Paper short abstract:

This paper attends to the processes of ballet bodies becoming, requiring a move away from the oft visual analyses of ballet. Instead, employing a moving touching analysis delivers rich insight into the subtleties of institutional-body relations and how these powerful relations are experienced.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have often 'read' professional ballet bodies for what they can tell us about gender, society or culture, but have paid little attention to how ballet bodies are created. However, moving away from these predominantly visual analyses and taking a more Foucauldian approach allows us to closely attend to the experiences of ballet bodies becoming within institutions and how they relate to those processes. Doing so in and through the prism of touch - the primary mode in which ballet is experienced by its practitioners - allows us to move towards an understanding of the experiences of bodies engaging in and being shaped by institutional relations. Drawing on almost 12 months' fieldwork at one of the world's leading professional ballet schools, this paper builds on Manning's (2006) work on the political and powerful nature of touch. To do this, a broadened definition of touch is required, becoming something within, between and external to bodies. Exploring the subtleties of institutional-body relations within that of a professional ballet school, whose pursuit is the crafting of ballet bodies-in-movement achieved primarily through the relational deployment of bodies and their parts through variations of touch, a broadened definition of touch offers rich insight into how bodies experience institutional power and how they participate in its relations.