The aim of the paper is to untie some of the knots linking together the body, gender and work in dance artistic-professional field. I consider how sex, gender, dance style, body 'type', kind of gender performance, cultural representations of gender and the (gendered) body interact and influence one each other in shaping female as well as male dancers' artistic and professional path, and their everyday experience too. The paper derives from the extensively ethnographic research I have been carrying out on the professional world of dancers. The material on which it is based includes, first, the basic structural data concerning the quantitative dimensions of the field; secondly, a series of in- depht interviews with professional dancers, teachers and choreographers; and, finally, the fieldnotes and videorecordings of the everyday activities of two Italian dance companies and related schools. Moreover, in order to better understand the ways in which dance training affects the (sense of one's) body, I enrolled for the first time in courses and stages: fieldnotes and videorecordings coming from my own experience are part of the data set too. "Dance is a queers' stuff!", a sentence we all have heard at least once. "Ballet is one of the strongest models of patriarchal ceremony" writes instead Ann Daly [1987:16], contradicted about ten years later by Sally Banes [1998]. It is not surprising, given the extreme involvement of body, corporeality and non-verbal communicative resources in dance, that this art form is theatre of a symbolic struggle - of classification - in which the possibility of inscribing one's own values and tacit norms on those bodies that will be then publicly exhibited is at stake. As various scholars [Butler, 1990; Garfinkel, 1967; Goffman, 1977, 1979] underlined, gender - and, with it, sexual orientation - is performed in everyday interaction. No doubt that its performance during the social ritual of theatrical performance [Goffman, 1974] is very useful to sustain and maintain (or challenge and change) social norms. But this is not only about representations: dancers' artistic, professional, and, more generally, biographic paths (and their narratives of them), as well as their everyday lived experience, are affected by the cultural norms of both dance community and the broader society, until reaching the very relation of dancers with their own body. The paper will first explore the dance world's and, particularly, labour market's stratification on the basis of sex, aesthetic appearance of the body, gender performance and implied sexual orientation. I will also show how elements such as the professional level and, especially, dance style interfere with the previous ones. In particular, I will describe through a semiotic square a gender-style continuum based on sex, as well as other body's properties, ways of corporeal doing (movement, gestures, body techniques [Mauss, 1936], habitus [Bourdieu, 1979, 1980], etc.), and clothing (practice wear, costume, and 'street' wear) and bodily decoration in general. Finally, I will discuss how the representations and norms of both dance occupational community [Van Maanen and Barley, 1984] and broader society affect dancers' self-representation of their own body and their own dancing body, thus of their embodied corporeal self as well as their embodied artistic-professional self.
Gendered Bodies and Dance Profession. Social Representations, Cultural Norms, (Art) Work Opportunities and Lived Experience
Chiara Bassetti
2010
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to untie some of the knots linking together the body, gender and work in dance artistic-professional field. I consider how sex, gender, dance style, body 'type', kind of gender performance, cultural representations of gender and the (gendered) body interact and influence one each other in shaping female as well as male dancers' artistic and professional path, and their everyday experience too. The paper derives from the extensively ethnographic research I have been carrying out on the professional world of dancers. The material on which it is based includes, first, the basic structural data concerning the quantitative dimensions of the field; secondly, a series of in- depht interviews with professional dancers, teachers and choreographers; and, finally, the fieldnotes and videorecordings of the everyday activities of two Italian dance companies and related schools. Moreover, in order to better understand the ways in which dance training affects the (sense of one's) body, I enrolled for the first time in courses and stages: fieldnotes and videorecordings coming from my own experience are part of the data set too. "Dance is a queers' stuff!", a sentence we all have heard at least once. "Ballet is one of the strongest models of patriarchal ceremony" writes instead Ann Daly [1987:16], contradicted about ten years later by Sally Banes [1998]. It is not surprising, given the extreme involvement of body, corporeality and non-verbal communicative resources in dance, that this art form is theatre of a symbolic struggle - of classification - in which the possibility of inscribing one's own values and tacit norms on those bodies that will be then publicly exhibited is at stake. As various scholars [Butler, 1990; Garfinkel, 1967; Goffman, 1977, 1979] underlined, gender - and, with it, sexual orientation - is performed in everyday interaction. No doubt that its performance during the social ritual of theatrical performance [Goffman, 1974] is very useful to sustain and maintain (or challenge and change) social norms. But this is not only about representations: dancers' artistic, professional, and, more generally, biographic paths (and their narratives of them), as well as their everyday lived experience, are affected by the cultural norms of both dance community and the broader society, until reaching the very relation of dancers with their own body. The paper will first explore the dance world's and, particularly, labour market's stratification on the basis of sex, aesthetic appearance of the body, gender performance and implied sexual orientation. I will also show how elements such as the professional level and, especially, dance style interfere with the previous ones. In particular, I will describe through a semiotic square a gender-style continuum based on sex, as well as other body's properties, ways of corporeal doing (movement, gestures, body techniques [Mauss, 1936], habitus [Bourdieu, 1979, 1980], etc.), and clothing (practice wear, costume, and 'street' wear) and bodily decoration in general. Finally, I will discuss how the representations and norms of both dance occupational community [Van Maanen and Barley, 1984] and broader society affect dancers' self-representation of their own body and their own dancing body, thus of their embodied corporeal self as well as their embodied artistic-professional self.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
