Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T19:17:44.170Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2012

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

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.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2007

References

Works Cited

Alderson, Evan. 1987. “Ballet as Ideology: Giselle, Act II.” Dance Chronicle 10 (3): 290304.Google Scholar
Banes, Sally. 1998. Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bentley, Toni. 1982. Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Brady, Joan. 1982. The Unmaking of a Dancer: An Unconventional Life. New York: Harper.Google Scholar
Brownmiller, Susan. 1984. Femininity. New York: Fawcett.Google Scholar
Clifford, James. 1978. “Hanging Up Looking Glasses at Odd Corners.” In Studies in Biography, edited by Aaron, Daniel, 4165. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen Bull, Cynthia Jean (a.ka. Novack). 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Cohen Bull, Cynthia Jean (a.ka. Novack). 1993. “Ballet, Gender and Cultural Power.” In Dance, Gender and Culture, edited by Thomas, Helen, 3448. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Daly, Ann. 1987. “The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers.” The Drama Review 31 (1): 821.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daly, Ann. 1987/1988. “Classical Ballet: A Discourse of Difference.” Women & Performance 3 (2): 5766.Google Scholar
Daly, Ann. 1992. “Dance History and Feminist Theory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze.” In Gender and Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, edited by Senelick, Laurence, 239–59. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.Google Scholar
Daly, Ann. 2002. Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. 1995. “Stripping the Emperor: The Africanist Presence in American Concert Dance.” In Looking Out: Perspectives on Dance and Criticism in a Multicultural World, edited by Gere, David, 95121. New York: Schirmer.Google Scholar
Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. 1996. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
English, Rose. 1980. “Alas, Alack the Representation of the Ballerina.” New Dance 15: 1819.Google Scholar
Farrell, Suzanne, with Bentley, Tony. 1990. Holding Onto the Air: An Autobiography. New York: Summit Books.Google Scholar
Fischer, Michael M. J. 1986. “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by Clifford, James and Marcus, George E., 194233. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Fisher, Jennifer. 1994. “Choreographing and Improvising the Interview.” In Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars 1994, 341–46. Provo, Utah: SDHS.Google Scholar
Fisher, Jennifer. 1998. “The Annual Nutcracker: A Participant-Oriented, Contextualized Study of The Nutcracker Ballet as It Has Evolved into a Christmas Ritual in the United States and Canada.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside.Google Scholar
Fisher, Jennifer. 2003. Nutcracker Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Fisher, Jennifer. 2007. “Make It Maverick: Rethinking the ‘Make It Macho’ Strategy for Men in Ballet.” Dance Chronicle 30 (1): 4566.Google Scholar
Flett, Una. 1981. Falling from Grace: My Early Years in Ballet. Edinburgh: Canongate.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1996. “The Ballerina's Phallic Pointe.” In Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture and Power, edited by Foster, Susan Leigh, 124. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1979. “Docile Bodies.” In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Marianne. 1987/1988. “Ballerinas and Ball Passing.” Women & Performance 3 (2): 731.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review, No. 80 (15 [2]), March-April.Google Scholar
Innes, Shona. 1988. “The Teaching of Ballet.” In Writings on Dance 3: Of Bodies and Power. 3747.Google Scholar
Kirkland, Gelsey, with Lawrence, Gregory. 1986. Dancing on My Grave. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Kondo, Dorinne K. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lansley, Jacky. 1977. “Off Our Toes.” Spare Rib 64: 58.Google Scholar
MacAloon, John. 1984. “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies.” In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle, edited by MacAloon, John, 241–80. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Institute for the Study of Human Issues.Google Scholar
Mailloux, Steven. 1990. “The Turns of Reader-Response Criticism.” In Conversations: Contemporary Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature, edited by Moran, Charles and Penfield, Elizabeth F., 3854. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.Google Scholar
Matsumoto, Valerie. 1996. “Reflections on Oral History: Research in a Japanese American Community.” In Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, 160–69. Boulder, CO: Westview.Google Scholar
McMahon, Deirdre. 1985. “The Feminist Mystique.” Dance Theatre Journal 3 (4): 810.Google Scholar
McRobbie, Angela. 1991. “Dance Narratives and Fantasies of Achievement.” In Feminism and Youth Culture, 182219. Boston: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
Minister, Kristina. 1991. Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. Edited by Gluck, Sherna Berger and Patai, Daphne, 2742. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Not Just Any Body: Advancing Health, Well-being and Excellence in Dance and Dancers. 2001. Owen Sound, ON: Ginger Press.Google Scholar
Radway, Janice A. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Russo, Mary. 1994. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Savage-King, Chris. 1985. “Classical Muscle.” Women's Review 2: 29.Google Scholar
Stinson, Susan W., Blumenfield-Jones, Donald, and Van Dyke, Jan. 1990. “Voices of Young Woman Dance Students: An Interpretive Study of Meaning in Dance.” Dance Research Journal 22 (2): 1322.Google Scholar
Thomas, Helen. 2003. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. New York: Palgrave, MacMillan.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor. 1977. “Variations on a Theme of Liminality.” In Secular Ritual. Edited by Moore, Sally F. and Myerhoff, Barbara, 3652. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum.Google Scholar
Wulff, Helena. 1998. Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Zavella, Patricia. 1996. “Feminist Insider Dilemmas: Constructing Ethnic Identity with Chicana Informants.” In Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, 138159. Boulder, CO: Westview.Google Scholar