Tulle as Tool: Embracing the Conflict of the Ballerina as Powerhouse

Abstract

The image and interpretation of the ballerina has shifted over time since she first took her place in the pantheon of romantic female performers in the early nineteenth century. For many, she is still romanticized, respected, and revered; in other circles, she has become suspect as a creature who may be obsessed, exploited, and retrogressive in light of the egalitarian strides women have made or are still trying to make. The female ballet dancer's basic contradiction—her ethereal exterior and her iron-willed interior—has not been sufficiently accounted for in either scheme, nor has it been woven into the kind of complex, contextualized analysis that includes practitioners who embody the form, audience members of various kinds, and the multiple, shifting locales and attitudes that surround them. As an elite art form, ballet has until recently relied on the more univocal discourse of bouquets and brickbats from critics and other specialists. In 1993, when dance anthropologist Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull called for a consideration of ballet's relationship of dance to life in ways that other cultural forms are investigated, few took up the call.

Tracing tears and triple axels: Media representations of Japan’s women figure skaters

“…However, Janofsky’s (1990a) prescription for Ito to take ballet lessons is ironic considering how ballerinas comply with similar racist and classist ideals of femininity as gymnasts and figure skaters. Moreover, contrary to perspectives of ballet as ‘ultrafeminine’ and merely an art form, ballerinas express their independence, endure rigorous training, and forge ‘superhuman’ strength and stamina like athletes (Fisher, 2007: 14; Oliver, 2005: 46). Except perhaps for Asahi ’s narratives on Ito, thinking of the triple axel as queer redraws the spaces delineating artistry and athleticism and blurs boundaries of race, femininities, and nationalism, proliferating new meanings for figure skating.…”

“Indian Ballerinas Toe Up”: Maria Tallchief and Making Ballet “American” in the Tribal Termination Era

“…1.Rose English (1980), Valerie Briginshaw [1994] (2009), and Susan Foster (1996) have associated the classical ballerina's legs and toe-shoed feet with phallic symbolism, embodying an iconography of heteronormative desire. Jennifer Fisher's research on the “image and interpretation of the ballerina,” affiliates the “dichotomy of pointe shoes” with “the dichotomy of ballet itself: the pristine pink satin on the outside and the unseen blisters, calluses, bunions, and ingrown toenails inside” (2007, 9).…”

The Swan Brand: Reframing the Legacy of Anna Pavlova

“…I return to ideas about the ballerina I have explored previously, in that she is both a delicate, glossy creature and one who suggests strength, expansion, and power (Fisher 2003, 2007). Pavlova's swan brand may have been too easily consumed by some historians, in an era in which scholars have only begun to understand the fundamental dichotomy of ballerinas, and the way power and empowerment operate for women who play swans.…”