(Re:)Claiming Ballet (Reclaiming Ballet) PDF
Preview (Re:)Claiming Ballet (Reclaiming Ballet)
(Re:) Claiming Ballet (Re:) Claiming Ballet Adesola Akinleye, editor/ curator First published in the UK in 2021 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2021 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas Copy-editing: Newgen Knowledgeworks Cover image credit: Dancer Nena Gilreath, in The Leopards Tail by Waverly Lucus, Photographer Keiko Guest Frontispiece image credit: Agata Lawniczak Production manager: Laura Christopher Typesetting: Newgen Knowledgeworks Print ISBN 9781789383614 ePDF ISBN 9781789383621 ePUB ISBN 9781789383638 Printed and bound by Severn To find out about all our publications, please visit www.intellectbooks.com There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print. This is a peer-reviewed publication. Contents Foreword ix Katy Pyle, Founder and Artistic Director of Ballez Company Foreword xiii Virginia Johnson, Artistic Director and former Principal Dancer of the Dance Theatre of Harlem Introduction: Regarding claiming ballet/ reclaiming ballet 1 PART ONE: HISTORIES 9 1. Ballet, from property to art 10 Adesola Akinleye 2. Should there be a female ballet canon? Seven radical acts of inclusion 29 Julia Gleich and Molly Faulkner 3. Arabesque en noire: The persistent presence of Black dancers in the 48 American ballet world Joselli Audain Deans 4. Portrayals of Black people from the African diaspora in Western 68 narrative ballets Sandie Bourne PART TWO: KNOWLEDGES 87 5. The traces of my ballet body 88 Mary Savva 6. Ballet beyond boundaries: A personal history 99 Brenda Dixon Gottschild 7. Auftanzen statt Aufgeben and the Anti Fascist Ballet School 116 Elizabeth Ward 8. Dancing across historically racist borders 129 Kehinde Ishangi v (RE:) CLAIMING BALLET PART THREE: RESILIENCES 147 9. The Dance Theatre of Harlem’s radicalization of ballet in the 148 1970s and 1980s Theresa Ruth Howard 10. ‘Showgirl with red pointe shoes’: Personal testimony as social resilience 168 Theara J. Ward 11. ‘Can you feel it?’: Pioneering pedagogies that challenge ballet’s 172 authoritarian traditions Jessica Zeller 12. The ever after of ballet 189 Selby Wynn Schwartz 13. Ballethnic Dance Company builds community: Urban Nutcracker 209 leads the way Nena Gilreath PART FOUR: CONSCIOUSNESSES 223 14. The Counterpoint Project: When life doesn’t imitate art 224 Endalyn Taylor 15. Ballet’s binary genders in a rainbow- spectrum world: A call for 240 progressive pedagogies Melonie B. Murray 16. Dancing through Black British ballet: Conversations with dancers 255 Adesola Akinleye and Tia- Monique Uzor 17. Ballet aesthetics of trauma, development and functionality 275 Luc Vanier and Elizabeth Johnson Notes on contributors 293 Index 307 vi By no means the first, this book just scratches the surface of the contributions of the many brilliant dancers of our communities; the book looks forward to sitting alongside more books, histories, and of course more dances. In the spirit of multiplicity that this book represents, we begin by offering two Forewords representing different generational acknowledgments. Foreword Katy Pyle, Founder and Artistic Director of Ballez Company With this book, we remember ourselves, and remember that ballet is awoken, enlivened, radicalized and made better by our work outside the racist, cis- heteropatriarchal mainstream status quo. Through the braveness of celebrating the very differences we represent, a path is carved to make ballet truly relevant today. The ballet canon is studded with transgressive acts that created seismic shifts; acts of change have inspired and transformed the art of ballet from being a lonely re-e nactment of a bygone Western European colonial era into a site of contemporarily relevant, beautiful art with transformational expressive power. Art must electrify, challenge and Queer in order to stay alive. The Queer, the different, the other have subverted mainstream ballet throughout its history, whether intentionally or by the de facto nature of our presence, and thereby pro- pelled its evolution. Our contributions have always been present in ballet, in the training, the culture and the performance – so much so that we have been folded into the fabric of ballet itself, but also usurped, made invisible and threatened with disappearance. I fell in love with ballet as a young person when it showed me that I could use my body to be expansive, generous, dramatic, expressive, precise, powerful and graceful. At the same time, ballet also taught me to betray myself, through hiding my gender, my sexuality and the beauty of my powerful frame. The gatekeepers in ballet asked me to be subdued, fragile and quiet, which I could only accomplish through disordered eating and the suppression of my truth. For those of us not within the definitions of ballet’s current mainstream status quo, our relationship can be abusive. For me, ballet was the great love of my life, and I felt as if I had to betray myself in order for us to stay together. Once I left ballet, came out, came into myself and developed my artistic voice, the thought of returning to ballet felt like it could only be some kind of post- modern, conceptual joke. I could not perceive myself inside the form as anything but funny, strange or ironic – so I founded Ballez, which embraced those contra- dictions. And it was not until I found my ‘dancestors’ that I was able to become ix
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