American Studies

Thesis

Dancer as Worker: Histories of Labor in Modern American Ballet

The ballet company–with its dual role as an arts institution and a place of work–has long been entrenched in modern labor structures. Yet the history of this relationship, and its impact on the ballet dancer as both artist and worker, has remained relatively unstudied by both historians of labor and dance. Ballet is–as performance studies scholar Susan Leigh Foster argues– a “performance of ease”: a masking of the immense physical and mental energy that is poured into it to create a presentation of grace. But it would be a mistake to not consider the modern ballet dancer as a worker. At two extremes, their labor is either extremely vulnerable to exploitation and instability, or bound within tightly managed company structures under union protection. The American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) has represented ballet dancers since its founding in the late-1930s, and yet, the origins of this relationship, the tensions it produces, and the impact it continues to have on the labor of art production and on the ballet dancers themselves had not been clearly addressed in scholarly literature.

Through this thesis, Cat investigates how the American ballet dancer’s dual role as artist and worker developed in the mid-twentieth century through the unionization in their field. She places this history alongside broader waves of labor action that were moving through what Michael Denning has detailed as “the cultural front” in the 1930s and 40s. Drawing upon my archival research into the papers of AGMA, and the oral histories of AGMA dancers between the 1930s and 1960s, she focuses on what shefound to be the first documented strike of ballet dancers– led by sixteen dancers of The Original Ballet Russe company on the beaches of Havana, Cuba in 1941. The strike erupted in response to their increasingly precarious pay, and the subsequent dissolution of their union contract by their director, Colonel W. de Basil, during an international tour. In narrating this pivotal strike, she foregrounds the ballet dancer’s own voice, as articulated through oral histories, correspondence, and internal union documents, in order to illuminate how these dancers understood their changing relationship to art, their bodies, and to the conditions of production they were subject to as unionized workers. Through the lens of this strike, she explores why ballet, the form of dance that most rigorously erased the visual residue of labor on stage, became the place most willing to embrace the work of unionization during the mid-twentieth century. Much more willing she have found than modern dancers, who while bearing the mantle of political radicalism in dance history, were actually far more reluctant than ballet dancers to welcoming unionization during this time period. My thesis covers the origins of AGMA’s role in ballet, the course of the 1941 ballet strike and its consequences for the union, and concludes with the union’s struggle to unionize modern dance companies in the post war era.

In building this argument, she aligns herself with strands of performance and labor history that seek to understand the artists’ relationship to capitalism through an analysis of the social relations of production within which they work and create, rather than focusing exclusively on the aesthetics produced by this performing labor. By doing so, she hopes to more clearly define how ballet operates as a form of performance work, to explore the contradictions that underlie this relationship between the production of both art and value on the dancers’ body, and to understand what is at stake for dancers who put their bodies on strike.