter 5, Mary Savva discusses how important it has been to find her own liberating relationship with ballet in order to teach students who want to take syllabus- and exam-based dance technique classes. In Chapter 6, Brenda Dixon Gottschild discusses how ballet has been woven across the fabric of her career as an eminent dancer and scholar. In Chapter 7, Elizabeth Ward speaks to the Queering of ballet and activism in the ballet community, which aims to question what we choose to inherit rather than using ‘ballet inheritance’ as an excuse for continuing systems of oppression. In Chapter 8, Kehinde Ishangi speaks to how she has crafted her performance and teaching techniques to acknowledge and challenge exclusionary prejudices towards what the dancing ballet body should look like.

Part Three: ‘Resiliences’ features chapters that overview how challenging mainstream narratives in ballet have manifested as activism. The chapters in this part reveal how challenging the expectation to conform to the dominant grand narrative of ballet instigates and nourishes larger social-political changes beyond the arts. In Chapter 9, Theresa Ruth Howard discusses how Arthur Mitchell’s dream for the Dance Theatre of Harlem emanated beyond its Harlem studio to offer methods and strategies for community in ballet into the twenty-first century. Chapter 10 features Theara J. Ward’s exploration of personal testimony as social resilience. In Chapter 11, Jessica Zeller discusses the work of Maggie Black and Roger Tully as examples of pedagogical approaches that have developed the artistry of dancers rather than stifling them with the autocratic demands. In Chapter 12, Selby Wynn Schwartz chronicles the history of Les Ballets Trockadero De Monte Carlo and how the company has become a family and a safe haven, promoting Trans, drag and Queer creativity in classical ballet. In Chapter 13, Nena Gilreath describes how finding a place for ballet in the community of Atlanta, Georgia in the United States became a way to feed the community growing around the company.

Part Four: ‘Consciousnesses’ consists of chapters examining awarenesses and realizations that can strengthen ballet as a wider field and can also deconstruct the self-limiting construct of mainstream ballet. In Chapter 14, Endalyn Taylor discusses the self-reimaging of the dancer in order to navigate invisiblization. In Chapter 15, Melonie B. Murray explores changes to pedagogy that respond to the history of the ballet studio as a limiting heteronormative site. In Chapter 16, Adesola Akinleye and Tia-Monique Uzor talk with Black British ballet dancers mapping a history of resistance to erasure. In Chapter 17, Luc Vanier and Elizabeth Johnson raise questions about the relationship of the notion of humanity and dance through discussing ballet techniques and pedagogy for undoing the trauma of early ballet experiences.

The chapters attempt to offer meaningful doorways into the realization of the capacity and possibilities of the diaspora of ballet. We invite further contributions to the acknowledgement of this work within ballet. The book is a sample of the wide range of practices that constitute the ballet diaspora. It is important to note that while there are a number of chapters about ballet from an American perspective, there are no chapters about the rich impact of Native American artists on ballet in the United States. Globally, Indigenous artists have been present in ballet: from the steps of the Basque country to the contribution of artists such as Marjorie and Maria Tallchief (Tallchief et al. 1999), native peoples have contributed globally to what ballet is. The scope of this book project intentionally leaves room for further work. It is important to gather further chapters, for instance, from those identifying as Black male ballet dancers, those identifying as transgendered dancers, from intersex dancers, from dancers identifying as or living in Asia, the Middle East, the continent of Africa, the Pacific, Australasia and South America – your voice! This book is a celebration of the work that has been and is being done to keep ballet alive, resilient and responsive to the twenty-first century, while being cognizant of our rich history of alternative practices within the form. In other words, the book does not describe a victimization but rather acts as a beacon to connect and encourage those who are working in their own ‘corners of the ballet world’ to counteract narrow constructions of who, what, where, when and how ballet can happen.

References

Gottschild, B. D. (2003), The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Loomba, A. (2005), Colonialism/Postcolonialism (2nd ed.), London: Routledge.

Tallchief, M., Wells, R. and Kelley, G. (1999), Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina, New York: Viking.

Wynter, S. (1995), ‘1492: A new world view’, in V. L. Hyatt and R. M. Nettleford (eds), Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 5–58.

Wynter, S. (2003), ‘Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument’, The New Centennial Review, 3:3, pp. 257–337.

Part One

Histories

Chapters in this section interrupt the grand narrative of a monocultural ballet institution. They address the macro, reviving and discussing alternative and parallel histories to a single, exclusive account.

1

Ballet, from property to art

Adesola Akinleye

Introduction

In this chapter, I reflect on ballet using the two lenses of property (ballet-as-property) and inheritance (the Manor House of Ballet). This is an attempt to contextualize and separate the artform itself from legacies of Western imperialism in the twenty-first century. I do this to set the stage for why ballet has a broader (if invisiblized) church than the narrow population of the exclusively White, heteronormative, propertied class. Ballet is a mode of physical expression, a creative artform loved by many artists from across social stratifications who are dedicated to the form but are perceived as unentitled to claim it as an inheritance or artistic identity. Using the lenses of property and heritage helps to