The image and interpretation of the ballerina has shifted over time since she first took her place in the pantheon of romantic female performers in the early nineteenth century. For many, she is still romanticized, respected, and revered; in other circles, she has become suspect as a creature who may be obsessed, exploited, and retrogressive in light of the egalitarian strides women have made or are still trying to make. The female ballet dancer's basic contradiction—her ethereal exterior and her iron-willed interior—has not been sufficiently accounted for in either scheme, nor has it been woven into the kind of complex, contextualized analysis that includes practitioners who embody the form, audience members of various kinds, and the multiple, shifting locales and attitudes that surround them. As an elite art form, ballet has until recently relied on the more univocal discourse of bouquets and brickbats from critics and other specialists. In 1993, when dance anthropologist Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull called for a consideration of ballet's relationship of dance to life in ways that other cultural forms are investigated, few took up the call.

At my first performance of Eidos:Telos, in Frankfurt in 1998, I discover a work of penetrating power that is both ordered and disordered. It is febrile at one moment and cool at the next. It is abstract but threaded through with symbolism, and its three acts exude darkness and mystery.

There are no obvious divisions into time or place, and the weave of obscure and fragmented allusions means that dramas build and drop away. The dancing bodies create a mass of curves, lines, and angles with astonishing fluency but in few centrally organized patterns. I try to make sense of the diversity of abstract dance that seems rooted in evasive purpose, and symbolism that lends itself to poetics rather more often than to literal meaning. I search for metaphors that will bind images together, but the imagery is delivered faster than the speed of thought. The movement is rooted in ballet, and fleetingly I sense Apollo lingering; warm to a fragment of Giselle and feel a frisson of excitement when a man sinks to the ground and folds over his body, because it reminds me of Nijinsky's L'Aprés midi d'un faune. But though these connections continue to burn in my mind, they are incidentals and personal to what I see, and quickly succeeded by others.

But I leave Eidos:Telos feeling somehow different, for my body is pumping with energy and ideas, and colorful dynamics are colliding in my head. It has taken me on a journey of the philosophical, kinaesthetic, and sensual, and I need to experience more.

The film From a Classical Position (1997) is a fully collaborative work between a notable dancer and performer and a notable choreographer, being danced, directed, and edited by Dana Caspersen and William Forsythe of the late Ballett Frankfurt. By looking closely at the film, its origins, and its process of creation, we gain an understanding of Caspersen and Forsythe's way of collaborating and their interest in working with other media and formats. Uncompromising if not difficult for a general dance audience, it is also somewhat didactic and offers insights into some of the Ballett Frankfurt's methods of generating movement, choreographic structures, and the importance of classical technique to a distinctive movement vocabulary:

[The film] was also a little message to the British, who I'm sure were curious about us. It was a little missile to them, saying yes we are the Frankfurt Ballet, yes we perform before so many seats in the Opera House. We are the same people and this is what we do … There is the obvious classical training and this is how we are dealing with it. (Forsythe 1999)

On the morning of May 4, 1961, a brave and motley group of travelers—seven black males, three white males, and three white females, varying in age and professional standing but all trained in nonviolence—embarked on what they called the “Freedom Ride.” Designed by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the bus ride was meant to commemorate and further the organization's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, a non-violent test of desegregation on interstate buses that quickly disintegrated in the face of staunch resistance. This time, riders would test the 1960 Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, which prohibited segregation in the waiting rooms and restaurants of bus terminals (Branch 1989, 390). Departing from Washington, D.C., the Freedom Ride aimed to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Explaining that they were merely exercising rights granted by the Supreme Court but that they knew the dangers, CORE director James Farmer said, “We were prepared for the possibility of death” (Cozzens 1997). Riding the momentum of the student sit-ins, the civil rights movement had become for many a matter of “putting your body on the line” (Branch 1989, 392).

This statement may resonate with many who practice, teach, or write about dance and movement training and performance, but it is particularly apt in relation to the work of Gertrud Falke-Heller (1891–1984). Her extraordinary career spanned almost sixty years, and she worked with some of the most influential figures in European modern dance and performance, including Rudolph Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss. The training she developed, based mainly on the work of German body awareness pioneer Elsa Gindler (1885–1961), did not have a name, and little documentation about it exists. After an early career as a performer in Hamburg, Falke-Heller taught this form of training for Ballet Jooss at Dartington Hall in the 1930s. She developed her work after World War II with psychiatric patients in a variety of hospitals in England and Scotland and died at her home in London in 1984. In an interview given four years before her death, Falke-Heller lists the following questions and concerns that underpinned her work in the many different contexts to which it has been applied:

The body awareness in the sitting, standing, walking, lying down in all human functioning. What is expressive movement? Where does it start to be really interesting? And where is it empty? Then also the space—the dynamic in the room. That's what I was always interested in from the beginning. (Falke-Heller 1980)