Fractured identities: injury and the balletic body

Abstract

Social worlds shape human bodies and so it is inevitable that there are strong relationships between the body, professional dance and identity. In this article we draw on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, and various forms of capital, as the main theoretical framework for our discussion. Our ethnography of the balletic body elicited dancers and ex-dancers’ perceptions of their bodies and sought to reveal some of the facets of their embodied habitus. The sheer physicality of their working lives - of feeling exhausted, sweaty and out of breath - is something dancers (like all athletes) become ‘addicted to’. Ageing and injury can reveal this compulsion to dance and so dancers invariably find it very difficult to, for example, give up class once they retire from the stage; or miss a performance if they have a ‘slight injury’. In other words, the vocational calling to dance is so overwhelming that their balletic body is their identity. In addition, there is an unremitting loop between individual habitus and institutional habitus (the ballet company), which affects both the meaning and management of injury. All our informants at the Royal Ballet (London: n = 20) had suffered dance injuries. The injured, dancing body is perceived as an inevitable part of a career in ballet. Everyone spoke of the improved athleticism of dancers, and of the expansion in facilities to maintain healthy dancers. However, most dancers can expect several major injuries during their careers. Such epiphanies force dancers to confront their embodiment, and their thoughts invariably turn to their body, career and self. Critical injuries threaten to terminate a dancer’s career and so endanger their embodied sense of self. On a more everyday level, dancing and performing with painful, niggling injuries is the norm

Sintomatologia dolorosa e fatores associados em bailarinos profissionais

“…The studies conducted by Nah and Morris (16) and Wainwright, Williams and Turner (17) state there are significant evidences that psychological interventions may decrease damage in dancing and sports as well, and that when intervention programs are designed in order to reduce injuries in dancers, physicians should identify the psycho-social factors which are involved with injury risk perceived by the artists.…”

Finding Support in a Field of Devastation: Bereaved Parents' Narratives of Communication and Recovery

“…My research used Hastings's notion of the ''fractured identity'' to explain what happens to a parent following the loss of a child. Other research by Wainwright, Williams, and Turner (2005) has used ''fractured identities'' to examine how injuries and age fracture the identities of ballet dancers, while Scarduzio and Geist-Martin (2008) have used this term to explain the narratives of sexually harassed male professors. Theoretically this research extends Hastings's use of fractured identities by explicating three specific forms of communication that can support the recovering of a parent's fractured identity.…”

Pain in the Act: The Meanings of Pain Among Professional Wrestlers

“…In addition to early retirement, pro wrestlers can expect a shortened life expectancy, a fact recently brought to light by United States Congressman Cliff Stearns (R-FL): " [B]etween 1985 and 2006, 89 [professional] wrestlers have died before the age of 50... [T]his abnormally high number of deaths of young, fit athletes should raise congressional alarms" (Barker 2007). Moreover, these injuries, like those in other physically demanding performances (such as dance) hinder or eliminate an actor's opportunity to perform, which is especially crippling for participants because the performance and body are so central to the participants' identity (Wainwright et al 2005).…”

“…Studies of boxers, dancers, and piano players show that their social worlds may assuage or exacerbate the likelihood of painful injuries and shape the lived experience of pain (Wacquant 1998;Alford and Szanto 1996;Wainwright et al 2005). The specific social universes in which participants are embedded shape their bodily disposition towards and-crucially, for the case at hand-against pain.…”