The body as a tool: professional classical ballet dancers’ embodiment

Abstract

This article is a qualitative study, which adopts the approach of social construction in order to comprehend the role played by the body in the formation of social behaviour. Using the concept of embodiment, professional ballet dancers have been chosen in order to investigate the particular attitude they form towards their bodies. The use of their bodies as tools on which they invest (capital) and which are expected to 'indemnify' them in the future, show the difference between this attitude and the one prevailing in the western commercial societies (the body as an object of short-lived delight and pleasure). The phenomenology of the healthy, athletic, thin and injured body offers the possibility of understanding the social dimension of the body, as generated in the sociology of the body. Professional ballet dancers form an almost ascetic, abstinent attitude towards their bodies in order to have it work at the limits of its biological basis (overcoming even pain and serious injuries) and offer them profits (in a wider sense including financial remuneration as well as prestige and professional development and distinction). The presentation of the way in which professional ballet dancers use their bodies is an example which may increase the understanding of the function of embodiment in the generation of social behaviour.

Governed and Liberated Bodies: Experiences of Young Female Competitive Dancers

“…Pickard (2013) explored habitus in ballet dancers and argued that dancers developed an "unconscious ballet habitus" (p. 3) that was transmitted though dance contexts and informed dancers' understandings of the relationship between their bodies and identities. Foucault's work on docile bodies and Bourdieu's concept of habitus are both relevant to female athletes (Beckner & Record, 2015;Clarke & Markula, 2017;Harder & Theune, 2017;Rudd & Carter, 2006) and particularly to dancers (Alexias & Dimitropoulou, 2011;Clarke & Markula, 2017;Green, 2001;Kleiner, 2009;Pickard, 2013Pickard, , 2015Tai, 2014;Wainwright, Williams, & Turner, 2006).…”

Distributed corporeality: Anatomy, knowledge and the technological reconfiguration of bodies in ballet

“…I was reminded of Mauss when I was trying to take somebody else at their word: In the world of ballet, there is a lot of talk about ‘technique’ in reference to the body. Sociologists have taken up this talk in interviews and their analysis, asserting (and criticizing) that ballet dancers attend to, exploit and shape their bodies as technical objects (Aalten, 2007; Alexias and Dimitropoulou, 2011; Gugutzer, 2002; Pickard, 2013; Turner and Wainwright, 2003; Wainwright and Turner, 2004). 1 These sociological studies are concerned with overcoming Cartesian dualism and pointing out that dancers are embodied agents; they draw on the phenomenology of the body or on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus.…”

Editorial

“…It is suggested that the dominant 'realities' and/or 'fronts' being presented and maintained in the context of the ballet class reinforce and authenticate the dancers as 'embodied' , staged presentations of self as 'idealised' ballet students/dancers. There are connections to be made here with previous work concerned with ballet identity that has been published in Research in Dance Education (Dryburgh and Fortin 2010;Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011;Pickard 2012Pickard , 2013 but the originality in Whiteside and Kelly's article is the use of Erving Goffman's model of dramaturgy.…”