Intersectionality and the Politics of Ballet

Ballet dancers drag a long and conservative history with them each time they step onstage. Yet recently some of the most radical challenges in dance are coming from ballerinas, featuring prosthetic limbs, non-female identifying dancers en pointe, and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women performing classical repertoire. This seminar uses dance history to reposition ballet as a daring future-facing art form, one where the politics of nationality, religion, class, gender, race, and disability intersect. These issues are provocatively illuminated by classically trained dancers like South African artist Dada Masilo in her gender-bending Swan Lake and Giselle adaptations, Phil Chan's anti-Orientalist restagings, and activist American dancer Alice Sheppard's showcasing of the art of disability partnered by her wheelchair. What can ballet bring to the pressing social issues of equity, inclusion, and diversity when for centuries it has been considered an exemplar of the static imperialist, Western art form and idealized white body? What has shifted to reveal ballet as a vital medium for registering new global identities and social justice challenges? How can an art form built on obedient bodies be politically dangerous? Exposing limitations of binaries such as masculine/feminine, White/Black, heterosexual/homosexual, and colonial/ colonized histories, we consider how culture is complicated through the ballet repertoire and its techniques for disciplining and gendering bodies. Using live and recorded performances, interviews with practitioners reshaping the field, and close readings of new scholarship, we will see how 21st century politics are being negotiated through ballet in an intersectional frame.