Habitus Ballet

8/4/2019 Habitus Ballet

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/habitus-ballet 1/24

A B S T R A C T The overall aim of our research was to produce an

ethnography of ballet as a social practice. We draw upon our fieldwork at

the Royal Ballet (London) where we conducted 20 in-depth interviews

with ballet staff, and observed ‘the company at work’, in class, rehearsal,

and performance. We explored dancers’ (n = 9) and ex-dancers’ (who are

now administrators, teachers, and character dancers: n = 11)perceptions of their bodies, dancing careers, and the major changes that

have occurred in the world of ballet over their professional lives. In this

article, we draw upon Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, physical

capital and cultural capital. The main focus of our article is an extended

discussion of our threefold distinction between individual habitus,

institutional habitus and choreographic habitus. Although our

ethnography of the body is set within the elite cultural field of

professional classical ballet, we hope that our research adds to debates on

the interrelationships between individuals and institutions, the body and

society, and on the salience of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus forunderstandings of the social world.

K E Y W O R D S : ballet, body, culture, ethnography, habitus

Introduction

The broad aim of this article is to provide a counterweight to the excessively

theoretical approach to the body that is a striking trait of the burgeoning liter-

ature on the body (Turner, 1996). This ‘decorative sociology’ is commonplaceacross the whole field of cultural studies (Turner and Rojek, 2001). Relatively

little research has focused on the ways that ‘specific social worlds invest, shape,

and deploy human bodies’ (Wacquant, 1995: 65). Atkinson (2000) also

A RT I C L E 535

Varieties of habitus and the embodiment

of ballet

DOI: 10.1177/1468794106068023

Qualitative ResearchCopyright © 2006SAGE Publications(London,Thousand Oaksand New Delhivol. 6(4) 535–558

Q

RS T E V E N P. WA I N W R I G H T

King’s College London

C L A R E W I L L I A M S

King’s College London

B RYA N S . T U R N E R

National University of Singapore



536

argues against what he describes as ‘sociology at a distance’, and in his recent

ethnography of Welsh National Opera he explores the cultural production of

opera as a series of social practices. Similarly, our qualitative research aims to

understand the balletic body as a series of cultural practices. In general terms,

there is a dearth of empirical research on the sociology of the body in westerntheatre dance (Thomas, 2003), and especially on classical ballet (Wulff, 1998).

In brief, research on the ‘body and dance’ is dominated by postmodern readings

of ‘dance as texts’ (Adshead-Lansdale, 1999; Desmond, 1997; Fraleigh and

Hanstein, 1999; Goellner and Murphy, 1995), although there is some ethno-

graphic literature on ‘ethnic dance’ (see Cowan, 1990). In addition, elements of

Bourdieu’s analytical framework have been applied in research on modern

dance in the USA (Daly, 1995; Morris, 2001). We hope that our research on

ballet and the body is a useful corrective to the often peculiarly disembodied

literatures on dance, particularly ballet, and on the body more generally.

Bourdieu and habitus

Pierre Bourdieu’s work is widely viewed as a fruitful approach to both theory and

research on the body (Shilling, 1993; Turner, 1992) as Bourdieu links agency

(practice) with structure (via capital and field) through the process of habitus.

Moreover, ‘the way people treat their bodies reveals the deepest dispositions of

the habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 190). Habitus is, in essence, an acquired scheme

of dispositions: ‘When habitus encounters a social world of which it is the prod-uct, it is like a “fish in water”… it takes the world about itself for granted’

(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 127). Bourdieu (1984), in brief, argues that

physical capital (in the form of body shape, gait and posture) is socially produced

through, for example, sport, food and etiquette. In this article, we are using the

term physical capital as basically a synonym for the fleshy body, and we argue

that the acquisition of physical capital is essential in pursuits where ‘the body

matters’ – for example, in boxing and ballet (Wainwight and Turner, 2003a).

Moreover, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: ‘illuminate[s] the circular process

whereby practices are incorporated within the body, only then to be regener-ated through the embodied work and competence of the body’ (Crossley, 2001:

106). Our ethnographic study of the Royal Ballet (London) explores the pro-

duction of the dancer’s habitus within the cultural world of classical ballet.

Although the main focus of our research is on injury (Turner and Wainwright,

2002, 2003, 2004; Wainwright and Turner, 2004a; Wainwright et al., 2005)

and ageing (Wainwright and Turner, 2003b, 2004b), in this article we discuss

the value of the notion of habitus for understandings of both the balletic body

and of the social world more generally.

Habitus is the coping-stone of Bourdieu’s conceptual system, or, to changethe metaphor, habitus ‘is the conceptual pivot of Bourdieu’s theoretical

synthesis’ (Seidman, 1998: 154). Habitus is the outcome of the sedimentation

of past experiences, shaping the agents’ perceptions and actions of the present

Qualitative Research 6(4)



and future and thereby moulding their social practices: ‘It is because this world

has produced me, because it has produced the categories of thought that I

apply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant,

1992: 127). Habitus ‘tends towards reproducing existing social structures’

(Shilling, 1993: 129), being ‘durable but not eternal’ (Bourdieu andWacquant, 1992: 133). Hence, a useful way to think of habitus is as ‘a pro-

cessing of structure’ (Ball, 1998: 3), ‘the embodiment of social structure’

(Sweetman, 2003: 532, original italics). Habitus is, therefore, both a medium

and outcome of social practice. In Bourdieusian language, the habitus consists

of ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predis-

posed to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 53). Similarly,

‘[t]he habitus, the product of history, produces individual and collective prac-

tices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemas engendered by

history’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 82). On one level, because biographies are alwaysdifferent, then everyone has a unique habitus. However, on another level, each

individual habitus also bears the stamp of a group’s collective history.

Moreover, the habitus is not simply a state of mind, it is also a bodily state of

being. The body is a repository of ingrained and durable dispositions and this

incorporation of our history is demonstrated, for instance, in the differences in

posture that men and women adopt (Bourdieu, 2001).

In this article, we argue that it is possible to tease out three forms of habitus

(individual, institutional and choreographic) in the field of ballet. Furthermore,

we suggest this tripartite schema is an important counterweight to one of thefrequent criticisms of Bourdieu’s work. For instance, Shilling (1993: 149)

claims that:

The concept of habitus has a lot of work to do in Bourdieu’s conceptual scheme. It

is something of an overburdened concept whose meaning tends to slip, slide and

even disappear, as it is deployed in different contexts.

As a short illustration of our threefold distinction, the dancer Wayne Sleep’s

stature, speed and his remarkable ability to turn, or his ‘individual habitus’

was accentuated by his schooling [Royal Ballet School] and training [RoyalBallet] that together formed his ‘institutional habitus’ as a ‘Royal Ballet

dancer’ (Sleep, 1996). This, in turn, was further reinforced in the roles created

for him when he was a star dancer at the Royal Ballet via his ‘choreographic

habitus’ e.g. as Kolya in Sir Frederick Ashton’s (1978) ballet A Month in the

Country (Brinson and Crisp, 1980), and this meant that his (considerable) abil-

ities as a ‘lyrical adagio’ dancer were underdeveloped. Furthermore, Wayne

Sleep’s height (5’2”) meant he was seen as a demi-caractère dancer rather than

as a danseur noble (Sleep, 1996). In other words, his stature meant he danced

the Jester, and not the Prince – for example, in Ashton’s (1948) balletCinderella. To coin an aphorism: his balletic body sealed his dancing destiny. As

we shall see, the same maxim can be applied to female dancers too, and we

therefore give a range of male and female examples in our article. Of course we

537Wainwright et al.: Varieties of habitus and the embodiment of ballet



538

accept that ballet is a gendered art form, but an in-depth discussion of this is

beyond the scope of this article (see Banes, 1998; Burt, 1995). Although our

three varieties of habitus are interlinked, we turn next to outline individual

habitus, before proceeding to discuss institutional and then choreographic

habitus. We conclude our article with an overview of the linkages betweenthese three types of habitus, and we end with a broader discussion of some of

the sociological writings on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus.

The dancer’s individual habitus

The pre-eminence of Balanchine as a choreographer and founder of the NYCB

(New York City Ballet) has had a profound effect on the look of the modern bal-

lerina (Shearer, 1986). To cite a famous example from the great American bal-

lerina Gelsey Kirkland’s (1988: 56) painfully honest autobiography:

[George Balanchine] halted class and approached me for a kind of physical inspec-

tion. With his knuckles, he thumped me on my sternum and down my rib cage

clucking his tongue and remarking ‘Must see the bones’… He did not merely say,

‘Eat less’, he said repeatedly, ‘Eat nothing’… Mr B’s ideal proportions called for an

almost skeletal frame, accentuating the collarbones and length of neck… Mr B’s

methods and taste have been adopted by virtually every Ballet Company and

school in America… ‘Thin-is-in’… For those who refuse to go along with the crowd,

professional employment is unlikely.

In our terms, this illustrates the interconnection and reciprocity between indi-vidual and institutional habitus. Even if a dancer meets the broad physical

requirement for ballet, there is still a tendency to ‘catalogue’ dancers in terms

of their body – as we saw with our example of Wayne Sleep. In addition, all

dancers find some steps and movements easier to perform than others. For

example, Darcey Bussell, one of the leading ballerinas in England, writes that:

‘I find bourrées [small running steps on Pointe] hard... I have very bendy feet

which makes it hard for me to stay on the tips of my toes’ (1998: 117). In other

words, differences in physical capital produce differences in individual habitus,

and these are then developed (and usually reproduced) in the way a choreog-rapher inscribes his steps upon a dancer (as we will see later, when we discuss

choreographic habitus). Antoinette Sibley and Lynne Seymour were contem-

poraries at the Royal Ballet and yet, ‘we were brought up in completely differ-

ent spheres: me [Sibley] totally as a classical ballerina, she [Seymour] totally as

a dramatic ballerina’ (Newman, 1986: 150; Seymour, 1984). In other words,

their shared institutional habitus was overridden by the interconnection

between their individual and choreographic habitus.

Gelsey Kirkland, again, has written of how her body and the way she danced

profoundly influenced her development as a ballerina:

I thought of myself as a soubrette or allegro dancer, known for speed and preci-

sion. In my struggle to become a lyrical or adagio dancer, I was trying to take on




those qualities of character that I associated with the drama of classical dance. I

knew that I had to work against my training… My physical type and technical pro-

ficiency decreed a specific place for me in the Balanchine repertory. My figure sealed

my fate. (Kirkland, 1988: 82, our italics)

To escape this fate, Kirkland left NYCB and joined ABT (American BalletTheatre). Her transformation can be seen as an example of the reflexive nature

of Bourdieu’s sociology:

[Bourdieu’s] constructivist structuralism suggests that the aim of social science is

to enhance the constructivist power of social agency over social structures.

Bourdieu’s structuralism thus involves the freeing of agency from oppressive social

structures by raising to the level of reflexivity the degree to which existing forms of

cultural production are limited by social structures. (Delanty, 1997: 115)

In other words, and in our terms, Kirkland transformed her individual habitus

by changing the institutional habitus and the choreographic habitus that sheworked within. Her move enabled her to evolve into a different type of balle-

rina. This sense of transformation is captured in Dame Marie Rambert’s

famous account of watching Vaslav Nijinski in both class and performance:

One is often asked whether his jump was really as high as it is always described. To

that I answer: ‘I don’t know how far from the ground it was, but I know it was near

the stars.’ Who would watch the floor when he danced? He transported you at

once into higher spheres with the sheer ecstasy of his flight... And then there was

his unique interpretation. He wafted the perfume of the rose in Spectre de la Rose;

he was the very spirit of Chopin in Les Sylphides; he looked like a Hamlet in hisGiselle; his Petrushka broke your heart with his sorrow, and his Faune had the real

breath of antiquity. (Rambert, 1972: 60)

This is a paradigmatic example of the transfiguration of physical capital into

the artistic capital of balletic genius. In other words, the technical abilities of

fleshy bodies (physical capital) are combined with an embodied cultural

knowledge (artistic capital). Not all dancers reach the level of genius of

Nijinski, of course, but the embodiment of artistry and the sheer physical slog

and buzz of acquiring it, together with the joy of dancing, are defining char-acteristics of the cultural world of a ballet company, as Megan (now a leading

ballet coach, once a great dancer) remarked:

Megan: We’re surrounded by beautiful, talented, young people. Unusual

people. We all have the same identity in a sense. We love being

pushed. We love being challenged. We don’t mind getting hot and

sweaty and killing ourselves. We get a buzz from being exhausted,

and still managing to get up and do it again. It’s a drug. All of us have

that in common.

The example above is a powerful depiction of the way in which the social world

of the professional ballet company becomes embodied in its dancers. It is this




540

intersection between body, career and institutions that contributes simultane-

ously to a sociological understanding of dancing careers and to the embodi-

ment of dance. Ballet is an art that is literally inscribed on the body as both

ballet technique and, especially, ballet artistry, is handed from one generation

to the next (Bland, 1981; Guest, 1988).As we have already intimated, the close correspondence between an indi-

vidual’s ballet habitus and a choreographic habitus is invariably most closely

aligned when roles are created on dancers:

When steps are created on you, they are inevitably the sort of steps you favour.

When the second cast tries to step into your shoes it feels completely alien. Chris

[Saunders, Royal Ballet] worked at it until his body couldn’t take any more. I doubt

he’ll be walking in the morning. (Bull, 1999[1998]: 151)

The discipline required to literally exhaust your stocks of physical capital is the

dancer’s daily price for the acquisition of their lifetime’s artistic capital. For as

Margot Fonteyn (1978: 106, our italics) recalls, ‘new roles are the stuff of life for

a dancer , and when such plums are landed it is a sure thing that every spare

moment will be spent perfecting them’ – even if, apparently, this means that

you are, like Christopher Saunders, unable to walk the next day. The individual

habitus of the truly great dancer tends to eclipse any shortcomings that they

may have in, say, technique. So, with the young Rudolf Nureyev:

The viewer was so transfixed by the sweeping scope of his movements, his confi-

dence and feline grace, that even the most vigilant eyes failed to catch his techni-cal imperfections. They were in fact of no importance given the thrill of his

presence. (Smakov, 1984: 227)

The dancer’s institutional habitus

Nureyev was a product of the discipline and schooling of what is now the

Vaganova ballet school of the Kirov Ballet in St Petersburg (Craine and Mackrell,

2000). His individual habitus was moulded through this (Russian) institutional

habitus. Similarly, although Gelsey Kirkland danced with the dramatic flair of aRussian-trained ballerina in her later career, she laments how ‘I would not have

the benefit of years of memorization to take on the style and shape that seemed

to be the basis of the Russian theatre. I would never be a Russian ballerina’

(Kirkland, 1988: 92, our italics). Kirkland was one of Mikail Baryshnikov’s

favourite partners when he first defected from the Kirov to the West. She states:

Watching him [Baryshnikov] rehearse the variations for his upcoming appearance

in La Bayadère I was stunned again by his technical virtuosity, the liquid purity

with which he executed his steps. His body was more than an object of physical

attraction, it was a fountain of wisdom. (Kirkland, 1988: 122)

There is of course a reciprocal relationship between individual and institu-

tional habitus. One example of this is an extract from our discussion with

Royal Ballet dancer Jessie, about body types and ballet companies.




Jessie: I think it’s interesting because in this company we do have very different

shapes and sizes, men and women, whereas in a company like the Paris

Opera Ballet, they are much more uniform. Much, much more uniform.

And the Russians too. Very much more uniform. And it’s, it’s almost a

deliberate thing for us. If you’re looking at the corps de ballet in Swan Lake,you’re not going to get here the same uniformity that you do in the Paris

company or in Russia. But because so much of our rep is the Ashton and

the Macmillan rep, which is based around characters, you know, real

people. And real people aren’t all the same size and shape, they are all dif-

ferent. And so for our repertoire it really works that we have a wide range

of shapes and sizes and I think we really don’t want to lose that.

Another example of the influence of an institutional habitus is the contrast

between two of the greatest male dancers of the 1960s, the Danish Eric Bruhnand the Russian Rudolf Nureyev:

As the epitome of the Bournonville dancer, Bruhn was Nureyev’s polar opposite, the

Apollo to his Dionysius, poetic not powerful. Where the Soviet school favoured big,

soaring, powerful jumps with sustained poses, the Franco-Danish style of Bournonville

shunned fire for finesse, calling for crisp, nimble footwork, quick changes in direction,

fluttering beats and incremental steps building to a crescendo. Bruhn moved audi-

ences with the effortlessness of his dancing; Nureyev thrilled them with the effortful-

ness of his dancing … With its emphasis on buoyancy and precision, on bounding

beaten steps and quicksilver shifts of weight, it [Bournonville] contrasted sharply with

his own pliant, expansive style of dancing. (Solway, 1998: 192, 280)

In our study, one of the people responsible for auditions and selection of Royal

Ballet dancers supports this distinction between schooling and national styles

of ballet:

Megan: We all know that when someone comes for an audition you really have

to look at their initial posture at the barre to have a pretty good idea of

where they’ve trained. You can tell whether it’s Russian training, or

French, Danish, American. They all have a different way of standing.They support their arms differently. They use their heads differently.

This theme, of embodied differences in dance style, which are a sign of differences

in institutional habitus between the leading ballet companies, was something that

we were particularly interested in hearing Zelda’s views upon, because she trained

in France and danced with the Paris Opera Ballet before joining the Royal Ballet:

Interviewer : What about the difference between the Royal Ballet and the Paris

Opera?Zelda: The Paris Opera is a beautiful, beautiful company – absolutely

beautiful. Beautiful dancers. As dancers the Royal has always

danced much faster…




542

Interviewer : So did you find that difficult coming from your French training?

Zelda: Yes I did, because for us it’s completely different. It’s all much

more the flexibility, not so much the flexibility as the high leg and

the length of the leg. You are not as fast because you have that

length. It’s a different quality of dancing. I love the talent of being really quick, but I know that I don’t have that Royal Ballet

work [training] that is necessary.

So physical capital, ‘suppleness and length of leg’, enables the production of the

desired line and extensions of the Parisienne company; and this type of body and

the embodiment of French schooling (the intense dance training at a company

ballet school from the ages of 11–18) acts as a constraint on dancers if they then

switch to the relatively ‘fast footwork’ of the Royal Ballet. Zelda went on to talk

about other influences on the institutional habitus of the Royal Ballet:

Zelda: …there’s people like me who are foreigners…and they’ve all kinds of dif-

ferent trainings and it makes a huge difference in the company because

it means that it is more difficult to get a similar style, basically…and the

Royal used to. I mean when I joined, eight years ago, you could still really

see the style of the Royal Ballet, because you had all the…dancers like

Tracy Brown, Nicky Sedgefield, Nicky Roberts – all these people still in

their 30s, still dancing. And they had a quality that now you don’t see.

Because the oldest person now is about 22! That’s me! The company hasgone much much younger. I had the chance to see all these people danc-

ing and they are the ones that I copied and that I kind of sucked all this

information from. But now the younger ones don’t have the same thing.

They do in a way because they have Darcey [Bussell], but they don’t have

the middle layer of people that make the company really important.

What is noticeable here is the way in which the signature of the Royal has

changed with the influx of a younger and more diverse group of dancers. The

institutional habitus has been diluted by an influx of dancers with a morewidely varied individual habitus than, say, 20 years ago when almost the

whole company of around 80 dancers were products of the Royal Ballet

School.

Another dancer we interviewed had spent almost seven years with NYCB

(New York City Ballet) before moving to the rival, and very different, ABT

(American Ballet Theatre) – a point we highlighted in a question to Errol:

Interviewer : Did you find it difficult when you moved from NYCB to ABT as

they have very different styles and a completely different rep?

Errol: Yes and no. The first time I danced for ABT it was a bit weird. It

wasn’t because of what I could or couldn’t do, but because I was

thinking exactly what you just asked me. I doubted myself… In




this profession you look at yourself all the time under a microscope.

There definitely was a transition period though. I understood

that, and I wanted to be patient with myself. There’s got to be a

period of development.

Interviewer : So how long was it before you really felt comfortable dancingfor ABT?

Errol: Probably when I was about three months into it… Coming from

City Ballet it was going to take time to convince some people.

Whether it [his dancing] was good or bad didn’t really matter. It

was going to take that amount of time. The first night I was

doing Sleeping Beauty and I was just sweating and sweating…

That was probably the worst experience I’ve ever had, to be honest.

Errol felt comfortable in his old and familiar dancing home at NYCB, but veryuncomfortable when he moved to his ‘new dancing home’ at ABT. The nerves

of his first night illustrate the embodied nature of the balletic habitus and the

way that a dancer’s habitus is the product of a very particular field, for, as

Crossley (2003: 62) notes, there are ‘fields within fields’. In this case, Errol had

moved from the abstract style of NYCB, where he was one of the company’s

star dancers, to ABT, which is famous for a very different repertoire of ballets,

and where the emphasis is on narrative and drama. For Bourdieu, ‘being a fish

in water’ is one key sign of habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). This becomes increas-

ingly difficult when there is an increasing movement of star dancers betweenthe leading ballet companies, who are inevitably, to some extent, ‘fish out of

water’. In contrast, Casper, a ballet coach, talks of how the institution is liter-

ally able to mould the corps de ballet into one body:

Casper : I think where the strength of this company lies is actually in the main

body of the company: the corps de ballet, the soloists. It’s that strength

of that group of people staying together over a period of time, again

we’re back to the family thing, the cohesiveness of the company,

they’re not transient dancers so they actually work together for a con-centrated amount of time and become much better performers. Then

we can get a depth to them.

Comparative sociology compares phenomena over both time and space. The

notion of institutional habitus can also be viewed as a continuum along these

two dimensions. In other words, the institutional habitus varies both between

ballet companies (spatially) and within a ballet company (historically). Several

informants commented on the dramatic changes in what we describe as the

institutional habitus of the Royal Ballet. Many of our interviews were with

people who had spent their entire careers with the Royal Ballet. They argued

that some of the particular changes that they noted reflected broader changes

in British society. One striking theme was the increased participation of dancers




544

in decision-making. Both Dexter and Megan joined the company over 40 years

ago. At that time:

Dexter : Then there was no question of being asked. Dame Ninette [de Valois,

the legendary founder and first director of the Royal Ballet] made medo two Albrechts [the demanding lead male role in Giselle] in one day.

I’d just done a matinee and she said, ‘You’re on again tonight!’…it

never occurred to anybody to argue with her. You were told what you

were doing, and now you are asked if you will do it.

Megan: In those days I think it really was that we served the company. I don’t

think that there was a policy then of anyone on the management

actually feeling that they had a real responsibility to fulfil our lives for

us. Whereas I know Anthony [Dowell, the Director of the company at

the time of the interview] does… As time’s gone on, everywhere insociety, no longer does one sell one’s soul for a company. You wanna

know what they are going to do back for you.

The role of the Director of the Royal Ballet is a striking example of this change

in the institutional habitus of the Royal Ballet being a mirror of broader

changes in organizations and society over the last four decades.

The dancer’s choreographic habitusAll choreographers need to work out their ideas on real bodies (Brinson and

Crisp, 1980). There is a reciprocal relationship between the choreographer’s

ideas of what movements he (typically) wants, on how they look on the bodies

of the dancers he is inscribing his choreography on, and with how these steps

feel for the dancer. This is true even when dancers are rehearsing an estab-

lished ballet (it was apparent in every rehearsal that we attended). In a similar

way, no two pianists will play, say, Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in exactly the

same way, even though the notes on the page are the same. However, with

dance then, the process of creation is often inspired and always changed by

working with dancers’ bodies. For the choreographer George Balanchine:

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty... I need to have real, living bodies to

look at. I see how this one can stretch and that one can jump and another one can

turn, and then I begin to get a few ideas. (Balanchine, in Taper, 1984: 4)

Balanchine makes the link between the individual dancer and the choreogra-

pher when he argues: ‘Steps are made by a person. It’s the person dancing the

steps – that’s what choreography is, not the steps by themselves’ (in Taper,

1984: 321). The choreographer John Cranko notes how the physical capital

invested in the steps needs to be converted into artistic capital through the

melding of the individual, institutional and choreographic habituses (although

he didn’t use those terms to express this idea). Cranko writes:




There’s a limit to the amount of jumping around people can do... One has to con-

vert this extremely physical image – a physical way of expressing oneself – into a

spiritual way of expressing oneself. In the great Balanchine ballets – Serenade,

Concerto Barocco, Apollo – the flesh becomes spirit while you’re watching them.

(Percival, 1983: 139)

The institutional habitus is partially determined by the predominant choreo-

graphic habitus – for example, at the Kirov Ballet via the heritage of Marius

Petipa, at the Royal Danish Ballet via August Bournonville, at the Royal Ballet

via Frederick Ashton and Kenneth Macmillan, and at the NYCB via George

Balanchine. A favourite saying of Nureyev’s was: ‘My body has Petipa, my

head has Bournonville, and my heart has Balanchine’ (in Solway, 1998: 462).

So, on his appointment as Director of the Paris Opera Ballet in 1983, Nureyev

introduced classes in Bournonville and Balanchine techniques to complement

the existing ‘Petipa’ inspired French style of the Paris company (Craine andMackrell, 2000). Lisa sums up the factors that have produced the ‘English

style’ of the Royal Ballet:

Lisa: English style is mostly wrapped up in its choreography of course. Since

coming here I do notice a serious lack of good port de bras [movement of

the shoulders], but I also notice a serious advantage of technical ability.

So there are pros and cons, and if we could just marry the two, then we

could have a wonderful ballet company. The rep, probably has changed

more. We’ve kept Ashton; we’ve kept Macmillan, which has been ourstaple diet I would say in trying to keep the style. The classics change

because they become different combinations of style. I mean dealing

with the corps de ballet, from worldwide. And I suppose in that way it’s

made us like every other company in many ways.

In this case, the choreographic habitus is seen as trumping the rather inchoate

institutional habitus produced via a range of international teachers, and the

increasing international nature of companies like the Royal Ballet, both in

terms of dancers, and especially in terms of the globalization and homoge-nization of the core ballet repertoire (Newman, 2004; Wainwright et al., in

press). The quotation above also reinforces the difficulty that current ballet

masters and ballet mistresses face in producing a stylistically uniform and reg-

imented corps de ballet.

The difference between rehearsing and performing in a certain style (a

choreographic habitus) and being taught daily class in a certain style (a

schooling habitus) was brought out by one of the world’s leading ballet teach-

ers in his comments on the production of an English and an American style of

ballet:

Dudley: I was asked about this in America. What was the difference between

Balanchine and Ashton? Balanchine established an American way




546

of moving. Ashton created a choreographic style of moving that was

very coordinated with the English, sort of, rather reserved way of

moving. He developed his choreography along those lines. Balanchine

invented a style of American movement that involved the classroom.

Ashton did not. Ashton wasn’t interested in that. So it was a very dif-ferent kind of development. Balanchine came from Russia, and it

would have been a very interesting thing had he not of gone to

America. How would he have developed in Russia? But he went to

America at a very important time of his life and he spent a lot of time

in Hollywood – which a lot of people don’t realize. He did a lot of

movies. All of that old Busby Berkely stuff. When you look at

Balanchine’s choreography in terms of formations and all that one

thing after the other, it’s all Busby Berkley influenced. Ashton’s influ-

ence was Anna Pavlova and Margot Fonteyn, not reserved, butproper is a good word. ‘Nothing a little bit too much dear. No don’t do

this! Oh no no no no, we don’t do that!’ So a sort of elegance that he

brought about with that.

So, although it is true that Ashton did not teach daily class, students at the

Royal Ballet School inevitably dance a great deal of Ashton as Ashton remains

the mainstay of the Royal Ballet repertory (Jordan and Grau, 1996; Kavanagh,

1996; Vaughan, 1977). This view, and the implication that dancers trained in

ballet schools where Ashton is not part of the everyday curriculum find itmore difficult to dance Ashton, is supported by our interview data. For

example:

Interviewer : Do you think that with the people coming from the Royal Ballet

School, the Ashton is more instilled?

Casper : Yes, yes… Again it depends on the individual, whether they

assimilate it quickly or whether they don’t. You find the ones

that do make quicker progress through the company. Very often

you get a dancer who comes in from outside that you see imme-diately has the potential to be able to integrate into the company

very quickly because their style of dancing is such that they fit in

terribly quickly. Others don’t, and it’s a matter of time until you

find out whether they can or they can’t.

So, it also seems that the choreographic habitus is itself transformed via the

institutional habitus of ballet companies with significantly different dance

styles.

It can be seen that the relations between individual habitus, institutional

habitus and choreographic habitus are complex, and in our discussion we

elaborate on some of the ways in which they are interrelated.




Discussion and conclusion

The relationship between individual, institutional and choreographic habitus

becomes especially clear when there is either concordance or discordance

between these three elements. So, for example, when the choreographer

William Forsythe’s productions are:

Danced by companies other than his own [Frankfurt Ballet], they tend to do it with

great success, but not always as articulately as his own dancers. Forsythe’s own

dancers have…been practising his steps and concepts for years, some for more

than a decade, whereas other dancers usually only have about a month to learn

them. And this shows in their respective performances. (Wulff, 1998: 42)

Here, individual habitus is insufficiently shaped via a lack of the appropriate

background schooling, the embodied discipline, of a particular choreographic

and institutional habitus. The dance quotations gleaned both from our inter-views with Royal Ballet dancers and from the memoirs of dancers provide a

useful insight into the bodily habitus of classical ballet dancers. Moreover, they

begin to illuminate the relationships between the body, self, society and culture

within the field of dance. To oversimplify, we saw earlier how the so-called ‘lyri-

cal style’ of the Royal Ballet is less suited to the ‘attacking athletic allegro style’

required for the ballets that Balanchine produced for his New York City Ballet

(Clarke and Crisp, 1981). Some ballet memoirs reveal the synthesis of individ-

ual, institutional and choreographic habitus that occurs in one dancer – for

example, in the contrasting styles (balletic habitus) of, say, Allegra Kent withthe NYCB (Kent, 1997) and Antoinette Sibley with the Royal Ballet (Newman,

1986). Furthermore, dancers who move between companies, and particularly

those who endeavour to move between classical ballet and modern dance,

such as Nureyev (Solway, 1998), provide useful insights into these differing

habituses. As they struggle with fresh ways of dancing, they are, in effect, try-

ing to obtain enough physical capital and cultural capital to assume a new

dance habitus. The ex-Kirov dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, therefore, spent two

years with NYCB in order to attain his ‘Balanchine’ habitus (Ramsey, 1998).

We hope our article has shown that the cultural world of ballet is repletewith embodied practices. For instance, the mental and physical demands of a

career in ballet become embodied in a craving for perfection. This daily quest

for the unattainable is one of the features of class, rehearsal and performance.

The ballet coach literally inscribes the steps onto and into the bodies of the

next generation of dancers. Ballet is based on the production and reproduction

of this generational artistic embodiment. More generally, the balletic habitus is

constantly created and replicated by the reciprocal connections between

agency and structure. We tried to capture this process in our tripartite distinc-

tion of individual habitus, institutional habitus and choreographic habitus.

Individual habitus is extremely diverse as individuals vary both in terms of

their capital (some are great turners, others great jumpers; some are polished




548

technicians, others are wonderful actors and so on) and in their embodied his-

tories. Some dancers prefer modern dance to classical ballet, while others pre-

fer the classroom to the stage – and vice versa. At the individual level,

distinctions in physical capital can literally ‘seal your fate’. For instance, the

raw material that forms your ‘body type’ can determine whether your careertrajectory as a male dancer follows that of a danseur noble or of a demi-caractère

dancer. The individual agent is processed by the institutional structure, and

this reflexive relationship produces and reproduces the habitus of the balletic

body. Casting for existing and for new ballets adds a further choreographic

dimension to this association, and so the dancer’s habitus is a function of the

interrelationships between individual, institution and choreography.

Shevtsova (2002: 58) states that ‘habitus is a socialised subjectivity’ and so

there is both an individual and a ‘group habitus’. In a similar vein, several authors

have discussed the idea of ‘institutional habitus’ (Reay, 1998; Reay et al., 2001;Thomas, 2002), and especially the ways in which this can, for example, mould

students’ choice of university in the UK as the school ‘launders cultural advan-

tages’ (Crossley, 2003: 43). Institutional habitus is ‘the impact of a cultural group

or social class as it is mediated through an organisation’ (Reay et al., 2001).

Within the field of dance, schools will have differing institutional habituses, and

our interviews revealed how many dancers saw their move from the Royal Ballet

School to the Royal Ballet Company as inevitable and natural. To adopt a phrase

of Bourdieu’s (2000: 143): ‘they feel at home in the world because the world is

also in them, in the form of habitus, a virtue made of necessity’.For Bourdieu, and for many other social researchers influenced by his

approach such as Reay et al. (2001), habitus is a key to understanding social

class and the reproduction of hierarchies of distinction (Bourdieu, 1984).

Habitus is, essentially, an appropriated set of generative dispositions. Some of

these dispositions are bodily ones. Hence:

The apparently most insignificant techniques of the body – ways of walking or

blowing one’s nose, ways of eating or talking…[reveals] the most fundamental

principles of construction and evaluation of the social world. (Bourdieu, 1984: 466)

The lifestyles of the different social classes become inscribed on and in their

bodies. Furthermore, physical capital – via body shape, gait, posture, speech

and so on – contributes to the reproduction of social inequalities. In other

words, the body is a bearer of value in society (Shilling, 1993).

One way of extending our research would be to investigate the field of clas-

sical ballet in order to trace the social trajectories of aspiring ballet dancers

who, for example, enter the Royal Ballet School and the subsequent dancing

careers of graduates of this school. We have some interesting data on the

family milieux of those who become professional dancers, and this too could

form the basis for a Bourdieusian discussion on social hierarchy and issues of

power which are central to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (Hillier and Rooksby,

2002; Wainwright and Turner, 2003a).




We recognize that the institutional structure of ballet, like any field, deter-

mines a range of social positions in terms of their prestige and authority. In

other words, the structure of the field shapes the careers of ballet dancers.

Although all dancers have physical limitations, what counts as ‘physical capi-

tal’, as we outlined earlier, and how this is viewed, changes both historicallyand geographically. The power to determine ‘what counts’ exemplifies the

power struggles within a field. The careers of ballet dancers, like other ‘sports

stars, artistes’ (and even academics), depend on the views and actions of those

with the power to determine what counts as capital within a particular field.

Even world famous ballerinas like Gelsey Kirkland and Lynn Seymour were lit-

erally driven out of ballet companies through disputes with powerful ballet

company directors (Kirkland, 1988; Seymour, 1984). The different forms of

institutional habitus could also be considered as different forms of capital, with

currency in some fields (say, the Royal Ballet) but not in others (for example,the Kirov). Various company styles are forms of capital within these ‘fields

within fields’. In this article, we highlighted the difference between the inter-

nalization of a company style (a product of the institutional habitus and

choreographic habitus of, say, the Royal Ballet) by members of the corps de bal-

let and the way various ‘star dancers’ can adopt (given time) or ignore a par-

ticular company style as they dance around the world.

Within a ballet company, the corps de ballet is the institutional habitus made

manifest. Here, dancers of different schooling and styles become one entity; or,

to put it more accurately, their individual bodies are transfigured to dance asone body. Even with the homogenizing pressures of globalization, the corps of,

say, the Kirov Ballet, New York City Ballet, and the Royal Ballet would form

three noticeably different bodies. However, staying in the corps for years may

wear away and eventually ablate your individual dance habitus. The work of

being, in a sense, ‘a clone in the collective’ renders some dancers incapable of

becoming principal dancers. In contrast, some future principal dancers – for

instance, Lynn Seymour (Seymour, 1984), have such an abundance of indi-

vidual habitus that they are quickly promoted out of the corps as their individ-

uality overrides the communal similarity of the uniform corps de ballet.Because it takes years to incorporate the distinct style of a dance company

into your body, dancers who change companies and thereby move ‘across

styles’ are interesting case studies of the interplay between individual, institu-

tional and choreographic habitus. Hence, Frederick Ashton, the founder of the

English style of ballet, created only one major role for Rudolf Nureyev during

Nureyev’s 15 years as a guest artist of the Royal Ballet (in Marguerite and

Armand , 1963, a role that accentuated Nureyev’s dramatic Russian style of

dancing [Vaughan, 1977]). Mikhail Baryshnikov was correspondingly disap-

pointed by the lack of English style in Rhapsody (1980) – when Ashton created

a role for him that was full of Baryshnikov’s bravura ‘trademark tricks’ but

devoid of Ashton’s brand of languid lyricism (Kavanagh, 1996). In both cases,

a great choreographer responded to the remarkably individual balletic bodies




550

of these ex-Kirov dancers to produce works that are more infused with Russian

melodrama and bravura than with flowing Ashtonian English restraint. It is

likely to take a year, and often much longer, for a dancer to acquire a new insti-

tutional habitus. Nureyev could have become ‘an English dancer’ but he was very

reluctant to do so because he felt it would diminish the brightness of his talent(Solway, 1998): ‘Endlessly newsworthy... He is adored by a huge audience; he is a

force of nature’ (Brinson and Crisp, 1980: 244). ‘Forces of nature’, like Nureyev,

mould institutions in as much their own image as vice versa (Solway, 1998).

In the concluding section of our article, we address some of the criticisms

that have been made of Bourdieu’s work, and especially of the concept of habi-

tus (Calhoun et al., 1993; Fowler, 2000; Grenfell and James, 1998; Lane,

2000; Robbins, 2000; Shusterman, 1999). Typically, critics of Bourdieu’s work

see it as vague, deterministic and ahistorical. Given the wide range of Bourdieu’s

writings, and his growing eminence across a number of academic disciplines,this has inevitably produced a large critical literature. Our aim here is to out-

line and evaluate three of the more common criticisms that relate directly to

our discussion of habitus in the field of ballet.

First, Bourdieu’s concepts are often criticized for being vague. A typical crit-

ical refrain is ‘that in trying to explain everything they explain nothing’.

Equally, the cynic might tease the Bourdieusian with the taunt that ‘they

wouldn’t know what the habitus is if they tripped over it’. Similarly, the con-

cept of field is sometimes conceptualized as a bounded space, or as a field of

struggles, and/or as a ‘magnetic’ field – where agents align themselves withthe pole that ‘attracts’ their stock of capital:

The concept [of field] has an almost chameleon-like quality in that it can mean all

things to all people: determined and determining, structured and structuring,

strong and weak, modern and postmodern, promoting reproduction and change,

Marxist and Weberian. (Prior, 2000: 144)

But this supposed weakness is, we argue, the strength of Bourdieu’s concepts.

It is the very vagueness and ambiguity of Bourdieu’s notions that give them

an elasticity that allows the concepts of habitus, capital and field to beemployed in a wide range of empirical research projects – as Bourdieu’s exten-

sive and very varied research shows. The concept of field, for example, has cap-

tured the imagination of researchers trying to unravel some of the complexity

of fields as diverse as education (Reay et al., 2001); literature, (Pinto, 1996);

social policy (Peillon, 1998); disability (Edwards and Imrie, 2003); radical

social movements (Crossley, 2003); journalism (Marliere, 1998); personal

finance (Aldridge, 1998); theatre (Shevtsova, 2002) and the arts (Danto,

1999). Moreover, other key concepts in both the humanities and social sci-

ences are also vague, but this does not mean that they lack heuristic purchase.So, to give just one example, ‘we should not assume that the word ‘culture’ can

act as a magic wand; it is what we do with it that counts’ (Smith, 2000: 133, our

italics). This, as we shall see shortly, is essentially Bourdieu’s defence against




his critics. In this article, we have tried to show how three varieties of habitus

are helpful in understanding the field of classical ballet.

Body techniques, within and beyond ballet, are not naturally acquired; they

are essentially about education (Durkheim and Mauss, 1975[1912]). As a

result of this detailed education of the body into a cluster of techniques,human beings occupy a habitus. Mauss argued that this habitus is the: ‘tech-

niques and work of collective and individual reason rather than, in the ordi-

nary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties’ (Mauss, 1979: 101). One

can see in this passage the intellectual roots of Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of

habitus and his logic of embodied practice (see Crossley, 2001).

Ballet is a paradigm case of embodied social practices. We see habitus and

embodiment as entwined, as ‘bodies embrace and express the habitus of the

field in which they are located’ (Wainwright and Turner, 2004a: 101). In addi-

tion, we view embodiment as overcoming the problematic Cartesian dualismbetween mind and body (see Crossley, 2001). In a similar vein, habitus is also

a way to overcome the Cartesian mind–body split. For example, Bourdieu

(2000: 136) writes: ‘to understand practical understanding, one has to move

beyond the alternatives of thing and consciousness’. Moreover, to use Csordas’

(1994) phrase: ‘Embodiment provides the existential ground of culture and

self ’. The concept of embodiment derives from Merleau-Ponty’s (1962)

Phenomenology of Perception. In essence, Merleau-Ponty rejected the

mind–body dualism of Descartes by contending that thinking, feeling and

doing are all practical actions that obligate embodiment. For Merleau-Ponty,the body is never isolated because it is always engaged with the world (Weiss,

1999). Bourdieu draws upon Merleau-Ponty in the development of the con-

cept of habitus (Crossley, 2001). Furthermore:

We can define embodiment as the mode by which human beings practically

engage with and apprehend the world. In this respect, the concept of embodiment

also has a close affinity with the sociology of Bourdieu, which attempts to over-

come dichotomies between action and structure in the notions of practice and

‘habitus’. (Abercrombie et al., 2000: 115)

One critical response to our tripartite distinction of the varieties of habitus is

to claim that this proliferation of terms reifies ‘the habitus’ into three pseudo-

objects which then need to be related in some kind of framework. We empha-

size that we see habitus as a useful way of gaining some analytical purchase on

a wide-ranging array of social processes that thereby contributes to a richer

understanding of various types of social fields. We accept that some aspects

are relatively fixed – for instance, that a dancer’s height (especially when rela-

tively small or tall) has an important influence on a dancer’s career (as we saw

in the case of Wayne Sleep) – while some things are changeable so dancers canlearn to dance in a different way, and an individual habitus can be modified

through new choreographies and new artistic influences shaping an institutional

habitus. Our article is an attempt to capture the fluid interplay of regimes of




552

practice in which person, troupe and choreography are dynamic and respon-

sive to constant changes.

Second, Bourdieu’s work is often viewed as being deterministic (Alexander,

1995). For example, Jenkins (1992: 97) claims that habitus acts behind the

backs of agents so that in Bourdieu’s schema, ‘behaviour has its causes, butactors are not allowed their reasons’. In our view, however, this overstates the

case. The habitus is not deterministic, but it is determining. This distinction

means that the habitus allows some room for manoeuvre, but typically not

very much. Usually the habitus changes slowly though a process of evolution.

But revolutions in habitus do occur. Fateful moments, to use Giddens’ (1991)

phrase, change the trajectory of our lives and with it the nature of our habi-

tus. The habitus can be transformed via what Bourdieu calls the ‘Don Quixote

effect’ where perceptions and dispositions are ‘ill-adapted because they are

attuned to an earlier state of the objective conditions’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 109).This disjunction between habitus and field can lead to ‘a site of explosive forces

(resentment) which may await (and even look for) the opportunity to break

out’ (Bourdieu: 1993a: 87). The threat of redundancy or, to use a positive

example, an important job promotion may both produce a revolution in habi-

tus. We saw earlier how dancers like Kirkland, Nureyev and Baryshnikov all

‘broke out’ and thereby changed their balletic habitus. These star dancers

refashioned their identity as they had what Sweetman (2003) calls a reflexive

habitus. Crossley’s (2003: 55) point that ‘reflexive schemas of self-inspection

and reflection constitute an integral part of the normal habitus’ is especiallytrue of the balletic habitus.

This alleged determinism leads to a third common criticism of the

Bourdieusian corpus: that it is ahistorical. We argue that this, once again, is

wide of the mark. Bourdieu argues that history and sociology should be flip

sides of the same coin; that history should be a historical sociology of the past,

while sociology, at its best, is a social history of the present (Bourdieu and

Wacquant, 1992). Correspondingly, many of Bourdieu’s books are, effectively,

social histories of, for example, academia (Bourdieu, 1988, 1997b) and of the

cultural field (Bourdieu, 1984, 1993b, 1996, 1997a). We hope, by usingevocative examples from our own research, that we have outlined some of the

elements of a ‘social history’ of the Royal Ballet and that our use of a range of

ballet memoirs also constitutes the beginnings of an historical sociology of

ballet’s recent past (Wainwright et al., in press).

One of the recurring themes in Bourdieu’s writings is his attempt to wake

people from their ‘doxic slumbers’. This is because ‘a scientific practice that

fails to question itself does not, properly speaking, know what it does’

(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 236). Once again, Bourdieu provides a telling

insight in his critique of some of his critics:

I blame most of my readers for having considered as theoretical treatises, meant

solely to be read or commented upon, works that, like gymnastics handbooks, were




intended for exercise, or even better, for being put into practice.... In fact, as I have

said hundreds of times, I have always been immersed in empirical research pro-

jects, and the theoretical instruments I was able to produce in the course of these

endeavours were intended not for theoretical commentary and exegesis, but to be

put to use in new research, be it mine or that of others. It is this comprehension

through use that is most rarely granted me. (Bourdieu, 1993c: 271, original italics)

Bourdieu’s ‘theoretical concepts’ have been empirically forged in a wide range

of empirical research projects. He offers us a powerful way of thinking about the

social world. The continuous spiral between theory, practice and theory, com-

bined with the open and adaptable nature of his key concepts, means that

Bourdieu’s work offers a very fruitful approach to social research on the body.

Such a claim is echoed in a range of statements that praise Bourdieu’s achieve-

ments. For example, ‘My main claim is that he [Bourdieu] has superseded vari-

ous problems that have perennially plagued sociology as a critical social theoryand that, at the present moment, this is the most original and cogent modelling

of the social world that we have’ (Fowler, 1997: 13). Bourdieu’s cultural sociol-

ogy is: ‘not only the best, but…the only game in town’ (Lash, 1993: 193).

Furthermore, ‘the manner in which he [Bourdieu] manages to weave together

both empirical data and theoretical insight is a lesson for all of us in the “art” of

doing sociological research…the intellectual fruits are there for the takers’

(Williams, 1995: 581, 601). Even Bourdieu’s critics concede that he is ‘enor-

mously good for thinking with’ (Jenkins, 1992: 11). We, like many other social

researchers, view Bourdieu’s conceptual schema as a set of tools for thinkingwith, and it is inevitable that academics, like Bourdieu himself, use terms like

habitus to mean slightly different things. In this article, we employ physical cap-

ital in a somewhat different way from Bourdieu, and our notion of individual

habitus differs from Bourdieu who writes of habitus and social agents.

In conclusion, our article is an example of Dyke’s dictum that ‘the best way

to praise and appraise Bourdieu’s work is also the most straightforward: use it’

(Dyke, 1999: 192, our italics). Bourdieu’s social theory ‘should be understood

as habitus rather than as a theory of habitus’ (Brubaker, 1993, original italics).

We hope our discussion of three varieties of habitus and the embodiment of ballet is an interesting and helpful example of Bourdieu’s (1993c: 271) plea for

social researchers to aim for ‘comprehension [of habitus] through use’.

R E F E R E N C E S

Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B.S. (2000) The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology

(4th Edition). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Adshead-Lansdale, J. (ed.) (1999) Dancing Texts: Intertextuality in Interpretation.

London: Dance Books.

Aldridge, A. (1998) ‘Habitus and Cultural Capital in the Field of Personal Finance’,Sociological Review 46(1): 1–23.

Alexander, J.C. (1995) Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of

Reason. London: Verso.




554

Atkinson, P. (2000) ‘Days at the Opera: The Ethnographer and the Repetiteur’,

European Sociological Conference, University of Exeter, 1–2 September.

Ball, S.J. (1998) ‘It’s Becoming a Habitus: Identities, Youth Transitions and Socioeconomic

Change’, paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference,

Belfast.

Banes, S. (1998) Dancing Women – Female Bodies on Stage. London: Routledge.Bland, A. (1981) The Royal Ballet: The First Fifty Years. New York: Doubleday.

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London:

Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1993a) Sociology in Question. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bourdieu, P. (1993b) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature.

Cambridge: Polity Press.Bourdieu, P. (1993c) ‘Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of

Intellectual Works’, in C. Calhoun, M. Postone and E. LiPuma (eds) Bourdieu: Critical

Perspectives, pp. 263–75. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field .

Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1997a) The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public. Cambridge:

Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1997b) The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power . Cambridge:

Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2000) Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press.Bourdieu, P. (2001) Masculine Domination. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge:

Polity Press.

Brinson, P. and Crisp, C. (1980) A Guide to the Repertory: Ballet and Dance. Newton

Abbot: David & Charles.

Brubaker, R. (1993) ‘Social Theory as Habitus’, in C. Calhoun, M. Postone and E. LiPuma

(eds) Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, pp. 212–34. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bull, D. (1999[1998]) Dancing Away: A Covent Garden Diary (Revised Edition). London:

Methuen.

Burt, R. (1995) The Male Dancer – Bodies, Spectacle, and Sexuality. London: Routledge.Bussell, D. (1998) Life in Dance. London: Century.

Calhoun, C., Postone, M. and LiPuma, E. (1993) Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives.


Clarke, M. and Crisp, C. (1981) The Ballet Goer’s Guide. London: Michael Joseph.

Cowan, J.K. (1990) Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. Princeton, MA:

Princeton University Press.

Craine, D. and Mackrell, J. (2000) The Oxford Dictionary of Dance. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Crossley, N. (2001) The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Crossley, N. (2003) ‘From Reproduction to Transformation: Social Movement Fieldsand the Radical Habitus’, Theory, Culture & Society 20(6): 43–68.

Csordas, T.J. (1994) Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and

Self . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.




Daly, A. (1995) Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press.

Danto, A. (1999) ‘Bourdieu on Art: Field and Individual’, in R. Shusterman (ed.)

Bourdieu: A Critical Reader , pp. 214–19. Oxford: Blackwell.

Delanty, G. (1997) Social Science: Beyond Constructivism and Relativism. Milton Keynes:

Open University Press.Desmond, J.C. (1997) Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press.

Durkheim, E. and Mauss, M. (1975[1912]) Primitive Classification. Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press.

Dyke, C. (1999) ‘Bourdieuian Dynamics: The American Middle-Class Self-Constructs’,

in R. Shusterman (ed.) Bourdieu: A Critical Reader , pp. 192–213. Oxford: Blackwell.

Edwards, C. and Imrie, R. (2003) ‘Disability and Bodies as Bearers of Value’, Sociology

37(2): 239–56.

Fonteyn, M. (1978) A Dancer’s World: An Introduction. London: W.H. Allen.

Fowler, B. (1997) Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations. ThousandOaks, CA: Sage.

Fowler, B. (2000) Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fraleigh, S.H. and Hanstein, P. (1999) Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Inquiry.

London: Dance Books.

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age.

Cambridge: Polity.

Goellner, E.W. and Murphy, J.S. (1995) Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as

Dance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Grenfell, M. and James, D. (1998) Bourdieu and Education: Acts of Practical Theory.

London: Falmer Press.Guest, I. (1988) The Dancer’s Heritage (6th Edition). London: Dancing Times.

Hillier, J. and Rooksby, E. (2002) Habitus: A Sense of Place. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Jenkins, R. (1992) Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge.

Jordan, S. and Grau, A. (1996) Following Sir Fred’s Steps: Ashton’s Legacy. London:

Dance Books.

Kavanagh, J. (1996) Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton. London: Faber.

Kent, A. (1997) Once a Dancer: An Autobiography. New York: St Martin’s Press.

Kirkland, G. (1988) Dancing on My Grave: An Autobiography. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Lane, J.F. (2000) Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press.

Lash, S. (1993) ‘Pierre Bourdieu: Cultural Economy and Social Change’, in C. Calhoun,M. Postone and E. LiPuma (eds) Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, pp. 193–211.


Marliere, P. (1998) ‘The Rules of the Journalistic Field: Pierre Bourdieu’s Contribution

to the Sociology of the Media’, European Journal of Communication 13(2): 219–34.

Mauss, M. (1979) Sociology and Psychology. London: Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.

Morris, G. (2001) ‘Bourdieu: The Body and Graham’s Post-War Dance’, Dance Research

19(2): 52–82.

Newman, B. (1986) Antoinette Sibley: Reflections of a Ballerina. London: Hutchinson.

Newman, B. (2004) Grace Under Pressure: Passing Dance Through Time. London: DanceBooks.

Peillon, M. (1998) ‘Bourdieu’s Field and the Sociology of Welfare’, Journal of Social

Policy 27(2): 213–29.




556

Percival, J. (1983) Theatre in My Blood: A Biography of John Cranko. New York: Franklin

Watts.

Pinto, L. (1996) ‘The Theory of Fields and the Sociology of Literature: Reflections on

the Work of Pierre Bourdieu’, International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 33(2):

171–86.

Prior, N. (2000) ‘A Different Field of Vision’, in B. Fowler (ed.) Reading Bourdieu onSociety and Culture, pp. 142–63. Blackwell: Oxford.

Rambert, M. (1972) Quicksilver: An Autobiography. London: Macmillan.

Ramsey, C. (1998) Tributes: Celebrating Fifty Years of New York City Ballet. New York:

Morrow.

Reay, D. (1998) ‘“Always Knowing and Never Being Sure”: Institutional and Family

Habituses and Higher Education Choice’, Journal of Education Policy 13: 519–29.

Reay, D., David, M. and Ball, S.J. (2001) ‘Making a Difference? Institutional Habituses and

Higher Education Choice’, Sociological Research Online 5(4), URL (consulted 23/8/2004):

http://www.socresonline.org.uk/5/4/reay.html

Robbins, D. (2000) Bourdieu on Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Seidman, S. (1998) Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era (2nd

Edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

Seymour, L. (1984) Lynn: The Autobiography of Lynn Seymour . London: Panther Books.

Shearer, M. (1986) Balletmaster: A Dancer’s View of George Balanchine. London:

Sidgwick & Jackson.

Shevtsova, M. (2002) ‘Appropriating Pierre Bourdieu’s Champ and Habitus for a

Sociology of Stage Productions’, Contemporary Theatre Review 12(3): 35–66.

Shilling, C. (1993) The Body and Social Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Shusterman, R. (1999) Bourdieu: A Critical Reader . Oxford: Blackwell.

Sleep, W. (1996) Precious Little Sleep. London: Collins.Smakov, G. (1984) The Great Russian Dancers. New York: Knopf.

Smith, M.J. (2000) Culture: Reinventing the Social Sciences. Milton Keynes: Open

University Press.

Solway, D. (1998) Nureyev: His Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Sweetman, P. (2003) ‘Twenty-first Century Dis-ease? Habitual Reflexivity or the

Reflexive Habitus’, Sociological Review 51: 528–49.

Taper, B. (1984) Balanchine: A Biography. New York: Times Books.

Thomas, H. (2003) The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. London: Palgrave.

Thomas, L. (2002) ‘Student Retention in Higher Education: The Role of Institutional

Habitus’, Journal of Education Policy 17(4): 423–42.Turner, B.S. (1992) Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. London: Routledge.

Turner, B.S. (1996) The Body & Society: Explorations in Social Theory (2nd Edition).

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Turner, B.S. and Rojek, C. (2001) Society and Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Turner, B.S. and Wainwright, S.P. (2002) ‘Il corpo di ballo: uno studio dell’infortunio

nella danza’, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia: 327–51.

Turner, B.S. and Wainwright, S.P. (2003) ‘Corps de Ballet: The Case of the Injured

Ballet Dancer’, Sociology of Health & Illness 25(4): 269–88.

Turner, B.S. and Wainwright, S.P. (2004) ‘Corps de ballet: o caso dos bailarinos lesion-

ados’, Polítitica e Trabalho 20: 15–34.Vaughan, D. (1977) Frederick Ashton and His Ballets. New York: Knopf.

Wacquant, L.J.D. (1995) ‘Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labour Among

Professional Boxers’, Body & Society 1(1): 65–93.




Wainwright, S.P. and Turner, B.S. (2003a) ‘Reflections on Embodiment and Vulnerability’,

Journal of Medical Ethics: Medical Humanities 29: 4–7.

Wainwright, S.P. and Turner, B.S. (2003b) ‘Ageing and the Dancing Body’, in C.

Faircloth (ed.) Ageing Bodies: Meanings and Perspective, pp. 259–92. Boston, MA: Alta

Mira Press.

Wainwright, S.P. and Turner, B.S. (2004a) ‘Epiphanies of Embodiment: Injury, Identityand the Balletic Body’, Qualitative Research 4(3): 311–38.

Wainwright, S.P. and Turner, B.S. (2004b) ‘Narratives of Embodiment: Body, Ageing,

Retirement and Career in Royal Ballet Dancers’, in H. Thomas and J. Ahmed (eds)

Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory, pp. 98–120. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Wainwright, S.P., Williams, C. and Turner, B.S. (2005) ‘Fractured Identities: Narratives

of Injury and the Balletic Body’, Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study

of Health, Illness and Medicine 9(1): 49–66.

Wainwright, S.P., Williams, C. and Turner, B.S. (in press) ‘Globalization, Habitus and

the Balletic Body’, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies.

Weiss, C. (1999) Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. London: Routledge.Williams, S. (1995) ‘Theorising Class, Health and Lifestyles: Can Bourdieu Help Us?’,

Sociology of Health and Illness 17(5): 577–604.

Wulff, H. (1998) Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers. Oxford: Berg.

STEVEN P. WAINWRIGHT is Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. His research

focuses on three areas: first, his major current interest is in the connections between

Medical Sociology and Science & Technology Studies (especially innovative medical

technologies). Second, he also works on Medical Humanities (especially narratives of

ageing and death in painting, opera and ballet). Third, he has written extensively on the

Sociology of Body (especially the reciprocal relationships between various combina-tions of the arts, the social sciences, biomedical science and medicine). He is currently

working on an ESRC-funded ethnography of stem cell research, and some of this study

forms the basis of his (with Clare Williams) forthcoming research monograph on The

Body, Biomedicine & Society: Reflections on High-Tech Medicine (PalgraveMacmillan).

Address: Division of Health & Social Care Research, King’s College London, 57 Waterloo

Road, London SE1 8WA, UK. [email: [email protected]]

C L A R E W I L L I A M S is Reader in the Social Science of Biomedicine at King’s College

London. Her research focuses on the clinical, ethical and social implications of innova-

tive health technologies, particularly from the perspective of health care practitionersand scientists, and on influences of gender on health. She currently holds research

grants from the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Programme on ‘Facilitating choice,

framing choice: experiences of staff working in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis’,

and the ESRC Stem Cell Initiative: ‘Mapping stem cell innovation in action: the interface

between the bench and the bedside’. She has recently completed research for the

Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Programme on the ethical and clinical dilemmas of

the changing status of the foetus for practitioners and policy makers; for the ESRC/MRC

Innovative Health Technologies Programme, exploring the social implications of inno-

vative first trimester antenatal screening; and for the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics

Programme on the clinical and ethical dilemmas of genetic and reproductive develop-ments for health practitioners.

Address: Division of Health & Social Care Research, King’s College London, 57 Waterloo

Road, London SE1 8WA, UK. [email: [email protected]]




558

BRYAN S. TURN ER is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. His

previous research focused on four areas: Medical Sociology (particularly the body and

society); Political Sociology (especially citizenship and human rights); the Sociology of

Religion (chiefly Islam); and Social Theory (especially Classical Social Theory). He sees

these four domains as related via the theme of the body and embodiment. Over the next

six years, he is directing research on globalization and religion concentrating on suchissues as religious conflict and the modern state, religious authority and electronic

information, human rights and religion, the human body, medical change and reli-

gious cosmologies. The general aim is to develop a comprehensive overview of the

impact of globalization on religions, and the consequences of religion on global

processes, and this will be published as three books on religion and globalization

(Cambridge University Press).

Address: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore. [email:

[email protected]]


Documents

Habitus Ballet