From Ballroom to Dancesport: Aesthetics, Athletics, and Body Culture
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Drawing on recent media portrayals and her own experience, author and dancer Caroline Joan S. Picart explores ballroom dancing and its more "sporty" equivalent, DanceSport, suggesting that they are reflective of larger social, political, and cultural tensions. The past several years have seen a resurgence in the popularity of ballroom dance as well as an increasing international anxiety over how and whether to transform ballroom into an Olympic sport. Writing as a participant-critic, Picart suggests that both are crucial sites where bodies are packaged as racialized, sexualized, nationalized, and classed objects. In addition, Picart argues, as the choreography, costuming, and genre of ballroom and DanceSport continue to evolve, these theatrical productions are aestheticized and constructed to encourage commercial appeal, using the narrative frame of the competitive melodrama to heighten audience interest.
1The contested landscape of ballroom dance : culture, gender, race, class, and nationality in performance12Dancing through different worlds : an autoethnography of the interactive body and virtual emotions in ballroom dance293Ballroom dance and the movies394Paving the road to the Olympics : staging and financing the Olympic dream695Packaging fantasy and morality896Quo Vadis?107AppFilmography of selected dancesport and ballroom films
