Paradoxical Control: How Romantic and Enlightenment aesthetics are created in ballet today
Abstract
Classical ballet is indisputably a cultural product: its forms, themes, and images
all derive from the cultures and time periods in which the dance form was created
and developed. Two especially important times in the shaping of ballet as it is recognized
today were the Enlightenment and the Romantic era. The most important aesthetic results
of these contexts are the idea of perfection through symmetry and geometric form,
the imagery of yearning tension, and the illusion of weightlessness and ethereality,
the defiance of gravity. While superficially opposed, one glorifying the rational
and the other idealizing the unexplainable, the two movements in fact merged harmoniously
in dance, and this combination itself gives ballet its particular aesthetic. It is
in the use of control to create the illusion of freedom that the ideals of the Enlightenment
and the Romantic era meet and merge to create and execute the specific aesthetic ideals
of ballet. In this paper, after introducing the cultural and historical bases of
the particular aesthetics of ballet, I will attempt to explain, using the laws of
physics, how the image of weightlessness and suspension is created in the movement
vocabulary of ballet. I will also outline how a dancer, understanding the laws and
predictions of physics, can use this understanding to consciously extend her body
and her dancing to appear just past the limits of gravity in order to create the illusion
promoted by Romantic era ideals. A final section will discuss how these illusions
are conveyed to an audience through the lens of neuroscientific inquiry, another significant
product of the Enlightenment. These discussions will also highlight the overarching
theme that unifies these three disparate points: a desire to attain the unattainable
and the worth of the endeavor towards that unachievable goal. The Enlightenment posits
physics, empiricism, and logical thought as the most valuable ways to understand the
world while Romanticism seeks to display that which cannot be understood. Ballet takes
both and combines them, using physics to predict how the world should work and then
going against that expectation to create the illusion of being unaffected by these
laws.
Description
Graduation with Distinction Project
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
DancePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9277Citation
Lipkin, Anna (2014). Paradoxical Control: How Romantic and Enlightenment aesthetics are created in ballet
today. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9277.Collections
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