Elizabeth Ward & Andrew Champlin & Kevin Fay
bad ballet

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love – whether we call it friendship or family or romance – is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.”
– James Baldwin

As artists who have studied Ballet intensively and migrated to contemporary dance, Elizabeth, Kevin and Andrew have come to understand Ballet as a form where dancers’ inner light can be diminished. Identifying that, and their continued interest in Ballet, they have each sought to create spaces to reflect on that problem and practice Ballet as a site of transformation – celebrating inner vitalities as they intersect with Ballet forms.

In this Field Research Project, participants will collectively reckon with Ballet’s exclusive and prohibitive affects, exploring what they desire from it, instead. In groups both large and small, they will ask: Can we use what we bring into the studio (e.g. our eclectic dance practices and backgrounds) to (re)make Ballet?

Importantly, this research is open to dilettantes and professionals alike. There is space for you, no matter your movement background. The goal in the weeklong exchange is to ask many questions and lean into the creation and dancing of Ballet, together.

This proposal grows out of the Bad Ballet workshop Elizabeth, Kevin and Andrew gave at Tanzquartier Wien in June 2024, alongside, and at the invitation of, dance historian Anna Leon. Together, they discovered a research territory for deconstructing the craft and performative potential of Ballet movement, knowledge transmission, and repertoire.

One thing they found out is that, as we age, for one reason or another, we distance ourselves from make-believe and from investing time collectively creating fictional worlds. Nevertheless, infatuations remain. This workshop respects the deep erotic space of longing to inhabit other versions of reality, and it aims to generate relationships.

As an example of fantasy sliding into the present, there is the adagio – a movement speed that requires moving slowly for the sake of exhibiting a temporality that is akin to sleeping.
Sleep dancing, tucked in, stretching of both time and body.

The love of Ballet might be irresolvable, an uncertainty that is hyper present in this inquiry. For western Contemporary Dance culture often signals that we should not love Ballet, and rightfully so, as ballet technique and spectacle historically exclude so many individuals, communities, and styles of appearance. But we love what lights up in people when they inhabit ballet and make it viscerally their own. So, collectively, we wish to acknowledge and pass through the veil of generalities, plots, prejudices, and assumed positions of the word “ballet“ and research nuances of non-virtuosic Ballet embodiments.

“My favorite performances actually are little kids who are out there jumping around in a performance and they’re all over the place, but there’s something really intact in their spirit. They have a very specific idea of what jumping is. They have no form and that doesn’t really matter. But you can see in their faces and in their timing there’s something really correct about it. And that’s the stuff you don’t want to get rid of when people are learning all this technical information. You can’t get rid of that. You get rid of that and you’ve got nothing.”
– Janet Panetta

On method: As facilitators, our collective wish is to build practices – choreographic, curatorial, and at all times sensual – that interrupt Ballet’s normative ideals of beauty. Together, the group poeticise the will to interrupt and challenge the exclusive, elitist notions associated with ballet practice and performance, and experiment with what it means to inhabit balletic techniques, rituals, and repertoires in non-virtuosic ways. These efforts seek plural conceptions of embodied excellence and collective growth.

The group aims to empower a place of togetherness. From places of knowledge, understanding, spontaneity, and care, they will move with rigor. Also, they will read about love, difference, failure, and (un)learning. With the knowledges that they share, participants will practice Ballet, both in class and in choreographic forms (e.g. reenactments of repertoire) that develop from emergent nuance. The aim is to cut against the grain of Ballet allegory, symbolism, and ideology and explore the poetic fringe of the word and all that is outside the linguistics of its iconography. We welcome you into our passionate attention to Ballet forms and spectacles.

The field project will conclude with a performative panel discussion with Ballet historian Anna Leon and others. The panel will be held on the final day, host a small number of invited guests, and be open to the public.

In collaboration with the research project The Unlikely Margin, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), project T1336-G.