CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Petrović, Sara |
|---|---|
| Title | Dancing (pregnant) in precarious years: Negotiating pregnancy and working as a theatrical dancer in Serbia |
| Summary | This thesis explores how theatrical dancers negotiate their pregnancy and working in the public theatres in Serbia. The scholarship on dancers/dance and pregnancy is still scarce, particularly when it comes to ballet dancers, and my interviewees are all trained in ballet and they call themselves like that. Dancers’ work is typically imagined and researched in terms of its continuities from an early age when the training starts or injuries are included in these timelines as possible breaks. Time available for professional dance is short and dancers are caught in carefully negotiating the breaks they make. Given this urgency of time in dance, I explore how dancers in Serbia consider, plan, and go through their pregnancies and coming back to work. I am also interested in dancers’ (precarious) working positions in underfunded public theatres and with many dancers having experienced work under multiple temporary contracts. Throughout the thesis, I argue that dancers work on their bodies as a form of capital, highly aware of its short-lasting timeline, within which they consider pregnancy as a “compensable” break in a dancer’s 20s and early 30s. Dancers work through their daily pain, with those of them under temporary contracts being in a particularly precarious position of prolonged, exhausting waiting for relative security. I show that pregnant dancers can tactically use their time on stage and that they negotiate their changing bodies through letting go of control and moral meanings assigned to their new weight. In coming back to work, dancers’ bodies were part of the talk about the body and care at work, and they were exposed to others, which was all constitutive for dancers’ management of bodily capital. Ultimately, dancers see their work on the post-pregnant body as a predominantly individual responsibility that demonstrates being responsible and control of one’s bodily capital. |
| Supervisor | Fodor, Éva; Lukić, Jasmina |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/petrovic_sara.pdf |
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