Table Of Content(Re:) Claiming Ballet
(Re:) Claiming Ballet
Adesola Akinleye, editor/ curator
First published in the UK in 2021 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2021 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd
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Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Copy-editing: Newgen Knowledgeworks
Cover image credit: Dancer Nena Gilreath, in The Leopards Tail by Waverly Lucus,
Photographer Keiko Guest
Frontispiece image credit: Agata Lawniczak
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Print ISBN 9781789383614
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Contents
Foreword ix
Katy Pyle, Founder and Artistic Director of Ballez Company
Foreword xiii
Virginia Johnson, Artistic Director and former Principal
Dancer of the Dance Theatre of Harlem
Introduction: Regarding claiming ballet/ reclaiming ballet 1
PART ONE: HISTORIES 9
1. Ballet, from property to art 10
Adesola Akinleye
2. Should there be a female ballet canon? Seven radical acts of inclusion 29
Julia Gleich and Molly Faulkner
3. Arabesque en noire: The persistent presence of Black dancers in the 48
American ballet world
Joselli Audain Deans
4. Portrayals of Black people from the African diaspora in Western 68
narrative ballets
Sandie Bourne
PART TWO: KNOWLEDGES 87
5. The traces of my ballet body 88
Mary Savva
6. Ballet beyond boundaries: A personal history 99
Brenda Dixon Gottschild
7. Auftanzen statt Aufgeben and the Anti Fascist Ballet School 116
Elizabeth Ward
8. Dancing across historically racist borders 129
Kehinde Ishangi
v
(RE:) CLAIMING BALLET
PART THREE: RESILIENCES 147
9. The Dance Theatre of Harlem’s radicalization of ballet in the 148
1970s and 1980s
Theresa Ruth Howard
10. ‘Showgirl with red pointe shoes’: Personal testimony as social resilience 168
Theara J. Ward
11. ‘Can you feel it?’: Pioneering pedagogies that challenge ballet’s 172
authoritarian traditions
Jessica Zeller
12. The ever after of ballet 189
Selby Wynn Schwartz
13. Ballethnic Dance Company builds community: Urban Nutcracker 209
leads the way
Nena Gilreath
PART FOUR: CONSCIOUSNESSES 223
14. The Counterpoint Project: When life doesn’t imitate art 224
Endalyn Taylor
15. Ballet’s binary genders in a rainbow- spectrum world: A call for 240
progressive pedagogies
Melonie B. Murray
16. Dancing through Black British ballet: Conversations with dancers 255
Adesola Akinleye and Tia- Monique Uzor
17. Ballet aesthetics of trauma, development and functionality 275
Luc Vanier and Elizabeth Johnson
Notes on contributors 293
Index 307
vi
By no means the first, this book just scratches the surface of the
contributions of the many brilliant dancers of our communities;
the book looks forward to sitting alongside more books,
histories, and of course more dances.
In the spirit of multiplicity that this book represents, we begin
by offering two Forewords representing different generational
acknowledgments.
Foreword
Katy Pyle, Founder and Artistic Director of Ballez Company
With this book, we remember ourselves, and remember that ballet is awoken,
enlivened, radicalized and made better by our work outside the racist, cis-
heteropatriarchal mainstream status quo. Through the braveness of celebrating
the very differences we represent, a path is carved to make ballet truly relevant
today. The ballet canon is studded with transgressive acts that created seismic
shifts; acts of change have inspired and transformed the art of ballet from being
a lonely re-e nactment of a bygone Western European colonial era into a site of
contemporarily relevant, beautiful art with transformational expressive power.
Art must electrify, challenge and Queer in order to stay alive. The Queer,
the different, the other have subverted mainstream ballet throughout its history,
whether intentionally or by the de facto nature of our presence, and thereby pro-
pelled its evolution. Our contributions have always been present in ballet, in the
training, the culture and the performance – so much so that we have been folded
into the fabric of ballet itself, but also usurped, made invisible and threatened
with disappearance.
I fell in love with ballet as a young person when it showed me that I could use
my body to be expansive, generous, dramatic, expressive, precise, powerful and
graceful. At the same time, ballet also taught me to betray myself, through hiding
my gender, my sexuality and the beauty of my powerful frame. The gatekeepers
in ballet asked me to be subdued, fragile and quiet, which I could only accomplish
through disordered eating and the suppression of my truth. For those of us not
within the definitions of ballet’s current mainstream status quo, our relationship
can be abusive. For me, ballet was the great love of my life, and I felt as if I had to
betray myself in order for us to stay together.
Once I left ballet, came out, came into myself and developed my artistic voice,
the thought of returning to ballet felt like it could only be some kind of post-
modern, conceptual joke. I could not perceive myself inside the form as anything
but funny, strange or ironic – so I founded Ballez, which embraced those contra-
dictions. And it was not until I found my ‘dancestors’ that I was able to become
ix
