Ballet and pain: reflections on a risk-dance culture

Abstract

This qualitative study of Western Canadian dancers explores how elements of the ballet world, and associated risk-taking behaviours, affect the physical and emotional health of dancers. Authoritarian power structures, intensely competitive training and performing environments, and hyper-critical and perfectionist attitudes of instructors and performers are found to be ubiquitous pressures that initially appear to facilitate success in dance but may ultimately compromise health. Drawing upon existing knowledge from the sociology of sport, we conceive of ballet as a ‘culture of risk’ that normalises pain and injury and encourages dancers to understand and talk about their pain in ways that both suppress and trivialise it. In addition, the pain–injury experience was found to have negative emotional consequences, such as feelings of crisis and loss, shame, guilt and anxiety for dancers who are complicit in accepting the often unhealthy conventions of the dance subculture, including problem approaches to eating and weight. Finally, because existing literatures have shown that gender and risk intersect in human movement cultures (such as sport and dance), the paper also considers the gender dimensions of ballet, and the ways in which the core identities of participants grow uneasily out of a setting that both rewards and hurts dancers.

Keywords:

• ballet
• risk
• injury
• pain
• power

Notes

1. In her in-depth and critical examination of the figure skating and gymnastics communities for young girls, Joan Ryan (1995) shows how the often intense and demanding ‘careers’ of many young females start long before puberty, and it has long been known that in countries such as China and Russia infant ‘competitors’ face gruelling training regimens and technical routines in what have been called ice and gym ‘factories’ oriented to the very highest level of competition and performance.

2. The Solo Seal Award is the highest level of examination offered by the Royal Academy of Dance and focuses upon excellence in solo performance.

3. Emil Zatopek was a Czech long-distance runner who won three gold medals at the 1952 Summer Olympic Games in Finland and was well known for his ability to endure excruciating pain. Thus, the term Zatopekian pain, sometimes used in the sociology of sport literature (e.g. Howe 2004), refers to the role of positive pain for training purposes and the improvement of performance.

4. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) contains many themes mirrored in our data. These include problems at the individual and group level around, for instance, body control, discipline and hard work, torturous preparation, tyrannical teaching methods and fear of instructors, humiliation and bullying, ambition, self-abuse, eating disorders and other weight and body distortions and pathologies, narcissism, individual and group pressures, intra-company rivalry and intense competitiveness, hierarchically based identities and statuses, emaciation and isolation.