Questioning the ideal female dancer body : past to present, east to west, folk to contemporary

Abstract

This dissertation is about an issue that affects both women dancers and non-dancers: the yearning for the ideal body, a product of the patriarchal system that moulds and exercises power over women. Particularly for the case of the female dancer: is the body and its aesthetics or the artist as a human being more important for this profession and their audience? To investigate this topic further, I use feminist theories and philosophers that unpack notions of power and surveillance. I explore this issue in the context of the United States and Western Europe in comparison to the Eastern and Central European area and its dance life, from the twentieth-century perspective up to the 1980s. Based on my experiences growing up in Hungary, I will examine if the body ideals passed down in both folk dance and contemporary dance genres in Hungary are still relevant or discriminatory today through the examination of two performances.