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Session 35	Balletic Point(e)s
Clare Croft	The Women Behind the Woman: New York City Ballet Corps Dancers on Gender
	Choreographer George Balanchine and the ballets he created have much to say about the idea of femininity in American dance. A legion of dance scholars have read Balanchine’s ballets through a feminist lens, frequently understanding the work as severely limiting the possibilities for representations of women onstage, particularly when the ballet centers around a pas de deux. But what happens if we look beyond the male/female duel center stage and see the women surrounding the primary couple? This paper argues that the women of Balanchine’s corps present a more diverse picture of what counts as woman in American ballet, focusing on a milestone in New York City Ballet history that foregrounded the performance of identity, the company’s 1962 U.S. State Department sponsored tour of the Soviet Union. Personal interviews with corps dancers who traveled on the tour will illustrate how the corps’ perception of gender affected their work onstage and off.
Rim Zahra	Between Resistance and Restraint: The Corporeal Practice of Ballet
	This essay uses ballet as an example of how, within the context of globalization, dance can be rooted in a discourse of difference that women must learn to overcome. Contributing to the growing research on ballet produced by Jennifer Fisher (and others), this article explores the practice of ballet from the perspective of three students enrolled at a university level intermediate ballet classroom. Based on ethnographic material, that was brought together by observing the body practices in the ballet classroom, and interviewing the ballerinas about their experience with ballet, I explore the intersection between ballet and the lives of the female participants. In describing how the students understand their bodies in relation to the rigid structures of ballet, I show that it is precisely those structures that imbue the students with a sense of agency and self expression. I also reveal that by conforming to the structures of ballet, the students are also striving to reconcile their sense of a mind/body dualism.
Virginia Taylor	Utube, Beyonceworld, and Second Life: do girls still ‘go to ballet’?
	Utube, Beyonceworld, and Second Life: do girls still ‘go to ballet’? presents updates from my ongoing ethnographic study into the lived experience and worldviews of 8 -11 year old girls in the UK, 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 how girls in 2008 assess such experience, and considers whether the girls’ bodies are being rechoreographed 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.
	Clare Croft is a Ph.d. Candidate in the Performance as Public Practice program in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas-Austin, where she is writing a dissertation focused on U.S. State Department sponsorship of international dance tours as a form of cultural diplomacy. Clare has published performance and book reviews in Theatre Journal and Dance Research Journal, and her article on dance dramaturgy within the undergraduate dance curriculum will appear in Theatre Topics this spring. In 2007 Clare received the Society of Dance History Scholars’ Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for outstanding graduate student work.
	Rim Zahra is Ph.D. candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis. She holds an M.A. in English literature from Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. She has authored " Virtual Reality: Elizabethan Theatre and William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream," a chapter in Lost and found in virtual reality: Women and information technology, edited by Hannakaisa Isomaki now at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, and Anneli Pohjola at the University of Lapland, Finland. Currently, her dissertation research traces how, since the 1920s, Disney has employed aspects of theatricality in their animated productions and theme parks to shape and direct the cultural imaginary about American values and the American dream.
	Virginia Taylor researches ballet outside the opera houses and élite practice; in the working theatre and local schools, as a participatory practice enjoyed by many people, and as a Utopian motif in popular culture. (PhD Ballerinas in the Church Hall: Ideologies of femininity, ballet, and dancing schools, Chichester 2003). In 1999 she won the SDHS’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Award. Recent research in practice considered Dance and Landscape (Dances through Topological Space). From 2000-2006 Taylor was on the faculty of Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts: from 2006, Liverpool Hope University.
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