Izzy's BAPP Blog

The past week has been a bit of a battle: enjoy the sunshine v explore data collection tools. With the weather firmly back below 15 degrees, I have no excuse today!  My proposed inquiry question depends very much on audience opinion. Whilst finding out the preferences of current audiences, I think it will be important for me to discover why some people have never watched a ballet and/or have come to the conclusion it is not for them (that's assuming that is why they don't want to watch ballet and there could be a plethora of other reasons). When I initially started to investigate the different methods of data collection, a few immediately jumped out at me.  Interviews seemed like a good method because I felt that people can give a very personal insight into their thoughts and expand where they deem appropriate. Most importantly I liked the idea of being able to collect "expectations and attitudes that are very difficult to collect by any other means" (BAPP Han...

For this task, I made a start by broadly looking at some literature surrounding the area I was interested in. Many thanks go to Ann (Module 3) for helping me here. I was looking at ballets that had both hidden and obvious political agendas. I found that this has been the case as early as 1640 in French culture (Bloechl, 2010) and again in early 20th century France when the country was looking to reinvent itself and show off its cultural power (Karthas, 2012; Christmas, 2017).  Moving on a few decades, I already knew that ballet played a larger role in the Cold War than one might expect. It was an important form of cultural propaganda especially to the Soviet Union (Järvinen, 2014; Caute, 2003; Christina Ezrahi, 2012).  As interesting as I was finding all this, I couldn't see how useful it was to me and my practice right now. To solve this, I started to look at ballet's current place in the world. In many ways, to the general public, ballet is a bit backwa...