Powerful gifting

In this chapter, I examine the operations of power which enable the gifts I have just described to be given, received and repaid, and how these operations facilitate the creation of bodies, identity and difference, and the institution. In so doing, it will become apparent that all relations within the institution, not only those overt or visible, harbour the potential for both generosity and injustice, as gift exchanges succeed or fail based on a body’s willingness or ability to hold itself open to others.

In addressing both Diprose’s critique of Mauss’ theory of gift exchange and my own criticisms of the existing literature on ballet bodies as missing the experiences and processes of bodies becoming, I have turned my attention towards the institutionalised training of gifted ballet bodies. As I have so far suggested, a Bourdieusian theoretical framework of habitus can be readily applied to acknowledge that a ballet dancer acquires the ballet habitus – defined by both the skill to learn, refine and reproduce complex movement sequences and the dancer’s identity and membership to the ballet world – through a training process (see Pickard 2012, 2013, 2015). For Bourdieu (1977), the formation of habitus was not just experiential but also connected to power, because it guided thinking and behaviour, resulting in the creation and maintenance of social hierarchies, such as a student learning how to behave and relate to both teachers and peers within the school. Pickard (2012, 2013, 2015) offers this connection to power as a way to somewhat reconcile her Bourdieusian approach with Green’s (2002) Foucauldian analysis of ballet training, although I argue that there are elements of Bourdieu’s theory that also align with a Maussian approach.

Chapter 5: Powerful gifting

For instance, Bourdieu’s theory of practice and his notion of habitus emerged from his analysis of gifts and their exchange: he determined that generosity is made possible not by individual intent or consciousness but because of habitus, a disposition which individuals acquire through being taught “or through early and prolonged exposure to social worlds in which it is the undisputed law of behaviour” (Bourdieu 1997:233). This could be understood in much the same way as Mauss considers the power of gift exchange in its creation of social identities, hierarchies and bonds between bodies and groups. For Mauss, it is these social worlds that enable the exchange of gifts, as groups “carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by obligations” (Mauss 1954:3); and while the capital or prestige accrued by such exchanges may reside with an individual, crafting both individual and collective identity in the process, it is the group that enables them.

A Bourdeisian analysis of ballet training may show that the students accrue various types of capital as their bodies are shaped into balletic form and that the structure of training enables the creation of identity and balletic disposition – an understanding of which goes a long way to explaining the powerful and perhaps agentive role of the body in the training process. However, I argue that Mauss’ theory of gift exchange allows me to examine how this currency cycles between bodies within the social group and the institution, and the powerful ability of these relations to shape identity, belonging and the accrual of giftedness.

As I have previously established these are corporeal and sensory gifts – of ways of moving, holding, working and feeling the body and its parts. I have described these gifts exchanged between moving bodies in the training of ballet and how they are made sense of by both the teachers’ and students’ ability to feel, recognising, after Diprose, that for gifts to actually be gifts they must indeed operate at the sensory level. Applying a sensory analysis based on

touch has allowed me to access these experiences and describe the process by which bodily information and sensory gifts (of muscles, movement and feeling) are exchanged via body-to- body relations. This is an approach distinct from existing analyses of ballet and ballet training which have maintained that it is through vision, the look of bodies, that ballet becomes embodied. However, framing the training of ballet as a social economy based on the body-to- body exchange of corporeal gifts, and extending Mauss’ thesis into the corporeal and sensory after Diprose, enables these intercoproreal relations to take precedence over the gifts themselves.

In other words, it is not what is given or received, the gifts themselves, which ultimately matter in this analysis, for these simply determine what kind of gifted body is produced. For example, where balletic gifts, such as those I have been describing, craft ballet bodies, so too would military gifts (of marksmanship, battlefield tactics or methods of engagement) craft military bodies; academic gifts (of mathematics, writing or reading) craft academic bodies; or even ice hockey gifts (of skating, puck handling or shooting) craft ice hockey bodies etc. If I am to examine how the body becomes gifted, it is important to analyse the relations and power that enable the gifts to be given, received and reciprocated. As Diprose shows, it is the intersubjectivity of carnal bodies, their intercorporeality, which is the basis of social power and not its results (Diprose 2002:106). In attending to the intercorporeal, intersensory relationships and thus the identities established between bodies in the cycle of gift, receipt and counter-gift, I propose that such operations of power become evident.

To do so, I continue to place touch at the heart of my approach. I have already brought a sensory approach to Mauss’ thesis on gift exchange, to examine the dancers’ felt experiences of becoming gifted and have asked how a gifted body becomes. I have argued that touch is

Chapter 5: Powerful gifting

the primary way in which the ballet body becomes as such; it is the relations of touch with oneself, with other dancers, with teachers, with surfaces, that create and sustain the ballet body. Accordingly, I have applied this touching analysis to explore multisensory experiences of student and teaching bodies during training. My analysis has yielded insights into relations both between and within bodies, and how they are experienced through the body’s capacity to feel. By framing touch as the primary sense by which all other sensory information is taken into and made sense of by bodies, I have illustrated how it is through feeling – of feeling bodily sounds, feeling music, feeling the tastefulness of movement, feeling internal sensations, feeling their body in space, and feeling how their bodies look – that students make sense of their progress in attaining giftedness. In addition, understanding touch in such a way has enabled me to show how this may also extend to a relationality between bodies – for what is touched simultaneously touches – as the students and teachers work to interpret the bodies and felt experiences of others. This is an understanding for which I have argued Mauss’ thesis, as it stands, does not allow.

In ignoring the feeling body, Mauss overlooks the pre-reflective basis for generosity – that exchanges are made and made sense of by and between sensing bodies. This oversight prevents an understanding of the body-to-body reciprocity needed in order for gifts to cycle and thus bodies and identities to form. To continue to address this limitation, I now take my exploration a step further, to illustrate how these processes and sensory relations are made possible through operations of power. In this chapter, I continue to build on Manning’s (2006) examination of the political nature of touch. I illustrate how touch – which she shows is not a ‘thing’ which can belong to or be given to another (Manning 2006:xiii) – may be conceptualised in the same way that Foucault (1977, 1994) understands power to not operate

as a ‘thing’ possessed or wielded by bodies. Instead, that the power of touch comes from its relationality, that it is defuse and exercised and experienced through feeling bodies, will offer an important understanding to the power of gift exchange to craft bodies and further moves Mauss’ thesis into the corporeal world.

I argue that the powerful relations that craft bodies and form the basis of the institution cannot be understood through a visual exploration or the traditional surveillance of bodies. Indeed, if we do get caught up in attending to how domination and hierarchy looks – the violent spectacular – we are blinded to the subtleties of intercorporeal relations, relations which are being continually negotiated through the very bodies they engage. After Foucault (1977, 1994), we can quite easily attend to the look of power as it marks and trains bodies; but I show how touch provides another way to understand institutional power and its relations, where the gifted body and the institution itself are made possible through felt

exchanges. In the case of ballet training, the result of these powerful relations is the material ballet body – a body both crafted through the bodies of others and yet made distinct from them – and the process of becoming is experienced inside and between bodies through their capacity to feel.

Through this chapter’s investigation, I show how generosity and an openness to other bodies – of living in ambiguity – becomes central to how power is negotiated and gifted bodies become as they participate in their own creation. By proposing this touching analysis of power, I offer a new perspective through which to consider gift exchange, our understanding of the institutional crafting of bodies, and how bodies experience and relate to these powerful processes that shape them.

Chapter 5: Powerful gifting

Bodies of the past

In Chapter 3, I suggested that it was the temporal dimension of the training process – the forgetting of gifts and delay in their return, and of distance within the self – that allowed balletic gifts to be given and the gifted body itself to transform. However, this process is not only defined by the future outcomes of giftedness on the body, but also by the past and the bodies which once possessed such gifts. In fact, as Mauss shows, it is the historical legacy of the gifts which give them the power to both cycle between and transform bodies (Mauss 1954:43).

Ballet is taught person-to-person, with a more than 400-year tradition of its embodied and bodily knowledge being passed from teacher to student down the generations. Tracing the pedagogical lineage of any ballet school has been likened to examining a complex family tree “in which dancers, teachers and choreographers all play a part” (Fournier 2018) and NBS is no different. During my year at NBS, roughly half the professional ballet program full-time teaching staff had been students at the school prior to their professional dance and teaching careers; and all were either graduates of the school’s in-house teacher training program or had been trained as a teacher by the school’s founding principal prior to the establishment of the formalised program. Because of this, NBS can boast a continuous 60-year pedagogical lineage from which to ground the identity of the school and the quality of training. However, the school’s pedagogical lineage does not only begin with its formation in 1959. Like the majority of professional ballet schools around the world, this lineage can be traced directly back to the reign of French King Louis XIV whose 1661 establishment of the Académie

Royale de Danse – 8 the Western world’s first dance institution – marked the beginning of classical ballet as we know it today (see Homans 2010 for a detailed history of the evolution and global spread of classical ballet).

From the court of Louis XIV to NBS’ founding principal, Betty Oliphant (by way of the French, Danish and Russian schools of training), and to the school’s current artistic staff (who are able to trace a more recent and global ballet lineage comprised of teachers, dancers and choreographers they worked alongside and learnt from in their professional dance careers), to today’s students at NBS, these students are learning the balletic techniques du corps that have been passed down, person to person, body to body, spanning continents, balletic styles and generations. As ballet has no universal written texts and because its traditions are physical 9 and oral, as dancer-turned-historian Jennifer Homans has described, “it is held instead in the bodies of dancers” (Homans 2010:xix) to be, quite literally, handed to others.

Through a Maussian lens, I can consider how this genealogical characteristic of ballet training imbues the handed-down knowledge with power – what Mauss calls “the magical legacy of the people” (Mauss 1954:42) – as teachers pass on what their teachers taught them and students accept these precious gifts that they will eventually also pass on in time. Just as Mauss maintains that the power in “these precious family articles” is conceived as such by all who possess, receive and repay them (ibid.), the students I spoke to were aware of how important and valuable this legacy was in their pursuit of giftedness. As one student told me:

Louis XIV’s Royal Academy of Dance ceased to exist in 1789 with the French Revolution. 8

As a result, the Paris Opera Ballet School, established in 1713, remains the oldest surviving ballet training academy in the world.

There have been various forms of notating dance since the 1400s, and the first ballet- 9

specific notation system was created in the court of Louis XIV. However, none have

maintained currency nor been put to universal use (see Foster 1996:7; Guest 1989; Homans 2010:xix; Wulff 1998a:153).

Chapter 5: Powerful gifting

“what the teachers are bestowing upon you is like, like think back, it’s probably like generations of like a little morsel of knowledge, you know. They’re like ‘take it!’”.

This bestowal of generational knowledge contributed to the students’ trust in their teachers’ approaches, instilling loyalty and defining belonging to the NBS family. “We’ve been given this base that has been shown to work through like years, like years of all these other dancers who’ve become like stars and we’ve seen that that base works”, said another student:

So we put that base on our bodies, but it’s going to be different for everyone in the way that that base works because [another student] may have longer legs than me so that’s going to be different for extensions or even tendus, but then I may have longer arms than her or a shorter torso, like just like different things where we have to find how this base like works for our own bodies.

It is this power in the embodied knowledge itself, of these embodied “physical memories” (Homans 2010:xix), that can be considered to confer privilege on the receiver and at the same time a moral obligation to the giver.

Obligation and identity

I have suggested that ballet training might be usefully conceptualised in terms of a series of intercorporeal historical gift exchanges, of sensory and corporeal knowledge, that manifest, ultimately, in the gifted body – a body that is the result of formalised and regularised exchanges in which a gift for ballet is realised and embodied in a gifted dancing body over time. Yet Weidmann suggests that “the idea that the teacher gives information and the student receives and understands it is appealingly simple, but the classroom reality is more complex”, where if the student is to succeed, they have an obligation to take an active role in their own

training (Weidmann 2018:56-57). I suggest that when considered through a Maussian lens, such an obligation born of intercorporeal and senso-historical gift exchanges comes to reside in the body itself, where the bodily gifts of knowledge, skill, training – of increased

techniques du corps – have become embodied.

The students must demonstrate through their bodies that they have accepted the gifts to prove that they belong at the school – to prove they are worthy of gifts given and the prestige of becoming gifted. Such evidences are examined through the bodies of their teachers, an ongoing process of sensory evaluation I described in the previous chapters. Failure to make a return over time, because of unwillingness or inability, increases the risk of dismissal from the institution and the training process as students submit to ongoing evaluation and yearly re-acceptance processes. Students are therefore aware that if they are to avoid this fate – the loss of prestige which the embodied gifts confer and exclusion from the social group and institution – they must willingly participate in the cycle of receiving and repaying gifts, where teachers parcel out gifts depending on their ability to reciprocate. For example, as one student described:

When I’m having a good day then the teacher is correcting me lots and is like just giving me more and more to work on. Like they can see that you’re improving if they keep giving you more corrections. But if they just leave you with one correction, […] if they don’t come back and it’s just like one correction, then it’s kind of like they’re like “oh you haven’t really improved on that correction so I can’t really give you more”.

Another student spoke of needing to ensure that the teacher understood they were accepting the gifts given, especially when the teacher accused other students of not responding to training. “[I] take that opportunity to, like, kind of show off”, she said, “because I want to show her that I’m working and that I’m trying to do well”.

Chapter 5: Powerful gifting

Similarly to the broader giftedness literature, as detailed in Chapter 1, where it is recognised that to achieve success students must be willing to participate in their own development (see Critien and Ollis 2006; Garces-Bascal et al. 2011; Hutchinson et al. 2013; Sanchez et a. 2013; Subotnik et al. 2011; Walker et a. 2010; Warburton 2002), students are therefore obligated to actively participate in this gifting cycle with their teachers – knowing that if they do not they run the risk of not progressing, being excluded from the school and not becoming a gifted ballet body.

Not all bodies are the same

Yet not all ballet bodies are created equal and indeed not all professional ballet institutions craft the same kind of ballet body (see Morris 2003). Some craft graduates specifically for their own national or state company. Others, like NBS, craft dancers able to be marketed to a broad selection of the world’s top companies. So, attending NBS is not the only way for a