Humanizing Ballet Pedagogies: Philosophies, Perspectives, and PRAXIS for Teaching Ballet

In Humanizing Ballet Pedagogies, Jessica Zeller offers a new take on the ballet pedagogy manual, examining how and why ballet pedagogies develop, considering their implications for students and teachers, and proposing processes by which readers can enact humanizing, equitable approaches.

This book supports pedagogical thinking and development in ballet. Across three parts, it reflects how pedagogies come to be: through rationales, dialogues, and practices. Part 1, Philosophies, offers a contextual reading of ballet pedagogy’s historic relationship to ideals, and it describes an alternative approach that takes its meaningful purpose from the embodied knowledge of participants in the ballet class. Part 2, Perspectives, looks at how the teacher’s person shapes the ballet class. It draws from a new survey of ballet students that illuminates the direct effects of pedagogies and proposes future directions. Praxis, Part 3, includes three theoretically based approaches that can be applied directly or adjusted to readers’ contexts for teaching ballet: yielding to student agency and autonomy, ungrading graded ballet classes in higher education, and practicing reflection for growth. Grounded in the wide range of people who participate in ballet, themes of equity, ethics, and humanity are at the heart of this book.

Humanizing Ballet Pedagogies is a valuable resource for those teaching or developing a teaching approach in ballet. It addresses important issues for school owners, administrators, or anyone responsible for supporting ballet teachers or students in the twenty-first century.

Jessica Zeller, PhD, MFA, is an Associate Professor of Dance in the TCU School for Classical & Contemporary Dance, USA, where she teaches courses across the ballet curriculum and in dance histories, theories, and pedagogies. Her first book, Shapes of American Ballet: Teachers and Training before Balanchine (2016), unearths the teachings of lesser-known European and Russian ballet pedagogues and situates them in the context of early twentieth-century American Capitalism, and her research on ballet pedagogies appears in (Re: ) Claiming Ballet (2021), Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies (2013), Dance Chronicle, and the Journal of Dance Education. Zeller is a past president of CORPS de Ballet, International.