The Conservatory
as a Greedy Total Institution
By Clyde Smith (2001)
Revision of Paper Presented at the 30th Annual Conference
of the Congress on Research in Dance (1997)
This paper is part of my ongoing investigation
into power relations in the dance classroom that reached a temporary culmination
with my dissertation (Smith, 2000). The overall project utilizes a form
of extreme case sampling (Patton, 1990) featuring interviews with former
students of a dance conservatory known for the cruelty of its faculty.
It began with my attempt to find explanations for why these students endured
and often expected abusive behavior when first training professionally.
That initial questioning resulted in a paper entitled “Authoritarianism
in the Dance Classroom” which is included in a collection of works
edited by Sherry Shapiro called Dance, Power and Difference (1998). In
this paper, based on a previous conference presentation (1997), I explore
themes from a group of interviews focusing on the dancers’ feelings
that this training center, termed the “Conservatory,” was
an enclosed isolated world that consumed their lives. I utilize the related
sociological concepts of the “greedy institution” (Coser,
1974) and the “total institution” (Goffman, 1961) to consider
implications for professional dance training more generally. I close by
briefly discussing some of the possible implications of this study.
The interviews drawn on for this presentation
were conducted with six women who attended the Conservatory as either
high school or college students. All six left the Conservatory to continue
their undergraduate training in university based dance programs. I quote
directly from interviews with a woman I call “Catherine,”
who attended the Conservatory in the late 1970s, and two younger women,
called “Mo” and “Taylor,” who attended in the
late 80s and early 90s. Catherine subsequently pursued an extremely successful
performing career while Mo and Taylor are still training for their own
anticipated careers.
The interviewees described the Conservatory
as a place where their daily routine was institutionally established and
required a near total commitment of their physical and emotional resources.
The intensity of the training left little time for other than recuperative
activities. Most of their personal lives revolved around fellow dancers
and much time was spent discussing their teachers and other students.
The uninviting community adjacent to the Conservatory encouraged students
to confine their activities to the campus. Their understanding of dance
was constrained by the visions of their teachers. Their sense of anything
outside of the dance world was limited and often perceived as unimportant
at the time.
This portrait of an all consuming training
schedule and an enclosed world relate closely to aspects of both the greedy
and the total institution. Lewis Coser developed his ideas regarding greedy
institutions, which “make total claims on their members and which
attempt to encompass within their circle the whole personality”
(1974, p. 4), through study of organizations such as the Jesuits and the
Bolshevik Party. Erving Goffman’s study of a mental hospital produced
his concept of the total institution that “may be defined as a place
of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals,
cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together
lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (1961, p.
xiii).
Though I look at each concept separately,
my aim is to bring both together in the hybrid of the greedy total institution.
I use these concepts not to say that the Conservatory is a prison or an
asylum or a cult, though I find the resemblances startling. Instead I
am using these ideas in order to “unthink” (Bush in Morgall,
1993, p. 129) our taken for granted notions about the way things are so
that we can more easily rethink how we go about educating dancers.
Goffman contrasts the total institution
with what he terms “a basic social arrangement in modern society”
in which “the individual tends to sleep, play, and work in different
places, with different co-participants, under different authorities, and
without an over-all rational plan.” For Goffman,
The central feature of total institutions can be described as a breakdown
of the barriers ordinarily separating these three spheres of life. First,
all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same
single authority. Second, each phase of the member's daily activity
is carried on in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all
of whom are treated alike and required to do the same thing together.
Third, all phases of the day's activities are tightly scheduled, with
one activity leading at a prearranged time into the next, the whole
sequence of activities being imposed from above by a system of explicit
formal rulings and a body of officials. Finally, the various enforced
activities are brought together into a single rational plan purportedly
designed to fulfill the official aims of the institution. (1961, pp.
5-6)
This description of the total institution is readily applicable to the
observable social structure of the Conservatory. More telling perhaps
is the lived experience of Conservatory students. Catherine stated,
It's like being in a little prison, that school. There's just a whole
system when you're in high school. You are regulated. You have certain
hours that you need to be in the door. You have room checks. You have
hall checks. You have the cafeteria that you ate at 3 times a day. The
class. The schedule. It is a kind of emotional prison.
Mo told me about her schedule as a high school student in the modern
dance department:
Well, it started out, eight o'clock was an academic, nine o'clock academic.
Then ten o'clock I'd have technique, modern technique. Then eleven thirty
I would have ballet technique. And then one I'd have lunch. Then two
an academic, three an academic, four a dance class, five a dance class.
And then dinner at six. And then we were expected to go back into the
studios and work on what we had done in class that day. And then I go
home and try to do my homework. The pressure is hard. It's really hard
to be that young and be on a schedule like that.
Goffman explains how the nature of power relations within the total institution
are established upon initial entry:
Staff often feel that a recruit's readiness to be appropriately deferential
in his initial face-to-face encounters with them is a sign that he will
take the role of the routinely pliant inmate. The occasion on which
staff members first tell the inmate of his deference obligations may
be structured to challenge the inmate to balk or to hold his peace forever.
Thus these initial moments of socialization may involve an "obedience
test" and even a will- breaking contest: an inmate who shows defiance
receives immediate visible punishment, which increases until he openly
"cries uncle" and humbles himself. (1961, pp. 16-17)
While Goffman is addressing initial entry into the institution, Taylor
told of a similar experience of her first encounter with a particularly
brutal faculty member I call the “Teacher”:
This is my first exposure to modern ever. And I was thirteen and my
first modern class and I'd heard horror stories about the Teacher and
I was petrified. I mean we all were . . . We were all just scared to
death of what he was going to be like. And we went in the class and
I was doing something and I started tugging on the back of my leotard
cause it started rising up in the back. And I pulled it out and he came
up to me and he said, "If you touch your leotard one more time.
I'll pull it so far up your ass, I'll split you in two like a chicken
and make you bleed." I never touched my leotard again. And then
another girl that was in the class was doing the same thing and so he
gave her a huge wedgie and made her wear it like that for the whole
class. And this is sort of our introduction to modern.
Such events set the ongoing tone of training at the Conservatory as Mo
revealed:
People are at different stages . . . They're all very good but they
come in at different points. And what they do is they break you down
to nothing. I mean, after my first semester there I felt like I had
lost all the technique that I had ever had. I felt like I could not
dance at all . . . And they break you down mentally, I guess in a way
you feel like that. And then what they do is they build you back up
through the rest of your years there the way that they think that a
professional dancer should be.
Dancers describe dance training at the Conservatory
as always entailing much abusive behavior, usually verbal but occasionally
physical. Yet they chose to stay and endure various hardships in part
because they believed that the Conservatory would provide them with the
necessary training to achieve their goals. In many ways, the Conservatory
represented their dreams of being dancers. This belief is an example of
the functioning of a greedy institution that Lewis Coser describes as
“maximizing assent . . . by appearing highly desirable to the participants”
(1974, p. 6).
Taylor pointed out that “they sort
of make you think that that school is the begin all, end all first of
all. And if you want to be anybody, this is the place to be.” But
such beliefs were not simply illusions, as Mo explained one of her reasons
for staying:
I saw that every time somebody graduated they had jobs like that .
. . You think, well they had to be like me when they were here . . .
So I guess that kept me going. And plus everybody that graduated there
that I knew got jobs. I mean, good jobs. It's almost like, if they can
get me ready for that, you know. That's what I really want to do so
if they can really get me ready for it.
As students became accustomed to their environment,
the Conservatory began to feel like their only place in the world. As
Coser puts it, “being insulated from competing relationships, and
from competing anchors for their social identity, these selected status-occupants
find their identity anchored in the symbolic universe of the restricted
role-set of the greedy institution” (1974, pp. 8-9). One aspect
of this process entailed being cut off from their former friends. Mo related
that,
I had to grow up real fast there. Where I'd call my friends that I'd
grown up with at home . . . and they're like, oh, we ran around in my
car last night and got drunk in the car. And I was like, let me just
tell you about the day I had. My teacher called me a bitch today. I
had the worst fight. And they could just not even comprehend anything
that I was going through because they weren't. I lost a lot of the friends
that I had. Because we couldn't really relate to each other. Because
I was maturing a lot faster, well I had to. I was living away from home.
They weren't. And just being in that kind of situation. So that was
hard.
Taylor concurred:
I knew I didn't want to go back to the public school because I had
changed too much to go back. I noticed that I didn't really relate to
my public school friends the same. And I think a lot of that was just
the kind of environment, I had to grow up so quickly.
For Taylor this process occurred without her officially residing on campus:
Even though I was living at home, after like my first or second year
I wasn't really living at home anymore . . . I was rehearsing until
11 sometimes 12 [midnight] . . . and then coming back for class at 8:30
in the morning the next day.
Taylor’s situation supports the idea that
the conditions of the Conservatory’s training as a greedy total
institution applied whether the student was in residence or not. Remembering
that such an institution demands one’s total commitment and cuts
one off from the larger society, we can begin to think of the greedy total
institution as a mobile, internalized state of being. What makes this
hybrid concept even more useful is to extend it to the total life of the
professional dancer from elite education to elite practice. Such an orientation
is clearly suggested by Catherine as she reflects upon her life as a performer
in relation to her experiences at the Conservatory:
I still think of that little room that I took class in every day in
high school and think of it as an incubator. Or a greenhouse. Or a prison.
And somehow that never left me. That intense room I've been living in
for 17 years. 17 years I've put into working my butt off to be as good
as I be and that took all of my stuff. I didn't have any really successful
relationships with other people because . . . traveling all around the
world wasn't really conducive for me to be in a relationship. I didn't
have that learning experience fully. There's a lot I feel like I missed
out on.
Catherine’s metaphor of the “little room” provides
another way of understanding the mobility of the greedy total institution
as we follow the dancer’s career from the Conservatory to the performing
world. Mo has realized, though still training, that life as a professional
dancer will be as consuming and restrictive as life at the Conservatory:
I have friends that have gone on and are in companies and stuff now.
And you know it's hard. You don't make any money. You're performing
all the time. You don't have a social life and all these things . .
. And a lot of people that I've talked to that are in companies, they
hate touring. That's like the worst part of being in a company they
say . . . There's things like being on a plane all day and then getting
off and having to perform in a few hours and things like that, that
are real hard that make touring not so fun.
Catherine, though still in her thirties, was
looking back at a life of enclosure. Though still a relatively young woman,
Catherine’s reflexivity was deepened due to a major debilitating
injury requiring surgery and a multiyear recovery process. When I spoke
with her, she was sorting out alternate career possibilities and realizing
she had little or no experience in anything other than dance. The greedy
consuming of her life by dance left little possibility for other directions.
This lack of alternatives brought on by an exclusionary education was
also noted by Taylor:
It's like a little world in its own. And I sort of lost touch with
the world outside of that school. Because you're there twenty four-seven.
I didn't know anything else. What else am I going to do? All I've done
all my life is dance. I don't know how to do anything else. You know?
. . . I was talking to someone. I said, I've never even played a sport
in my life. I don't know how to play one sport . . . They train people
to be stupid dancers in a way. There's not even a typing course offered.
There's not a computer course. It's like, this is the only avenue you
have if you come to this school.
Such observations raise the question of how
we train professional dancers, particularly when we know that the majority
will not go on to reasonably paying performing careers. We must consider
the possibility that dancers are impoverished by dance as a greedy total
institution. Yet I also want to ask, does the experience of the Conservatory
dancers suggest possibilities for re-envisioning dance training? Let me
consider a few ideas and draw some conclusions while being clear about
the fact that I am thinking my way into a problem rather than presenting
finalized curricular proposals.
For example, we must recognize the pleasure in
immersing oneself in the world of dance and in a total arts environment.
Mo described such pleasure:
When I first got there it was like magic . . . because you were totally
surrounded by artists. I mean you're closed off and . . . you're surrounded
by very talented people. . . . You don’t get to take advantage
of the other arts as far as classwise because you don’t have the
time. But you know there's always music going on everywhere or people
always dancing . . . People all over the place stretching and classes
going on, like five classes, you can hear the pianist from each class.
Cause there's so many classes going on at once. Things like that are
magic to me.
We might also look at how students of the Conservatory
cope with stress. For Mo, coping strategies included finding friends outside
the dance department:
I made good friends there but none of my friends were dancers . . .
all the people in dance talked about was dance or people in the dance
department or how fat you are or how this sucks or how that sucks. So
instead of hearing about that all the time . . . I wanted to talk about
something else when I went home at night. So I had friends that were
visual artists and actors and singers and stuff. And that was nice.
That was like an outlet for me. Even though I didn't leave that campus,
you know.
Mo also commented on some of the differences
between the Conservatory and the “University” at which she
now studies dance.
I finally realized that the [University] department is not bad. It's
just that they don't baby-sit you here . . . [At the Conservatory] they
make you take floor barre. They make you take body conditioning. They
motivate you there . . . While here [at the University], I think that
they just leave all that up to you if you really want to dance. They'll
give you classes and they'll give you training. But they leave all that
up to you, as far as getting yourself in shape and taking care of yourself
and motivating yourself.
Taken together these statements, in relation
to earlier comments, suggest that in an atmosphere of total immersion
it would be better to loosen both internal and external boundaries that
define and compartmentalize the total institution. For example, encouraging
interaction between disciplines would help dancers relate their concerns
to those of other students. Furthermore the rigidity and excessive demands
of the curriculum must be challenged to undermine its greedy total aspects.
Rather than controlling and monitoring every moment of the dancer’s
training we must allow dancers more responsibility for their own education.
To some degree, dancers are trained as if they are incapable of doing
things for themselves. By giving them the benefit of the doubt and the
resources and support necessary to accomplish their goals, we can begin
to move away from this totally greedy notion of training and towards a
more fruitful model of education.
For some who have responded to this paper
in an earlier form, the Conservatory faculty are viewed as “bad”
teachers as opposed to the apparently “good” teachers who
have a more enlightened view of dance education. Of course, it is easy
to identify outright abusive behavior, even in settings such as ballet
or Graham technique where such teacher behavior is sometimes considered
a mundane element of the traditional norm. Yet the next step of this investigation
explores what happens when we begin to consider the ideas generated through
consideration of the notion of the greedy total institution in the classroom
of the “Caring Dance Teacher.” However I must bring
this particular writing to a close with the observation that as I discuss
this work with dance educators, I increasingly discover that many people
are reconsidering business as usual in the dance classroom, from the teaching
of technique classes to the overall curriculum of dance programs. My hope
is that my own unthinking of the assumptions that I encounter can be part
of a larger rethinking of dance education.
References
Coser, Lewis. (1974). Greedy institutions: Patterns of undivided
commitment. New York: Free Press.
Goffman, Erving. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of
mental patients and other inmates. New York: Anchor Books.
Morgall, J. (1993). Technology assessment: A feminist perspective.
Philadelphia: Temple University.
Patton, Michael. (1990). Qualitative evaluation and research method.
Newbury Park: Sage.
Smith, Clyde. (2000). Power relations in the dance classroom.
Columbus, OH: Ohio State University.
Smith, Clyde. (1998). “Authoritarianism in the Dance Classroom,”
in
Dance, Power and Difference. Sherry Shapiro, Ed. Champaign,
IL: Human Kinetics.
Smith, Clyde. (1997). The Conservatory as a Greedy Total Institution.
30th Annual CORD Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson.
Clyde Smith can be reached at: clydesmith(at)culturalresearch(dot)org
Content ©1994-2007 Clyde Smith |
