Building Ballet: developing dance and dancers in ballet

Abstract

This thesis unpacks a commonly expressed phrase in the dance industry – ‘Teaching dance beyond the steps’ – by exploring teaching practices that develop dance and dancers in children’s ballet lessons. Exploring an area that is commonly practiced and often talked about, but rarely studied, this study shows how ballet education builds particular ways of moving as well as particular behaviours and dispositions deemed desirable in ballet. Enacting Legitimation Code Theory, this thesis undertakes a qualitative case study of children’s Royal Academy of Dance ballet classes through analysis of non-participant, video recorded observations of five consecutive classes at Grade 1 and Intermediate Foundation levels, teacher interviews, follow up observations, and curriculum documents. The LCT dimension of Specialization is used as an organizing framework and distinguishes between teaching that develops dance as epistemic relations, or what is being danced, and teaching that develops dancers as social relations, or who is dancing. The dimension of Semantics is used as an explanatory framework to explore change in both the dance and the dancer at different levels of expertise. Ballet dance is both precise, or highly detailed, and transferable, where steps, technique, musicality and artistry taught in specific exercises manifest in other danced contexts. Tools for analysing epistemological condensation and epistemic-semantic gravity are used to explicate how the teachers build complex, principled, durable ballet movement. When looking at the dancer, axiological-semantic density and axiological-semantic gravity are enacted to elaborate how teachers develop particular valorised actions and behaviours, or externalized ways of acting as a ballet dancer, and how these are subsumed by dispositions, or internalized ways of thinking, feeling and being. The findings in this thesis examine different teaching practices that build knowledge and knowers, dance and dancers, in ballet and how they change at different levels of expertise.