Essay On Dancer Identity

My intention is for this essay to explore the topics of dancer identity and the transitions between career stages, mainly focusing on the retirement from dance from a theoretical and partly self-reflective angle.

To elaborate on that, my aim is to consider from the perspective of career stages from professional dance, the nature and fragility of identity and to contemplate what it might be attached to in relation to its severance. I will form this through notions of character and their relationship towards the corresponding occupation. I also intend to discuss the varying concepts of identity and its adaptation towards retirement from professional dancing.

Character and occupation fall within the psychological hypothesis of identity and it’s affiliated theories, a question that arises to me is how does the training and performance career of a dancer contribute

towards creating an identity that is in it’s type unique from that of a sports profession, and why might this make it particularly difficult to part from dance as a career, which refers back to my title using retirement as my main transitional stage. As any career evolves, professions experience transitional processes, a dancers career beginning from recreational to vocational, and progressing through vocational to professional.

Through my current research into identity, three components have been determined.

Firstly, engaging in a dancer’s career develops aerobic power, muscular strength, balance, flexibility and bone and joint integrity (Koutedakis & Jamurtas, 2004) physical elements of strength within a discipline that centers on aesthetic values glorifying the body; the body being the valued medium of manifestation. Consequently, it seems reasonable to suggest that the body, meaning it’s physicality, could be one of the key factors in the formation of a dancer’s identity. Although I do not intend to separate my work into chapters as such, there will be three themes that reoccur and these will be three components of dancer identity, with physicality being one of them. If possible I will avoid using the three components as chapters because I feel their topics overlap each other and cannot always exist alone in the matter I choose to discuss. It also seems that if I chose to form chapters the specificity of the focus into the professional dancer’s career transition to retirement may be endanger of becoming faded in

comparison.

Secondly, Wainwright et al (2005, p.9) disagreeably debate that, “ballet requires emotional performing bodies in order to come into existence”.

Although not all dance forms comprise of the overt expression of emotions, the physiology of placing movements is too, a physiology of expression (Berthoz, 1997) This component of dancer identity is that of an emotional factor, perhaps a correlation between postures, expression through artistic aspects of a career, emotion and character (as mentioned earlier in relation to occupation) or identity.
And lastly, dance psychology theories involving motivation and perfectionism and its association to control might be contributing factors towards the foundations that build a dancer’s identity. The final component of dancer identity, a newer area in the psychology field, is passion. Passion may have an impact on identity, the only evidence suggests commitment to career is often fuelled by passion itself, and that over time dancers may experience a dip in drive and what is validated in the surrounding culture, which can include the passion that fuelled their career choice. (Levine, 2004) Alterations in passion levels could ultimately influence upon the dancer’s perception of their profession, consequently their identity.
I will choose to highlight the impact of environmental factors involving loss on a dancer’s identity. Career transition will be my focus point, discussing how retirement after years of training can bring challenges to identity, and how loss of environmental factors such as deterioration of physical fitness as a dancer ages can affect a career and in turn, identity, also in relation to physical fitness, the effects of injury on a dancer’s identity. This loss will also be translated back into the loss of a career when transitioning into retirement, and back to the physical component of dancer identity.