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

Author(s): Jennifer Fisher

Source: Dance Research Journal , Summer, 2007, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer, 2007), pp. 2-24
Published by: Congress on Research in Dance

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20444681

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Tulle as Tool: Embracing the Conflict of
the Balterina as Powerhouse
Jennifer Flsher

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.1 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.2 Ihe 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 I 993,when dance
anthropologist CynthiaJean 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.3
My own ethnographic-centered approach started with influence from Cohen Bull and
led me to territory I have crossed and recrossed for about fifteen years.4 This article starts
nearly that long ago, at a birthday party for a North American toddler whose attitudes
toward ballet would be, to some extent, shaped by those around her, by her own personal
ity and choices, and by the images she saw and read about. The article then proceeds to
reflections on the ballerina, an image of which the three-year-old embodied long before

Jennifer Fisher is an associate professor of dance history and theory in the dance department of
the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Nutcracker Nation: How an Old WorldBallet
Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World (2003 ,Yale University Press), which was awarded
the 2004 de la Torre Bueno special citation by the Society of Dance History Scholars. A former
dancer and actor, she has previously contributed dance writing to many dance publications and
scholarly journals, as well as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. Current projects
include co-editing a volume of essays on dance and masculinity with Anthony Shay and research
on the life and work of Anna Pavlova. She holds the distinction of being the only ballet coroner
to hold regular inquests into the death of Giselle.

Figure I. Xiao Nan Yu (2005). Photo by Chris Nicholls.

Courtesy of the National Ballet of Canada Archives.

Dance Research Journal 39 /1 SUMMER 2007 3

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 she might have sensed its contradictions. The unseen catalysts for any contemporary dis
cussion about the ballerina's worth are always nearby; they are the feminist attackers and
defenders who have wrestled with this most stereotypically dressed of feminine figures.
TShey hovered in the background of a child's birthday party, or at least in the conscious
nesses of some of us in attendance.
The scene unfolded in a Toronto living room, after I gave a pink tutu to my three
year-old godchild for her birthday. She seemed enchanted, but her mother privately
expressed some fear that little Iris might be lured into the exploitative, rarefied world
of too-thin ballerinas whose shoes deformed innocent feet and whose ultrafeminine
profiles somehow erased all progressive gains for which feminists had fought so hard in
the twentieth century. It was a lot to fear from a tutu, but I was not without an under
standing of such concerns. For women committed to issues of agency, gender equality,
and the interrogation of patriarchal hierarchies, ballet has often seemed a mixed blessing,
with its strictly defined version of femininity, weight restrictions, impossible challenges,
and relentless competition. Still, pink tulle did not scare me; I had experienced ballet as
a positive force in my life, a tool that had facilitated my learning about personal agency,
collaborative effort, and spiritual expansion. Ihat is a lot to credit a tutu with, as well,
and I was already deep into research territory that was relatively uncharted-namely,
the ballet world in ethnographic perspective. After reading early feminist indictments
of ballet, I had pondered the difference between theoretical arguments that "proved" the
ballerina was a dangerous figure and the experience of women who thought otherwise.
Among other things, I wanted to record and add to the discourse the voices of women
who had strong relationships with ballet. My friend, on the other hand, wanted to take
no chances with her growing daughter, who would face enough challenges, she thought,
without adding the rarefied demands of ballet. Was this a viable concern? I use the story
of Iris's encounter with ballet to bookend voices from an ethnographic study I was doing
at that time. That project was followed by another, smaller study to find out why adult
women take ballet, and after that, the topic of women's relationships to ballet was also
woven into my dissertation and the book that followed, Nutcracker Nation: How an Old
World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World. This article returns to my
early focus on the issue of interpreting the ballerina in a more general way.
As is the case with many latter-day ethnographers, I started with insider knowledge
that led me to ask particular questions and to suspect more complex meanings than had
previously emerged in the literature.5 Before I came to ballet as an academic, I was steeped
in its language, conventions, and mythologies, having trained fairly seriously, performed
briefly, and read widely before I entered graduate programs in dance.When I presented the
first version of this article as a paper at the I993 Feminist Theory and Music Conference
at the Eastman School of Music, I did not know what response to expect. I fully expected
someone in the audience to insist that the ballerina was a retrogressive throw-back to
the idealized pedestals and prisons of a pink ghetto; yet, if my previous encounters with
nondance people were any indication, I knew they might not know enough about the
ballet world to have formed an opinion. In the end, they did not challenge any aspect
of my hypothesis about the potentially positive aspects of ballet. In the question period

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afterward, some people expressed interest in a subject they said they had never thought
about; others said that my topic awakened their own reflections about ballet classes they
had taken or performances they had watched in the past. It was probably a rare audience
for a dance paper-only a few insiders and many curious, sensitive outsiders.
Throughout my subsequent Nuitcracker research, I found even more people who related
to the theme of empowerment in ballet; many were also just on the verge of thinking
about it analytically, seeming to discover an importance ballet had for them that had gone
previously unarticulated. I do not want to suggest that this is a prevailing view; there are
no viable statistics, and, to some degree, my projects have focused on women who "self
select"in that they are interested in talking about ballet.These are the relationships I have
had occasion to probe. I suspect it is still more likely that the old stereotypes arise and
that condemnations of ballet have not disappeared. And when negative attitudes do not
appear at all-in the realm of staunch ballet fans, for instance-the sometimes genuinely
oppressive operations of the ballet world remain unquestioned.6 Neither categorical way
of characterizing ballet seems viable.

The Ballerina in Critical Focus

After early feminist critiques demonized ballet in the I 98os and early I 9gos, it seemed clear
that the contradictions inherent in women's changing roles and the ultrafeminine aspects
of the ballerina were not easy to figure out.7 For detractors, the ballerina's shiny surface un
necessarily masked whatever strength she had, and her technical mastery, achieved through
rigorous daily routine, was confused with total submission to the multifarious technologies
of power proposed in the schemas of Foucault and others. For ballet partisans, the ballerina's
strength and fortitude were evident-who today does not know that talent and hard work
lies behind the seemingly effortless grace? How many careers are there where so many
women participate and achieve on so many levels? Is there not a difference in suffering for
totalitarian regimes and suffering for art? But there were still the very real problems of the
ballet world that, in truth, might be keeping the female dancer within certain boundaries,
even as she soared above others. I refer to the fact that women predominate in the world
of ballet as dancers, teachers, and volunteers; yet there are comparatively few female ballet
choreographers and artistic directors. Is the ballerina implicated in maintaining this offstage
"glass ceiling" for women in so-called"power positions"? Questions that surround the issue
have tended to be the following: Is ballet a positive or negative force in the lives of women?
How much of the fairy-tale plot and ultrafeminine technique, costumes, and style of bal
let do women internalize? Do they confuse art and life, so that a ballerina becomes a role
model? If so, what sort of role model? Does the audience interpret ballet women as passive
partners in a relationship controlled by men?
In the early I99OS Ann Daly's forceful argument about balletic gender inequities
exerted much influence, and it continues to be read and supported in some universities
(Daly I987, I987/88).' In two well-constructed essays written in the late I98os, Daly
persuasively outlines choreographic clues that seemed to symbolize women's oppression in
ballet-for instance, that the male dancer maintains a solid stance and appears in control,

Dance Research Journal 39 / 1 SUMMER 2007 5

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 while his partner needs steadying and is led, handled, and manipulated. Daly concluded
that women could not represent themselves on the classical ballet stage as long as they
were unstable on the tips of their toes, and as long as they had to be as superlatively
strong but were not allowed to exhibit that strength in a recognizable way and receive

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the respect that obvious power accrues in contemporary society (I987/88, I7).9 Critiques
from other dance writers pointed to the training process that produces the ballerina as
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 On the other hand, sociologist Angela McRobbie (I99I) and dance historian Sally
Banes (I 998) championed the ballerina as a figure of strength, both in purpose and limb.
Their analyses suggest that her yielding, pink-clad first impression in no way precludes
resistant readings and can be counteracted by a forceful subtext, which is recognized by a
knowledgeable audience and interpreted singularly. Banes reinterprets nineteenth-century
ballet heroines as women who may in some ways fit into the status quo but who also can
show independence-Aurora turning down suitors in Sleeping Beauty, for instance, or the
Sugar Plum Fairy in 7he Nutcracker exerting influence as the "magisterial, the supreme
commander of her realm"(Banes I998, 56-6o).1> McRobbie focuses on the way the ac
tive, energetic, motivated heroine of ballet fiction inspires "fantasies of achievement" that
suggest escape routes for women trapped in adverse circumstances. McRobbie proposes
that "dance operates as a metaphor for an external reality which is unconstrained by the
limits and expectations of gender identity and which successfully and relatively painlessly
transports its subjects from a passive to a more active psychic position" (20i). Dance, in
this scheme, can be "a participative myth ... a way of taking one's destiny into one's own
hands" (2 I 7).12 During my extensive immersion in the Nutcracker world, I encountered
myriad ways in which girls and women exercised assertiveness and independence both
onstage and off, in amateur and professional ventures. Although The Nutcracker is not
usually counted in the realm of ballets that afford opportunities for resistance or for
progressive roles, I found this to be an unwarranted stereotype in terms of what women
I spoke to experienced. For many in North America, The Nutcracker often stands in for
the whole world of ballet, and it remains a readily accessible place where women are
encouraged and expected to achieve-a place where they are set in motion in the world,
both literally and figuratively.'3

Expanding the Pool of Critical Voices

Interpretation of the ballerina, then, appears to depend on any number of contextualizing

factors that are not accommodated for in otherwise impressive conceptual schemes, such
as that relying on the so-called male gaze, for instance.'4 The "theoretical spectator" who
receives messages because the performance dictates them seems an inadequate concept
when you consider the many ways different people operate, with both cultural and idio
syncratic forces exerting influence."5 I became interested less in closed systems that put
limits on the possibility of agency and more in the way people believe themselves to have
agency and argue for the validity of their viewpoints gained through experience. Eschew
ing psychoanalytic schemes and many poststructural ways of conceptualizing the closed
universe of signs and wonders, I began the pursuit of "ethnographic truth" with the idea
that I could uncover at least some aspects of the ways my respondents perceived themselves
to operate in relation to ballet. Eventually, I called my approach "participant-oriented";
it was highly influenced by aspects of reception theory, reader-response criticism, and
rhetorical hermeneutics, which highlights the way individuals argue for the perceived
truth of their thoughts and experiences.'6 I started by discussing the "ballet experiences"
of a group of diverse women who had in common a strong connection to ballet. I use

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 the term "ballet experiences" to include a whole range of experiences, from professional
training, to recreational classes as a child or adult, to reading or watching movies about
ballet to watching live ballet performances. One major aspect of my interviews was the
way these ballet experiences, with their physical, intellectual, and emotional resonances,
through memory and consideration, affected interpretations of the ballerina onstage. I
asked questions that revolved around how each woman interpreted her, identified with
her, resented her, and took meaning of any kind from the image of the ballerina in her
tulle-bound persona. I consider these discussions part of "ballet territory," which is both
a geographical realm-where dancing occurs-as well as an imaginative space-where
thoughts and feelings about ballet arise."7
'The ten women I interviewed for this project were in various stages of articulating
their involvement with ballet, which occurred on many levels, but they had in common
many ideas and attitudes. They ranged in age from twenty-five to eighty-three and came
from various social and ethnic backgrounds, with current middle-class economic status
prevailing. Seven of them lived in Toronto at the time, two were in New York City, and
one in Ohio. All had grown up in North America, except for one immigrant who had
moved from Hong Kong to Canada as an adult. In deciding on this small group, I tried
to include women of various ages and experiences, choosing at least two who were pro
fessional dancers at an elite level, several whose ballet classes as children or adults had
had a vivid impact on them, and a few who were self-described balletomanes. I had a
general idea that I had chosen women who liked, loved, and hated ballet. One middle
aged woman had never taken classes; one I knew had been overweight as a girl in ballet
classes; one was an African American woman in a very white ballet company; a few had
problematic relationships to ballet but stayed connected to it; and the one octogenarian
was a woman who astounded everyone by taking ballet classes weekly. I offer this small
sample as potentially representing a number of experiences and attitudes to which other
women (and perhaps men) might relate. The unifying factor, as I defined it and described
it to each respondent, was the fact that each had a strong relationship to ballet and that
it had affected their lives in some significant way.18
I take a small methodological detour here to note the atmosphere in which in
formation was gathered. My respondents had rarely been called on to articulate
their "relationship" to ballet and to answer questions such as "What did the bal
lerina mean to you?" and "Did your friends or family think of ballet the way you
did?" Therefore, I used an open-ended interview format with guiding questions
and did something a group of sociologists who studied young dancers called "en
gaging in interested conversation ... in the spirit of participant hermeneutics"
(Stinson, Blumenfield-Jones, and Van Dyke I 990, I 5).19 lThis meant not only following
the lead of my respondent but occasionally "sharing" and "suggesting" my own experiences
and associations with ballet. Another way of spurring conversation was to produce, at a
relevant part of the interview, a pair of pointe shoes-primary artifacts in the world of
ballet. Whether conversation was slow or flowing, the shoes tended to open a flood of
memories and opinions. Some respondents handled the shoes fondly while remember
ing details about longing and achievement; a few women recoiled with disgust at painful

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memories and defeats. Both reactions were offered with some humor in recognition of
the unexpected power these symbols of ballet achievement can have.
All of my respondents noted the dichotomy of pointe shoes, which is, in some way,
the dichotomy of ballet itself: the pristine pink satin on the outside and the unseen
blisters, calluses, bunions, and ingrown toenails inside. But even the women who came
to see them as instruments of torture (one quoted an article that compared pointe shoes
to Chinese foot-binding practices) had experienced a thrill of achievement at times and
spoke with pride about mastering some aspect of pointe work. One woman summed
up her feelings by saying it was another notch toward growing up, like being promoted
from pee-wee league to little league, from softball to hardball, when you could suddenly
start to "hit harder." lhe sports metaphors are not unusual when you consider that half
of my respondents were tomboys and did not come to ballet to be princesses. From my
interviews and from reading many ballerina biographies and memoirs, I came to call
the two major ways girls got into ballet the "princess" route and the "tomboy" route. You
were either the girly girl who longed for tulle and tiaras, or the rambunctious daughter
whose parents hoped ballet would wear her out or tame her impulses while satisfying a
voracious appetite for movement. Either way, young dancers needed to learn to deal with
the opposing quality they had not expected ballet would require.
The one respondent who had never taken a ballet class offered a rare opportunity to see
how attachment and interpretations arose without the experience of dancing.lhiis middle
aged ballet company volunteer felt she had discovered the New York City Ballet "all alone,"
having come from a working-class family that had no interest in the arts. As a young working
woman, she had attended performances regularly and particularly wished City Ballet still
offered the festive NewYear's Eve galas she and a girlfriend used to attend. After retirement,
she spent even more time volunteering backstage, where her hushed reverence and respect
for the dancers seemed easily combined with her image of them as hardworking "regular"
people. She was surprised to hear of the feminist critique of ballerinas and mused in her
flat, definitive New York accent that she had never thought of the woman depending on
the man to balance. What she remembered most were the brief moments of triumph when
the ballerina balanced alone on pointe, "on just that little point of the shoe." Seeing dancers
living unglamorous lives backstage only increased her wonder. A single woman who had
always supported herself, she seemed to think of ballerinas as working women like herself,
only more exalted. Unlike other balletomanes I have met over the years, some of whom fall
definitively into the "ballet princess" category, this woman had never thought of ballet as
particularly feminine, though it certainly was not unfeminine, she was quick to say. But it
was more vigorous than that word indicated, and she thought of the ballerina as having "a
kind of beautifuil, athletic stance." Female ballet dancers were not about one overwhelming
thing like femininity, she said; they had their individual personalities, and that was what she
liked best about the dancers she saw regularly-that each could be dramatic, effervescent,
mysterious, or aloof in her own style.
The image of the ballerina on an isolating pedestal or as a dependent adjunct to her
more powerful partner had not occurred to most of my respondents. Most tended not
to follow the fairy-tale plots of ballets, so the narrative plights of betrayed maidens and

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 doomed swans barely figured in their assessments of the ballerina's power. When the
image of the princess was evoked, it was often linked with strength, autonomy, authority,
and independence. One woman who had become a psychologist described her Midwest
childhood ballet teacher as a princess, but not a passive one. She recalled that this teacher
was not like other women in the suburbs of the mid- i 960s, who were almost all house
wives and mothers. Instead, the ballerina teacher was unmarried, childless, glamorous,
and successful at running her own school.
Ihe exceptions to this view of ballerinas as empowering were two women who had
become involved in dance research and criticism as adults.They knew the various feminist
critiques of ballet but had never discussed their personal relationships to the art form in
the way I was asking them to do. In fact, one requested that I record her objection to being
described as "someone who had a strong relationship to ballet," which was the primary
research project description I used to tie my respondents together. Though it was clear
to me that ballet loomed large in her life (she was critiquing ballet for a master's degree
thesis), she wanted it formally noted that she thought ballet had no significant effect on
her "personally."Tlhe other respondent contributed dance reviews to a major newspaper
and was pursuing a career in physical therapy. Both of these women said they preferred
to couch our discussions about ballet "strictly in theoretical terms," although they spoke
personally as well. Both had enjoyed aspects of their childhood ballet training, but one
of them felt intimidated by and angry about being asked to live up to ballet's version of
femininity. The other became aware of ballet's negative effects on women when she saw
more of the ballet world as a journalist. Both became converts to modern dance and no
longer wanted to go to the ballet, though they did so on rare occasions, for which they
offered various mitigating circumstances. Echoing admired critiques by Evan Alderson
(I987) and Ann Daly (I987; I987/88), both women said they were no longer seduced
by the beauty of the ballerina but instead saw a kind of masochism involved in her cre
ation-the mutilated feet, the underweight body, the elite, exclusionary practices, and
the narrow definition of femininity.
In my interviews, another theme that arose was the connection between social back
ground and the way ballet was prized as a "high" art or "mainstream" activity. The minor
ity viewpoint was that ballet was an exclusionary world; most of the women described
ballet expertise as something anyone could attempt; they said its study made them feel
"special,"whether it was in terms of serious dedication at an early age or being associated
with a respected art form. The respondent who had grown up in Hong Kong spoke more
self-consciously about class issues than the others, calling ballet a "classy" or "high-class"
activity that she sought out as a adult immigrant to Canada. Like the family of the New
York ballet volunteer, her working-class family could not have afforded to send her to
ballet classes, even if they had considered it important. As an adult, taking classes became
more interesting to her than viewing ballet, as if the posture and associations with the
art form imparted a special glow to those who took them on.20 The intrepid octogenar
ian who still went to ballet class had a very formal way of alluding to the more "refined"
aspects associated with ballet, in that she found it preferred by the "genteel" people she
respected. These attitudes pointed to positive ballerina assessments that could easily seem

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exclusionary to those whose economic, social, and physical realities made involvement
with ballet less likely.
It was beyond the scope of my small study, or, indeed, my subsequent longer study of
The Nutcracker realm, to identify all the factors that affect the way women interpret the
ballerina and the world of ballet in general. Women who danced in or saw The Nutcracker,
for instance, often felt their experience contributed to fulfillment of personal ambition
and education, for themselves and their children. Others saw the ritual of attending or
participating as emphasizing the positive values of art and community.The ballerina took
on many personalities for different women in this realm. Religious participants connected
their dancing to the glory of god, while atheists related it to deep personal satisfaction;
both groups spoke positively about the feeling of communal celebration during the holi
days. Conservatives thought ballet reinforced a status quo orderliness; liberals said it was
all about nonconformist role-playing and socialist dreams of imagined community.2'
Among the adolescents who danced in an amateur Nutcracker, some seemed to be solid
rule-followers, while others thought their ballet ambitions represented rebellion against
dutiful daughterhood (or maybe especially, of course, dutiful sonhood). It seems clear
that many circumstances in each woman's life could lead her to individual relationships
and reactions to ballet, a fact that can be glimpsed in the elite ballet world by comparing
the memoirs of Gelsey Kirkland (I986) and Suzanne Farrell (Iggo), with their opposing
conclusions based on similar circumstances.22
Among my respondents, family support and self-image issues that preceded or ac
companied involvement in ballet emerged as major factors when it came to interpreting
ballet experiences. Interestingly, it was not always easy to predict which circumstances
would lead to which result. Sometimes, amateur dancers who felt they failed at ballet as
children became adults with opposing views.lThe woman who had become a psychologist
remembered childhood ballet classes fondly, though her ample body type might easily
have left her feeling inadequate; another woman from a privileged background had a
noticeable limp from a childhood infirmity and was humiliated in ballet class as she
dragged across the floor with a more impaired girl. It was as if she had failed at being a
woman, she said, but the humiliation faded over the years, and she later became a fan of
attending ballet. Looking back, she thought that what stayed with her most about ballet
was not the failure but the way you could be powerful in performance, even though she
had not been able to do that herself in the ballet world. She did, however, point out that
performance skills became integral to both of her subsequent careers-acting and law.

Bipolarism and Ballerinas Reconsidered

It is possible that the chronicling and analysis of interpretations of the ballerina progress
slowly because dancers and audience members have not yet participated in the discourse
ftilly and a gulf between academic analyses and reported experiences has not yet been
bridged often enough. Or possibly because the dichotomy of the ballerina presents the
thorny challenge that most dichotomies do. It is tempting to see her as an "either/or"
proposition-that her strength is either masked or evident, that she is either frilly or

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 powerful, that she is either in charge or swooning in someone's arms. I have danced
around these balletically bipolar elements in my writing on The Nutcracker, suggesting that,
for instance, Clara and the Sugar Plum Fairy both embody sugary notions of feminine
grace and also become powerful role models for the women who pursue those roles, as
well as those who see them. I have often suspected that stereotypes of "Nutcracker world"
make this point hard to see, in that no one really expects the "Christmas treat" ballet to
embody deeper meanings. I have also suspected, from comments and book reviews, that
my analysis, couched in the Land of the Sweets, is sometimes hard for others to absorb.
In a similar way, the ballerina might have trouble claiming she's as strong as a steelworker
when she is wrapped in satin and tulle like a Christmas package. This is part of the
ballerina's core "image problem." She, like 7he Nutcracker, has a lightweight reputation
that's hard to erase and easy to dismiss on a surface level. How can she be this when she
is already that? But maybe she can. Maybe she can be both as strong as a channel swim
mer, as Daly (I 987) would put it, and as graceful as a hummingbird. Maybe women do
represent themselves onstage, in their many incarnations, dressed at least part of the time
like a Christmas package.
Daly seems to amend her previous condemnation of the ballerina in her I992 essay
"Dance History and FeministIheory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze"
(reprinted in Daly 2002). Although the subject is Duncan, the analysis perhaps offers the
ballerina more scope as well. Instead of focusing on static poses and their iconic interpre
tation slanted toward disenfranchise
ment, as her previous analysis of the
Figure 4. Dominique Dumais in the second detail
Balanchine ballerina often did, Daly
(ig I). Photo by David Street. Used with permission.
Courtesy of the National Ballet of Canada Archives. takes into account the fluid process
of dancing itself. She uses Kristeva's
notion that meaning does not arise "as
the final product of codes"but emerges
as "a process of communication whose
complexity and subtlety exceeds any
simple transfer of information" (Daly
2002, 308). Acknowledging that
Duncan's performance was "a kines
k',
thetic experience in which the specta
nce Research journal 39 /I SUMMER 2007
tors actively participated" and that she
._ became "a subject-in-process" (3 I 8),
Daly seems to allow a space for view
ers to make meaning actively when
watching the ballerina as well. This ap
proach seems to undergird the sense
of enfranchisement I found that so
many women had when it came to
ballet and the meaning-making pro
cess.

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 Ballet is a world in which change
comes slowly, and its procedures have
only recently undergone much con
temporary analysis. Feminist cries for
the abolition of ballet perhaps have
died down, but too many times the
ballerina still seems a prisoner of past
interpretations.

Returning to Ballet Gifts

Returning to the gift of a tutu for Iris,

my three-year-old godchild, I hoped at
the time that she would have fun with
it and also, perhaps, want to become
familiar with an art form that meant
so much to me. I hoped she would
have the right to choose ballet or not,
that its stereotypes of evil abuse as well
as its overly romantic aspects would
not deter her. Would she discover
that the ballerina's ultrafeminine style
was a trap, unrelated to the realities
of women's lives? Or would she find
Figure S. Dominique Dumais in Serenade (1990).
power in using her body in extrava Photo by David Street. Used with permission. Courtesy
gant, liberating ways, as Mary Russo of the National Ballet of Canada Archives.
imagines for the female performers
who both conform to and break through expected behaviors"?23 Would ballet technique
lead her to embody both machine-like power and delicate grace and claim an affinity with
Donna Haraway's brave new cyborg? Would she, as Haraway said, learn to hold together
two incompatible things because both are necessary and both are true?24
I ended my first version of this article at a conference with an optimistic turn of phrase
meant to aid in countering prevailing stereotypes. Maybe, I said, when the rhetoric of
ballet and women is seen in new contexts, people will not look at girls who do ballet and
say, "Oh, how sweet, how cute"; they will instead say something like,"She knows what she
wants, and she's not afraid to stand on her toes to get it."Talking to Iris twelve years later,
I realized she had discovered that for herself, without much agonizing over contradictions.
When she had first received the tutu, it joined her Barbies and her building blocks, but
she rejected ballet classes as "too proper," imagining boredom and stern corrections at the
barre (I believe this could be because of a videotape I gave her, an adaptation of Ballet
Shoes in which there is a stern Russian teacher who might have seemed scary). Then, one
day when she was eight and I brought ballet to center stage in her life by visiting, she
struck an arabesque pose and asked me if she were doing it correctly. Careful with my

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 critique, because I knew her to resist being told what to do, I pointed out that the leg,
technically, should be behind her, not to the side. She got an earnest look on her face,
corrected the position, and looked particularly swan-like doing it. I had hope. After that,
she was striking all sorts of poses and getting excited when I said she had "a good line."
Ihen, it was a hop, skip, and glissade to gazing longingly at photographs of dancers and
asking how long it would take to get a pair of pointe shoes. She convinced her mother
to take her to ballet and for a while thought she might audition for the National Ballet
School of Canada.
By the age of about twelve, Iris decided she had too many interests to keep up a serious
level of dancing, but she stayed with it a while longer, until she won her pointe shoes and
found out what it was like to consider satin and tulle as tools-voluptuously deceptive
but rewarding pink tools that she masterfully learned to use. What did the experience do
for her? At fifteen, she says ballet was great because there were such clear milestones to
reach and such satisfaction when you reached them. And no, she did not think of it as a
ultrafeminine thing to do, that was just the "role-playing part of it." When she thought
of ballerina roles, it seemed there were as many strong ones as those where you were deli
cate as a flower. But after she thought about it, she said she knew what I meant when I
asked if other people thought it was a "girly" thing to do because sometimes people were
surprised when she said she studied ballet. She guessed it was because she also liked rock
music and seemed somehow stronger than "the girly type."
When I was a girl obsessed with ballet, no one bothered to encourage, discourage, or
analyze the reasons; it was just something girls did. Later, it seemed I had been lucky to
find a Trojan horse of a "feminine" activity to bolster my independence in the conformist
I95 os and early I960s. I doubt if anyone suspected that ballet might help me discover
aspects of power, art, dedication, and spiritual resonance. For me and other women I have
met in my research, ballet symbolized resistance and independence, not least because
claiming the Sugar Plum Fairy as a liberated role model seems a radical thing to do.
Times do change, but when the ballerina is relegated to an old-guard, status-quo position
today just because of her first impression, I wonder if the only changes are in the nature
and arguments of those who misunderstand her.
Despite her history of stereotyping and attacks against her, the ballerina continues to
evolve, embracing both her conventionally "feminine" side and her steely "macho" phy
sique and resolve-embracing the conflict and finding a transcendent power in doing so.
Today's ballet women even occasionally appear as tough as they are-in the choreography
of William Forsythe and Alonzo King, for instance, or when a dance writer notes that
when Gillian Murphy dances the lead role in a new Cinderella, "Her steps are as sharp
and crisp as any man's" and that Murphy "exudes a strong sense of self and of self-con
tainment."25 We might have seen these qualities in forceful dancers like Gelsey Kirkland
years ago, even as her "backstage" revelations shed a different light on her life. Today, even
the oft-neglected health of the ballerina is starting to be tended to, as draconian train
ing procedures are increasingly being interrogated and revised.26 Ever so slowly, women
dancers have started to embrace their futures more positively, becoming choreographers,

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attending university while dancing, and continuing to invest even their princesses with
no-nonsense force and exactitude.
It is even possible that the liberation of the ballerina, and the acceptance of her dual
nature, will open a conceptual space for understanding the maverick males in ballet, who
have their own set of stereotypes to deal with.27 And ballet itself will be discovered to have
a more wide-ranging embrace of life, both inside and outside the regal atmospheres of
opera houses. Ballet was once a folk dance, I remind students who are knee-deep in the
gilded salons of Louis XIV or the imperial cultural palaces of St. Petersburg. Now ballet
is an exacting art form that lots of folks will continue to affect, using whatever tools they
find viable, including, of course, tulle.

Notes
i. The term "embracing the conflict"in the title comes directly from the work of Brenda Dixon
Gottschild, who uses it to describe one aspect of Africanist aesthetics. For an elaboration of this
concept, see Dixon Gottschild 1995,103-6; and 1996,13-14. "In a broad sense," she says, "the
Africanist aesthetic can be understood as a precept of contrariety, or an encounter of opposites"
(1995,13). The term "ballerina" here refers to the coalescing of the ballerina image that occurred
at the Paris Opera around the time o? La Sylphide (1832) and Giselle (1841). To some extent,
that figure in a wafting tulle skirt, shoulder-baring bodice, and pointe shoes still dominates the
popular and specialist imaginations, though there are variants that are less romantic in nature.
Ballet is always evolving, so a definition-like paragraph will help define the way the words "ballet"
and "ballerina" were used in my research and in this article.
The ballet I focus on here, briefly defined, is the classical form that developed first in European
courts and has evolved in large theaters and training institutions in Europe and North America,
and increasingly in other parts of the world as well. When it comes to male and female roles,
the hallmarks of this world can often be described in fairly definitive terms because ballet is so
clear when it comes to the following aspects: men are strong and flashy, women more delicate
and refined; men are lifters, women are lifted; men wear tights and trousers, women are always
in skirts and tutus; men stand behind, women in front; men offer a hand, women take the hand.
The ballerina I refer to here is graceful, controlled, and regal, whether she is a princess, swan, or
ordinary maiden; her job is often to await rescue and dance happily when her prince comes along.
In my interviews, the words "ballet" and "classical ballet" tended to be recognized as the form
that contains story ballet masterworks such as the nineteenth-century Tchaikovsky classics Swan
Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker, as well as traditional versions of Romeo and Juliet or
the story ballets of Ashton and MacMillan made in a similar tradition in the twentieth century.
I include in this definition plotless works such as Fokine's Les Sylphides or any number of other
compositions that tend to be identified as classical or romantic ballet, as well as the neoclassical
work represented by Balanchine because it retains much of the atmosphere and gender differ
entiations of the past. I consider less, for the moment, more recent experiments with the form,
such as the work of William Forsythe and Alonzo King, or crossovers between ballet, modern,
and other kinds of dance.
2.The attack on ballet and the ballerina first arose in popular feminist books such as Susan
Brownmiller's 1984 Femininity, for instance, in which she says that ballet is one of the "hymns
to femininity" ( 17-19), requiring painful, unnatural procedures and finding its idealized pinnacle
in the gender-unequal pas de deux (182-83). More scholarly critiques of the ballerina followed
and are discussed below (see note 7). While the debate over ballet in the feminist perspective is

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 ongoing, "feminist writers have placed ballet in general on the negative side of the representations
of-women continuum (Thomas 2003, 165). Sociologist Helen Thomas and I often refer to the
same sources and arguments regarding aspects of ballet practice and performance, and I find her
overview of these sources instructive in its attempt to sketch the field and the major theoretical
strains within it (158-76).
3. Cohen Bull (then called Cynthia Novack) said: "The anthropological commonplace that
dance and life are inextricably related gets easily applied to the people of Bali or Ghana or Mo
rocco; it applies as well to the people who perpetuate ballet. Only through understanding some
thing about those relationships can we understand ballet's cultural power" (Bull 1993,46-47).
Though literature in this regard is still sparse, one ethnographic study "behind-the-scenes" of a
ballet company has come from Helena Wulff in Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the
World of Dancers (1998); and, more wide-ranging theoretically, in Thomas 2003.
4. The core group of respondents who are the focus of this article were part of my 1992 master's
thesis research at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, directed by ethnomusicologist
Beverly Diamond, to whom I am eternally indebted for leading me into my "field" with attention
to fieldwork precedents and operations. The initial project involved ten respondents who sat for
formal interviews of about two to three hours. A set of guiding questions (see Appendix) structured
the interviews, but I was also somewhat "respondent driven" in terms of letting conversations go
where my interviewees wanted them to. Transcripts of these interviews were submitted to the
respondents and further conversations occurred, sometimes revising or extending the original
interview. A literature review at that time included many feminist and gender-oriented writings,
both scholarly and popular, the most notable of which appear here, although the many ballerina
biographies and autobiographies of notable dancers of the twentieth century I read at the time
do not (I can say I had read virtually all of them published in English at the time; a partial list is
found in the bibliography of Fisher 1998). My current revisiting ofthat research project inevitably
incorporates knowledge gained in further interviews I did during doctoral work at the University
of California, Riverside (from 1994 to 1997). In 1994 I did a small fieldwork project exploring
the reasons adult women take ballet classes, which involved participant observation (taking and
watching adult ballet classes at a local conservatory-type studio) as well as one-on-one interviews.
For a more detailed description of the interviewing methodology, see Fisher 1994.1 include here as
well aspects of my fieldwork and dissertation research on The Nutcracker in sociocultural perspec
tive, which was directed by Nancy Lee Ruyter and Sally Ness. During the major period of this
research (1995-98), I engaged in participant observation, with interviewing a prominent feature,
in several locations, the most notable being in Toronto with the National Ballet of Canada and in
Leesburg, Virginia, with the Loudoun Ballet (see Fisher 1998 and 2003 for more details about this
work). At that time, I also developed research methodology I called "introspective interviewing,"
for which many respondents took home my "guiding questions" and a tape recorder to record
their thoughts and observations in their own time (see Fisher 1998, 61-70, for more about that
aspect). A literature survey included, again, both scholarly and popular writing, especially in the
areas of feminist ethnography, ritual studies, hermeneutics, Christmas studies, children's ballet
literature, and articles relating to dance and The Nutcracker from popular magazines, newspapers,
movies, and television. I thank my Yale University Press editor, Harry Haskell, as well as dance
scholar Lynn Garafola for help in making that document a book that covered approximately the
same ground as the dissertation without the abundance of specialist language.
5. Ethnographers who are closely related to the cultures they investigate, anthropologist James
Clifford has emphasized, are uniquely poised to do this work since "it probably requires cultural
insiders to recognize adequately the subtle ruses of individuality, where outsiders see only typical
behavior" (Clifford 1978,53).
6. For instance, I refer to ballet environments in which weight loss is still dictated with no
regard for growing bodies or the potential for eating disorders. I have seen evidence that these

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environments exist all over the world, though perhaps never so blatantly as in the former Soviet
Union and in Asia, where "weigh-ins" and explicit demands for weight loss still enjoy wide
popularity. Other negative aspects of the ballet world commonly include prejudices against dark
skin tones, various body types, and exploitation of dancers who are too intimidated to unionize
or take advantage of union rules, to mention just a few.
7. Attacks on ballet have often relied on psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches, sometimes
utilizing the so-called male gaze theoretical apparatus, especially as it first emerged in film stud
ies. The work of Michel Foucault, especially his "Docile Bodies," has also been invoked in terms
of its relationship to the disciplinary protocols of ballet training. Critiques making use of one
or several of these theoretical influences include the following examples: Daly, both 1987 and
1987/88; Alderson 1987; Goldberg 1987/88; English 1980; Foster 1996; Lansley 1977; and Innes
1988. Those that tend toward the re-reading of the ballerina in a positive light include McMa
hon 1985; Savage-King 1985; and (pertaining to portrayals in literature) McRobbie 1991. Most
recently, dance historian Sally Banes, in her book Women Dancing: Female Bodies on Stage (1998),
has gone beyond some of the narrow-casting approaches of previous feminist ballet critics and
given contextual depth to the idea of ballerina agency in her interpretation of ballet heroines such
as the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker; Swanilda in Coppelia, and Aurora in Sleeping Beauty.
For a thoughtful preliminary ethnographic consideration of both positive and negative aspects
of the ballerina, see Cohen Bull, 1993. My own incorporation and furthering of some of these
themes is found in my doctoral dissertation (1998, especially sec. 1 of chap. 5) and in my book
(2003, see esp. chap. 4 and the index entries for "Clara" and "Sugar Plum Fairy").
8. I summarize much of the argument Daly made then (1987/88), although her later writ
ing on Isadora Duncan (1992) seems to contradict conclusions made in earlier years. Even so,
I have heard that Daly's early condemnations of ballet are taught as "gospel" in some university
classrooms.
9. In her title Daly uses the metaphors of "hummingbird" and "channel swimmer" in her
description of the bipolar requirements for ballerinas. She uses dance analysis of a section of
Balanchine's Four Temperaments to illustrate her points.
10. See especially Goldberg (1987/88) and Savage-King (1985). Indictments of ballet training
also appear in a category I call "ballet confessionals" in the realm of popularly read and viewed
ballet material. It includes ballet memoirs, the most notorious of which was Gelsey Kirkland's
1986 Dancing on My Grave (Kirkland was a talented but ill-fated dancer who told stories of drug
addiction, botched plastic surgery, and self-starvation, all of which she blamed on the pressures
of the ballet world). In my experience, the outlines of Kirkland's story are still fairly well known,
perhaps aided by a segment done by the popular television show 60 Minutes (CBS) that same
year. It was filled with tabloid-like simplifications, like the narrator's discovery that there is "an
ugly truth behind the beauty of the ballet world, that dancers are conditioned to be passive and
silent, even about the brutal truth in the ballet studio." More "behind the scenes" information is
contained in several books about the ballet world, such as Winter Season, New York City Ballet
dancer Toni Bentley's (1982) diary-like memoir of the trials and tribulations of a frustrated corps
member; Joan Brady's The Unmaking of a Dancer: An Unconventional Life (1982), in which she
struggled with fluctuating self-esteem as it related to her painful on-again, off-again love affair
with ballet; and Scottish journalist Una Flett's memoir of her short ballet career in Europe, after
which she offers the following conclusion: "Enslave the body in certain ways of obedience, and
mind and spirit will follow suit" (Flett 1981, 74). In my dissertation, I also point to ballet docu
mentaries and popularly distributed "reality" photographs of tattered shoes and tights as part of
the general awareness that the ballet world is a tough one.
11. Banes is interested in the way the Sugar Plum Fairy and other nineteenth-century ballet
heroines fit into "the complex range of representations" of women in Western theatrical dance of
the last century and a half (1). For her, the Sugar Plum Fairy, dancing happily with her roman

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 tic cavalier, was a retrograde image when The Nutcracker premiered in St. Petersburg, given the
fact that Russian feminists were struggling to achieve advances in education and employment
(61). In its 1892 context, then, Banes sees the ballet as an attempt to restore "the dream?or the
fantasy?that marriage will be sweet, smooth, and all-fulfilling for women" (61). Still, a certain
amount of "autonomy and power" are "written into" the pas de deux choreography of ballets such
as The Nutcracker (she speaks of Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake as well), she says, rejecting, as
I do, the "homogenizing and essentializing" view that women in classical ballet pas de deux are
manipulated and dominated in ways that prevent them from exerting any independence (62).
Banes performs a "close reading" of the character of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, factoring in plot
points as well as choreographic strategies, noting in particular the ways in which Aurora asserts
her independence?not only by rejecting suitors but by displaying high extensions, unsupported
turns, moments of commanding balance, and an energetic mastery of physical skills (56-59).
Aurora is, Banes says, a character who is "the perfect aristocratic woman" in terms of her regal
bearing, her femininity, and her grace; but she also possesses an "ability to command space and
to display precision, strength, balance, and control?in short, authority" (5 9).
12. McRobbie, 189-219. McRobbie looks at several of the same popular culture sources that
I consider in my Nutcracker dissertation and book, namely Noel Streitfeild's Ballet Shoes and the
popular 1980s movie Flashdance, in which ballet holds a place of high esteem and represents a
particular kind of achievement.
13.1 have taken the opportunity, in the wake of my Nutcracker book, to elaborate on aspects
of female empowerment and Clara as a role model in an essay on the editorial pages of the Los
Angeles Times (December 24, 2003), as well as in a few public lectures.
14. The "male gaze" concept, born of psychoanalytic theory and articulated by film theorists such
as Laura Mulvey and E. Ann Kaplan, has been the subject of much debate since first mooted in
the late 1980s and early 1990s. In brief, the performer on screen is seen as "feminized" and con
sumed by the "male gaze" of the observer through the lens of the camera. Both male and female
characters on stage or screen might possess or be recipients of the male gaze, although feminist
analyses concentrate on ways in which women are particularly affected. Daly has described the
male dancer onstage as the "active principle," whereas the woman is "the bearer and object of male
desire" (1987/88,57). But when such "imported" concepts are used, there is a danger of ignoring
the particular history and circumstances of the ballet stage performance. Even in the arena of
film and especially television studies, the primacy of the all-consuming male gaze has been much
debated in recent years.
15. For Susan Foster, for instance, "the dance" is not an entity that comes into existence as
the viewer creates it; it is a textual entity that has "an ability to require that we attend to it in a
specific way" (1986, 243). In this scheme, the viewer is an abstract concept, similar to the "ideal
spectator" posited by some literary theorists?Foster's term is "hypothetical viewer"?a spectator
who is "created out of a particular interaction with a set of choreographic conventions" (243).
16. Steven Mailloux defines rhetorical hermeneutics as a focus on "how specific interpretive
practices function within sociopolitical contexts of persuasion" (1990,5 2). My theoretical approach
grew more from American reader-response criticism than its earlier incarnation as German re
ception theory, in which liberating ideas regarding interpretation tended to revert to singularly
restrictive modes of operation. I was also greatly influenced by perspectives on "new ethnography"
by Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and Michael M. J. Fischer, as well as feminist ethnography
from a number of sources, notably Dorinne Kondo's Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses
of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (1990), and the resistant reading tactics of Janice Radway in
Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984). Crucial to me in terms of
the dance world were the works of and conversations with Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull (formerly
Novack), whose mentoring and graceful intertwining of autobiography as fieldwork and participant
observation (1993) helped me conceptualize my own field. A fuller description of influences that

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contributed to my participant-oriented approach, especially discussions of the rhetorical hermeneu
tics of Steven Mailloux, as well as the work of Victor Turner ( 19 7 7) on ritual and John MacAloon
(1984) on neoliminal ramified performance types, can be found in my dissertation (1998) and, to
some degree, in the book that followed (2003), which is written in a more accessible style.
17. See note 4 concerning interview details and a list of "guiding questions" in the Appendix.
18. The one respondent I had expected might have had a very different experience in terms of
encountering prejudice in the ballet world was a dark-skinned African American dancer who
had just joined the corps de ballet of a major ballet company. I chose her with the idea that she
might reflect the concerns of many women who did not conform to the pale-skinned image
that still prevails in the ballet world. At the time we spoke, she was still hopeful that she would
progress smoothly through the ranks of a predominantly white major ballet company. In this
sense, because she had the body type and enough talent to begin a professional ballet career
successfully and did not talk about any difficulties that related to race (though there may have
been some), it did not become a focus of this study. I offer this note to record that while she
had a positive attitude toward the ballet world at the time, her experience later changed, and
she considered more seriously the fact that racially tinged decision making might have limited
her career.
19. Oral historian Kristina Minister calls a similar approach "mutual self-disclosure" (1991,3 6);
and two feminist anthropologists, Valerie Matsumoto and Patricia Zavella, refer to their way of
"sharing" as a reassuring, demystifying part of their interview process (Matsumoto 1996,162-65 ;
Zavella 1996,146). The process of conversational exchange could be a tricky one, I feared, since
suggesting an attitude toward the ballet might have influenced the way my respondents chose to
speak about their own experiences, but the number of times interviewees disagreed with what I
said seemed to suggest that the strategy helped the flow of ideas rather than dictating them.
20. Dance anthropologist Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull (1993) said that as she grew up in a white,
lower-middle-class, Midwestern American town, she knew that ballet was "a bit rarified" (36)
and was performed for "a white audience of social status" (37). "For my family," she said, "ballet
was a means of giving culture'to granddaughters of immigrants" (36).
21. A discussion of Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined community," as well as an
elaboration of the range of "Nutcracker experiences" indicated briefly here, can be found in Fisher
1998 and 2003.
22.I refer to Gelsey Kirkland's memoir Dancing on My Grave (1986) and Suzanne FarrelTs
Holding onto the Air ( 1990), in which the vastly different outlooks and experiences each had while
dancing with the New York City Ballet are described. Figuring out what elements of circumstance
and character led to the shape of each career would surely be an interesting and perhaps impos
sible endeavor.
23. In several essays exploring what she calls "the female grotesque," Russo (1994) considers
the ways in which female performers are contained within and/or exceed societal norms. Though
ballerinas are not discussed (and in many ways are the opposite of "grotesque," as Russo uses it), a
comparison can be made between aspects of the ballerina and aspects of the nineteenth-century
actresses and circus performers Russo discusses. By using the histrionic acting style of the day,
Russo suggests, women who were performing in Romantic melodramas, for instance, offered
audiences the "spectacle" of a woman taking up more space than she was permitted in most social
situations of the time (68). These actresses may have been appearing in performances directed by
men for men, Russo says (as were ballerinas of the time), but "they used their bodies in public in
extravagant ways that could only have provoked wonder and ambivalence in the female viewer,
as such latitude of movement and attitude was not permitted most women without negative
consequences" (68). Likewise, Russo describes female circus fliers and acrobats as figures who
physically challenged normative female movement style: "The representation of femininity as
an effortless mobility implies enormous control, changeability and strength" (44). I suggest that

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 today the ballerina s movements may still have something of the "extravagant" about them for
most audience members?and for the dancers themselves. For instance, my respondents during
Nutcracker research spoke of the pleasures of ballet and of feeling "free" and in control at the same
time?flying through the air, spinning across the stage. Audience members appreciated the power
moves of male dancers, but they also often pointed out the women's impressive steps, noting the
way that they stretched limbs high into space or "ate up the stage" with swift turns, such as the
series of pirouettes performed by the Sugar Plum Fairy at the end of her variation.
24.1 borrow a phrase from Donna Haraway's famous cyborg essay, her science-fiction en
visioning of a woman who is equipped to survive the postmodern age because she can hold
"incompatible things together because both are necessary and true" (1985,173-74). In my view,
the demonization of the ballerina can profit from a new openness to nonbinary logic.
25. This excerpt is from an article by Apollinaire Scherr about Murphy's role in James Kudelka's
Cinderella (danced by American Ballet Theatre) in the June 4,2006, New York City paper News
day. Kudelka's version, Scherr says, has "a feminist twist," in that the heroine becomes a sort of
"dancer-choreographer" who is seen inventing steps for herself, not assuming "the usual feminine
postures of elusiveness, mystery, coquettishness or reckless abandon."The glass slipper has become
a pointe shoe, "so when the prince searches the globe for the matching shoe, he's looking for a
woman not just with pretty feet, but with a special skill." Scherr emphasizes Murphy's offstage
independent, spirited nature, comparing it to that of her character's.
26. My faith that this is occurring is based largely on what I know about increased interaction
between the dance world and health care practitioners, biomechanical experts, and others who
affect long-term pedagogical problems ballet inherited largely from nineteenth-century tradi
tions. The process of promoting a "healthy dancer" is slow, but there are signs it is occurring. The
1999 "Not Just Any Body" conference, held at the National Ballet School (NBS) of Canada in
association with The Hague, is one example of this trend (a publication of the same name followed
in 2001). Mavis Staines, director of NBS, has for many years introduced healthful new measures,
both physical and psychological, to the elite training program there.
27. Although my subject here is the relationship of women to ballet, I do not preclude the
relevance of some of these themes to men, who have a different set of issues when it comes to
masculine/feminine dichotomies in the ballet world (see Fisher 2007). At the moment of editing
this article, I am co-editing a book (with Anthony Shay) on the topic of dance and masculinity.

Appendix
Ihis opening statement and these guiding questions were developed for interviews conducted
in I 992 in Toronto, Ontario, and in New York City, New York. Ihese guiding questions were
developed with ethnomusicologist Beverly Diamond, who directed this fieldwork project at
York University. I tended to cluster them to cue me visually as I conducted an interview and
often did not follow them or ask them directly as written unless there was a natural pause in
the conversation. In my subsequent research projects (see note 4), many of the same kinds of
questions surfaced, either tailored to ask about why adult women took ballet or as part of my
interviews about Nutcracker experiences. See Fisher I998, chap. i, for details about theory and
methodology for the latter project.

Opening Statement
This statement was always read at the beginning of the interview:

The information I'm looking for is about your relationship to ballet and its effects on your
life. It can include talking about ballet classes (the way you relate or related to technique and

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 atmosphere of the class), books you may have read, performances, images, and ideas about
ballet and dancers. I'm going to ask you to reflect on the effects ballet has had on your life
in whatever ways you perceive it to have happened.

What we talk about will be determined by what mattered or matters to you about ballet, about
your relationship to ballet. What I would like to hear is what you feel strongest about, what you
remember and relate to in your life, in whatever way you want to express it.
I have some questions that we may use to guide the conversation. Ihey were suggested largely
by my own experiences and sometimes by the experiences described in books by other women.

Guiding Questions
Have you, or do you, give much thought to your relationship to ballet, how it might
have affected you?
What are the things that come to mind?
What's your history with ballet?
Classes? What kind, where, how long, why?
Performances that have had an impact?
Books? Films about ballet?
Images, pictures, dolls, costumes, jewelry, other memorabilia?
How would you describe your experience taking ballet classes?
Do you remember what it felt like to dance? (or, What does it feel like now?)
Were you aware of the attitudes of people around you to your taking ballet? (mother,
father, siblings, friends, boyfriends?)
Did those ballet classes affect your life then or later?IThe way you felt about yourself;
your body, your identity? Your posture? Your attitude about femininity?
Were you given images about how to act by your teacher?
Do you have any ideas about pain in relation to ballet?
Do you recall your feelings about success or failure?
Do you think they affected the way you approached a challenge elsewhere?
Did you walk differently outside ballet class due to its influence?
Complete this sentence: If I hadn't ever taken ballet ...
Some dancers say that as children and adults, ballet offered refuige and order from chaos
in the rest of their lives. Has this ever occurred to you?
Did you encounter images of the ballerina?
What were they like? Describe her. Why do you remember her? What did she mean to
you?
How did you see the image of the ballerina in relation to yourself? (Were there other
women in your life who gave you the same or similar messages?)
What did "going to the ballet" mean to you? Then? And now?
Did you see lhe Turning Point or 7he Red Shoes? Other films or television shows
about ballet?

Pointe Shoes
At some time during the interview, I brought out a slightly used pair of pink pointe shoes. I either
asked, "What do these make you think of?" or just listened to the comments they occasioned.

Photograph
Usually, toward the end of the interview, I brought out a ballet company brochure with photos
of ballerinas on it and asked what these images brought to mind. I used a i99I-92 season ad

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 vertisement from the National Ballet of Canada. It had various classical images on its pages and
a photograph of a Swan Lake arabesque featured prominently.

Questions about Famity Background, Education, and Profession

Ihese questions were usually asked after the interview.

Age
Location of upbringing
Familial information and roots ("How would you describe your family?)
Education
Profession

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