The self dancing: Four stories of professional women dancers.

Abstract

This thesis focused on the self as dancer explored through narrative and presented through constructed stories. Four dancers were interviewed, two from contemporary dance and two from the classical genre, in order to collect narratives of their career path. The interviews were videotaped and transcribed; the object of the analysis was the interview as text. Only those aspects of the self supported by language were explored in this study. Narrative analysis involved selecting and sequencing events and themes taken from the narratives and writing them into a story for each dancer. The dancers' words were used as much as possible in order to let a sense of how a dancer told about her life and work be present. However, the created stories represent my interpretations of the dancers' texts. Four unique paths to the role of professional dancer are presented.