The One I Didn’t Want to Write: On Ballet Pedagogy and Bodily Autonomy

Roe v. Wade was overturned on Friday, the 24th of June, 2022, the same day I learned I’d been exposed to Covid-19.

Two days later, I sat outside in my backyard in Texas, in 104-degree heat, with a 101.3 fever. Wearing a hoodie. Shivering. And hideously angry.

It seemed appropriate.

I’ve been struck since then with varying degrees of what-the-fuck and are-you-fucking-kidding-me and just out and out tears of rage because well… fuck.

I figured that inevitably I’d get Covid, but understanding that likelihood is a lot different than feeling myself weaken under the weight of it. I knew we would be stripped of the right to determine what’s best for our bodies—hard not to see it coming—but knowing is a lot different than feeling it go. Feeling the fragility set in.

There’s a plague on, and we’ve lost our bodily autonomy. This is some nineteenth-century bullshit.

*

I think—probably too much—about those young nineteenth-century corps de ballet dancers at the Paris Opéra, “sponsored” at institutional behest by the wealthy patrons they were required to engage with in the Foyer de la Danse. Having traded the only thing they had to offer in exchange for the financial support that enabled them to continue their work, dancers were shuttled off to the provinces to bring their resulting pregnancies to term. If they didn’t die in childbirth, they’d return to the stage. Les petits rats. Around the same age as today’s traditionally-aged college students. Many even younger.

Just as I’m wondering how (and why…) the hell I’m going to teach fucking ballet this Fall—given the very real possibility students will either need time off to recover from a highly communicable disease being permitted to run rampant, to access out-of-state abortion, or to become a parent too soon—I think of the petits rats. How much they must have held onto ballet as their raison d’être in spite of their suffering. And how similar they must have been, in the most basic of ways, to the Gen Z students I’ve come to adore.

My pedagogy is a response, in a sense, to this history that seems to be working its way back into the present. Because it’s too easy to drop into Nihilism; to wonder how ballet could matter at all right now; to make it irrelevant. The harder conversation to have, perhaps, is that ballet—despite its sordid history and corrupt authoritarian power dynamics—might actually be a source of empowerment for so many, or at least something consistent and meaningful for dancers to hold onto when everything else feels like quicksand.

We owe it to them—to ourselves—to change. Especially now.

*

Ballet feels most empowering when we can control it—when it belongs to us. If I can’t bring back legal bodily autonomy or common fucking sense public health policy, at the very least I can develop a pedagogy that helps students access and trust every last ounce of their physical and artistic power. Prioritizing dancers’ bodily autonomy as a core rationale, a means, and an end, in policy and practice at every level of the field, is the only way forward.

To counter the narrative that students and their bodies need “fixing”: I articulate what’s working, to help students trust their own knowledge and capacities.

To counter the narrative that students don’t know what’s best for themselves: I ask them to articulate their own goals that I can then support them in achieving. What do they want from ballet, and how can I help?

To counter the narrative that there’s only one “correct” way: I offer histories, contexts, and rationales for the material, and I make space for us to consider a range of approaches.

To counter the narrative that ballet is only for certain bodies or certain kinds of people: I explicitly deny the hegemony of ideals; working instead to build environments in which students can develop their own voices—their own ways in—their own solutions. Experiment with that pirouette a bit. What would happen if. Tinker with it, and see what you find.

And to counter the notion that ballet is only-ever-the-most-serious-undertaking-that-can’t-possibly-be-fun-or-absurd-even-in-the-face-of-societal-collapse, I sometimes stand to the side and cheer them on with my whole heart, while they throw themselves into movement that makes them feel exhilarated and alive.

In this moment, perhaps that’s pedagogy enough.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash