Manifestations of surveillance in private sector dance education: the implicit challenges of integrating technology

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to illuminate the challenges of integrating new technologies in private sector dance education and explores the formation of digitally mediated identities in adolescent female dancers. Autoethnographic research is supported by Foucauldian theory as well as surveillance and social media scholarship. Research examines how the imagined audience, produced by live-streamed closed-circuit television (CCTV), perpetuates the status quo in systems of Western concert dance education and creates new dimensions in dance competition culture. The values of the dominant class are embedded in institutional systems of training. Structural systems of oppression exclude marginalized groups and maintain the status quo. The argument is extended to include how the imagined audience produced by social media plays a role in reinforcing dance’s established exclusionary aesthetic, as dancers create online identities to meet perceived audience expectations and build cultural capital. The discussion explores ways in which the imagined audience exacerbates current concerns in the field of dance education. Existing socioeconomic and institutional barriers perpetuate patriarchal values and reinforce gender expectations. In a post-pandemic world, teachers and students will negotiate new dimensions in dance education produced by manifestations of surveillance as this technological mediation will continue to be the norm.

KEYWORDS:

• Dance education
• dance competition
• technology
• surveillance
• digitally mediated identities
• technological mediation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tanya Berg

Tanya Berg holds a PhD in Dance Studies from York University and is a graduate of Canada’s National Ballet School Teacher Training Program. Tanya currently teaches in the Dance Department at York University and she has been a Sessional Lecturer in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto since 2003. Tanya has presented her research at multiple international conferences and contributed her research to Research in Dance Education and Journal of Dance Education, as well as the anthology Ethical Dilemmas in Dance Education: Case Studies on Humanizing Dance Pedagogy (Risner and Schupp 2020).