Maguy Marin’s Social and Aesthetic Critique

This chapter situates French choreographer Maguy Marin as a valuable figure in contemporary ballet history. In analyzing her works Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1985), Groosland (1989), and Coppélia (1993), one discovers Marin’s application of self-reflexive strategies, body-transforming costumes, and dancer “dollness.” With these elements in place, the three ballets initiate discussions on objectification, gender performativity, labor relations, and body aesthetics, for both society at large and the institution of ballet specifically. Cendrillon, Groosland, and Coppélia function as examples of how ballet choreography might implement social and aesthetic critique, while simultaneously reflecting on ballet’s participation in the structures under consideration.

Making Ballet 3

Making Ballet 3 provides a choreographic analysis of the ballet Western Symphony, produced by the New York City Ballet in 1954 with choreography by George Balanchine, music by Hershy Kay, scenery by John Boyt, and costumes by Karinska. It brings to light the multitude of intertextual allusions that occur throughout the ballet, playfully intermingling references of “America” with an entire lineage of nineteenth-century European classicism. Although Western Symphony has no story line, it crafts a deliberate message: a long, transatlantic genealogy of Western classicism that, in the twentieth century, has come to rest in America. Drawing on archival sources and movement analysis, this interchapter argues that Western Symphony incorporates parody to present a revisionist ballet history in which the high cultural lineages of Europe and America are intimately entwined. Ultimately, this message reinforced the Atlanticist politics of private and state anticommunist groups in the cultural Cold War, the historical setting for its production and performance.

CREATING A CONTEMPORARY ARCHIVE: ALONZO KING LINES BALLET AT TWENTY-FIVE

In the title essay from Choreographing History, Susan Leigh Foster interrogates the belief that the body serves as a site for dance to be enacted upon and through. She, along with several others in this edited volume, sought to reposition and consequently enhance the contribution of dancers' bodies by not limiting the essays within to observational accounts or choreographic reviews. Instead Foster and her colleagues query “the possibility of a body that is written upon but that also writes” as means of urging dance scholars to “move critical studies of the body in new directions.” I take this position as an entry point and use it to contemplate the process of making and writing about contemporary ballet history using Alonzo King LINES Ballet, a San Francisco–based troupe, as a case study. In this essay, I describe the challenges I and others have faced in our efforts to collect and interpret a visual and verbal archive for this dance troupe, which has been performing for more than a quarter of a century. This process highlights a larger issue for dance historians, namely, how to create a critically sensitive archive for a company when the most reliable (and oftentimes the only available) source is the personal memory of its choreographer. I anchor this analysis to the different models of critical writing about bodies offered by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, and Hayden White and suggest that companies such as LINES offer challenges to those engaged in the archival process and in the practice of writing history.

You Tube, Beyonceworld, and Second Life: Do Girls Still “Go to Ballet”?

This paper presents updates from my ongoing ethnographic study into the lived experience and worldviews of eight- to eleven-year-old girls in the United Kindom and responds to my 1999 Selma Jeanne Cohen award-winning paper, “Respect, Antipathy, and Tenderness: Why Do Girls ‘Go to Ballet’?” History has moved very fast: technologies have transformed the daily lived experience of children, now supersaturated with images and with access to communities far beyond their physical and cultural environment. The paper reports on the girls' assessment of their experience and considers whether the girls' bodies are being re-choreographed by an unprecedented excess of images of bodies and ways of moving, very different from and potentially more powerful than those they encounter in their own cultural setting.