A touching analysis

In order to examine the experiential, corporeal and sensory dimensions of gift exchange that Mauss’ thesis, as it stands, does not allow, and to draw analysis away from the dominant mode of reading the balletic and gifted body for insights it might give into broader contexts, I have asked how a gifted body becomes and how that becoming is experienced. To answer these questions it is necessary to move away from the predominantly visual analyses of gifted bodies that have been conducted to date, in favour of an ethnographic analysis that privileges the primary mode through which that becoming is both experienced and facilitated. In this chapter, I argue that this sensory mode is touch.

Of course the evaluation of ballet bodies that I described in Chapter 1 are a lot about looking, seeing and making judgements about bodies, yet we can only look at those examinations as little snapshots in time, where the results of training are made visible on and through the dancing body. As the structuring of NBS’ evaluation and audition processes show, these snapshots of the gifted body do not allow an understanding or assessment of the more subtle and less visible evidences of giftedness, which only become apparent to the institution through the body-to-body relations and longer-term evaluations between teacher and student. Equally, Mauss’ “forgetting” of the feeling body in the process of gift exchange, as critiqued by Diprose, prevents me from analysing these body-to-body relations when the gifts exchanged are not material but instead comprise embodied and corporeal knowledge, and when giftedness is accrued in the body itself. I therefore argue that what happens between those moments when giftedness can be visually assessed, when the body participates in

Chapter 3: A touching analysis

exchange relations with others in the process of becoming gifted, is much better pursued with touch.

Drawing on an anthropology of touch to consider its powerful and relational properties beyond that of physical contact, my proposed new sensory mode of analysing the gifted ballet body provides an important avenue by which to explore the ways bodies experience becoming gifted and the often invisible exchange processes by which that becoming is achieved. Such analysis offers an important corrective to the vision-centric and audiential analyses conducted to date. It also allows me to move beyond Mauss’ theory of gift exchange and extend his insight into the sensory realm, by showing how the production of the gifted body is both facilitated and made sense of within and between feeling bodies.

A sense of ballet

The performance of ballet is of course a spectacle. Without the audience being able to see the dancers, the shapes they make with their bodies and choreographic patterns, ballet could arguably cease to exist as a performing art. So, the literature’s preoccupation with approaching ballet through a visual analysis of its performance and performing bodies is understandable. However, vision is not the only sense integral to understanding or appreciating the performance of ballet or ballet bodies. From hearing the music or the dancers’ heavy breathing, the sound of pointe shoes bourréeing across the stage or dancers as they land from jumps, to the applause of the audience sitting in a theatre, the performance and experience of ballet is also influenced by our ability to hear. Touch is also integral to the performance of ballet. The traditional pas de deux for example, where the male dancer and

ballerina dance together, relies completely on each dancers’ ability to feel the other. Despite this, aural and tactile perception in ballet has seldom been explored. Where they have been, references to touch and sound are limited to what touch looks like to the viewer and how music has an integral (and therefore often taken-for-granted) role in the cultural creation of ballet. In this way, the notion that aural and tactile perceptions in ballet are developed in connection to visual perception (see Cohen Bull 1997:274) is evident. However, as this chapter will show, when the dancer’s own experience is accounted for, this visual supremacy becomes problematic.

For anthropologist Cynthia Cohen Bull, ballet is predominated by a “primacy of seeing”, both for the dancer and the spectator:

While the sense of sight is not, of course, the sole mode of perception in ballet, it seems to organize all the other senses so as to tie them inextricably to the visual appearance of design in space. (ibid.)

This, she argues, is apparent in both the practice (ballet training) and performance of ballet, which “hone [the] visual sensibility” needed for the dancer to manipulate the body into distinct shapes and for the viewer to interpret what the movements signify (ibid., 282). Indeed, this is evident in Wulff’s brief descriptions of a teacher’s use of touch in the studio, pulling and pushing limbs to make students’ bodies look a certain way (Wulff 1998a:66, 70). Others, too, highlight the importance of vision for ballet dancers, where dancers are said to rely heavily on the use of the mirror or a teacher’s gaze to shape their bodies (see Aalten 2004; Alexias and Dimitropoulou 2011; Cohen Bull 1997; Grau 2005; Green 2002; Hall 1977; Legrand and Ravn 2009; Pickard 2012, 2013, 2015; Salosaari 2001; Wulff 1998a). For these scholars, “movement is about how the [ballet] dancers are able to make their body

Chapter 3: A touching analysis

look” (Legrand and Ravn 2009:398), which is often considered distinct from contemporary dancers, who, they maintain, rely more on proprioception and the way movement feels. While Cohen Bull does not ignore other sensory modes of perception in her analysis of ballet, she situates them hierarchically under and secondary to sight. In this way, her analysis of ballet, and those of others, echoes the historical legacy within anthropology of a hegemony of sight (see Classen 1997; Goody 2002; Howes 2003; Porcello et al. 2010). It is interesting then, from an anthropological perspective, that ballet has sought to be understood through the primary sense register it is thought to inhabit – vision. Briefly mentioning this link between anthropological method and subject of enquiry, Cohen Bull likens the vision predominance in ballet (something she does not consider to be problematic) to anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s (1983) notion of visualism in anthropology – “a tendency to fix phenomena in space and time, to gravitate toward the ‘pictorial aesthetic’” (Cohen Bull 1997:283) – where analysis of symbols leads to cultural understanding. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this approach to understanding ballet through a reading of the gifted ballet body as object or symbol has been prevalent within anthropology and seldom challenged. However, acknowledging that other sensory paradigms, such as touch and hearing, are fundamental components to the practice and performance of ballet opens the possibility for their exploration and a rethinking of this visual primacy.

I take inspiration from other Western and non-Western modes of dance which have been explored outside the hegemony of sight. For example, an analytic of touch has been employed when investigating Western contemporary dance and contact improvisation (see Albright 2013; Brandstetter 2013; Cohen Bull 1997, 2001; Houston 2009; Novack 1990; Potter 2008) and Argentinian tango (see Manning 2006; Zubarik 2013), where sustained

physical contact between two or more bodies is recognised as functional and integral to the learning process, performance and creation of new movement through the transmission and exchange of bodily knowledge. The importance of sound, hearing and rhythm has been explored in Ghanian dance (see Cohen Bull 1997), Indian kathak dance (see Dalidowicz 2015) and Tiwi dance (see Grau 1993, 2005); where bodies must be able to feel and make sense of music and sounds made by bodies, such as feet slapping the floor, in order to learn and perform movement as well as exchange bodily knowledge. Interestingly, in approaching their various dance forms through a sensory medium other than sight, the social nature of dance is exposed, as each form is found to be heavily reliant on the relationality of bodies, and body parts, in their production, performance and/or consumption. Taking a sensory approach, to better understand how these gift exchanges of bodily and embodied knowledge between moving bodies both operate and are experienced, will be an important addition to our existing Maussian understanding of exchange relations and will also offer a different understanding of the training of ballet which is not a solitary pursuit either, but also “taught and cultivated between bodies” (Wulff 2008:519).

While touch is identified as an essential element of dance (Brandstetter et al. 2013:3), the exploration of touch in ballet is severely limited. In the same way that touch has often been ignored within anthropology, perpetuating a bias towards visual and cognitive perception (see Blake 2011; Classen 1997, 2005a; Csordas 1990; Howes 2008), so too has touch in ballet been neglected in favour of these ‘higher’ senses. The existing literature would have us believe that touch is used in ballet simply for the aesthetics of performance, where a male dancer may lift, manipulate or support a female ballerina to meet choreographic demands and as a way to communicate relationships and emotions between characters (see Brandstetter

Chapter 3: A touching analysis

2013, Cohen Bull 1997; Novak 1990). In the context of ballet training, touch has been oft considered simply as a teacher’s tool to make bodies look a certain way: to shape bodies towards a visual ideal where a student’s limbs and other body parts are moved, manipulated and placed in certain ways by the teacher to reach a desired visual display through the body (see Wulff 1998a, 1998b, 2008). Yet my fieldwork reveals touch to be more complex than this, both in the role it plays in the training process and the ways in which it is experienced by both students and teachers. Indeed, I suggest that while touch in ballet may ‘look’ a certain way to an outsider, what is missing from current analysis is the experience of touch by those involved. As dance scholar Deidre Sklar has suggested, the problem with reading dancing bodies as texts “overvalues the visual while ignoring the kinesthetic” (Sklar 2001:31). Equally, dance scholar Jennifer Jackson suggests that external analysis leads to the “unhelpful objectification” of the dancer’s body, arguing that “the outside perspective on ballet is categorically different from the inside perspective and, thus, on the nature of what is perceived” (Jackson 2005:26). The absence of experience not only limits our understanding of touch to the level of the skin but also denies its productive and relational properties and its role in the crafting of gifted bodies. To break from this rigid and limiting conceptualisation of the use of touch in ballet, I broaden a definition of touch beyond that of physical contact to also encompass internal sensation and feeling.

Anthropology of touch: a brief history

Since about the 1960s, the senses and the body have come to be understood as socially produced rather than a purely biological or natural construction. This understanding opened discourse to consider the physical body as the site of lived sensory experience and knowledge

production, and scholars have continued to challenge the visual and analytic bias of the discipline in relation to research on and through the body (Blake 2011). From this, phenomenological approaches emerged and, in particular, the work of Maurice Merleau- Ponty, based on the earlier work of Edmund Husserl, who rejected that sensory experience was an intellectual act and maintained that it was through perception – what he termed the “pre-objective” – that we understand and engage with the world, and in turn are shaped by it (Csordas 1990:35). This notion of embodiment was further bolstered by Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) practice theory and, in particular, his concept of habitus (after Mauss 1973), which acknowledged that we accumulate a certain way of being in the world – certain skills, attitudes and habits – through our physical engagement with the world. For Bourdieu, this “socially informed body” unified and structured all practices through the use of all its senses (Bourdieu 1977:124). Combining the methodologies of both Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu, Thomas Csordas (1990) called for a paradigm of embodiment that shifted focus away from analysing perceptual categories, classifications and differentiation to examining the process of perception, objectification and attention. With this focus, the body is seen as the locus from which our experience of the world is situated, and that our senses act as mediators by and through which we interact with and understand the world (Classen 1997, 1999; Csordas 1990; Desjarlias and Throop 2011).

From the 1990s, an anthropology of the senses emerged from these influences (see Classen 1997, 1999; Goody 2002; Howes 2003, 2008; Pink 2013), as scholars considered the role and value of sensory experience outside the hegemony of sight which had dominated within the discipline. Despite this emergence, the experience and role of touch was often neglected (Blake 2011; Classen 2005a). While ancient philosophers, such as Democritus and Aristotle,

Chapter 3: A touching analysis

had pondered the nature of touch, a theme which has continued within the philosophical literature (see Derrida 2005; English 1915; Manning 2006), it has only been in the past two decades that anthropologists have considered the value of the cultural study of touch in its own right. Championing an investigation of the communicative, social, historical and powerful properties of touch, and pioneering an anthropology of touch, Constance Classen suggested that one of the reasons why touch had perhaps been neglected was because of “the customary Western emphasis on the brute physicality of touch” (Classen 2005a:5). As scholarship has since shown, our understanding of touch however need not be limited to tangible physical contact.

It is commonly understood that our senses do not work in isolation, but that they work together as a “cohesive phenomenological complex that gives rise to a total experience of the body in the world” (Potter 2008:458). However, touch has been said to be the most fundamental sense – a proto-sense – from which all other perception emerges and which allows us to ‘make sense’ of information we receive from other senses (Bannon and Holt 2012:3; Chidester 2005:50; Gibson 1962:97; Lysemose 2014:352). This diffuse nature of touch and the way in which it interacts with, informs and is inextricably linked to our other senses, makes it notoriously difficult to define (Blake 2011; Classen 2005a; Lysemose 2014). Derrida highlights this problem as it was presented by Aristotle in On the soul, “what is the organ of touch; is it or is it not the flesh […]?” (Book 2, Part 11 in Derrida 2005:5), to which Derrida answers is threefold: first, touch is something which is experienced internally; second, the skin acts as the medium of touch; and, third, the object of touch can be both material and immaterial.

Touch, then, when considered in this way, becomes an experience more complex than merely physical contact with the skin, as the literature on ballet and dance suggests (see Brandstetter 2013; Brandstetter et al. 2013; Cohen Bull 1997; Houston 2009; Novak 1990; Potter 2008; Wulff 1998a, 1998b). Instead, it becomes an experience which also captures internal sensations and feeling. A broadened definition of touch, therefore, to encompass not only its literal application as a physical sensation on the surface of the body caused by material external pressure, but also a sensation within and between bodies, allows for an investigation of the ways in which bodies experience becoming gifted when they participate in touching relations with others. It is this broadened definition that I adopt in my investigation of these experiences.

Teaching with touch

My research reveals that, while creating a desired aesthetic or ‘look’ through the student’s body was indeed one reason for teachers to employ touch, where a teacher might approach a student, for example, to manipulate their leg in arabesque to achieve a more pleasing line through the body, the use and experience of touch was more complex and integral to not just the look of bodies but also their creation. In ballet classes I observed, touch was always present, yet the types, quality and frequency of touch varied. Some teachers made physical corrections at the start of class and became less ‘hands-on’ as class progressed, some employed touch throughout class, while others only used their hands when students were unable to make sense of verbal feedback or visual demonstration. The amount of physical contact also decreased over the course of training. Teachers of the junior grades employed physical contact frequently to guide the young bodies into the regime of giftedness and of the

Chapter 3: A touching analysis

ballet, while teachers of senior students utilised touch proportionately less and less often as those gifted bodies began to take form. Despite the varying frequency with which physical contact was employed across the levels, it became apparent that teachers used touch to teach students how their bodies and movement felt. “I’m using touch for them to find out more about themselves”, one teacher said.

While I am not dismissing the role of touch in the visual and external creation of the look of the ballet body, touches to the gifted body during training also transmit information to be made sense of internally, resulting in the feel of the gifted body. In this way, physical touches were ‘made sense of’ by the gifted-body-in-becoming through touch, which in turn facilitated the body’s own creation and awareness of itself. For example, teachers would stroke their hands down a student’s arm, back, leg or even face, to encourage a release of tension or a certain quality of movement; with their fingers they would poke or prod specific areas of the body, such as the top of the hamstrings or under the scapula, to encourage the student to activate the desired muscles to execute a movement; they would hold and support various body parts, such a student’s leg in the air, so that the student could work to achieve the movement and placement correctly and efficiently without having to support the weight of their own leg; or, they would help to move a student’s body, such as encouraging more external rotation through the hip or guiding a deep back bend, to help the student access more movement and learn how that increased movement should feel even if they hadn’t yet the strength or ability to execute it by themselves – to show what the student should be working towards and quite literally provide a ‘helping hand’. They used touch to encourage the feeling of motion and how the body should move in space, such as pulling an arm forward during a leap to help the student travel farther. They used touch as a way to guide a movement, such as

holding a hand above a student’s head and asking the student to touch it with the top of their head each time they jumped, to encourage a higher, straighter jump; or, as a reminder and to bring a student’s awareness to a certain area of the body to teach them to self-correct, where a