Findings & Conclusion

The pandemic necessitated the introduction of digital technology to enable ballet classes and rehearsals to continue. From professional companies to open classes, studios, teachers and students had to quickly adapt if they wanted to continue dancing. Raymond Chai, a teacher and choreographer, shared in his interview that, prior to the pandemic, he had never heard of Zoom. It was only after his students at a prestigious London-based dance school expressed their concerns and hesitations about classes continuing in early March, 2020 that the school introduced Zoom to the teaching faculty. The introduction of digital tools for live streaming classes has resulted in a seemingly lasting shift in the experience of ballet classes as many studios have maintained hybrid teaching, and ballet companies have maintained an online element to rehearsing choreographic works. 

The pandemic has provided digital and dance anthropologists with a unique experience to explore the sensorial elements of ballet through a comparison of online and in-studio classes. The introduction of the digital element heightened the awareness of, or drew attention to the absence of, specific sensorial elements of ballet that contribute to the overarching experience of dance. Through the following three sections (click the images below), I provide the details of my findings across three dimensions where the senses of touch, sound and sight interact with kinesthesia, the sense of movement that creates a unique form of knowledge production for each dancer and for the teachers and choreographers who train them. Where dance anthropologists have positioned kinesthesia as separate from or, “largely ignored” by the anthropological convention of the “five senses” (Sklar 2000), this mini research project suggests that the introduction of the digital element to ballet has provided an opportunity to explore where kinesthesia and the conventional senses interact to co-produce the unique sensorial experience of dance, and in some cases where the conventional senses mediate the sense of kinesthesia.

The following sections demonstrate findings of where the interaction between kinesthesia and conventional senses were made visible, or known, either by way of the heightened experience, or the absence of, in the comparison between at-home and in-studio ballet class. In each section, I describe how the senses interacted and influenced the experience of the dancers and teacher and provide suggestions for where digital and dance anthropologist may further expand on and add to these observations in understanding the experience of dance in the digital world.