Shakespearean dance, embodiment, and gender at the National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Ballet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how ballet adaptations of Shakespearean works have the power to interrogate established patriarchal traditions in both Shakespearean and balletic performance practices. Through the analysis of Frederick Ashton's The Dream, Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet, and Christopher Wheeldon's The Winter's Tale, this study assesses how the phenomenological experiences and material aspects of ballet performances affect the comprehension and reception of a Shakespearean narrative; how these three ballets portray gender and female agency through movement to confront the patriarchal structures present in Shakespeare’s works and ballet history; and how the embodied knowledge of dancers and choreographers contribute to the performance of Shakespearean characters and meanings. I bring together theories and methodologies from literary and Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, gender studies, and dance studies to expand the conversation surrounding Shakespearean ballets at the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada. This research establishes the potential for artistic collaboration to unite scholarship in Shakespearean performance studies; observes that representations of patriarchal control in Shakespearean drama depend on the genre of the work and are influenced by the conventions of the adaptation’s performance tradition; recognises how gender theory illuminates conventions of balletic femininity; and reinforces the importance of embodied and artistic inquiry in Shakespearean adaptation studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".