Everyone Can Dance, But Not Everyone Can Be Trained: Belonging and Legitimacy in Professional Ballet

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 5. Performance, Embodiment & Aesthetics

Abstract

Drawing on approximately 226 hours of participant observation and 23 in-depth interviews across two elite ballet training institutions in the United States, this paper examines how evaluation, attention, and legitimacy are informally organized within gendered training environments. Based on my dual role as dancer and ethnographer, I analyze how instructor feedback, spatial positioning, peer interactions, and aesthetic norms operate as a hidden curriculum that shapes who is seen as promising, professional, or out of place in elite ballet settings.
Rather than treating technical standards as neutral measures of ability, this study conceptualizes evaluation as an organizational practice embedded in visual, embodied, and gendered regimes of recognition. I show that attention and correction are unevenly distributed and often concentrated on dancers already perceived as having potential, while others—particularly older, less technically advanced, or non-normative bodies—receive limited feedback and social affirmation. These patterns are rarely articulated as policy or pedagogy, yet they strongly influence how dancers interpret their standing, manage their bodies, and anticipate their futures within the institution.
By foregrounding informal pedagogies of attention and visibility, this paper challenges meritocratic narratives that frame success as the result of individual effort alone. Instead, it demonstrates how inequality is reproduced through routine practices that appear natural, aesthetic, and apolitical. Gender shapes these processes not primarily through explicit instruction, but through expectations surrounding bodily presentation, discipline, and legibility.
The paper contributes to solutions-oriented sociology by identifying attention itself as a site of intervention. Making informal evaluation practices visible creates opportunities for more reflexive pedagogies that disrupt taken-for-granted hierarchies of worth. Beyond ballet, the findings have broader implications for understanding how inequality is reproduced in other performance-based educational and training institutions where assessment is embodied, informal, and difficult to contest.

Author

• Xiaofei Song, University of Alaska Southeast