Emotions in the Everyday Life of a Dance School: Articulating Unspoken Values

Introduction

In everyday thinking art is very often linked to emotion and, more generally, to a kind of emotional and spontaneous way of relating to the world that contrasts with the rational and controlled intellect that, for example, science is understood to cultivate. Emotion is also commonly linked, via bodily existence, to femininity and the private sphere—the home (see, for example, Heinämaa and Reuter 1994; Sihvola 1999). These conceptualizations reveal a tendency toward typically Western dichotomies between art and science, emotion and reason, body and mind, private and public, and woman and man (see also Domagalski 1999; Sandelans and Boudens 2000).

Furthermore, working life and emotion have long been seen as separate; only emotion-free employees and institutions have been perceived as being efficient because emotional control, self-restraint, and rationality bolster stability and predictability in working life. Thus, emotions belong somewhere else. In fact, Lloyd Sandelans and Connie Boudens (2000, 48) note that we have had the habit of building special quarters for the exercise and display of emotion such as concert halls, movie theaters, football fields, and therapist’s offices. This does not mean, however, that emotions can be eliminated from working life, as many studies on emotion at work have shown (Ashkanasy, Hartel, and Zerbe 2000; Fineman 2000, 2003; Hochschild 1983).

Art institutions are an interesting field in which to study emotion. In art institutions emotions are often perceived as a natural and even indispensable part of everyday life because they are viewed as necessary tools to get artistic work done. This very easily leads to the perception that art institutions are somewhat mystical places where people have no control of their emotions and feelings (Koivunen 2003, 74–75). Artists are seen as highly emotional and expressing their emotions strongly and spontaneously. Even though emotions are understood as entwined in artworks as well as in artistic working processes, art institutions have been studied relatively little.

I became interested in emotion in an institutional context while I was conducting research for my doctoral dissertation (Löytönen 2004). The aim of the study was to explore how dance artists construct their everyday lives in dance institutions by conversing about it. I interviewed fourteen dancers and dance teachers about their work in a contemporary dance theater and a dance school whose curriculum emphasized classical ballet. Both of these institutions are based in Helsinki, Finland. The format of the interviews was semi-structured; the open-ended questions provided opportunities to explore any new themes that arose. Emotion in the everyday life of dance institutions was one such theme.

Emotions such as pleasure, satisfaction, and joy, as well as anxiety, fear, and sorrow, were mentioned frequently in the interviews when the dancers and dance teachers described their diverse everyday lives in dance institutions. More explicitly, emotions came to the fore while the dance teachers openly talked about how they felt about the institutional culture at their work community, where upcoming changes within the dance school had provoked feelings of unhappiness, frustration, and uncertainty. These various feelings were connected to the specific situation the dance school was facing at that time (change of the principal and curriculum reformation). However, the most common word used by the dance teachers to describe their everyday life was loneliness. All of the interviewed dance teachers described their work as well as their working community as being lonely.

I begin this article by briefly looking at emotion and asking, What are emotions actually? I continue by exploring commonly held beliefs about the special links between art, artistic expression, and emotion with the help of different art theories. The main emphasis of the article, however, is on how the interviewed dance teachers described the emotion of loneliness. Their descriptions serve as a bridge to a more general analysis of the meaning of emotion in an institutional context, in which emotion plays a role not only in an individual teacher’s experiences but also in the dance teachers’ shared culture. In addition to looking at the links between art and emotion, I discuss how emotions and morals...